Secret Cartographies: Persia, Sri Lanka, Great Britain, and Rhode Island.

The old Persian name for Sri Lanka was Serendip. The name first met the English language in the form of a children's story, and the place became a word through the attentions of Horace Walpole. When I was young, I was told that it was the West that found Sri Lanka and called it Serendipity. They'd been looking for India, for spices and tea and exoticisms, and found this other place, instead.

Sri Lanka is not actually closer to Europe than India, of course, so I'd always been left to wonder exactly why these men in boats felt so lucky to have stumbled upon it, or, alternately, why Serendip, an island that had been charted by the outside world in the time of the ancients, would have developed the reputation for being a place in which one could stumble into luck. It has less, apparently, to do with our finding Sri Lanka than what clever Sri Lankans, and clever children, can manage to find.

Here's another: the founder of the colony of Rhode Island, when he died, was buried on his family's farm under an apple tree. In recent memory, the government of the state of Rhode Island decided that their founder deserved some sort of monument. The old maps were lined up with the new maps, and they found that his grave was in someone's back yard, which was far more convenient than its being under someone's house. As it happened, the apple tree was still there, ancient and thick. They began the exhumation in order to move the dirt that was once his body to some more prestigious spot.

Through the use of their science, they knew they were in the correct place, and they noted that the roots of the apple tree had grown through the place where the coffin once would have been. No matter; they'd dig around it. But the root had a form to it. It had an arm, in fact, and fingers. There was a torso, and legs, and even toes. The tree, finding the tasty dead thing, had eaten it, inch by inch, starting at the shoulder. Using their science once again, they found that the capillaries of the tree had borrowed the body's arteries, tracing a strange organic map.

I've always been terrifically jealous, of the tree, and the corpse, and those who found it. Alas, it seems that the root, cut away from its tree and exposed to the air for display, began to decay quickly. One can still tease out the shape, but it lacks the same majesty as finding a headless underground man made of wood.

If you require more tales of strange things that happen to the dead, I recommend After the Funeral, the funny little out of print, extremely cheap book from which my second story was stolen entirely. If you require more cartographies, sometimes secrets, always bizarre, I might recommend the often thoroughly delightful blogue, Strange Maps. If you want to increase the likelihood that you, too, will be eaten by a tree, I suggest that you look into the growing green burial movement.

Secret Cartography: UNDEAD THEME WEEK IS UNDEAD

President's Day (which was on the 18th - who knew?) was the nationally recognized date of George Washington's birthday, until it was graciously expanded to include those presidents who could not throw knives into Heaven. Washington grew up in a time when duels were still an established way to settle arguments, and it was not unheard of for firearms to explode in your hand, leaving you a smoking rag of muscle where there once were fingers. And then he fought, single-handedly, the forces of a mad king to free America, or whatever.

Holidays are an important way that I navigate my life, because God knows I'm incapable of doing it on my own. All the same, their irregularity is something of a bête noire with me - it seems like they come at a staccato pace at some points in the year, with birthdays leading up to unofficial anniversaries bleeding into major holidays. Thanksgiving itself is the beachhead of these assaults, burning away the gentle memories I have of ever-distant Halloween (a holiday which I have yet to spend sober), and then as soon as the leftovers are disposed of, it's off to buy Christmas presents and arrange New Year's parties. Similarly, this time of year is marked adagio, with angsty Valentine's being the only day which even offers any turbulence to our flight. Would you like a beverage? Pillow? Towel? Our in-flight movie will be Final Destination.

As surely as we navigate language (and what navigating you had to do with my last post! Oh dear, it was terrible.) and landscape, we also navigate time. Thank the stars for their own cyclical nature, because it's these observable patterns that allow us to locate ourselves in time. Where would we be, for instance, if every day was unpredictable? If weather moved according to it's own whims? We are creatures built on patterns and predictability, who depend on the knowledge that it snows in month X (lousy Smarch weather) and it's always sunny in month Y (also, Philadelphia), and so disruption in these schedules make us sub-prime, take away the comfort of knowing what to expect. Just as all rebellion is inherently conformist, we have to see that we go through time as meticulously as any lost traveler follows a map through a foreign country - that is, maybe kinda in the right direction, though also very easily getting lost and maybe finding a delightful little place to spend an afternoon. Or maybe going to prison! Yay for being lost!

Holidays, though, serve as the places on our maps where we can get back to where we're going; they take us out of the doldrums of mindless space and back onto the main stage, where we can participate again with our culture at large. How you spend your holidays is almost as important as participating in them, with the only important thing to do being to take advantage of the opportunity to do something unusual. Valentine's day can be spent with your sweety, yes, but how much more interesting is someone who drives two hours out of their way to buy a unique shoe, or begins a new health regimen instead of bitching about their loneliness?

All in all, dullness is always a measure of self, or rather, if you're bored, then you're boring. The most interesting people I know are always the ones who are up to something, even if they're just sitting and staring at a wall, they're up to something. To admit to boredom is admitting that you've stopped, that you're afraid to go astray in time, and such timidity stems from a desire to do only good, to ably progress down a preconceived correct path, when no such path exists. Budget your time, yes, but do not allow your natural inclination to temporal frugality to override your sense of actually going out there and having a good time of it. After all, tempus fuggits when you're having fun.

Secret Cartography: Its like the Internet

My first thought of secret cartography was to write about the many pathways that weave themselves through the internet, guiding you from one page to another, revealing treasures that you could only find by crawling through the bowels of inter-web's most seedy societies. But then I thought, you must already know about that, after all, you are reading our blog.

Zach's article about the subtle musical nuances of the newest Daft Punk album strongly reminded me of my own form of Secret cartography: allusions. I love books, a lot, and nothing makes me happier then finding a book full of allusions which either test my knowledge of other works of literature, or make me curious about something I have never read before.

What brings this particular literary device to mind is my growing love of author Terry Pratchett who's large collection of works have satirized almost every famous work of literature or genre out there. I have to admit, I was not taken with Mr. Pratchett at first, but now as I read each new book, and am treated to a series of references that hearken back to Shakespeare and horrible fantasy novel cliches, and I love it. I love that there is a secret level to the books, one that makes them more interesting, more humorous, and more socially relevant. In many ways it is my version of a treasure map, one that you can only appreciate if you have the the key (being a huge nerd and having read tons of books). It makes me feel like I am some kind of explorer, following the clues and codes to some long lost document that holds information that will alter the perceptions of western civilization.

Hmm, somehow I feel this whole secret cartography thing is feeding into my life's goal of finding some history altering artifact, like a new Rosetta Stone or something.

Secret Cartography: Internet, please don't shoot me.

Following Zach's post about our own secret posts that never see the light of day, there's one of my own that I wrote about Cowboy Bebop and suicide terrorism at least a half a year ago that wasn't published because I was too close to it to edit it at the time, and now that I'm not taking a terrorism class, I don't remember the details, but this still makes sense to me, so here we go.

I'd call this secret cartography, but the truth is, this makes more sense to me as a b-side, something that should have gone on the site, but for spacial or emotional reasons it didn't make the proverbial record during the mutually assured destruction theme week. Well, here it is for your consumption.

We've come to recognize mutually assured destruction as something having to do with lots of nuclear weapons. Tom, of course, goes one step further, and places it in the context of his own life. We don't really see ourselves as doing these terrible things at the time because we're blinded by how we feel.

Spike from Cowboy Bebop, on the other hand, has a very good idea of what he is. Given two conditions, he is a suicide terrorist. Those two things? Finding his lost love, Julia and then losing her.

The story, if you please.

Spike, an inhumanly talented interstellar bounty hunter and former mob hitman/enforcer loved a woman called Julia. The catch is that Julia at the time of Spike's and Julia's love was the current girlfriend of Spike's best friend, Vicious, who is also Spike's partner in crime. Vicious gave Julia an ultimatum: Either I kill you and Spike for being disloyal to me, or you kill Spike. Spike gets wind of this and fakes his own death in a gun battle with a rival syndicate, dropping off the mob (Red Dragon Syndicate's) radar. Spike told Julia he'd be waiting in the graveyard after it all went down. Julia never showed. Since then, Spike has searched for Julia, while meeting up with a former cop, Jet, turned bounty hunter becoming a loyal, if detached member of Jet's crew.

To be fair, Zach noted something very important: I think you're missing the bit where Vicious is a monster. And it's true. Vicious is a cunning, deadly, monster. He seizes power in the crime syndicate by staging a fake coup, allowing himself to be caught and imprisoned, then has the real coup de'tat by breaking free and killing the top brass of the crime syndicate during the execution and with the aid of turncoats in the syndicate. Vicious also testifies against one of his former soldiers who admired him, framing the soldier for the things Vicious had done.

Three years and some months later, fate has conspired that Julia and Spike find each other again.

Julia and Spike leave, as was their original plan, to get away from the Red Dragon forever. There is a gun battle on a roof. Spike and Julia manage to run away, killing the mob thugs below until one luckier hitman is standing between them and the door. Julia and Spike don't notice him. The thug, predictably, shoots Julia. His job for the entire series completed, the lucky hitman now exits stage getting-shot-by-a-disbelieving-lover.

After a predictably voalitle scene with Spike holding Julia during her last moments, the action eventually heads back to Spike's ship. Spike decides there's nothing left to do but confront Vicious, who is currently sitting at the throne of the Red Dragon. Spike says goodbye to his friend and partner of three years, Jet, who offers to come along despite Jet's broken leg. Spike says no, indicating the coming killing spree is something he must do himself.

Spike, enters the Red Dragon building with a bomb detonating in the lobby, then running up the escalators, killing whatever hapless thugs stuck on security duty remain with the ease of a man possessed. (Speaking of which, I feel bad for these thugs. Very bad, in fact. They just survived one of the most harrowing gun battles of their lives after the Vicious-concocted coup, only to be shot on guard duty by a killing machine with a deathwish.) After another couple running gun scenes, he runs into an old friend, Shin, who saves Spike from getting shot by Red Dragon thug #3578. Shin then tells Spike Vicious was waiting on the top floor and that Shin has been waiting for Spike to return. Shin then gets shot by Red Dragon thug #3579, likely fatally.

After killing his way to the top floor, Vicious (like any good anime villian) is waiting. A fight ensues. The two people are evenly matched, so much so that they both lose their weapons (Spike loses his gun to Vicious and Vicious loses his katana to Spike) to the other. Spike shouts "Julia is dead, let's finish this", to which Vicious replies, "as you wish". The two slide the weapons to the other, and both parties deal their killing blows, Spike shooting Vicious fatally, and Vicious slashing Spike across the chest. Spike, bleeding out of his chest profusely, somehow survives, walks down the stairs of the building to point a finger at the moon, say "Bang", and then falls in a bloody heap on the stairs in front of the confused remains of the Red Dragon Syndicate.

Spike owes more to this battle than is fashionable to admit. Far from being flung into these events, Spike is the catalyst for them. Vicious, knowing that Spike was still alive between episodes 14-23 (I believe...) could have very easily set up bounties for Spike and his friends deaths. He did not. Vicious could have gone after Spike personally, but did not. Bigger fish to fry? Perhaps. Being in jail might have hurt, but I sincerely doubt that it was impossible to get messages out of the prison.

When Vicious does meet Spike on the battleground before Julia's reappearance, Vicious has Lin (yes, Shin's brother, how did you guess?) shoot Spike with a tranquilizer dart and leave him in the snow. Had Vicious wanted Spike to die, Lin could have shot him with a real gun.

Spike continues to go after Julia, with the zeal of a man crazed. That's fine. But once Julia died, Spike was mentally committed to the death of Vicious. It is not as though Spike was out of options. He had friends, a group of people willing to risk their lives for him. He had possessions. It is not as though he did not have standing in the universe. Ultimately, Spike is a suicide bomber, and Vicious was perfectly willing to let him detonate around him. Vicious, in his only line to Spike, after hearing the woman they both at one point or another loved, didn't even attempt to say no, or try to stop fighting. He allowed Spike to shoot him, so he could slash Spike across the chest.

Both their demises could have been spared, Spike, by not going on an inhuman rampage to get to Vicious, and Vicious by at least attempting to continue the dialouge beyond agreeing to kill each other. Both fictional men were committed to death to destroy each other, and that's really the best example of mutually assured desctruction I can think of in an anime.

~

As for secret places, little caves, nooks or crannies to find and be found in, the fun, is not in having a map guide you to them, but instead in having a group of friends that also know where it is, and the excitement that comes in going there. Also, finding these little places where one can have something secret to themselves, or amongst friends is the fun.

I have only recently returned to trips to find my own nooks and my own private headspace that no one else knows about, which you'll understand if I don't spill what or where they are here. It's just not fun, somehow. My adventures aren't really worth posting, because they all occur in my mind, and they require a little more background to my life than I'd like to give here. My eureka moment for the month was when the idea came to me that it wasn't what I was, but what I could be.

If my idea of secret cartography sounds kind of like a treehouse, I apologize for nothing. Furthermore, girls have cooties. All of them, without exception. (Yes, Cathleen, Beth and Jack, this includes you.)

If only it was that simple...

Theme Week: Secret Cartography

This week, we will delve into the project of mapping the unseen, divining the secrets of maps and charting old secrets. We will explore imaginary geographies, and share anecdotes relating to geographical explorations in reality. We will make grandiose promises, with nothing more than a glimmer of hidden knowledge to back them up. We will map out the future and past, showing you hidden things about each.

In that last capacity, here's a post I wrote acouple months back about Daft Punk's 'live album'. I never posted it, and I think it fits the theme rather well:

-
Alive

So, yes. Daft Punk! They create music somehow. Magic may be involved.

Their new album Alive, is a strange beast. A live album from a pair of DJs, it contains no completely new songs, but instead mixes old favorites into new mashups seasoned with highly enthusiastic crowd noise.

The crowd is justified in their enthusiasm.

It is a very good album. It is also an interesting album, because the more Daft Punk you've listened to before, the more you will probably enjoy it. This isn't to say that if you've never heard a Daft Punk song before, you won't enjoy the album: depending on your taste in music, you might. It's very good music of whatever precise genre Daft Punk happens to be, and, as a dabbling Daft Punk fan, there are tracks that I don't really recognise. I still like them. However, in the tracks that I do recognise, a strange alchemy takes place.

For example, an entire song been compressed into background music-beats, abbreviated but perfectly recognizable, that underlay another song, changing its context. If I didn't know either song, I would just hear one song, with an interesting counter-melody of synth beeps. But I know and recognize both; they amplify and play through each other, each one carrying with it a full emotional context of history and place: the people I've kissed, the roads I've driven while that song played.

Unlike more lyrical music, techno doesn't tell a story: it creates a space for you to tell your own. Hearing these songs successfully interposed and amplifying each other is like discovering that the perilous forest you killed an ogre in fits in between the walls of the cloud mansion you've always dreamed of, that the tulgey woods can grow out of the pavestones of Ankh-Morpork--that Narnia is Amber.

I'm not sure that this album really deserves that sentence, but I like the sentence too much to remove it. Also, I'm pretty sure I have more to say about techno songs being places rather than stories. Maybe I can work it into that hypothetical One Piece rant I'm supposed to be writing.

Back to the album.

It is, in short, a little bit like finding that someone has taken many of your favorite landmarks and shuffled them into a single super-landscape, where you are cordially invited to walk. They've done it in a way that, while not always perfect, contains glimpses of transcendent beauty, where the new context raises familiar sights into new realms of meaning that abandon nothing.

It's a little less awesome because they were all built by the same architect, so they're probably just some places you're fond of instead of Narnia, Amber, Viriconium and so on. That said, it's a little more awesome because you don't have to worry about distortion of the artists' intent: they distorted it themselves.

There are the slightly awkward elbow-junctions of back-alley and cloud bank, but even these are always handled with a charming grace, and give you somewhere to walk between one transcendent glimpse and the next.

It's not a perfect album. But it's made me smile harder than pretty much anything else this week. When it's on, it's on. And when it isn't, it's building to bring it back harder than ever when the time is right.

And that's more than enough for me.
--

I wrote that on December 14th of last year, and never posted it, possibly because I had failed to beat James to the punch on reviewing the album, which we both eard for the first time simultaneously.

So there you have it: a secret brought to light, light shed on darkness, and a thesis about the imaginary geography of music brought, at least dimly, into view.

An entire week of such cryptogeographical expeditions await us. I, for one, can't wait.