Literary Maps
Eleanor Swanson
Is the map the territory
or is it not? Is it an
abstraction taken to
be the real thing?
What is the utility
of a 1:1 map as
Lewis Carroll affirmed
in Sylvie and Bruno
Concluded?
“And then came the grandest
idea of all! We actually made
a map of the country, on the scale
of a mile to the mile!”
1: 1 maps are absurd, using
the country itself as its own map.
Not only is the map not the territory,
but the territory can’t be folded
up and put in your pocket.
William Faulkner begged to differ.
In a Paris Review interview he said,
to describe his hand-drawn map
of Yoknapatawpha County,
“I created a cosmos of my own.”
He signed the map, “WILLIAM
FAULKNER, SOLE OWNER
AND PROPRIETOR,” leaving
no doubt that he believed the map
he drew made him the one and only
owner of the territory that he
conceived of as mythical soil,
and of the Yoknapatawpha map,
claiming knowledge as power;
map as territory.
or is it not? Is it an
abstraction taken to
be the real thing?
What is the utility
of a 1:1 map as
Lewis Carroll affirmed
in Sylvie and Bruno
Concluded?
“And then came the grandest
idea of all! We actually made
a map of the country, on the scale
of a mile to the mile!”
1: 1 maps are absurd, using
the country itself as its own map.
Not only is the map not the territory,
but the territory can’t be folded
up and put in your pocket.
William Faulkner begged to differ.
In a Paris Review interview he said,
to describe his hand-drawn map
of Yoknapatawpha County,
“I created a cosmos of my own.”
He signed the map, “WILLIAM
FAULKNER, SOLE OWNER
AND PROPRIETOR,” leaving
no doubt that he believed the map
he drew made him the one and only
owner of the territory that he
conceived of as mythical soil,
and of the Yoknapatawpha map,
claiming knowledge as power;
map as territory.
Eleanor Swanson is a widely published poet and fiction writer. She was a featured poet in the fall 2017 issue of The Missouri Review. Awards include an NEA Fellowship and a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship. She has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. Her first poetry collection, A Thousand Bonds: Marie Curie and the Discovery of Radium, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and her second collection of poetry, Trembling in the Bones—about the Colorado Coal strike of 1913 and the 1914 Ludlow Massacre—was reissued in 2013 ( 3: A Taos Press). Her third poetry collection is Memory’s Rooms (Conundrum Press). She is also a fiction writer who has published a novel and two collections of short stories. Her collection, Exiles and Expatriates, won the 2014 Press Americana Prize. She is a mentor to two incarcerated poets at the Sterling Correctional Facility. She regularly reads from her work in the Denver Metro area and she is a Core Faculty member in the Regis University Mile High MFA Program, where, during the residency period, she teaches fiction and poetry workshops and craft seminars.
About the work: “I have a second collection of poetry in progress, Cartographies. In the course of doing research for the poems in this book, I found there were many literary maps that I was previously unaware of, such as Pauline Baynes’ map of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. In “Literary Maps”, however, I explore the conflict between map and territory. William Faulkner hand drew a map that appears in The Portable Faulkner (1946), but an earlier map appears in Absalom—a novel about ownership and property. He ends the novel with the declaration that ends my poem: “claiming knowledge as power;/map as territory.””
About the work: “I have a second collection of poetry in progress, Cartographies. In the course of doing research for the poems in this book, I found there were many literary maps that I was previously unaware of, such as Pauline Baynes’ map of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. In “Literary Maps”, however, I explore the conflict between map and territory. William Faulkner hand drew a map that appears in The Portable Faulkner (1946), but an earlier map appears in Absalom—a novel about ownership and property. He ends the novel with the declaration that ends my poem: “claiming knowledge as power;/map as territory.””
The Art
UNTITLED (НА МОЛША МЦЛА ЩЕЛЦЧЕА ГТЕЙА І.Г. 1967 К.G. ЗАЛЮКА), 24"X18", 2017
Daisy Patton has a BFA in Studio Arts from the University of Oklahoma with minors in History and Art History and an Honors degree. Her MFA is from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University, a multi-disciplinary program. Patton's practice is focused on history, memory, and social commentary stemming from this youth soaked in such specific cultural landscapes. Her work explores the meaning and social conventions of families, little discussed or hidden histories, and what it is to be a person living in our contemporary world. One such series is Forgetting is so long, reviewed in Hyperallergic and The Denver Post, as well as featured in Create! Magazine, The Jealous Curator, Vasari21, Fraction Magazine, Full Blede, and Backroom Caracas. Patton is the recipient of the Montague Travel Grant for research in Dresden, Germany, and she was also awarded a position as an exchange student at the University of Hertfordshire, UK while an undergraduate. She has completed artist residencies at Minerva Projects, Anderson Ranch, the Studios at MASS MoCA, RedLine Denver, and Eastside International in Los Angeles. She has exhibited in solo and group shows nationally, including her first museum solo at the CU Art Museum at the University of Colorado. K Contemporary represents Patton in Denver. More here
About the art: “Defacement is the confrontation with death and dislocation…”—Michael Taussig, Defacement. “ They say we die two deaths: the first is our actual passing; the second is when the last person who remembers us takes their final breath. Family photographs, vessels of memory, are integral to extending this quasi-life. They show a mother, a child, a past self, full of in-jokes and the mundane meaningful only to a select few. But divorced from their origins, these emotion-ridden images become unknowable and lost in translation, for they are intrinsically entwined with the intimate memories of someone. These images are timeless because photography can forever capture a moment—so much so that they have outlived their families and purpose, becoming orphans. As we drown in an overwhelming visual culture, what place does an old family photo have outside their original home? In Forgetting is so long, [the series which this painting is from] I collect abandoned, anonymous family photographs, enlarge them past their familiar size, and paint over them. I paint to disrupt, to reimagine, to re-enliven these individuals until I can either no longer recognize them or their presence is too piercing to continue. Family photographs are sacred relics to their loved ones, but unmoored the images become hauntingly absent. Anthropologist Michael Taussig states that defacing these types of objects forces a “shock into being;” suddenly we perceive them as present, revered, and piercing. By mixing painting with photography, I lengthen Roland Barthes’ “moment of death” (the photograph) into some semblance of purgatory. Not alive but not quite dead, each person’s newly imagined and altered portrait straddles the lines between memory, identity, and death. They are monuments to the forgotten. All works in this series are mixed media paintings (oil-painted photo prints), mounted on panel. A note on titling: all the paintings are technically untitled, but if there is any written information on the found photograph, that is included in parentheses. Otherwise, the bracketed wording is a general description.”
About the art: “Defacement is the confrontation with death and dislocation…”—Michael Taussig, Defacement. “ They say we die two deaths: the first is our actual passing; the second is when the last person who remembers us takes their final breath. Family photographs, vessels of memory, are integral to extending this quasi-life. They show a mother, a child, a past self, full of in-jokes and the mundane meaningful only to a select few. But divorced from their origins, these emotion-ridden images become unknowable and lost in translation, for they are intrinsically entwined with the intimate memories of someone. These images are timeless because photography can forever capture a moment—so much so that they have outlived their families and purpose, becoming orphans. As we drown in an overwhelming visual culture, what place does an old family photo have outside their original home? In Forgetting is so long, [the series which this painting is from] I collect abandoned, anonymous family photographs, enlarge them past their familiar size, and paint over them. I paint to disrupt, to reimagine, to re-enliven these individuals until I can either no longer recognize them or their presence is too piercing to continue. Family photographs are sacred relics to their loved ones, but unmoored the images become hauntingly absent. Anthropologist Michael Taussig states that defacing these types of objects forces a “shock into being;” suddenly we perceive them as present, revered, and piercing. By mixing painting with photography, I lengthen Roland Barthes’ “moment of death” (the photograph) into some semblance of purgatory. Not alive but not quite dead, each person’s newly imagined and altered portrait straddles the lines between memory, identity, and death. They are monuments to the forgotten. All works in this series are mixed media paintings (oil-painted photo prints), mounted on panel. A note on titling: all the paintings are technically untitled, but if there is any written information on the found photograph, that is included in parentheses. Otherwise, the bracketed wording is a general description.”
