Last year, I gave a friend a jigsaw puzzle as a present. The image printed on the puzzle was taken from an Andy Warhol print made in 1970, from his Flowers series, and comprised four hibiscus blooms – coloured yellow, orange, and red – each with a pink shadow and set against a blue background. Warhol took the image from a photograph, which he edited to create a flat, two-dimensional visual field, and then he printed it using a silkscreen to create a smooth inked surface on the paper. Consequently, the five-hundred-pieces of the jigsaw are mostly pure colour, with no visible structure or depth, and the only clues to assist in piecing them together are the colour borders. Completing the puzzle took some time.
My friend took appropriate revenge, insisting that I undertake the challenge of a four-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, in this case the image was a map of the world. Although the information on the map is contemporary – it includes Bosnia & Herzegovina and East Timor as independent nations, for example – the design and lettering are old-fashioned, as if the map had been drawn by hand. Much of the image, naturally, is taken up by large expanses of ocean in varying shades of sea green. It took me some time to complete the edges, the outlines of the continents, and the map legend; filling in the interior of the continents was quicker, because of the multitude of city names; but the final stage, piecing together the southern oceans and especially the spaces between the Micronesian islands and Pacific atolls, required considerable patience and concentration.
It had been many years since I undertook a jigsaw puzzle of even half this size, and I suspect it will be an equally long time before I embark upon another one. The process consumed many hours and more than a square metre of floor space. That said, I greatly enjoyed one aspect of my puzzle, which was the discovery – or re-discovery – of facts about the geography of the earth and the naming of places. For example, I have long understood that the equator passed through Ecuador but had never previously noticed that it also passed through Kenya; and I knew the explorer after whom the Tasman Sea was named, but I was formerly unaware of the Laptev cousins.
Working on this puzzle therefore turned out to be of some educational benefit. As I reflect on the process I followed, I notice that it is comparable to many other knowledge-acquisition and knowledge-sorting tasks. When we start to learn about something new – a topic we decide to study, or a new skill we choose to acquire, or a new place that we wish to explore – we often begin by setting some sort of frame of reference which delimits the range of things we want to learn about, then we identify the major themes and items – the big objects that dominate the task – and set them in place, after which we attend to the details – the minutiae – until everything is complete and in the right order. This is the standard method by which to transform what is strange into what is familiar, the random into the regular, the occasional into the habitual; this is how we move from ignorance to knowledge.
The purpose of a map is to elucidate through selective falsification. Certain elements are distorted to allow others to become clear. For example, the traditional map of the London Underground system shows that the journey from Kings Cross Station to Euston Station requires a southbound train for those travelling on the Victoria Line and a northbound train for those travelling on the Northern Line, whereas at street level a pedestrian should walk in a westerly direction. A good map is not true, but neither is it misleading, just so long as we know what it is useful for. Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story about a map that was 1:1 in scale and his joke worked well because the map in question did not work at all: it was useless because it was exactly true. The picture of the world that slowly emerged on the floor of my apartment, as I completed my jigsaw, taught me some new things, but I doubt it would be much use as a navigational tool for an ocean voyage.
A few years ago, I travelled to Hereford, a town in the west of England, close to the border with Wales. While I was there, I visited the cathedral to see the Mappa Mundi, a map of the world made on vellum seven hundred years ago, at about the same time that Dante Alighieri was drawing his map of hell and heaven in verse. Jerusalem lies at the centre of the map, which also shows several other important urban centres, such as Rome, Paris, and Hereford. For a devout medieval cartographer, Jerusalem was considered the centre of the world because that is what the Old Testament taught: this is Jerusalem; I have set her in the centre of the nations, with countries all around her (Ezekiel 5:5); Rome is where Peter the apostle established the headquarters of the early church before his martyrdom; the university in Paris was a leading centre for theological study; and Hereford was where the map was constructed and framed before being installed in the cathedral.
How we imagine the world to be organised reflects both what we believe to be true about the world and the specific viewpoint from which we regard our surroundings. Today, it is easy to laugh at a medieval monk who thought Hereford important enough to include on a map of the world, but when I look at most modern map projections, they show the northern hemisphere at around twice the size of the southern hemisphere, and the centre of the map follows the meridian that runs through Greenwich. Over the past half-millennium, the centre of the world has shifted from Jerusalem to London: I wonder what Ezekiel would have to say about that? I recently read that for some years after an International Conference, held in 1881, had confirmed the Greenwich Meridian as the Prime Meridian, the French continued to use the Paris Meridian instead: the temptation to assume that where we are is the centre, both geographically and metaphysically, is hard to resist.
There are many ways we might redesign the standard Mercator map of the world. For example, the German historian Arno Peters developed a projection that represents each country proportionally according to their size. Compared to the traditional projection, the countries close to the equator are “stretched” and the countries close to the poles are “squashed”. Peters Projection maps challenge our sense of the size of some continents compared to others, but they leave Greenwich in the middle. If we were to cut a traditional map in two, along the Prime Meridian, and switch the halves about so that London now lies on the far-left edge, then, moving eastwards, we would pass quickly from peripheral Europe, through Kazakhstan and Mongolia, to Japan and then the Pacific Ocean. Hawai’i would be the new centre of the world: aloha kākou. Moving eastwards again, we would pass through the new Orient, namely Mexico and the Caribbean Islands, before reaching the Atlantic and heading to Cape Verde and the north-west coast of Africa, at the far-right edge.
There is no need to stop the thought experiment at this point: in space there is neither up nor down, there are only relative positions and speeds. The poles are at opposite ends of the earth, but one is not above and the other below; we could just as easily think of the equator as the line that runs from top to bottom and the meridian as the line the runs from left to right. Trying to imagine what different maps of the world might look like can be disorientating, but it reminds us that maps are not true or false, rather they are useful or not. They might teach us something new, or they might confirm our existing assumptions. How we decide to draw the map depends on what we want to use it for. Function determines form and truth is what works best for us in the long run.
According to the philosopher Hans Blumenberg, “Humans live their lives and build their institutions on dry land. Nevertheless, they seek to grasp the movement of their existence above all through the metaphorics of a perilous sea voyage”. If we think of our lives as journeys, then to navigate successfully we will have need of maps for when we sail blind, we risk losing our way. What sort of cartographic projection is most useful for life? It is not possible to answer that question, without first asking what sort of journey we wish to undertake. Some might opt for safety, hugging the shore, fearing to venture out into deeper waters, staying close to the flotilla of family and friends, avoiding adventure, lowering the risks wherever possible. Others will prefer the open seas, far away from land and other ships, changing tack and taking chances as they present themselves, exploring the unknown, discovering for themselves as much as the ocean as possible. Different lives require different guides.
The adventurous navigators have always been celebrated for their bravery, skill, and perseverance. The classical poets told of Odysseus’s long voyage back home to Ithaca and of Aeneas’s equally long voyage to Italy, to establish a new home for his people after Odysseus had assisted in the destruction of his previous one at Troy. More recently, Camões, the first European poet to cross the equator, eulogised Vasco de Gama’s voyage around Africa and on to India. In each of these three stories, the heroes relied on the benevolent interventions of the gods to protect them from storms and enemies.
By contrast, in Herman Melville’s modern, secular myth, Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the white whale draws our attention to the obsessive quality of navigational adventurism and the central role, for good and ill, that knowledge plays in such quests. Would not the crew of the Pequod all have been better off if they remained forever ignorant of the whereabouts of the whale? There is something of a tradition amongst poets to err on the side of caution. In the third Ode of Book I, Horace suggests that setting sail across water is not just an act of unnecessary folly but of impiety too:
In vain in his wise foresight did God sever / the lands of the earth by means of the dividing sea, / if impious ships yet leap / across waters that they should not touch / boldly enduring everything / the human race rushes to forbidden sin.
In the mid eighteenth century, Thomas Grey wrote of schoolboys at leisure in his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College:
Alas, regardless of their doom, / The little victims play! / No sense have they of ills to come, / Nor care beyond to-day:
Grey concludes that youth’s innocent pleasures should not be spoiled by premature revelation of the travails that await in adulthood:
Yet ah! why should they know their fate? / Since sorrow never comes too late, / And happiness too swiftly flies. / Thought would destroy their paradise. / No more; where ignorance is bliss, / ‘Tis folly to be wise.
Or, for those who prefer the brevity of T S Eliot, from Burnt Norton:
… humankind / Cannot bear very much reality.
Perhaps it is better not to know what lies ahead, better not to drift too far from shore, better not to understand the ways of the world, better not to study maps that indicate distant locations – exotic and dangerous – and which entice us to embark on a journey. Perhaps it is better to stay home and safe, and content ourselves with jigsaw puzzles. If Gustav von Aschenbach had not taken an afternoon walk, encountered a foreign-looking man outside the local cemetery, and then decided to go on holiday, he surely would not have ended up dead in a deckchair on a Venice beach.