Our History: Embodied in the Land Itself
A couple months back, I happened upon a book review that began by quoting Elizabeth Bishop's poem "The Map," which concludes with one of my favorite lines:
"More delicate than the historians' are the mapmakers' colors."
The review, by Katy Waldman, was of Maggie O'Farrell's new book, Land — a story of history and of mapmakers and of place, set in post-potato-famine Ireland. Waldman explains that Bishop's poem contrasts cartography and poetry — dry record-keeping with a summoning of hidden places.
Exactly as O'Farrell does in Land.
Thanks to the recent movie, Maggie O'Farrell is probably best known for Hamnet, a story of William Shakespeare's family. While Shakespeare may be a great inspiration, it appears that the author who runs a close second is Barry Lopez, the preeminent contemporary historian-cartographer of human ecology.
Reading merely the first pages of Land, it seems clear that O'Farrell was inspired by two excellent Lopez works, namely Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Lopez and Debra Gwartney, and, especially, his short story from Light Action in the Caribbean, "The Mappist."
Home Ground, published in 2006, is a thick compendium of features of the American land and waterways. More than 45 writers contributed personal takes on geographic forms, many of which are regionally specific. Writers citing Kansas contribute over 15 terms, from high plains and point of rock to tallgrass prairie, dust bowl, tornado alley, and marais.
Similarly, in Land, a mapmaker named Tomas moves across the Irish landscape with his young son Liam, encountering hillock, drumlin, tulach, bluff, peninsula, and tobar. And that's just in the opening pages.
But before we know it, we move from the poetry of place to the dry cartography of invaders; Tomas is mapping the land for the British colonizers. The reader thinks they can guess the developing arc of the story, but...
Quite suddenly Tomas is literally changed by the land, and soon thereafter, having seen visions of "the mapmaker's colors," quits his job. A wise Shakespearean widow describes to him the history of people on the land they occupy and enlightens him further.
Here the story of Lopez's mappist: a retired geographer named Corlis Benefideo, comes to the fore — or perhaps comes alongside. Corlis, a wise widower, also quit his job making maps for the government to make real maps.
I often go back to the story as Lopez tells it; it's so quietly powerful. So much so that I had to stop here and turn to the acknowledgements at the back of Land, to see if Barry Lopez's name was listed. It wasn't. But given the earthy spirituality of O'Farrell's writing, I choose to see that merely as an indication that the wisdom within Barry Lopez's works is being shared and spreading in mysterious ways, even after Lopez's death.
(To wit: There's a brand new book that probably fits right into this review, but it's so new I haven't read it yet: THIRTY-TWO WORDS FOR FIELD: LOST WORDS OF THE IRISH LANDSCAPE, by Manchan Magan.)
Meanwhile, back in 19th-century Ireland, here's Tomas, post-epiphany, trying to explain the idea of real maps to his son Liam: "I see it all now. I see that maps cannot be made with theodolites and poles and compasses alone. These are but playthings... How much more there is to the land! How layered, how nuanced..."
To which Corlis might append: "This information is what we need, you know. This shows history and how people fit the places they occupy. It's about what gets erased and what comes to replace it. The maps reveal the foundations beneath the ephemera."
Or, as Tomas says to Liam, "What we thought we knew... is all wrong. About the land, about our history, and the intersection of both... Myth is fact and fact is myth, and both are embodied in the land itself."
Corlis charts a cautious way forward: "Don't make the mistake of thinking you, or I, or anyone, knows how the world is meant to work. The world is a miracle, unfolding in the pitch dark. We're lighting candles. Those maps — they are my candles."
Tomas to Liam: "We'll start now, today."
Liam: "Start what?"
Tomas: "To redraw the maps, of course."
—Jake Vail is an Adult Services Assistant at Lawrence Public Library.
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