Week of July 7, 2025
Maps of Maps
“Perhaps the most profound relationship between walking, thinking, and writing reveals itself at the end of a stroll, back at the desk. There, it becomes apparent that writing and walking are extremely similar feats, equal parts physical and mental. When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps. Likewise, writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands. Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts. Ultimately, maps like the one that Nabokov drew are recursive: they are maps of maps.”
—Ferris Jabr. (2014). Why Walking Helps Us Think. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/walking-helps-us-think #walking #thinking #writing #embodiment #movement #onfoot #maps
Fetadala
The Teeming World of Funes
“I now arrive at the most difficult point in my story. This story (it is well the reader know it by now) has no other plot than that dialogue which took place half a century ago. I shall not try to reproduce the words, which are now irrecoverable. I prefer to summarize with veracity the many things Ireneo told me. The indirect style is remote and weak; I know I am sacrificing the efficacy of my narrative; my readers should imagine for themselves the hesitant periods which overwhelmed me that night” (151).
—Jorge Luis Borges. (1942, 1999). Funes the Memorious. Collected Fictions (A. Hurley, Trans.). Penguin Books. #remembering #forgetting #mnemonism
Nudged from a Write! conversation earlier in the week, I re-read Borges’ “Funes the Memorius” and have been thinking about the accursed blessing of remembering more, remembering less, and the pleasurable inevitability of forgetting (thanks to CGB‘s mention of the 1942 short story).
Mists of Academic Majors
5ives
Midsummer To-dos
- External review letter No. 1
- Syllabus for ENGL3844
- Electrician to lend me a bzzt with swapping out remaining switches and outlets in front shed
- Virginia DMV registration renewal
- Finish painting shed
A Map May Be Concealing
“Such maps are widely assumed to convey objective and universal knowledge of place. They are intended to orient us, to tell us how to get from here to there, to show us precisely where we are. But modern maps hold no memory of what the land was before. Few of us have thought to ask what truths a map may be concealing, or have paused to consider that maps do not tell us where we are from or who we are. Many of us do not know the stories of the land in the places where we live; we have not thought to look for the topography of a myth in the surrounding rivers and hills. Perhaps this is because we have forgotten how to listen to the land around us.”
—Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder. (2018). Counter Mapping. Emergence Magazine. https://emergencemagazine.org/feature/counter-mapping/. #maps #histories #land #before #memory
Soon Enough
“Soon enough it will be me struggling (valiantly?) to walk–lugging my stuff around. How are we all so brave as to take step after step? Day after day? How are we so optimistic, so careful not to trip and yet do trip, and then get up and say o.k. Why do I feel so sorry for everyone and so proud?” (42).
—Maira Kalman. (2009). The Principles of Uncertainty. Penguin Books. #walkingmood #proud #lugging #walking #steps #trip
About Collectanea
Collectanea is a series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the seventh in this series from Week 28 of 2025, or the Week of July 7). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM
