Some gatherings serve as reminders of why it’s important for people to make time to physically come together to share work and ideas. A recent workshop on cartography and spatial thinking organized by Katharina Piechocki and Tom Conley at Radcliffe was a model of this, generous and inspiring in all kinds of wonderful ways. Here, see for yourself: this is an offering, an inventory of moments from the workshop.

 

quote and paraphrase (a little list, a cabinet of wonders)

in the para-grammar, all of a sudden things start to flow.
little houses. the pottery. the old oak tree.
the anxiety of being nowhere
the terror of totally bare rivers
the cartography of things taken away
the mountains of the moon
the geography of cheek-kissing in France
(this is the tyranny of green.)
Darwin. earthworms. Renaissance pottery.
the verticality that grows out of a perfect number
an island wearing the coastline like a snail wears a shell
a list of forms of emptiness
the sea surrounds everything, but it is not the end.
(the minaret is saying, “I am NOT the Red Sea.”)
what remains after everything evaporates
there is nothing but the interval
everything we do has some sort of a secret
coming out of the dark: a microphone, a father, a face
papamundi
(that’s like the league of the werewolf.)
a rhyming of two empty spaces
you must choose, for the first time, between vision and touch.
vision says something that touch can’t confirm.
Who burned your house down last?
the insane Easter bunny
a book of islands
a coat made of holes
a reliquary of digits
a map covered in clouds
a drunken beloved vomiting words in Nordic languages
a poem engulfed in the pseudopodia of extraordinary prose
the gesture of the turning of a page of a book
where do some things end and others begin?
marking love with stones on the roadside
(lines are for crossing.)
writing is rhythm for the eyes.
to write is to make maps.
i’m a cartographer.
you must be alone.
what can we do on our own?