Artist and researcher Iain Biggs introduces two fictional-poetic works that offer ‘narrative deep mappings’ as explorations of places that are never static, always in process. This post accompanies Iain’s new essay for our Longer feature, ‘Wild’ Deep Mappings.
1,330 words: estimated reading time = 5.5 minutes
You can also read Iain’s new essay for Longer, ‘Wild’ Deep Mapping (after Gary Snyder). Longer is our feature sharing members’ works that offer a deeper exploration of a topic than is usually possible with our blog: essays, fiction or other forms that haven’t appeared online elsewhere and explore in more detail creative responses to our ecological and climate crisis. With each new Longer piece, the author introduces or complements it here with an original, related post.
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Where we live in the world
is never one place…
– Naomi Shihab Nye, My Grandmother in the Stars
Until quite recently I always referred to Ursula K Le Guin’s Always Coming Home as the best fictional narrative flowing from the same mentalité as the deep mappings that most interest me. That changed when I came across Eavan Boland’s A Poet’s Dublin, edited by Paula Meehan and Jody Allen Randolph, an unusual combination of poetry, photographs and a conversation. I see the two books as trans-Atlantic cousins, surprisingly alike in some respects and quite unlike in others. Both celebrate a particular place in depth, and both were largely created by women whose work presupposes a poetic imagination. ‘Largely’, because both books are the product of active collaborations.
The title page of my beautiful 1986 copy of Always Coming Home — withdrawn from Shetland Library and bought second-hand — names Le Guin as author (she also drew the maps), but adds artist Margaret Chodos, composer Todd Barton and geomancer George Hersh as contributors. I get the impression that the poems in A Poet’s Dublin were selected by the editors, possibly with Boland’s assistance. It was certainly the editors who sent Boland out with a camera to gather images to accompany the chosen poems. The connections between the poems and the resulting photographs are not always obvious. They may even appear “like disjunctions”, as Randolph puts it in her Introduction, adding that this serves to remind us of something important: “that an imagined place is never static but always in process, always slipping away from its last definition into its next adventure of being imagined”.
Much the same could be said of the disparate, even disjunctive, elements in Le Guin’s book about “the Valley”. An imagined future region certainly, but one in no small part grounded in the various adult realities that surrounded Le Guin as a child. The reality of her mother’s work as author, anthropologist, and friend to and biographer of Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi people of North California. Also, of her father’s work as a highly respected cultural anthropologist and archaeologist, who later in life also served as a lay psychologist. Her father’s belief that genius arises out of culture at particular times, rather than being the isolated quality of a ‘great man’, would seem to have informed Le Guin’s detailed and diverse accounts of different aspects of ‘Valley’ culture and ritual, and to have informed the contrast between that culture, aligned to nature along the lines of the First Nations peoples in California, and that of the military and technologically-preoccupied Condor people.
Narrative deep mappings: always more than one place at a time
Any literalist familiar with both books could instantly come up with reasons why my linking them is at best idiosyncratic. But then literalists believe that we live in the world one place at a time and are almost certainly immune to the pleasures and challenges of deep mappings. They’re also likely to be suspicious of an orientation described as “towards an archaeology of the future”, as Le Guin names the act of imagination that initiates Always Coming Home. While literalists might acknowledge some similarities between the polyvocal approach of Always Coming Home and certain deep mappings, I doubt they’d see an equivalent polyvocality in A Poet’s Dublin. A view that, to me, would suggest that they had either skipped or missed the point of Two Poets and a City: a Conversation, its final section.
Reading that conversation between Meehan and Boland turned me back to all that had gone before, alerting me both to the many generational and class tensions that haunt Dublin, and to the implications of their mutual sympathies as Irishwomen and poets. The relevance of all this to deep mappings is suggested by Paula Meehan’s observation that: “To all intents and purposes, our maps [of Dublin] shouldn’t overlap. What I love about poetry is that it makes sectarian or sectional stances redundant”. She adds that what she had initially mistaken as Boland’s use of the city as “a scenic backdrop for the working out of the drama of the self” was in fact an exploration of Boland’s relationship: “with the polis, with the power structures of the state as manifest in architecture, in statuary, in the suffering histories of the excluded as much as in the commemorated and sanctified official histories”. So, not polyvocal in the sense of the multiple intersecting narratives, images and scores of Always Coming Home, but a listening, conversational concern for the numerous worlds that make up Dublin at the intersection of the physical city with various popular and official imaginaries. A Dublin in which it is necessary to acknowledge that:
Small things
Make the past.
Make the present seem out of place.
– Eavan Boland, Once in Dublin.
Alongside the need to
… look again.
Into the patient face of the unhealed.
– Eavan Boland, Unheroic.
To miss the underlying tenor of that concern would be to miss all that makes Anna Liffey, here quite properly located between photographs of two Dublin bridges and perhaps the most moving and compelling of all Boland’s poems.
When I earned a living working as an artist/educator/researcher in a university, reading art criticism and theory was a necessity that stretched my thinking. Since retiring I’ve had less and less appetite for writing predicated on the presuppositions of the analytical mind. Like an animal sick from a diet lacking certain vital minerals, I’ve hunted out material to enable me to address that long-standing lack. Material that nurtures a more inclusive, holistic and relational understanding of the world. Poetry, Le Guin’s speculative fiction and her essays in Dreams Must Explain Themselves and Space Crone, along with various poets’ reflective work — Boland’s A Journey With Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet, John Burnside’s The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century and Meehan’s wonderful (and wonderfully-titled) Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them have provided rich and varied nourishment that reaches parts that criticism and theory cannot.
Why share this?
Because, like deep mapping, these two works (and others that flow from the same mentalité) help us to resist the toxic culture of possessive individualism and the culture industry that serves it.
Find more
Always Coming Home by Ursula K Le Guin (1985) is published by Gollancz (2016 edition).
Eavan Boland’s A Poet’s Dublin (2014, edited by Paula Meehan and Jody Allen Randolph) is published by Carcanet.
Iain’s new essay for our Longer feature explores ‘Wild’ Deep Mapping (after Gary Snyder) as an approach that offers many possible modes of address, where practitioners follow their particular, informed and sensitive intuitions about the complexity and relationality of place in time. Mapping that is diverse, ancient, and full of information.
You can read Iain’s previous posts, Open Deep Mapping: Conversations-in-process, Places-in-time and Disciplinary Agnosticism and Engaging with Ecologies of Place, and his essay Open Deep Mappings Today – a Personal Introduction.
Artist James Aldridge reviewed Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place, the book Iain co-authored with Mary Modeen, in Queer River and Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place.
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