Category: Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas

The Porcineographic Map of the United States, ca. 1876

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This semi-magnificent map, The Porcineograph, produced by the Forbes Lithographic Manufacturing Company of Boston in 1876 or so, defines the states and territories of the U.S. in terms of their regional foods. Being a vegetarian of twenty years or so, very little appeals to me, though the foods do at least sound interesting. The again, somne of it sounds fantastically bad, like the selections for Wisconsin (Boiled Hog’s Heads, Hulled Barley and Blood Pudding).

Arizona: Jerked Beef and Greasy Doings; California: Bear Steaks, Grapes and Ham Sandwich; Connecticut: Shad, Hog’s Head Cheese and Gingerbread; Florida: Turtle Soup, Oranges and Pickled Trotters; Kansas: Buffalo Tongues, Paw-Paw and Ham; Maine: Lobsters, Cunners, Pork-Apple-Pie and Baked Indian; Louisiana😛 Gumbo Soup, Poussoneau and Larded Beef; Minnesota: Gopher, Stewed Pork and Molasses; Mississippi: Persimmon, Bacon and Hoe Cake; New Jersey, Pork Pie, Peaches and Pigeons; New York, Roast Pig, Fried Oysters, Strawberry Shortcake & Uninvestigated Drinks; Ohio: Sugar-cured Ham, Cream Cheese and Catawba Grapes; Tennessee: “Uncle Ned”, Bacon Roasting Ears and Corn Cake; Texas: Wild Steer and Corn Dodgers wobbled in Pork Fat; Vermont: Hasty Pudding, Maple Syrup, Succotash and Pork; Wisconsin: Boiled Hog’s Heads, Hulled Barley and Blood Pudding.

[Map source: the Library of Congress.]

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Dissecting a Map of Woman’s Heart

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1697

[This is an addition to an earlier post here featuring dozens of maps of imaginary places.]

I suppose that this map, “The Open Country of Woman’s Heart, Exhibiting its internal communications, and the facilities and dangers to Travellers therein” may well abe a reverse insight into woman, or at least an insight into what the early 19th century thought might be penetrating insight.

I can see four distinct parts of this heart, with a fifth element existing at the heart’s center–love. The regions surrounding love central are not entirely appealing by today’s standards, and were more than likely the work exhumed from a male surveyor’s approximations. The overall map as so:

[Source: the Beauty, Virtue and Vice website (here)]

At the very center lies the City and District of Love:

penetrated somewhat at the lower left by a morsel-shaped lake running through the Land of Constancy. Running due south are some rather appealing places in the Land of Sentiment: Platonic affection, hope, enthusiasm, good sense, discrimination, and at the very bottom bit, prudence.

The remaining autopsy is somewhat less generous, at least from our position here in 2012: the lands surrounding the Land of Sentiment and the heart’s heart are Love of Admiration, Land of Coquetry, Land of Selfishness, Region of Sentimentality, Love of Dress and Love of Display. And within these lands exist uncomfortable accommodations.

And the details, in four sections; the first, the northwest quadrant, or the right atrium:

The southwest quad, or right ventricle:

The north east quad, or left atrium:

And of course the fourth quadrant, the south east or left ventricle:

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Infographic Display of the Dead with the Living–1912 Aviation Losses

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Even though masses of people had been used in panoramic photography for some years (thousands of people, usually soldiers, gathered to form a living liberty bell, or portrait of George Washington, or some such thing) , I cannot recall the use of humans as a direct statistical aid as in this bio-bar graph, found in the pages of The Illustrated London News for 1912 (page 357).

The article asks the question of whether air travel (and flight in general) was “safe”, and responded by graphing its “yes” response with this image. The larger groups in the top half of the image represent the number of flyers flying for that particular country; the small groups below show the number of aviators killed. (There is no date of reference in particular but it seems to me that these are total deaths since flying began in Europe in earnest in 1905.) The photo montage below shows a selection of some of the most famous dead aviators. The number of deaths as a percentage of those flying seemed quite acceptable in the year of publication (1912) ; however if these figures were iterated forward to 2011 the death rate would be staggering, sending many thousands of aviators (and crew and passengers) to their deaths each year. In the United States we save that safety failure for deaths in automobile accidents, which still kill about the same number of Americans each year as were U.S. soldiers lost for the entire war in Vietnam. In spite of this the odds for survival looked pretty good in 1912.

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The Most Beautiful Blank Map in the World–the Bellman’s Fit from the Hunting of the Snark

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1644 [Part of the Series on the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things.]

“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank”
(So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best-
A perfect and absolute blank!”–Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark.

[This post fits perfectly in our History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things. Ditto for the series on The History of Lines–making this a great confluence for a History of Blank and Missing Lines (in the History of Nothing series).]

For all of the brilliance of all of the cartographers and map makers who have drawn a line in the sand or strung a strand of quipi or drawn a celestial rendering on a cave wall or imagined the Americas in 1504 or ventured out and away from the Medieval T-maps or drew maps of other worlds or fashioned spiraling maps of Hell, I think the maps I most like are maps of imagined places. Of course I enjoy the extremely rigorous and steadfast maps (like those of the German Stieler Company of Gotha who for a hundred years routinely drew the most detailed maps in a particular scale than any other mapmakers in creation—you know, the big maps of the U.S. that would locate minute places like Truman Capote’s “out there” town of Holcomb, Kansas) and of course maps of the solar system and galaxy and universe (as knowledge expanded and collapsed and expanded again). And of course there are the representational maps showing the comparative heights

of mountains and lengths of rivers, or the grouping of all the world’s lakes, or the divorce rate map of the United States at Centennial, or the heights at which different sorts of trees are found, or geological speculations on the thrust of the Appalachian chain, or the wanderings of the course of the Mississippi River (below), and other hosts of things.

As much as detail is attractive to me—complex, staggering information correctly displayed—there is also the opposite: the quick, thoughtful, spare map. The Tabula Peutingeriana is sort of like that—this is a 17th century reproduction of an ancient Roman map that was, basically, a road map of the world (or the Roman World) that was linear and included all manner of detail of the roads themselves, with little else. It is a spectacular thing—one version I had once was 14 inches high and 16 feet long, just a skinny map of how to get around in the world from 2000 years ago. There was of course nothing “quick” about how the map was made, coming at the expense of countless hours of careful observation, keen observation, and lots of general human tragedy.

Folrani’s world map of (ca.) 1575 (which appeared in Antoine Lafrery’s (1512–1577) Geografia tavole moderne di geographia) is a glorious thing and a fantastic accomplishment for its time (and also being the first map to use the name “Canada”). It has a sumptuous artistry to it in addition to including (and excluding) certain of the newly known discoveries. In this version of the map he chose to not use the newly-incorporated Straits of Ainan

[I’m sorry to say that I’ve misplaced the original source for this map–I will try and supply. My apologies.]

In another edition of the m-which appeared a few years later–North America is still attached to Asia, but now there is added another bit, a gigantic land mass to the south, Terra Incognita. This was basically put together by some sightings in the southern seas that located different land masses, and Forlani took it upon himself to connect all of those pieces of information and draw them into one continuous land mass, greatly expanding his own version of Antarctica from a few years earlier. It is a wonderful example of leaving something(big) out and making something else (even bigger) up.

But the map that I think I love the most illustrates Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits, and occurs in the Bellman’s tale, starting the second fit. It begins:

The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies-
Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!
Such solemnity too! One could see he was wise,
The moment one look in his face!

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when the found it to be
A map they could all understand.

“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,
“They are merely conventional signs!

“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank”
(So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best-
A perfect and absolute blank!”

Sometimes there is nothing so fine as something that beautifully illustrates the nothing that isn’t there, and this lovely map, unencumbered of all of the elements and details that define the mapness of something, perfectly explains the origin of its need.

For a lovely work on the complexities and simplicities and just sheer beauty of what things like maps are check out former Ashevillean Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination, the Writer as Cartographer.

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Invasion Routes to the U.S.,1940

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1532

This is a supplement to some earlier posts on this blog relating to the possibilities of the invasion of America: Mapping the Invasion of America, 1942 (which is the most-viewed post from this blog, with over 500k readers), The Invasion of America, 1935, and The Invasion of America, 1942, Part II to name a few examples.

In the 27 May 1940 issue of Life magazine appeared an article on Franklin Roosevelt’s call to American action in constructing an entirely new air force. For years the air corps arm of the American military lingered in a kind of low-numbers unresolved limbo–but by May of 1940, it became painfully obvious that something drastic must be done. By this point the European War was about eight months old, and the possibility of Nazi victory looked very real. After all, the Blitzkrieg had been very successfully employed in Poland, and in May was used in the invasions of Finland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. And France, of course. By late May, 1940, France was already pretty much done, the Parisian capital falling weeks later on 23 June, with the country capitulating ten days later. May also saw the collapse of the British and French armies along France’s northern coastline. (The rescue of the 350,000 troops on the beach and in the harbor of Dunkerque had not yet taken place (but would within the next few days). It was bad stuff.) In the light of the Nazi victories and the imminent fall of France, it was also time for people to start thinking about the invasion of England.

Roosevelt and his adviser knew that America was headed into conflict, and knew that the country needed to get onto a war-time production basis. One way to begin preparations was for FDR to call for the increased production of the newest and one of the most important aspects of modern warfare, the airplane. And not only an “increase” in production did the President call for, but a mountainous bump, an order of magnitude more in manufacturing of military planes. Earlier in 1938 the call for a 5,000-plane-a-year air force was shot down as being unrealistic–and perhaps so, even though the Nazis were just at the beginning of their outward thrust. So in May, 1940, Roosevelt stepped up and asked for 50,000 aircraft.

No doubt the war in Europe gave everyone great pause, or scared them silly. Two years before the number of 5,000 planes produced per year was seen as ridiculous–now the business of producing 50,000 a year seemed feasible–incredible, even, but the means of production were present, and so was the raw material and manpower. It was seen that of the 84 aircraft production plants then functioning only 23 were producing military planes, so there could be a modernization of existing plants as well as the construction of new aviation installations. The production totals for the year 1939-1940–1,247 aircraft, including 477 produced for the U.S. Army and Navy, 311 for Great Britain, and 459 for France–represented only a small percentage of what the existing factories could actually produce. (And it turned out of course to be just the case, as we can see from the production numbers in the “notes” section, below.)

There was also a certain amount of scare factor involved with waking up the American public to the needs for getting involved in the European conflict in the year-and-a-half before Pearl Harbor–that the Nazis wouldn’t stop in Great Britain, and that “invaders” could and would attack the United States. The need for increasing American war production was not only to supply the allied forces in Europe for stopping Hitler, but also would keep the Nazis away from the United States. (Summarizing the points discussed by the President and other government officials, the map of the invasion of America looked something like the global view we see above.) So if Roosevelt couldn’t stir the hearts and minds of the American public for keeping Europe aloft in American-built planes, then keeping the Nazis off Main Street might work.

What the map shows are the lines of attack for the un-named Nazi invaders–their aircraft making their way slowly across the Atlantic via Iceland-Greenland–Newfoundland, and across Europe -Africa-Cape Verde-Brazil-Paraguay-then across the Caribbean and right into Wilmington, North Carolina; and then of course all of the way across the Soviet Union to Alaska and then into Washington state. The plan was that these advanced forces would come in, establish an airfield, grow , and then move closer to the U.S., stopping to construct bases all along the way. The response, oddly enough, was for us to build “bombers” so that the airbases could be blown up. That would also extend the effective range of air coverage from the United States to deal with the very-slowly-approaching enemy. The circles on the map show the effective round-trip range of loaded American bombers and the territory that they could cover. In general the map, in its own way, portrayed the United States as approachable to foreign invasion. Some of this reasoning is a little inscrutable, but Washington was playing a game that needed to be won.

These interesting before and after pictures of a ramped-up aircraft production industry were to supply some proof that the job could be done, and that this factory could very well be a template that the dozens of others could follow:

[Aircraft production facility, “before”]

[Aircraft production facility, “after”]

Notes

Production numbers for U.S. aircraft manufacturing, 1940-1945:


Type of airplane	Total	1940¹	1941	1942	1943	1944	1945²
Grand total	295,959	3,611	18,466	46,907	84,853	96,270	45,852
Combat airplanes	200,443	1,771	8,395	24,669	53,183	74,564	37,861
Very heavy bombers	3,740	–	–	4	91	1,147	2,498
Heavy bombers	31,685	46	282	2,513	9,574	15,057	4,213
Medium bombers	21,461	52	762	4,040	7,256	6,732	2,619
Light bombers	39,986	453	2,617	5,954	11,848	12,376	6,738
Fighters	99,465	1,157	4,036	10,721	23,621	38,848	21,082
Reconnaissance	4,106	63	698	1,437	793	404	711
Support airplanes	95,516	1,840	10,071	22,238	31,670	21,706	7,991
Transports	23,900	164	525	1,887	6,913	9,925	4,486
Trainers	58,085	1,676	9,294	17,237	20,950	7,936	1,352

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A History Blank, Empty and Missing Things #76–the American Bison Extermination Map

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1512

Part of this blog’s series on Blank, Empty and Missing Things. (My thanks to Blanche McCallister for setting me on this path this morning.)

“A disgrace to the American people in general, and of the government in particular.” “The men who killed bison for their tongues and who shot them from railroad trains were murderers.”–William T. Hornaday, on the extermination of the American bison, particularly in the 1870’s.

William Temple Hornaday was an early–and probably a founding–member of the American conservation movement, and was also director of the National Zoological Park. He wrote a tremendously bitter and accurate report for the U.S. National Museum in 1894 on the extermination of the American bison, an absolute head-shaker, detailing the history of the bison in North America and its destruction at the hands of sportsmen, hunters, mindless dolts and many others who massacred tens of millions of the animal (“murdered” is the word Hornaday uses constantly). To put the whole issue in perspective, Hornaday issued a famous map showing the shrinkage of the North American bison herd, setting out the enormity of the issue instantly on one piece of paper, a summary of hundreds of pages of bad stories and big numbers.

And the legend

[William T.Hornaday, “Map Illustrating the Extermination of the American Bison”. published in the 1886-1887 Report of the National Museum, Washington, D.C. entitled The Extermination of the American Bison, and printed by the ubiquitous Government Printing Office in 1894. This full text version comes from the Library of Congress site.]

The map certainly provides a real context to the numbers collected by Hornaday–numbers so big that it is hard to put them in any perspective. For example, for the year 1873, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad carried out 250,000 bison robes, 2.7 million pounds of bones and 1.6 million pounds of meat. Generally the robe count was estimated at being about 1/6 of all the bison killed, so of the 1.2 million of taking this train ride in this one year (of aggravated annihilation) there was 1.6 million pounds of meat. Now the refrigerated car was available at this time, so it was possible for meat to be transported to market, like 100 million pounds worth, but that was not of interest to anyone. Not really. Except of course for the bison tongue, which was sometimes the only thing removed froma slaughter of thousands. The tongue was a delicacy, and sold for 50 cents. Just for the record, bison calf skins were sold for 50 cents, as well; adults were $1.25. (Fifty cents in 1873 would be what the lowest-paid cowboy would be paid per day, half a dollar to the guy at the tail end of the cattle herd, the dust-eater.) Over a three year period for the same railroad, 1872-4, there were 450,000 robes shipped, plus 2.2 million pounds of meat, and 16 million pounds of bones. Again, this is about a pound-per-bison of meat, not even the weight of a tongue.

Hornaday records the murder and murderers, repulsed at his findings–his revulsion comes through, as does the overwhelming lesson of carelessness and stupidity in dealing with the American landscape, and the creatures that lived on it.

The iconic photographs of bison skulls awaiting shipment are incredible, but I think it is the Hornaday map that gives the entire issue an overall correspondence to the magnitude of the destruction.

And here’s a map of one of the last bison hunting expeditions, this undertaken for specimens for the National Museum, showing the enormous, continent-covering herds reduced now to individual dots on a large landscape.

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Spaghetti Map of the Army-McCarthy Hearings, 1954

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1489

Some things are complex, and complicated and pretty–you don’t realize that they are this involved, exactly, because of the elegant way in which they are presented. An anti-gravity undertaking by Brunelleschi, in creating his dome, was an enormous challenge, solved with circles within circles, a series of nine of them enclosed in a polygon, the result being one of the most beautiful and iconic achievements in the history of architecture (and engineering).

And then sometimes things are complicated and complex and look and behave that way, their messiness outdistancing their own necessities.

Which gets us now to this game, a mass of entwined spaghetti, which was a tongue-in-cheek poke at the Army-McCarthy Hearings of the spring of 1954, a popular review in the tradition of Thomas Nast that is very effective.. The “Army” was the U.S. Army, and the “McCarthy” was Senator Joesph McCarthy, of Appleton, Wisconsin, a man who was about at the end of a short, meteoric career of vast unsubstantiated accusation, discord, lies and fraud. The hearings were supposed to sniff out Communists in the Army and the defense industry, because that’s what McCarthy did, being a rabid impersonator of a man with a decent mission. The hearings were long, involved, and traveled nowhere fast although much ground was covered.

The bottom line to the whole affair was that as the first televised Senate hearings, McCarthy drew a huge audience, estimated at some 80 million people over the course of the event. And what happened was that “Tail-Gunner Joe” (an appellation he gave to himself that among many other things in his personal and public life were exaggerations) found out that he was seen better int eh minds of Americans when he was not being televised. In short, he was outed for many as a crude, threatening liar, and his career of ruining people in his quixotic quest for deeply-rooted Commies was about over when the last lights in the hearing room went out.

Joe McCarthy would be dead in about three years, his liver failed, evidently (as his biographers say) from too much drink. He was a dangerous and divisive man, but one who had many friends and supporters to keep him re-elected and in power. (He was a darling of the Kennedys, being a favorite of Joe Kennedy, the godfather of Robert Kennedy’s first child, and one who dated two of the JFK’s sisters. Being Catholic and a vehement Commie-hunter went a long way with Joseph Kennedy, who had his own set of issues with power and rule.)

[Image source: LIFE magazine, 21 July 1954, page 42.]

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Maps of Imaginary Places, Part III–a Preliminary Listing of Images

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1469

“To wander in an empty cave / Is fruitless work, ’tis said: / What must it be for one like me / To wander in his
head?”–Selected Letters of Lewis Carroll, 5t, to Margaret Cunnyghame.

This is part of a developing thread on the mapping of imaginary places–primarily in work that is done before, say, 1900. There’s much more imaginary cartography in the 20th century than in the entire history of cartography preceding it, and 1900 jsust happens to be a nice arbitrary cut-off date which also coincides with L. Frank Baum’s map of his The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

And so what follows is a simple list, a familiar placeholder for the cumulative list which will soon follow.

Voyage au Rayaume de Galanterie (1652), by Delphine Denis. ( In: Espaces classique, volume 34, numéro 1-2, hiver 2002, p. 179-189. Source here.)

Map of the Location of Eden, 1785:

The mostly-imagined coastline of Australia, one of the earliest speculations on the place, ca. 1593:

(Novae Guinea. From the Speculum Orbis Terraum published in Antwerp in 1593, by Cornelius de Jode. The first landfall in “real-life” wouldn’t be made their until 1605/6, and so the speculation on the existence of Australia was fancifiul and based mostly on hearsay, unsubstantiated data and hope.)

Map of Matrimony, chromolithographed ca. 1870:

Map of the Kingdom of Coquetterie

Royaume de Coquetterie, by J. Sadeler.

Kingdom of Prester John

Map of Prester John’s realm, by Abraham Ortelius (1527 – 1598), 1572. The kingdom of Preser John was supposed to be that of exiled Christians surrouned by non-believers, set in Central Asia, or norther Africa, or India, or Ethiopia. Bordering such places as Paradise and the Fountain of Youth, and ruled by a descendent of one of the Three Magi who was wealthy and benevolent, this place was an object of much travel and considerable expectations.

Royaume d’Armour, by J. Sadeler, ca. 1659.

G. E. Bula, “Gospel Temperance Railroad Map” (1908), unearthed by Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps.

Map of interior world, from “The Goddess of Atvatabar” (1892)
by William Bradshaw:

Map of Isle Lincoln, from Jules Verne Mysterious Island, 1874:

And another from Verne: Two Years’ Vacation (Deux ans de vacances), Chairman Island:

Nouveau jeu de l’Himen

Complete description here.

Barsetshire, from the novels of Anthony Trollope:

Rudyard Kipling’s (George Coattar’s) map of the Sea of Dreams from the “Brushwood Boy”,

Pilgrim’s Progress, 1840.

The engraving is Thomas Conder’s, originally printed in A. Hogg’s 1778 edition.

Map of Oz, or at least the first map of Oz, as it appeared in L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900:

Michael Drayton’s (1563-1631) love-poem to England and Wales, the Poly-Oblion (published in 1612), mapped the reaches of the two countries and decorated them with allegorical iamges–it seems to me that the images were given far more work an understanding than the maps, which come off as outlines and suggestions of the real thing. (The maps were interestingly the work of one of the earliest British mapmakers, William Hole.)

Map of Harlem Nights, 1932, a fantastic map of a real place and real people and real happenings that I just couldn’t leave alone. It doesn’t belong here–I just like it.

Heinrich Bunting, 1581.

Map of the Empire of the Precieuse, 1652.

Les Quatre parties de l’Empire du Monde de la Lune

Clover-leaf map of the world, 1581, a wonderful map designed to increase the savoir faire of the mapmaker Heinrich Bunting’s hometown of Hannover, which appears at the center of the map. I have a map somewher here that depicts world trade and the importance of Knoxville, Tennessee–the only city depicted on the map.

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The Cosmology of Creation, 1554

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This woodcut comes to us from Biblia: Dat ys De gantze Hillige Schrifft Vordudeschet dorch D. Mart. Luth. Vth der lesten Correctur mercklick vorbetert, and published in Mageburg by Michael Lotter in 1554. I’d say that it depicts the Eath-centered cosmology of the creation just after the introduction of Eve, where everything seems to be in perfection and harmony, there (perhaps) inthe sixth day of the creation story.

In the detail we can clearly see the Garden:

There doesn’t seem to be any sign of the serpent, though Eve does seem to be covering herself in some sort of modesty, even though we are told in the OT that the two humans were naked but not ashamed.

The world seems to be divided into quarters, following the symbolic depiction of the world into sections, though more commonly seen as a three-section map,m the T-O, as seen below:

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The Topography of Emotion, 1654–a Visit to Lake Indifference in the Land of Passion

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1459

(Part of a new series on the mapping of imaginary places.) My thanks to Natalie Bouchard (Montreal, PQ, Canada) for suggesting this map.

[A massively expandable version of this map is available from here.]

This is an old , seemingly simple but somewhat deceptive map, drawn for the work of Madeleine de Scudery’s (1607-1701) novel Clelie, and published in 1654. It is for all intents and purposes a little more than its stated name (Tenderness, Carte de Tendre), diving deeper in the psycho/sexual area than anything else. On the other hand it may be exactly what you want it to be–evidently many people did, as this map turned out to be used as a very popular proto-game board in polite Salons.

As a map of friendship and caring and love and sexual adventure, it is interesting that what seems (to me) to be the stand-alone focal point battling for our initial attention is the The Lake of Indifference–it just seems to me to be the first thing that the eye sees, the map’s most dominant geographical fixture. It is not the largest feature, nor the most spectacular, but it does seem to capture the essence of what may be one of the most ordinal of sins: indifference is a suffocating malaise, a semi-disease, that covers an extraordinary amount of ground without even trying, a force invisible and while so immutable, a host to all manner of impending failures. Indifference may be the worst thing going for humanity in general, as it allows oxygen for so much of the nastiness to burn. Solidified hate is a much easier thing to deal with and potentially manage than a hate distilled and vaporous and filtered to a greater number of uncaring/discaring people.

And speaking of impending doom, one of the other main features of the map is the long, semi-straight river that feeds into the body of water at the top, the Sea of Danger. Now the Sea of Danger doesn’t appear so dangerous, except for the jagged island bits exploding from its calm, flat and not-detailed surface, though perhaps that is the very point. The large river is called the Inclination–translated to a natural disposition, a “normal” way of doing things, a common bent, which means that the mapmaker says that our standard approach to life is to head towards the deceptive sea of danger.

Even though we are headed that way it doesn’t mean that we can get off the river and visit, or stay, in any of the many towns that we see along the way. There are a number of alluring towns with charming names: alacrity/cheery readiness (Empressement); assiduity (Assiduite); eagreness (Empressement); favors (of perhaps a sexual kind, Grands Services); (lasting) friendship (Constante Amitie); kindness (Complaisance); obedience (obaissance); pampering (Petits Soins); sensibility (Sensibilite); submission (Soumission); and tenderness (Tendresse) are all places calling out for attention. The other town names are further indications of the personal stabilities that are the goals of most people: wit, sincerity, generosity, punctuality, respectfulness and goodness.
There’s also those other places, towns of a more sinister and betrayed nature that form a north-south line east and west of the river: Negligence, Inegalite, Tiedeur (tepidity), Legerete (lightness, not being there), Complaisance, Perfide, Meschancete (wickedness), and so on. And don’t forget the town of Oubli (oblivion).

At the last moment, before entering the Sea of Danger (which is fed in the east by the much more volatile waters of the Mer de Inimittie (Sea of Enmite) , the River Inclination is joined by the smaller rivers of Estime (Respect) and Reconnaissance (Gratitude), a mixing of waters all coming together at the same point, a combination that I do not understand. I have no doubt that there are abundant clues to all of this throughout the ten volumes of her novel, but I can’t give Mme. de Scudery that much time.

Maybe none of the placements and proximities in this map matter–maybe the rivers are flowing backwards or something, being filled by the waters from the Sea of Danger. Maybe this isn’t a map at all, but just a suggestion of what stuff might look like, a spatial suggestion of the concept of emotion. Or maybe it is just a board for a polite game.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas — Perception — Perspective