John Girgis
@clappingcactus
John Girgis
One to One: On maps, cartography and our relationship with geographical enquiry over time stretching from ancient Babylon to GIS software. With increasingly sophisticated tools to build maps, "we have the means to comprehend the future.
"We are each at the centre of our own map... We are all innate mapmakers... maps [are the] mediators between an... See more
"We are each at the centre of our own map... We are all innate mapmakers... maps [are the] mediators between an... See more
Weidenfeld & Nicolson • You Are Here: A Brief Guide to the World
I believe we also make maps because we are desperately, primally afraid of being lost. The tighter we cling to them the more we confuse them for something real. And when we do that, they stop showing us where to go and start leading us in ever-decreasing circles. If we can hold them lightly, however, they can open our perspective and contextualise... See more
Alexander Beiner • Lost Ways of Knowing
Nothingness, then, for all its presumed vacuity, is a multi-faceted thing: it embodies ways of knowing, it has ontological agency and politics, it has degrees and dimensions. A map of nothing demonstrates that an experiential nothingness depends upon a robust ecology of somethingness to enable its occurrence; and it recognizes the particular... See more
Mattern • How to Map Nothing
This is why the Greeks needed myth: for that boundary, to know where they stood amidst the infinite. No one can simply coexist with the ocean, storms, the cypress trees. They had to codify the elements with language and greater meaning, and create gods out of them—gods who looked suspiciously like themselves—so that even if they were powerless over
... See moreMelissa Broder • The Pisces
We are literal, scientific, rational, surface-oriented, and fast-paced. Yet without imagination, the world becomes arid. Mythopoetic language is magical; it brings worlds into being. Stories of warriors hunting the windswept plains, gods who trick and deceive, maidens transformed into sea monsters, and spiders that weave the web of life have long
... See moreJoanna LaPrade • Forged in Darkness: The Many Paths of Personal Transformation
In the deep, humanity can’t even pretend to be in charge. Of course we’re not in charge of space, either, but exploring upward gives us the illusion of expansion, as though we’re conquering territory, extending our ever-acquisitive reach. In this mindset, to go inward, into the abyss, is to be stuck with what we already have.
Susan Casey • The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean
Scientists couldn’t look directly at nothing to see something; they had to look and listen around the void, deploying techniques similar to image compositing and echolocation. We might apply these lessons, these techniques, to our own attempts to comprehend the pandemic’s pause, which has its own experiential event horizon. We have to look and... See more
Mattern • How to Map Nothing
If there are frontiers between the civilised and the barbaric, between the meaningful and the unmeaning, they are not lines on a map nor are they regions of the earth. They are boundaries of the mind alone.
Ursula K. Le Guin • The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
“Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”