Man who is bad at Geography, and people’s names

Geography was probably my most hated class in school, likely trouncing P.E. and the one where you have to cut up wood and make objects anyone can buy in a store for ten bucks a pop. This was my excuse for hiring a car to get to the party (yes, I lied to the host that I came from the subway — I felt ashamed). I’m just bad at geography. I don’t know how to read maps.

I’m not shy about it either — coming out of the subway, for example, I will immediately harass people about which direction my target location resides. Sometimes it gets complicated because you get assholes that try to give you a ‘GPS’ perspective on things, trying to draw an entire map in your mind — which of course is useless if you hate Geography. I tell these people “Point motherfucker, point. That is all I require of you.” Sometimes you come away from these people feeling like you’re a damn Terminator or something.

I liked History. Now, given that I cannot recall anybody’s name from the party, the question could be posed as to how I could possibly like History. How could you traverse this subject without being able to record notable names, or incidents? How would you distinguish between wars? Would not, indeed, the paleolithic be no different than the neolithic in your grayed mind?

That question, I contend, comes straight from the Department of Geography. Probably composed by the Dean of that college. They’re trying to make history look like a map. These scoundrels will try anything to make a cartographer of one, as if Magellan (or Google Maps) wasn’t enough.

History is not a map. It is not really about the names, or places, or, I boldly contend, the events themselves. History is about the flow of things, and the way that things generally have happened so far. There is a story in history, a describing. You can easily get lost in a fold of history, and travel to different times from the past, with just your mind. You can sit down with Da Vinci and discuss with him his placement of figures in The Last Supper. History within histories.

How could any of this be of tactical benefit to the common human being embroiled in the daily warfare of comings and goings? Well, as has been established, History is not Geography. When you are a student of History, you don’t so much have to learn about the details as you have to learn how to interpret them. A lot of History comes from languages other than English, and there always has to be at least one interpreter that has enough intelligence to figure out what actually happened, from all the left-over scrolls and parchments. And vases or urns. Sometimes, the recorders didn’t even know how to make paper, and they expressed everything on the walls of a cave. A true student of History is actually a student of the art of interpreting these relics, and figuring out what actually happened. Objectivity is required, and the ability to interrogate even stones.

Clearly such skills, bestowed upon a normal human being walking the Earth, would mean almost God-like status.

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As an epilogue, and a way of resolving the boundaries that have been created so heinously by the Dean of Geography, I propose a new way to learn Geography – the Historic way. This does not mean going to certain locations in your school books and taking notes about the particular architecture of the houses there (how long are those houses really going to last?)

I propose a way of walking through the streets in your city or town, and trying to get a sense of the ‘story’ of the place. One technique is to write a million stories about a place, and then filter from them. Remember, you can’t possibly write anything entirely new. Given that, it would be true that the more stories you concoct about a place, the more likely you will be to near true understanding of the area.

After all, what is a space, really?