Mapping the Mind

Maps have always appealed to my aesthetic: thin, curving lines, muted colors, keys--a mystery within an explanation--paper, certainly, labyrinthine passages and waterways.  I use maps in my print work, hang maps of Brooklyn on the wall of my bathroom, inhabiting what's represented,  try desperately to read maps in an unfamiliar town.  Whether the places I have liked best in this world I like because I can navigate them, or whether I can navigate them because I like them best, I'm not sure.  I've got the kind of face people look for when they want to ask directions (poor fools), and sometimes, very rarely, can I reply with confidence.  But the first week I lived in Brooklyn I was asked to point the way toward Iron Chef House, and though I'd never been there, I knew immediately the way to go.  I was a tour guide at Sarah Lawrence, my mouth was my map.  In London, I could get lost by choice and never fear that I'd find my way back.  I know my way around Lancaster better than I do my hometown.  In Minneapolis, I learned certain routes naturally, confidently, with ease.  It was there, in Minnesota, that I began to think about my own map, the landscape of life--my mother was my age when she and my father lived here, she had two surgeries here that directly led to the allowance of my birth, and I stood in front of the home my parents shared in Dinkytown near the U of M at 8 in the morning, snow on the ground, and was so happy to be a traveller, to learn, as Paul Simon says, "how the heart approaches what it yearns."