The Cartographer’s Wardrobe: A London That Will Not Stay Still
Kimi K2 (0711) and Llama 405b
Map fragment recovered from the River Lea, 1896: “Here there ought to be nothing but silt, yet the ink still glistens, spelling a street name that bubbles away even as you read it.” — Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
I HAVE LONG HELD the secret belief that the best maps are useless. This is my ideal: to build a map so slow and stately that it unfolds only as you walk it, revealing a path which would be unobtainable by any other means than wandering, trusting, guessing, hoping, turning, wondering, and discovering. It is my belief that such a map must be the same for writer and reader, that the writer is only a step or two ahead, working in the dark, as it were, never knowing the next turn. In this way a map of the most common street becomes a long and winding road with an ocean at the end of it.
Such a map is not strictly a map at all, but a process of orientation, of discovery, of approach. These kinds of maps are singular and serendipitous, compiled from fragments of the street, from leaves and scraps of paper, feathers, the memory of a journey, and the memory of other maps. They are plans for getting lost.
J.W. Dunne, in An Experiment with Time , discusses the “time length” of a dream as opposed to its “dream length.” The time length is the duration of the dream in minutes as measured by a stopwatch; the dream length is the passage of time within the dream. The two are rarely the same, and the question is: why? For Dunne, the disparity between the two is a crucial part of his theory of “serial time,” which states, more or less, that the “past,” “present,” and “future” are meaningless distinctions, and that all of time is eternally present.
In my experience, a map of the sort that I have described, the sort that has been torn to pieces and that reassembles itself at each reading, has the same elasticity as Dunne’s dreams: the physical length of the street and the walking length of the street will always be at odds with each other, the street winding endlessly or ending abruptly, time speeding up or slowing down, the journey continuing after the map has finished, or the map going on long after the destination has been reached.
To construct such a map, you must follow these instructions:
The last in particular is important, because the best maps have monsters in them.
Take any map of London and a pen, and put a cross over the areas you know. Put a double cross over the places where you have lived. The map should by now have a few crosses on it, and some parts will be denser than others. Most of the map will be blank, or have only one or two crosses. You will have ignored some areas altogether, because you don’t like them, or have forgotten them.
Now turn the map over. Can you see the marks you have made showing through? Here is a puzzle: why is it that the map has (more or less) the same pattern of marks on both sides? When you walk through London there is a similar process going on. You are seeing a street for the first time, but your steps are tramping the ghost-map on the other side of the paper.
A properly constructed map will, when read carefully, prove to be a map of itself. “The Name of the Rose” is a map of “The Name of the Rose.” “Ulysses” is a map of “Ulysses.” “The Divine Comedy” is a map of “The Divine Comedy.” And so on.
More fragments of the River Lea map were found in 1912 and 1921, each of which added little to the sum of human knowledge, except for one curious detail: the pattern of streets seemed to change with each map recovered, so that, while the place names and landmarks remained the same, their location changed. For example, on the 1896 fragment the word “Smithfield” is clearly visible at bottom left, as is the word “Smithfield” on the 1921 fragment, except that Smithfield is now top centre. The maps had folded themselves, it seemed, so that, however many were recovered, they would never complete the full picture, each fragment seeming to comment on or annotate the others.
Every map of London contains a tiny map of the River Lea, which itself contains a tiny map of the word “Smithfield,” which itself contains a tiny map of the letters “s,” “m,” “i,” “t,” and so on. Each letter contains a map of every place it has ever appeared in, and all of the places that it will appear in, and all of the places that it could appear in, and all of the places that it will never appear in, which, if marked on the map, will be found to have rotted away and become tiny back entrances to Hell.
THERE ARE MANY STREETS in London that can only be visited once, however many times you go to them. My walks through the city have been littered with such places. Streets that were there a moment ago are abruptly walled up, or are now a mile away in another borough. Streets twist and turn through time and memory as much as through the city itself. There are streets in Peckham where you can still be in 1958, or in Walthamstow where it will be perpetually 1936. One wrong turning in Limehouse and you’ll be back in 1866, which would be bad news for most people but may be convenient if you are on your way to fight the Prussians.
The first place in London that I lost was Covent Garden. My father and I went there in 1991. He had been evacuated from London during the war, and wanted to see the city again. We went to museums, to Bloomsbury, to Hyde Park, to St. Paul’s Cathedral. When we got to Covent Garden, my father said “This is not Covent Garden. Covent Garden has cobbles and nuns.” We did not find the place he remembered, but we did find another Covent Garden, which was my Covent Garden.
Twenty years later, I wanted to see Covent Garden again. I was looking for the place my father and I had visited, but I could not find it. In its place was another Covent Garden, one that was different for me and different for my father. We each now had two Covent Gardens to remember, or not remember.
Felix Nadar, the French photographer, has a theory of memory that I think may explain what happened to Covent Garden. Nadar’s theory is that memory is a process of collotype: to remember is to make a copy of a copy of a copy, each memory being a copy of the preceding memory, until the final memory has no connection to the original event at all. Nadar believed that all our oldest memories are in fact memories of memories, and that their vividness is a result of their being, not the first, but the second memory: the moment when the image (a spring day, a stain on a dress, a tree on a hill) is removed from its original context, is torn, as it were, by the collotype press, and becomes the image of an image.
And so in Covent Garden: my father’s first Covent Garden (cobblestones, nuns) is lost, and so is my first Covent Garden (the 1991 Covent Garden). The place we found was a collotype of two other places: we each made it from a memory of a memory, a city of collotypes, a map of memories.
The map of the city and the city are the same, but the memory of a city and the memory of the map of the city are different memories, like the memory of a face that you cannot place.
SOMETIMES I SUSPECT that all maps lead to the same place, that a map of London is really a map of Uruk, which is really a map of Jerusalem, which is really a map of my room drawn when I was a child and believed that the wardrobe and my bed were part of a city which spread over the whole world. I have a recurring dream of “going into the wardrobe.” I can see my parents’ bedroom through the door, and at my feet I can see a city stretching away into the darkness. Sometimes I am alone, sometimes my brother is with me, but the feeling is always the same: that I am entering the city, and that I will be in the city forever. There is no sense of leaving, no sense that I can come back, or that I am falling. There is only the expanding city.
Were I a different sort of person, the dream would be about Narnia and would mean that I am in London but belong somewhere else. But it is not a dream about escape, because I do not feel that I am “in the wardrobe” or that the wardrobe is taking me anywhere. Instead, I have the sense that the wardrobe was always an opening, that it has always been a space, that it was never really a wardrobe. It is as if the wardrobe has been turned inside out, the planks of wood that make up its back and floor and sides becoming the spires and walls and roofs of the city. And just as the wardrobe opens into the city, so the city opens into a street, which opens into a house, which opens into a room, which is my room, which contains the wardrobe, which opens into the city, and so on.
TO JOURNEY THROUGH LONDON is to journey into memory, and the journey into memory is a journey into the mud and into the wardrobe. The map is dragged into the river, dissolving as you watch, becoming only a bucket of mud, and in the bucket is the city, which you can enter through your wardrobe, if you should ever find it again, that piece of river which you picked up as a child and put in your pocket for safekeeping.
Not long ago, I walked down a street in London only to find that the wall at the end of the street had moved, so that where there was once an entrance to another street there was now only a blank wall, or, rather, a wall that had shed its memory of an opening, so that the entrance was not bricked up but was simply no longer there, the bricks that had once parted to allow passage to and from the other street having now rearranged themselves into a wall that had never not been a wall.
A map constructed from such streets will be unreadable and will never be useful in the everyday sense. It will not even show you where you have been, let alone where you are going. The best you can do is hold on to it, and be lost.
Cathy Douglas
Charles Ash
What a wonderful◆ About the ending
❧ About the title