Week 15: Karey & Innisfree

Karey

I want to share four map related experiences I had during winter break.

1. My sons played a game they discovered last month: Minecraft Earth. Players use a cell phone map to navigate a place, collecting Minecraft resources that appear and then place them in an augmented reality map. As I watched them play, I was intrigued by the map itself — it looked like Minecraft (everything was made of blocks) but it was clear that it was our neighborhood:

Screenshot of Minecraft Earth in my neighborhood

2. I visited the newly re-designed MoMA in New York City and stumbled upon a Julie Mehretu painting. Her map art still inspires and astonishes me:

"Empirical Construction" Istanbul 2003

3. My kids and I went to the newly opened Burke Museum in Seattle and we saw a navagational map that shows the Marshall Islands (as shells) and “the unique wave patterns that reverberate off each island” (as wood). I had seen pictures of these navigational maps but this was the first wave-piloting map I’ve seen in person:

Wave-piloting map from the Burke Museum

4. I re-read “MAP” a poem by Wislawa Szymborska. 

I included this poem in my fourth blog post but want to re-post it today. 

Szymborska’s vision of a simple green and blue map of earth is reassuring to me as we welcome in 2020. Perhaps, if we zoom out and see only the mountains, rivers, lakes, and seas and not wars, boundaries, and borders we can focus instead on our connected humanity.

MAP
Wisława Szymborska

​Flat as the table
it’s placed on.
Nothing moves beneath it
and it seeks no outlet.
Above—my human breath
creates no stirring air
and leaves its total surface
undisturbed.

Its plains, valleys are always green,
uplands, mountains are yellow and brown,
while seas, oceans remain a kindly blue
beside the tattered shores.

Everything here is small, near, accessible.
I can press volcanoes with my fingertip,
stroke the poles without thick mittens,
I can with a single glance
encompass every desert
with the river lying just beside it.

A few trees stand for ancient forests,
you couldn’t lose your way among them.

In the east and west,
above and below the equator--
quiet like pins dropping,
and in every black pinprick
people keep on living.
Mass graves and sudden ruins
are out of the picture.
Nations’ borders are barely visible
as if they wavered—to be or not.

I like maps, because they lie.
Because they give no access to the vicious truth.
Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly
they spread before me a world
not of this world.