From Out of the Bush

When I was a boy I had a great admiration for maps. So much so, that I would often receive them as gifts. These remain some of my most jealously guarded possessions. They fascinated me with their detached, objective detail. They conveyed an abstract view of the world mostly incomprehensible to we living on the vastly complex plane of existence the paper so desperately sought to simplify. Infinitesimally small points represented entire towns each containing an untold number of lives. Some called these points home and would know them better than anywhere else in the world. I had mine and everyone else had theirs. It helped me humanize the world in my own way. 

It was later that I turned my focus to the historical variety. Affording to this great narrative under construction in my own head, a new axis on which to travel. That being time. The birth of new town germinating into bustling city seemed to operate in an organic fashion as if a tissue reacting to geographic stimuli. A human tissue. As one cannot make note of the actions of individual synapses in the mind, so too could a lifetime of dedication prove only marginal understanding of the march of human civilization. Again like the mind, there were, among the more antique in my collection, vast swaths of real estate dedicated unexplored territory. In both world and mind, this was in large part due to the inhospitable nature of these environments. With foliage so dense, light seldom reaches the forest floor and what is illuminated is rife with snakes and other manner of beast. As world and mind developed, keen to remain beyond the margin of such territory, there arose an issue: the longing for the exposal of bare soil. The simple fact that there was nowhere left to go and the void beckoned. And with a degree of intelligence comes this dilemma. That of the unknown or rather unknowable. 

Who among famed explorers could pierce the paper veil of the map. Other territory choked with labels and detail juxtaposed to nothing at all. A journey into the uncharted can leave the trekker ridden with disease or perhaps dead outright. He forges ahead, blade in hand with anticipations of python, viper, arachnid, and pathogen. What comes as a surprise is the acrid stench of rot. Elsewhere the heat of direct sunlight subdues the worst of such aroma, leaving only a faint whiff of what was and now was gone. Here, beneath the broad-leaved leviathans, all is hidden and all that dies is left to decay unmolested. Deadwood and chaff.  If one ventures to akin places today, be it congo, amazon, or myriad others, such realities are still evident. An unrelenting law of the unseen. In my mind too, lay the unmapped and still I have not the courage of Stanley, Burton, or Speke. 

He who claims to have understanding reveals only his own unyielding ignorance. Only recently have I dared test the boundaries to be met invariably with abysmal blackness. The earth hidden by a green static veldt had gone necrotic which only worked to encourage the growth of such a verdant canopy further concealing the corrupted soil below. And unlike the explorers of old, I knew nothing of couriers patiently awaiting word of my discoveries to relay to loved ones back home. For me, my discoveries belonged to me only and were mine to contend with. I lay relegated to my own life. Not even the paramount figure of my own perception. An extra in the drama of existence. I lay alone. In repose in the undergrowth invisible to the beyond nevertheless whistling a tune that reminds me of the distant familiar. Absent in the thoughts of those around me, until a stranger in this most strange of lands forges a path to an emaciated me, resigned to death and says, "Hey, I saw this map and THOUGHT OF YOU. I thought you'd like it." as they hand me a rolled-up sheet. And such a map, regardless of the territory it depicts, leads me out of the jungle.