field notes from a cold country

Necessary Guesswork

I have a terrible crush on cartography. It is bizarre, given my notable absence of a sense of direction, but such is the madness of love. I see something sacred in the stillness of maps, some quiet reassurance in the learned jag of the coastline and the rise of scale-model mountain ranges. The shape of the land is constant even when its dwellers are not, even when names change and cartographers throw down their pens and curse politics. Knowledge is typically expected to replace blind wonder, but not this time. The fullness of an atlas instills greater awe in me than any sweeping vista ever could. It’s the possibility, not the conviction of a map that draws me in, though. The Steppes are smooth-faced and unyielding. The blue of Poland doesn’t speak of its inhabitants, nor does the brown crescent of Gambia allude to its history. For all the confidence of cartography, it cannot answer everything. It leaves room for guesswork. It leaves you with potential and your own imagination.

The wide empty swathes between coasts are only waiting to be filled in, and I am happy to oblige them. In the silent hours of the night, when I cannot sleep, I’ll turn on the reading light and pore over the atlas that lies on my floor. Casting a shadow over the Western hemisphere, I try to grasp the scope of this world. The sun is rising over the English Channel as tourists look for lunch in Red Square. Tokyo’s nightclubs are just coming to life after a full day as I sit in my pajamas and morning creeps closer. Seven billion people are living and sleeping and dying and waking on this planet all at once, and you cannot realize the absurd magnitude of this fact until you find yourself hunched over a map that fits within the span of your arms. I speculate while I trace the laminated terrain: there- the infinite plains of Ulaanbataar, and here- the alien coarseness of the Gobi Desert, and then onwards, south to China, past the sharp-dressed businessmen of Taiyuan, feeling out the imagined lives in my path. I taste the names of capital cities as I go, weighing them like possibilities in my mouth. In time, I will map the names and people and sights for myself, eliminating the guesswork as I go.

For now, I sleep and dream of Mongolia.

Geography & Skeletons: or, why I pursue useless knowledge

There are 196 countries in the world and 266 bones in the human body, and by the end of this year, I will be able to name each one.

There’s no practical use. It is the very definition of trivial knowledge. But still, I am determined and thrilled to learn every one of them. Because I find both areas- countries and bones- mysterious and fascinating on the surface. The combination of those two traits is nothing short of beauty.

Still, why? Think of it in these terms: you are walking down the street one day, and you hear a passerby speaking a foreign tongue: Italian, French, Russian; it doesn’t matter. It is elegant and you are enraptured. You want to be able to understand the words, should they be half as beautiful as the superficial sounds that reach your ears. Enamored, you research it. The complexity is baffling. As you study the language, it unravels itself before you, declensions and noun cases and verb structure and syntax. And like that, your awe is doubled, appreciation paired with a grasp of the impossible details that only heighten your fascination. Further still, and you are fluent in the language, understanding thrumming through your bones and now you can do more than appreciate the elegance of the sounds- you can understand them and you can manipulate them to create that elegance for yourself. How could you refuse that?

That is why I want to learn about bones and countries, because they are beautiful now, and they will be more beautiful still when I can express my awe by pursuing their secrets, and tenfold more beautiful when I am in perfect awareness of all 462 names.

The problem with Sea Wall is that it doesn’t feel like a movie.

I’ve never watched something that compels me to talk about it before I can allow myself to sleep. But I’ve gathered my thoughts and scraps of soul plastered across my bedroom, so I can give this thing a go:

For all Sea Wall broke my heart, I couldn’t cry. This is unusual, to say the least. I cry a lot at movies because they represent real bits of things, quirks of people and reactions, and yes, sometimes they’re sad. But- and without giving away so much as to rob you of watching it unfold for yourself- Andrew Scott’s acting is so real that I would describe it as anything but the former. Human, maybe. And it’s not even a proper film in any other respect either, dammit. There’s hardly a set, the scene never changes, and the entire thing consists of an average-seeming bloke telling you about his life. Even when it ended, they wouldn’t grant me the mercy of music.

I was waiting and sitting with my earbuds still in and hoping for anything, any song to remind me that yes, this was movie I just watched, because soaring violin pieces don’t end normal conversations. Instead it was just this total and complete silence, sealing off the edges of something less a movie and more a piece of a life so that it will remain in my head as I watched it, bright and real, like any other memory.

Honesty is a cruel trick to play on the human mind. Inevitably, I’m going to forget that there even was an actor and a script, and remember it as a story and a person. Watching it, even, you can’t tell. It’s gorgeous. And I couldn’t cry while watching it, because I’ve never cried at occurences, only the principles they represent. It was too immediate, too far out of left field. This unfair and brilliant script, executed in the most unfair and brilliant manner I could’ve hoped, is more occurence than principle. It’s one story, and so good and real I’m afraid it’ll follow me for years.