chapter 9. STARTING SMALL #1
on animated maps
This post has been translated from Dutch into English with DeepL. It will be manually edited and streamlined soon.
THE IMAGE of the two trigrams: Wind above, Heaven below. There are clouds in the sky, but the wind dissipates them. More time is needed for the clouds to develop, to eventually become big and heavy enough for rain. Without rain, little can grow; without water, very little can be undertaken. It is not the time of grand ambitions and grand gestures. It is better to take small steps, stay close to home and recharge for later. Wind over Heaven: the image of Starting Small.
THE IMAGE of the hexagram: between five solid lines, representing the atmosphere, there is only one broken line, representing humidity. The air is far from saturated, so it won't rain for now. It is a time of gathering and building little by little. A time to make small steps.
I drove by car from Amsterdam to Zwolle, and what can I tell you about that trip? Halfway, near Zeewolde, it started raining for a while, at a traffic light I put a chewing gum in my mouth, a short traffic jam a little later, but other than that, nothing special to report. I rode Amsterdam-Zwolle or Zwolle-Amsterdam very often, I lost count, so I know the route like the back of my hand, you might say. Yet I can hardly tell you anything worth knowing about the land in between. What grows and lives there, about the farms, the villages and towns, about their people, the forests, the history, ... The resolution of the journey, the resolution of the experience, is sadly low.
I took a course in it, learning to read straight down the middle of the page, and was able to go through ‘War and Peace’ in 20 minutes. It’s about Russia.
Woody Allen
Over a period of twenty years, I regularly flew from Schiphol Airport to Swechat, Humberto Delgado, London City, Vantaa and Galileo Galilei. Promising destinations in name, but in reality completely interchangeable locations with the look and feel of the standardised shopping gutter (what is the appropriate name for that in slang?). I retained very few memories of VIE, LIS, LCY, HEL AND PSA. The interior of the means of transport gave no reason for that either. Over the years, I had a handful of interesting conversations with fellow passengers, but generally I killed time reading. Imagine taking a trip that took a medieval traveller months, if not years - once in a lifetime - and upon returning had experienced enough to tell tall tales around the hearth for the rest of his life. And there I was making such a journey high in the sky, simultaneously reading on my iPad about Marco Polo, Phileas Fog and Redmond O'Hanlon. Instead of linking observations and experiences to the environment they belong to, while reading I connected the journey to the journey of others, the experiences of others. The resolution of journey and experience was not even 0, it was minus 0.
Going through life with earbuds in, listening to a podcast or the latest hits, seeing one world and hearing another at the same time - that's called schizophonia. Splitting reality into different parallel experiences. Is there also a name for being physically on a journey and not experiencing any of it, because in imagination a totally different adventure is being lived? Undoubtedly, I'll duck back The Matrix for it.
A distant ancestor of mine embarked as a soldier on the VOC ship West-Friesland in 1769 . His journey from Hoorn, with a stop at the Cape of Good Hope, to Batavia took 299 days. My father, born in Java, made the trip several times by steamship, through the Suez Canal. That only took another six weeks. Now you fly from Schiphol Airport to Jakarta in 13 hours 20 minutes. Nostalgia for journeys with scurvy and under-deck passages is of course nonsense, but there is very little story in the 13 hours 20 minutes journey compared to the journeys of my ancestor and father.
In 1823, two well-to-do young Dutch men, Jacob van Lennep and Dirk van Hogendorp, took a walking tour of the Netherlands. This was a time well before the standardisation of shopping streets, residential area’s and meadows. Every village had its peculiarity, beyond every bend of the country road laid something unexpected. There was so much remarkable to see and to experience during the three-month journey for the two young travellers that they each wrote a diary of respectable seize. You will read Van Lennep's diary in one go and it is more topical than ever, not only because it beautifully describes the diversity of society and nature, but also because it shows how high the resolution of experience can be, if only you go slowly, step by step.
A tree as great as a man's embrace
springs up from a small shoot.
A terrace nine stories
high begins with a pile of earth.
A journey of a thousand miles
starts under one's feet
Tao Teh Ching 64 - translation of Gia Fu Feng
‘What a useful thing a pocket-map is!’ I remarked.
’That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,’ said Mein Herr, ‘map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?’
’About six inches to the mile.’
’Only six inches!’ exclaimed Mein Herr. ‘We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all ! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!’
’Have you used it much?’ I enquired.
’It has never been spread out, yet,’ said Mein Herr: ‘the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight ! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.’
Sylvie and Bruno - Lewis Carroll
How wonderful such delicacy! There is something to see and discover everywhere, stories live everywhere. There is something hidden under every stone. And then that stone itself, what is its story. A tree root that pushed up the pavement. An elephant path: who would have initiated that? A odd street name, a plastic bottle on the verge, a big boulder along the road, a quiet dead-end arm of the river, graffiti on an abandoned electricity shed, something which triggers the memory of a previous time, suddenly the memory of something completely different, a snail crossing the street ...
… (the Australian skill of collecting information and memorisation), dating back possibly 50,000 years to the first habitation of Australia, is the basis under the famous 'dreamtime stories', which, for connoisseurs, make the Australian landscape 'shimmer' with ancient knowledge. The knowledge of water sources, ancient kinships and much more, was passed from generation to generation following rituals virtually unchanged. The aboriginal technique weaves the localisation of memory points into a mythological story, an additional element to the memory palace. Anyway, the educational and psychological function of narrative has been attracting more attention in science in recent years. An entirely different study, for example, concluded a few years ago that storytelling among hunter-gatherers seems to perform many of the educational functions for which in modern society children are sent to school.
Hendrik Spiering in the NRC
Below you can see the preliminary 8>1000 map, on which I mark my daily finds The map is made on a 1:25000 scale, so 1 centimetre on the map represents 250 metres. For indicating the course of the Vecht river and the road from Dalfsen to Ommen, it is fine, but you can't find a specific tree, a ferry house, an elephant path or a stork's nest on top of an overhead railway mast on it. So I started animating the map of my immediate surroundings. If I continue long enough to connect what I encounter during walks and bike rides with stories, a 1:1 map will emerge naturally. If you then ask me: ’Did you really used this scale for your map? How large did he become anyway? I will answer you: ’It has never been spread out, yet. The farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So I now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.’
'What I always find most interesting, when I just walk down the street following my nose, those are the things that you find the most frequent...' Thomas A.P. van Leeuwen, art and architectural historian.
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