Maps of the Inkling: When There’s No Quarter

You can’t use an old map to explore a new world. — Albert Einstein

A good map is proof of imagined worlds. Ink-born sketches of Middle-earth enchant young eyes, until Time reveals that everything is in the middle of something. Elven script carves magic into murky woods, while dragon’s blood stains the sunset beyond the mountains, giving credence to warnings of red skies at Dawn. Storms come later… Through a singular stroke of the pen, a signified river can divide the page, giving rise to distinct languages and magic systems, since nothing attracts and divides quite like a body of water. Naming finds its masterpiece in maps. Cartographers who often moonlight as writers leave their distinct arcs in the swooping letters denoting a place. Secrets of imagined worlds are contained within the letters that style themselves into the terrain, sometimes writing poetics in the sky, where dragons are as familiar as sparrows. A cluster of V’s create cursed marshland while the V turned on its head creates a sky-piercing mountain range, impassable by foot or hoof. Even the ink-blot of a weary pen can bleed a porthole into the map, delving below the paper and into the desk, where the magic of its accidental occurrence points to worlds yet to be mapped. Maps denote destinies.

How years ago in days of old When magic filled the air ‘T was in the darkest depths of Mordor I met a girl so fair… — Led Zeppelin: Ramble On

Every writer faces the faceless desert of the blank page. Imagined worlds never stand on words alone, just as wisdom is meaning that haunts the silence. A page full of words can become a disturbed anthill under the reader’s gaze, scattering the letters in all directions, leaving little more than quiet chaos. Maps give linear words a place to stretch their fonts, tunnels to burrow down and skies to fly unto. Chapters worth of text can vanish into the world of the map, but absence is where words find their power, according to the nature of wisdom, real or fantastical. There are maps that are never drawn, the ones that haunt the unwritten woods, since the edge of the map is not the end of the world. From the ledge of that page, the material world unfolds like a map forever changing, a contained chaos that brings the writer to the desert of the blank page in the first place. Imagined worlds come at a cost, just like anything worth its Time, but the book contains imagined ethics the real world can only pretend to follow. In the pages that fill the map with meaning, hope still flies into the smoke-thick skies of Mount Doom.

In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map… — Jorge Luis Borges

Maps gave rise to the Inkling who types these words. Sometimes the woods in my backyard were overwhelming, especially in the fires of a Southern August. Mirkwood waited within. When the world presses down, imagined worlds can rise and give quarter, sheltering an overwhelmed mind, where metaphors become real and the world of tomorrow is banished into a distant epilogue. Maps of the ‘real’ world are written in blood and the blank spaces of oceans are haunted by ghosts with forgotten names, while certified maps are obsolete before the ink dries, since nothing is ever resolved. All is scribbled in pencil. Imagined worlds bear the responsibility of wearing their ink, through every word on the pages that fill the magical names of the map with life. Smaug is nothing but a word without the inclination of the Inkling to read of the Misty Mountains and the adventure that led to the loquacious dragon. The dragon and the mountains drift in the linguistic aether without the maps Tolkien drew while he invented languages for Elves and Orcs, alike. Everyone stands in the center of it All, from here to wherever you are. Maps and the imagined worlds they signify are places for eyes to wander without fear or judgment. Everyone needs quarter.

Hayden Moore