By the Sea

I speak to maps. And sometimes they something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps, the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable.

Sometimes I think it is my fate to live in the wreckage and confusion of crumbling houses.

In their books I read unflattering accounts of my history, and because they were unflattering, they seemed truer than the stories we told ourselves. I read about the diseases that tormented us, about the future that lay before us, about the world we lived in and our place in it. It was as if they had remade us, and in ways that we no longer had any recourse but to accept, so complete and well-fitting was the story they told about us. I don’t suppose the story was told cynically, because I think they believed it too.

I am a refugee, an asylum-seeker. These are not simple words, even if habit of hearing them makes them seem so.

That's the way life takes us,' Elleke once said. 'It takes us like this, then it turns us over and takes us like that.' What she didn't say was that through it all we manage to cling to something that makes sense.

Before maps the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable. And later when it became necessary, geography became biology in order to construct a hierarchy in which to place the people who lived in their inaccessibility and

And at school there was little or no time for those other stories, just an orderly accumulation of the real knowledge they brought to us, in books they made available to us, in a language they taught us.

I have time on my hands, I am in the hands of time, so I might as well account for myself.

I have always had an interest in furniture. At the very least, it weighs us down and keeps us on the ground, and prevents us from clambering up trees and howling naked as the terror of our useless lives overcomes us. It keeps us from wandering aimlessly in pathless wildernesses, plotting cannibalism in forest clearings and dripping caves.

New maps were made, complete maps, so that every inch was accounted for, and everyone now knew who they were, or at least who they belonged to. Those maps, how they transformed everything.

Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable. And later when it became necessary, geography be­came biology in order to construct a hierarchy in which to place the people who lived in their inaccessibility and primitiveness in other places on the map.

aps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable. And later when it became necessary, geography be­came biology in order to construct a hierarchy in which to place the people who lived in their inaccessibility and primitiveness in other places on the map.

Suelo hablarles a los mapas, y a veces hasta contestan. Es menos extraño de lo que parece, y tampoco soy el primer en hacerlo. Antes de que hubiera mapas el mundo no tenía límites, fueron ellos los que lo moldearon y le dieron el aspecto de un territorio, de algo que se podía no sólo arrasar y saquear, sino también poseer. Los mapas volvieron alcanzables, y hasta domesticables, lugares que se hallaban en el límite de lo imaginable, y luego, cuando se hizo necesario, la geografía se transformó en biología para construir un orden jerárquico en el que situar a quienes vivían, aislados y primitivos, en otros lugares del mapa.