I Went for a Drive

Bernd and Hilla Becher travel and photograph factories and water towers, barns and houses. They always shoot head on, with a large format camera, in cloudy conditions. They always shoot in the spring or f­all, early in the morning. Despite their objective point of view (they went out of their way to crop out anything which might distract from the object being documented), there is an obvious aestheticism at play in their work. The array is their way to compress and stack space. One water tower isn’t just one water tower, it’s every water tower. 

Yves Klein jumped off a roof, a photographer took a picture, and just like that they captured what driving feels like. What traveling feels like. What being in a (non-literal) suspended state feels like.
Between places.
Between A and B. 

Jorge Luis Borges writes of a library which contains all possible books of a finite number of pages. This library—effectively but not actually infinite—is populated by librarians who are all born and raised in a common section of the library. Some spend their lives where they were born, each occupying one of the not-quite-infinite number of hexagonal rooms which make up the library. Others venture forth, searching for a particular book, one which would contain the ultimate “truth”, knowing full well that the number of books which contain lies is almost-infinitely larger, and knowing there’s no way to tell them apart. In fact, an inconceivably large fraction of the books contain nothing but gibberish, such that one single string of coherent text would be enough to send any librarian into ecstasy.  Some commit suicide by leaping down the near-bottomless pits which connect each and every hexagonal room vertically, presumably dying of either hunger or thirst in their fall, should the shock not kill them upon the leap. They jump because the vastness is overwhelming. Others thrive in the search. 

Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story so short and thought-provoking that almost any piece of text written about it would exceed its length. The story is about a fictional kingdom (as is often the case with Borges) which was so preoccupied with the idea of exactitude that the maps they drew were as large and as detailed as what they were mapping. The map was laid upon the land and corresponded with every point exactly. Eventually, the kingdom fell and the map was left to rot and degrade. The remnants now serve as shelter from the desert sun.  

Richard Long is a fairly prominent land artist known for walking a lot. One of his more interesting projects involved camping in the middle of the desert and going on hikes. He would plot his midday progress—as well as any landmarks identified along the way—and then head back to camp. He did this 7 times, over 7 days. The resulting circle is imaginary, defined by the furthest point he was able to reach. The relationship between his body and the territory he’s covering is made clear, and you don’t need any graphical scale to understand how far he must have walked. A map does not need to be descriptive.  It can be relational and ephemeral. It is tied uniquely to one person’s experience of a place.

“He saw in Astonishment the most lofty state of the soul, and the most overwhelming emotional product of the Sublime, when ‘all motions were suspended, with some degree of horror,’ the mind being so filled with the object that is could entertain no other. Sublimity only remains a defensible category so long as the philosopher was young and naive.”

Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque, P. 56

“The poles of the earth have wandered. The equators have apparently moved. The continents, perched on their plates, are thought to have been carried so very far and to be going in so many directions that it seems an act of almost pure hubris to assert that some landmark of our world is fixed at 73 degrees 57 minutes and 53 seconds west longitude and 40 degrees 51 minutes and 14 seconds north latitude—a temporary description, at any rate, as if for a boat on the sea. Nevertheless, these coordinates will, for what is generally described as the foreseeable future, bring you with absolute precision to the west apron of the George Washington Bridge. Nine A.M. A weekday morning.”

John McPhee, Annals of the Former World, P. 19

One hell of an opener. From drifting poles to a precise point in time and space. John McPhee spent 20 years driving along the American interstate highway network with a bunch of geologists at his side, studying roadcuts to get a better look at the geological history of the US. Along the way, he meets people and records his conversations. He writes 4 books, each without a single map. His stories, like the roads he travels, become a cross-section of american life. 

“Mapping is a fantastic cultural project, creating and building the world as much as measuring and describing it.”

“[...] the map has always preceded the territory, in that space only becomes territory through acts of bounding and making visible [...]”

James Corner, Agency of Mapping, from Mappings, P. 216, 22

Janet Malcolm wrote a profile on artist David Salle. The essay consists of 41 first paragraphs of a longer, unwritten essay, each iteration a different way of approaching the subject of Salle the person and Salle the artist. Each paragraph is self contained and has a discrete point to make, and the essay as a whole paints a vivid picture of the artist without making any sweeping conclusions.

David Foster Wallace has a lot to say, and he says it all—through footnotes, through page long stream-of-consciousness sentences, through witticisms. He has a frightening ability to broach any subject and make it fascinating. Though his essay “Host” is mostly making the point that conservative talk radio is having a negative impact on the collective subconscious of an entire country—all in the name of profit—he makes sure we understand all of the technology and insider jargon that makes this possible in the first place.