This post was written by Coleman Numbers, a Humanities Center student fellow.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about maps. What makes a good map? The most obvious answer might be that “a good map is an accurate representation of the region that it names.” The goodness, or usefulness, of a map scales with how much fidelity it has to a real-world stretch of land.
Simple enough. But what’s been fascinating me about maps is the extent to which this definition of a good map might be lacking. Is it enough that a map be spatially accurate?
On top of that, all sorts of things besides the dusty, faded bundle of paper in your glove compartment might fit the above definition of a map: anatomical charts, phone books, sheet music, sonograms, and literary texts, for example.
Human beings produce symbolic representations for lots of reasons besides literal navigation—but perhaps all our representations have some navigational component, some way of orienting us towards what we really want to find.
It’s worth thinking, therefore, about what really does make a good map. Is it all about fidelity? Or is there more? To find out, we’ll look at three very different types of “maps”: Gerardus Mercator’s Atlas, Walt Whitman’s “Passage to India,” and Jorge Luis Borges’ “On Exactitude in Science.” Along the way, I want to explore what makes humanistic texts useful as tools for navigating the world.
While the West had world maps before Gerardus Mercator, the Flemish polymath’s Atlas Sive Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura (“Atlas or cosmographical meditations upon the creation of the universe and the universe as created”), published in 1595, is one of the most enduring and transformative Renaissance map projects. The work was the first to use atlas to refer to mapmaking, and its form came to define the genre.
But the Atlas was more than a collection of maps of the world. In her book The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe, Ayesha Ramachandran of Yale asserts that the Atlas practiced a particular type of “world-making.” A map, she explains, is never only a straightforward representation of a subject; it is also an interpretation of it, a reflection and distillation of a particular mapmaker’s assumptions about that subject.
These assumptions are often unexpected but powerful. Ramachandran explains, for example, how Mercator’s mapmaking paralleled the development of anatomical texts in the 16th century:
“Anatomy was a powerful disciplinary analogue for geography since the anatomist displayed and described parts of the body that had hitherto never been observed, much as the mapmaker revealed parts of the world that had hitherto never been readily available for visible scrutiny.”
As the human body became a dissectible and inventoried material for anatomists, so for Mercator and subsequent cartographers was the world a material whole subject to dissection, division, and categorization.
We can see how Mercator’s anatomical outlook might have influenced the West in the way that Europe went about carving up and categorizing the rest of the world in the ensuing centuries. Imperialism, we might argue, came about partly because of how Europeans mapped out their world.
A good map is never just an accurate map—it’s a map that encourages (or discourages) a particular type of seeing in the maker and user.
Several centuries later, the American Walt Whitman writes a poem that might be seen as a spiritual inheritor of Mercator’s grand world-spanning project:
“Passage to India!
Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together” (2.30-35*).
“Passage to India” is one of my favorite Whitman poems. There’s a lot going on in the poem—it’s a song of Westward expansion, to American economy, to cosmopolitan aspiration. But one of my favorite aspects of the piece is that its expansive (albeit colonialist) journey across East and West, ancient and modern, old and new, form a kind of map—a map of the questing soul’s return to union with the divine. Rather than geographical, this map, laid out in American English, is temporal and mystical.
At the beginning of the poem, Whitman gives us the starting point of his odyssey: “The Past! the Past! the Past!” (1.9). The beginning of eternal expansion, for Whitman, begins in contemplating the deep past, the “elder religions” (2.23) and ancient traditions that launched civilization on its course.
While Whitman doesn’t explain how a soul is to access these “primitive fables” (2.17), for him they lead directly to an adventure across continents, which leads us to contemplate the world’s “vast Rondure” and expansive fulness (5.81). Whitman wants us to find a way to acknowledge the world’s “inscrutable purpose, some hidden prophetic intention,” the latent question of our own place on the earth waiting to be unfolded (5.86-93). Why are we here? Why am I here, one point on this huge, varied globe?
Once we do this, we’re ready to take the ultimate voyage, “Not lands and seas alone,” but to turn inward, and to contemplate “Time and Space and Death,” and to sing to the ground of all being. “Bathe me O God in thee, mounting to thee, / I and my soul to range in range of thee (8.193-194). The final stage of the soul’s “Passage to India,” to an unseen but sought-after land, is a journey inward. After we’ve recognized all the contingencies that have led to our current moment, and after we have attended to all that surrounds and constitutes our place in the world, we’re ready to ask ourselves and God if we can’t be “fill’d with friendship, love complete” (8.222) embraced in divine love that infuses our whole being.
After reading “Passage to India,” I’m always left in awe—and confusion. What does it mean to be “bathed in God?” How exactly do we launch ourselves “to those, superior universes” (8.205)? Unlike the exact geometries of Mercator’s Atlas, Whitman’s map of the cosmic voyage lacks clear guidelines. The boundaries of what he describes are fuzzy, open to the indeterminacy of poetry (especially Whitman’s poetry). It’s easy to see this as a bug rather than a feature, especially considering our initial definition of what makes a good map.
But Whitman is mapping a very different type of territory than Mercator—and for the place Whitman petitions us to go, we need a very different style of navigation. I think Whitman’s language, in its imprecision, leads us exactly where we need to go. It functions not unlike a Zen koan: a set of utterances that can place us in a particular frame of mind, a particular readiness, for deep truth.
Not all maps need to be precise. Some good maps are imprecise, more evocative than they are indicative.
And, in the first place, precision isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In 1946, Jorge Luis Borges’ Collected Fictions included a one-paragraph short story about a map:
“…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers’ Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.”
This short story, “Del rigor en la ciencia” (“On Exactitude in Science”), considers what a “perfect” map would look like. It is, in a word, “useless.”
Perfect fidelity cannot be the goal of mapping—whether a landscape or a soul. Again, even in precise maps, loss of detail is a feature, not a bug. When we compress real-world messiness down to symbolism, we get something portable and durable. This portability and durability come from a certain level of abstraction and distillation. Good maps understand what details to leave out as much as what details to include.
Good maps, then, are more than just accurate. Whether a map is a novel, a landscape painting, a sculpture, or an actual map, they give us strategies for navigating the terrain.
Good maps construct a reference frame, or way of viewing the world, that leads to constructive rather than destructive mindsets.
Good maps may evoke, in addition to denoting, certain important truths.
And, in connection with that last point, good maps are generalized enough that they can be carried into many places, many times, and many situations. Particularity in poetry, in art, in philosophy is good—but if there is no universality in an artifact, then it is not liable to endure beyond its time. It’s probably not going to be useful to future humans as a tool for navigating the world.
And what better tool could we leave our descendants than a good map?
*”Passage to India” citations are as follows: (Section.Line)
