Secret Cartography: Simile, you just Metaphor. OR The Author is Still Feverish Hooray!

Tragedy tonight, gentle readers. A man with serious problems has enacted a most terrible scenario; we extend our sympathies.


Onward.

Hi! I am just recovering from four or so days of bed rest and fever dreams. There was one where I was a pokemon trainer, and more than a few where I was the Aragorn-like savior of the world, gearing up for some conflict that I envisioned only as a conflict between bright orange and a sort of sea blue shade, surging against each other. A vision that I realized shortly after looked more and more like a map. I'm no prophet, and I realized that this was because I was hunched over (like a sick kitten!) during lunch the day before, figuring out a 50 States puzzle from my youth.

So I've at least had cartography on the mind, and if not of the secret kind, then the insane dream-logic kind. And that's just as good! I mean, cartography itself is mostly a function of metaphor, as we base our understanding of the world upon relating two things that are not very similar. The whole idea of Red and Blue states is entirely fictive, a sickening reduction of thousands of human lives into a single simplified concept, but still an effective way of communicating the idea of difference. The strange part with the dream of Blue vs. Orange, then, was that they didn't really relate to anything - they were just some damn colors. But I still sensed conflict, so it's entirely possible they were just a metaphor for their own action. Does that make sense? It doesn't have to! Hooray for being sick!

Similar to dreams, language and thought processes are extensions of metaphor. On this Valentine's day, consider the choruses of people claiming that two people in love are travelers, or, Lockhorn like, one is a Ball and Chain on the other. They also say (Who says this? God, what's going on? Who are you people?) the limit of a man's world is his vocabulary, with obvious reason; as a person learns more ways to express themselves, they see that few things are cut and dry. Their map of the world suddenly grows new colors that they didn't even know existed. For example, they can recognize Schadenfreude in Amy Winehouse or Britney Spears or even whenever anti-war activists vote for John McCain. Previously, these sensations were just kinda funny! There's a whole new high-falutin' world out there of words (many of them German) to express guilty enjoyment. Red and Blue and Orange are allowed to expand in our understanding into Purple and Burnt Sienna and Off-White and Blue Green - there are now a million ways to reduce individuals to blank representations. Again, the symbols that we use to understand things soon become more and more accurate, akin to creating a map so large and accurate that it's a faithful physical reconstruction of that which it depicts.

Speaking of that. It can be argued that maps are artificial impositions, but doesn't the world, after all, only really exist as long as we agree upon it? The foundation of knowledge is the communication of facts, and understanding these facts relies upon metaphor, the application of what we already know to what we don't. Minnesota is not an absolute truth, after all. So it is with the internet philistines - their world is shrunken, and I come off sounding like I'm speaking a justifiably foreign language when I say something like "I thought their representation was unique" instead of "lol" and then nothing for five minutes (presumably because I was rolling around on the floor). Therein lies the dark side of this understanding - the above mentioned Red vs. Blue struggle, where one side opposes it's opposite so completely they cannot tolerate each other due to an inability to even talk to each other, as each side ends up sounding like an alien to the other. Each side of an argument may know objectively what the words Gun and Control mean in relation to each other, but the term together carries so much baggage with it depending upon your red or blue experience that good communication is impossible. The meaningless quibbles of our time (Obama vs. Hilary, Evil White Guy 1 vs. Evil White Guy 2, Creationism vs. Science as a whole... wait, maybe not so pointless, that last one) are more a function of our enthusiasm towards understanding things in simplistic terms - a sort of Go Fight Win Ra Ra Ra for whatever cause is closest to our hearts, setting it up in a simple adversarial opposition with, well, whatever it is not. Who cares that we can't talk, let's fight about it!

Finally, there's no way to approach the issue with right or wrong, true or false, because these, too, are just metaphors. You can't escape an issue by relying upon it (like what I'm doing now!) to provide it's own end, even though you can eventually hope that a representation of Object A slowly becomes so accurate that is almost becomes Object A in itself. So it is with maps - the physicality of places is secondary to the thoughts that we have about them in our understanding, and the only things that can really be mapped out are enthusiasm and fandom and the strange motivation that lies in the logic of dreams and language, because these, ultimately, are the only things that we can hope to give a flying fuck about. Seriously, fuck that hill, let's get into a fight about it.

(OMG RAMBLING D-)

Edit: Am I encouraging XKCD-ish happy nihilism? You make the call!