As a little girl, Dillard would hide pennies by the sidewalk and draw arrows on the ground as a sort of map, so that strangers could find them. It was a way of enchanting the strangers’ world, throwing a pebble of surprise into their life. Dillard suggests that we should ‘cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity’.4 Our home towns, villages and streets are full of hidden pennies, which we will never see unless we take the trouble to look for them and to stoop and pick them up. And it would be healthy for us to stop thinking that the richest pickings are in some other neighbourhood, or in some more distant, more exotic place.
Self-consciousness, Dillard says, is the enemy: with our attention turned on ourselves, on our past and future, we forget to be with nature in the present. She calls self-consciousness ‘the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies’. It is a curse we are all victim of, today more than in 1974 when Dillard published Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Our phones, our tablets, our earbuds, our smartwatches, are all instruments of self-consciousness. They create around us a bubble of predictability, which moves with us and will surround us whether we are shooting photographs of wildlife in the Congo or planting bulbs in our back garden. We take photographs to relax, we plant bulbs to have summer colours – everything is about us. By hiding pennies for strangers, by creating a new map for them, a random situation of no consequence, young Dillard was bursting their bubble.
Getting lost in the (tame, tiny, two-hours-from-London) woods of the New Forest burst my bubble. As long as I knew my position on the map, I considered the woods on my own terms: I opened the map and hey presto! – the woods came out of it as the cardboard cutouts of a pop-up book. It was very nice to see that particular oak or that bend of the stream, sure, but I didn’t think in terms of oak and stream, I thought in terms of which leg of the walk I was on. If a friend had asked me ‘where are you?’, I would have confidently answered ‘here’, with a finger pointed at the printout, not at the grass underfoot.
But a ‘here’ on a map is not the same as a ‘here’ in the world. When I contemplated the green of the forest, and Paola the individual shapes and colours of the trees, as we each focused on the natural world in our own characteristic way, we lost our position on the map. In doing so, we stumbled upon home.
Be mindful of your GPS the next time you use it: you might notice that in your mind you are moving on its map rather than in the world, that when you say ‘I am here’, you mean the point where you see the cartoon car or character or blue dot representing you on the screen. The things we have built have trained us so well they have convinced us that we are the blue dot, that we have more in common with coloured pixels than with a goshawk on the hunt. That the pixels are ‘here’.
‘Here’ is actually a physical place in the physical world, in which you are with your physical body; where the wild things are, where home is.
To get there, we need to change the map we use.
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The writer Robert Macfarlane once went on a journey of exploration of the wild places of the British Isles, his aim being to fight ‘the prejudice induced by a powerful map’.5 The ‘prejudice’ is the idea that there is no wildness left in Britain and Ireland, and the ‘powerful map’ is the road atlas (or the digital version contained in a satnav). Everything that is not a road finds no space in a road atlas, for obvious reasons. Using the atlas as our only guide, we gradually forget that the things not marked there (‘the fells, the caves, the tors, the woods, the moors, the river valleys and the marshes’) still exist. The fact that we have little use for them does not make them any less real. They have little use for us too.
A road atlas is one example of a ‘grid map’, that is, a map based on Cartesian coordinates. To put it very crudely, a grid map is made of horizontal and vertical lines, which cross each other to create, exactly, a grid. That grid makes it easy to locate any point with a good degree of accuracy: all you need to do is identify its horizontal and vertical coordinates, and you can then pinpoint its position on the map. If you have ever used a London A–Z, you know how this works; satnavs work the same way, although you cannot see the grid when you are using it.
Remember Descartes, who believed that wonder is useful only as long as you quickly move on from it? It is no coincidence that Descartes gives his name to the coordinates that form grids: grid maps concern themselves with geometry rather than our senses, with ideas rather than bodies. Grid maps are about getting measurable results. There is no space in them for anecdote, emotion, personal reminiscence. Following Descartes, they want you to move on from a contemplation of the territory, so that you can accomplish things. They make the world more manageable, and smaller. They are another technology of self-consciousness.
Grid maps are probably the only kind of maps you have seen. Consider the effect this has on you. As we found out with our third key, once you start using a word to label a thing, it becomes nearly impossible to think of the word without thinking of the thing, and vice versa. In the last chapter I used as an example the word ‘dog’: when you see the word printed on paper, you immediately think of humans’ closest allies, and when you hear a real dog barking in the real world, the word ‘dog’ immediately comes to you. The made-up word and the real thing are one and the same in your mind. So far, so good.
Just as the word becomes the dog, so the grid map becomes the place – in fact, it becomes all places. Every time we visit a new city, every time we drive through a new part of the country, every time we go abroad on one of those trips they sell us with the promise that it will change our life, we think of those new territories in terms of the same grid. Even the maps used in the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons – maps of places that do not exist – are based upon it. The grid is such a pervasive fiction that we literally cannot imagine a place without it. It becomes the only way by which we understand place: it becomes place itself.
In both the experiences of wonder I shared with you – when I was little and fell on my knees to pray, and when I was older and got lost – I had forgotten to be self-conscious and I had peeked behind the grid to see a much vaster reality, a mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
But we do not want to fall on our knees any more – and getting lost on purpose would not work. Purposefully ignoring something is the best way to make it matter more than ever. So, what do we do to open ourselves to that vaster reality?
Macfarlane offers us a possible answer. He reminds us that there is a second kind of map, which he calls a ‘story map’ and which ‘represent[s] a place as it is perceived by an individual or by a culture moving through it’.6 A story map is idiosyncratic, mutable, concerned with our senses. It can be a literal story, a drawing, a wooden sculpture, but in all cases, it takes into full account the emotional resonance of human beings and the places where they happen to be, of experiences, feelings, myths and fables. It tells you to avoid the river that is home to an evil spirit who kidnaps people your age, then follow the shape of the big rock where your uncle and aunt got married and walk on to that old tree that looks like the mountain where you were born – mind, I don’t mean the tree that smells like roasted cabbage, no, the other one. A story map is art more than science.