the bellman’s map (revised)

The Beaver and the Beagle in terra incognita.

This map is a continuation of my look at The Hunting of the Snark (1874) started in the Markdown boot camp. A narrative is a kind of a map, a map of a journey through time. So The Hunting is already a map or a certain kind–a map with a certain end (a jovial evasion of oblivion by a logician). And it also contains within it a literal (blank) map as a clue, or a decoy or an amusement. My new map makes a layering of one narrative on top of another to add cross-dimension to the linearity of narrative. This allows me to situate some juxtapositions without asserting them as fact in an expository way. The layering here begins with thinking about the terra incognita (unknown land) to which the Bellman’s map seems to refer, those blank spaces on the early maps of empire not yet explored or assayed. By Carroll’s C19, the apex of empire, very few of these blanks remained in the space/time of Victorian cartographers. To the map of The Hunting I add a fragment of the journey’s of Martin Frobisher, who searched and mapped Baffin Island on behalf of the English crown. In 1577 he returned to London from Baffin with tons of ore (mistakenly thought to be gold) and three kidnapped Inuit (mistakenly thought to be cannibals). What you desire most comes along with what you fear most (gold with cannibals, snarks with boojums). Queen Elizabeth named the new-claimed territory meta incognita (the unknown limits). To this layer is added trajectory fragments of the Franklin expedition, which departed England in 1845 and became lost (thirty years before The Hunting). Searches for Franklin’s lost ships and men continued sporadically into the 1870’s. Much commercial exploration in the arctic was carried out under this label (and it goes on, witness Harper’s search). To this is added a last layer which is my own pre-literate trajectory through The Hunting by crayon and my first trajectories through my childhood neighborhood.

Is this map accurate to the data? I think not. Does it have an intentional or specific communication goal. No. Are the juxtapositions intentional? Yes. Is the intention for a fixed result or reading on the part of the reader? No. Does it have value as a critical tool? Perhaps. If I am a designer engaged to create a visualization of a certain communicable position I am making a representation of that position or ideology. If I do my job professionally the facts and the ideas (and the ideology) will all line up. If, however, I mimic such a rationalistic representation as a gambit to juxtapose some disparate information, facts, views, conjectures without knowing the specific outcome for individual viewers, then I might be mis-designing with purpose. In this case I have made some choices about what to put in this mix, but without premeditation about what people should conclude. In other words, the juxtaposition comes before the conclusion as a kind of pre-thought. (No doubt conclusions seep in along the way.) So the designer or the social scientist (or the explorer) is looking for things to ‘appear’ as nodes in the data according to the map’s logic. Hunting for the Snark, so to speak. But another question is what might ‘disappear’, sliding into the cracks of this method.

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Order on Order (the story, the map, the disturbing landscape of…)

(bootcamp: the markdown)

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The map in Lewis Carol’s Hunting of the Snark is a blank. Yet they make it to the island (what is an island defined by a blank map?). Order in the Hunting of the Snark is a series of absurdities-as-rules brought about by the author, including the narrative itself which could be summarized as follows:

THE LANDING > THE VANISHING

Its sad this, but less sad than it would be without the humour of order, without lyric and narrative jest layered like the smooth membrane of a page (as a map of time) over nothingness and the inevitable (if a narrative ‘inevitable’ is not already a map of time). This “agony in eight fits” begins when the omniscient (or so the crew is lead to believe) Bellman lands his crew with care,

“Just the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried, as he landed his crew with care; Supporting each man on the top of the tide by a finger entwined in his hair.

If we keep to the story, if we abide by the rules of this map, we will be safe, held gently above the abyss. We will be carried along with pleasure… to the end, far off in the future. It is a story for children.

My own copy of this epic quest (I think it was one of the first books I owned—it is definitely the book I have owned for the longest) is one illustrated by Mervyn Peake. I only discover today as I format this probe that the original (1884) illustrations were by Henry Holiday. We can compare the Bellman (Holiday -left; Peake-right):

Funny though, I thought the Bellman supported his people with a finger entwined in his own hair, not their hair! Needless to say I see the Holiday illustrations as latecomers, as wrong. The Peake illustrations were always ominous and disturbing for me. I owned this book before I could read. So the form of this book with its strange typography filled with quotation marks always fascinated me. Likewise, the two-handed mathematical calculations of the Butcher demonstrating how many times he said something while the Beaver looks on, deeply worried, were also a strange field of glyphs for me. This little book still resonates with this disturbing encounter with (incomprehensible) language and numbers. It is a feeling I still often feel when an external narrative of order or methodology presents itself.

On the cover of my copy of the hunting the title and author’s name is underlined in brown crayon (by me, I know). Inside the cover is the inscription ottwo.5 in the same brown crayon. Beside it, in my mother’s handwriting is my name and address. ottwo, if you can’t guess, is Ottawa. I do remember getting my mother to complete the inscription which marked my ownership of this little book. After I learned to read I was embarassed by the clumsy writing and mis-spelling. I’ve gotten over this.

Back to the map. I have spent most of my life without a tangible reference for the geography of the Hunting of the Snark. Fortunately, now I see images of the original 1884 illustrations which include Holiday’s very precise rendition of the map. It is a blank, a perfect blank, but one (to my dismay) framed by references to what lies haphazardly beyond this frame.

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