Dream Maps

"Then there are dream maps…," begins the cartographer as we sail by the long, white beach of an island off the coast of Cambodia.
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The cartographer spends a lot of time in a bungalow built on red posts sunk into the water. It is his retreat. It was his base for making the maps of the islands. Before that, he did the same job in Tibet and Nepal.
Dream maps, though, are not of fantastical, imaginary places. They do not represent places, like that beach, in which an island dreamscape materialises. They are not comparable to the mind maps of the Australian Aborigines, who follow the ways created by the unceasing walking of their mythical forebears in the Tjukurrpa, or Dream Temple.
They are a mixture of all of these, according to the cartographer and other dreamers like him. They are maps of real, existing places. But they are also dreams because they represent dreamed-about places that were thought not to exist, to be the stuff of legend, but which were found by following a myth or a story. As happened to him. "I was told that on a Himalayan path there was a door that opened onto a valley…Well, I found the door and it did open onto a valley." And that is how he came to draw the map of Naar Phu, the lost valley, which is entered through a door and which is populated by the descendants of the Khampa warriors.
As we sailed amongst the islands and told each other stories about Asia, real and imagined, the maps materialised in the stories. "This is what cartographers are for. To draw what lies beneath, what the satellites cannot see." His was a topographic version of the tantric illusion of Maya, somewhere between illusion and disillusion, a way of perceiving the world like an illusion - or a dream. And in this narrated dream, the maps were populated by spirits. “The ancient cartographers used to write ‘Hic sunt leones’ (usually translated as Here be dragons) to denote unexplored territories. About the villages of fishermen and farm-labourers - people so very different from us - we can write just one, indubitable, line: ‘Here be spirits’,” William Butler Yeats wrote in one of his Irish Fairy Tales.
After that journey I continued to think, as if I were dreaming about a map made up of places, memories, journeys, books and encounters. I was “transfixed by meridians and parallels” as Alberto Ongaro told me long ago, in turn quoting Hugo Pratt.
I inevitably thought of the aphorism by Alfred Korzybski, the father of general semantics: “The map is not the territory”. I actually remember it more because it's one of Robert De Niro's lines in the film Ronin. The meaning is clear, but that boat trip led me to think that the map can be the territory, especially if it is a dream map. It is almost what Gregory Bateson, an adventurer of the mind, affirmed: “The distinction between the name and the thing named or the map and the territory is perhaps really made only by the dominant hemisphere of the brain. The symbolic and affective hemisphere, normally on the right-hand side, is probably unable to distinguish name from thing named. It is certainly not concerned with this sort of distinction.” Little wonder that Bateson theorised about the ecology of ideas, a holistic method aimed at identifying the connections between phenomena such as the structure of leaves, the grammar of a sentence, the bilateral symmetry of an animal, and the arms race.
While I was losing myself in these connections, I found a quote I had already seen before: “There is little difference between performing my rosary in chapel of a morning or fashioning a wind rose on a chart. Each is a form of meditation.” It fit perfectly with my mood and I believe that would also be the case for the cartographer. The quote comes from A Mapmaker's Dream, a novel by nomadic Australian author James Cowan, which relates the life of Fra Mauro, a 15th century monk and cartographer who dedicates his life to mapping the then known world, based on stories from travellers, sailors and merchants.
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In the meantime, the dream maps and ancient planispheres overlapped with the possible routes taken by the mysterious missing flight MH370, which in turn, at least initially, intersected with those of the South China Sea, a potential theatre of world war or local conflict.
I had also chatted about these scenarios and intrigues with the cartographer. "Cartographers are a little like spies," he said. He was referring to the time of the Great Game (or Tournament of Shadows, as the Russians called it), when many of the men making Asia's maps were agents for some imperial power or another. But perhaps he wasn't only thinking of that time: the big intelligence agencies such as the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSCOM) are rediscovering the need to integrate geospace data with findings on the ground to better plan action in the dark areas of the planet. It is the rediscovery of humint, human intelligence. Intelligence, understood as being the “ability to acquire or apply knowledge and skills to new and difficult situations”, is not something that can be entrusted to a machine, nor to novices. Which is true of mapmaking, espionage, and anything else for that matter. But that's another story.
Or is it? Mapmaking, and geography, in this case, become a metaphor for the change and adaptation that people have to deal with, overturning Marshall McLuhan's view: The medium is NOT the message. This is demonstrated by the “prolific traveller and strategist” and chief analyst for Sratfor, Robert D. Kaplan, “Forget about the world being flat. Forget technology as the great democratizer”… “Territory and the bonds of blood that go with it are central to what makes us human,” he writes in a recent article entitled Geopolitics and the New World Order. It is in this light, for example, that we can understand and, above all, play the game in the South China Sea (as seen in Kaplan's latest book, Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific), which is where the great East/West clash is really taking place.

"The earth is a map. There is no geography without meaning and without history." So said an old Aborigine, Warlpiri, whom I met in Australia's Red Centre.


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Once upon a time an M16

The Vietnam war is over. Even though its veterans are alive. Even though it lives on in the morbid imagination of tourists. It's more than over: it's history. I have proof: an M16, the American assault rifle first used in 1967 in Vietnam.
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It isn't a weapon any more. It's a relic, almost a fossil.
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Encrusted with shells and deposits. It was fished out of the Perfume River, in Hue, the ancient commercial centre and capital of the Vietnamese empire and, many centuries later, the theatre of the Tet Offensive, one of the most ferocious battles of the “American” war, as they call it here.
The rifle is just another archaeological find, like the amphorae used to prepare nuoc mam, or fish sauce, the rice bowls, stone anchors or fishing net weights. Thousands of these objects belong to Ho Tan Phan, a smiling old gentleman and self-titled erudite, who has been collecting what the sampan fishermen bring to him for almost forty years. At first sight, his home and garden look like the den of a compulsive hoarder. Then you realise that it is a kind of historical warehouse. Amongst baskets filled with fragments of Chinese porcelain, stacks of vases, little amphorae and everyday objects, there are pieces of great beauty and value, including some celadon ceramic bowls.
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You wonder who these things belonged to, what human stories lie behind them, how they ended up on the river bed. The rifle prompts even more questions.
It is the poetry of mystery. And it brings to mind a verse by Baudelaire:
“Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance
In a deep and tenebrous unity”

The echo reverberates in the mind: history is never over.

A scene from Full Metal Jacket: The battle of Hue.
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