“The Map Occludes the Territory”


by Nicola Boari


“If you drew a map of them, showing their locations, what would the map look like?"
Philip K.Dick, “If You Find this World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others” Metz speech, 1977


“The Map Occludes the Territory” is a quote from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Wikipedia page commenting the article “Some Reflections on the Origins of MBSR, Skillful Means, and the Trouble with Maps” published in Contemporary Buddhism Vol.12 N.1 May 2011. I couldn’t find the exact quote in the article but it anyway spoke to me in the clear and at the same time mystifying way a sudden realization emerging from a lucid dream feels the morning after. Gone but still somehow lingering, evaporating as any second passes, but still there in some obscure recess of consciousness.

Only later did I learn of the origin of that quote. “On Exactitude in Science”, a very short story of just half a page by Jorge Luis Borges, a fragment of a historical forgery, surviving the eternal unraveling of time, narrating a forgotten empire where maps were so detailed they would cover the entire vastness of the territory itself, only to then settle in the earth, ruins of a domain mapped as much as reigned, whose plot has transcended history and borders, affirming itself on soil, penetrating it, making it fertile to fiction, and sterile to life.

I’m updating this attempt to an explanation almost six months after its first draft. It already feels foreign to me, the roads I thought I had traveled, the trajectories I had so thoughtfully traced no longer lead to any known destinations. The map and the territory are now illegible, they speak the language of a cancelled childhood. Reading or listening to it doesn't make me feel anything, if not a bit of pity, gripped as I seem to be in a vice of pathetic biological, social and existential terror, and that usual aura of fake self-pity that is specific to me. I feel a certain vertigo for the almost total lack of correspondence between the me of then, and the me of now. The me of then is verisimilar, and yet other. Dragged down the rabbit hole, a term that I thought was relegated to my childhood, to the vision of Disney’s rendition of “Alice in Wonderland”, now resurfacing in the titles of countless content on Youtube inviting you to follow them further and further down, not before signing up to their channel of course, in the disturbing abyss of a superficial morbid nighttime interest. Deep down into what I learnt, thanks to a consumer product such as the film "Matrix”, to be a quote from Jean Baudrillard, "The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory-precession of simulacra-that engenders the territory". I wonder by how many maps, lying on top of and to each other, the territory is covered, how deep the representation is, and if there has ever been a land at the bottom of all this, if it makes any sense to ask what and which is the false and the real, which the conspiracy and who the conspirators are, of what nature the limits of our seeing and feeling, whether the experience can only be partial and the Quest for a dock doomed since the very beginning.

I have no map, I wander this life aimlessly accumulating Question after Question, never to find any answer. No line’s ever been linear, the compass broken, the journey a catastrophe from the very beginning, no stars pointing home. There had been hope, love, expectations, but “midway upon the journey of our life I find myself within a forest dark for the straightforward path had been lost.” (Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto I). Any Italian student knows still opening quote and yet only now that I’m his same age I seem to understand it. Was there ever a true way, if not that which had been cast on me by others?

I’m confined to home, just as most people are, but saying that this “work” of mine is the result of the pandemic would be untrue. But I am home, I do have more time on my hands than in the past, and this is never a good thing for me, as my mind starts restlessly contorting around itself, breaking, tearing itself apart, thoughts deceive me, I hear voices whose nature I cannot trust, and the threat of the genetic plague that runs in my blood looms. I know what sickness looks like, I’ve seen it and spoken to it, and as it gets closer and closer my skin shivers, rots, it weighs down on me, forges my identity, but I still don’t fully know what it will feel like and what Ill become once it enters me, contaminating anything that I’ve ever been. I dread that moment, when I will be taken away from myself. Death is also now more present than we’d like it to be, with the tragic daily bulletin of the people who are no more, the imminent danger of infection, the sheer existence of the multitude is what makes even more dangerous. I fear death with my whole being, I’ve feared it since I’ve been, the thought of a before and after, the absence of an after, creation and destruction, the horror of not being, and most of all of not being enough in this here and now, of not having mattered.

Having more time sleep cycles have changed, habits have followed, the perception of time, dragging itself in an endless repetition of fear, anxiety, anger, indifference, depression, guilt, hopelessness, sudden elation, maniac states of ungrounded creativity, losing focus, realizing there was never any focus at all. I’ve read more and seen more, going back to things I thought were clear in the past but which clearly had never been, seeing them in a completely different shade and realising how little I know, and how little I know of myself and probably ever will. All this time and yet not enough, all this territory, unexplored, obscure, and to remain such. The middle ground, unbloomed.

Space, time, perception, knowledge, information, memory are the concepts that I’ve tried to deal with here. All of them confused, all of them feel urgent at once, failing to grasp anything is such a grandiose lack of focus and unmotivated burst of ambition. Working on it and saying, whether through sound or word which are actually the same thing here, what I thought I needed to conjure and ponder on felt of the uttermost importance. I have grown suspicious of such importance, I know the danger of such emotional ardor, it leads to deception, mania, to the ultimate loss of anything that really matters around me. As if thinking and telling deny the very experience of being. The more I seem to focus the blinder I am.

The impossibility of travelling and the depths inside us, the hopelessness of constantly feeling that there’s something missing, that everything is missing. Being yourself and the whole, sensing some connection and yet feeling none, swayed by the constant thinking, judging, planning, the present inextricably tied to the past, the future corroded, impossible to even consider if not in light of the past, as some sort of gravitational force that keeps dragging us down. Sleepless at night I try to fall asleep watching documentaries on the universe, on the origin of things, the fate of all things, and I grasp none of it. The vastity of what’s both above and inside of us, the unfathomable heat or cold, the still desolation of silence, the depths of eternity, weight and mass, matter, none of this makes any sense to me, it sickens me, and both my ignorance and my incapability of understanding any of this draw me to despair, to fear.

Any step we take a misstep or ridiculously minor. So much to be known and yet we know so little, but we think so highly of ourselves and our conquers and history which amount to nothing compared to deep geological time. It is not humbling, it’s sickening, it enrages me, it crushes every part of myself. I will contribute nothing towards what we proudly call progress, I’m part of the faceless multitude weighing the march down. I seek eternity through a tv screen and midi signals, unable to believe in any greater motive of plan, jealous of those who do have faith in something and receive light in the firmament above us. All I’m able to see is darkness and distance, a distance greater and greater the very same moment I seem to see something, unreachable by its very own nature, receding into spaceless infinity, so far away it might as well not even exist at all.

In a frenzied wake I stifle and go though countless internet entries, leafing through endless streams of information, none of which clarify anything, all of which cast more and more doubts around my very same questions. My quest for understanding is a deeply flawed one too: I accumulate words, quotes, unable to go beyond hoarding unintelligible data, in a state of constant fear arousal and suffocation. I absorb nothing, learn nothing, staring blankly, scrolling empty.

“The Map Occludes the Territory” is no answer but a broken attempt to somehow express all this both through words, told in a messy stream of spoken word read by both human voices (me, John Duncan and my mother) and by free online speech synthesis softwares in a variety of languages, and through sounds, with the use of a combination of field recordings, samples, shortwave signals and digital synthesis. I wanted the album to feel cold, artificial, with soulless voices failing at translating abstract concepts and sentences into broken foreign languages, and as the denser the words got the further away the translation departed. I avoided my own language, Italian, as it is how I express, or try to, deliberate thoughts, and this is not an articulate “work”, but a chaotic one. English is how I express feelings and emotions, my limited vocabulary bears weight, each word is charged with indivisible strings. Japanese as it speaks to me whilst I cannot speak it, another failure in a long list of half-assed attempts, yet the Orientalist gaze looks at the foreign ideograms and is fascinated by the symbols it cannot decipher, half asleep within a forest of signs, both fearful of the therein hidden knowledge and enamured by its potential delights, while at the same time imposing its own alphabet and pragmatism. A.I. provided translation fail as the words move away from English and into lesser represented languages. The machine is not yet ready, fallible, learning yet unreliable. As stars get fainter and fainter and distances unmeasurable, words lose all meaning, and any communication fails. This very same long “essay” is a broken attempt at explaining, explaining what is not clear, perhaps and intention, a longing or looking for some excuse or recognition. The message is unclear, flawed, ultimately no communication is possible.

Even the piano is sampled, and broken into random detuned note. The shortwave radio an online one, the sounds captured randomly. What is not artificial though are the words, which offered some sort of temporary relief and allow to remember and metabolizing such alien concepts through naming and vocalizing, characterizing them as part of my inner experience. The field recordings are all personal too, coming from various places from around the world: my hometown Bologna (Italy), Rablà (Italy), Penang (Malaysia), Tokyo (Japan), a glacier in Norway, captured since 2007 to today (2021). In my past “work” as SLP, アロキン and Salomè Lego Playset I had used samples taken from Youtube and the internet in general and treated them as found sounds, considering the digital realm as an extended field of experiences, but I chose here to exclusively use recordings from my own first hand experience as, going back to the theme of reaching middle age, I feel I’ve come to a point in which I’ve accumulated a sizable bulk of information about me and the world around me and have stored it, and the time has come to decipher what it all might mean. Some of this material ended up being corrupted beyond repair, and the question arose: did I remember it different or did the material itself become different? Is there any truth in what I remember, how has time distorted it, how has time come to corrupt and change data, and how will we store data in the future? What will we do with all this information we’re gathering, about ourselves and our experiences? Does it give us more worth as human beings because we’ve managed to somehow document our existences? Does it prove we have ever existed? Is digital data the gateway to immortality? How long will data exist, if of an existence, dematerialized and detached from life, we can talk about? I tried making sense of my own experience through its recollection of data with this “composition”, but again more questions arose, scattered, chaotic. This will speak in no way whatsoever to the listener, but it did to me, while making it. How will I remember it years from now?

The track goes through different motions, of quiet, silence, recollection, density, distortion and accretion, transformation between the composite and the individual, the artefact and the experiential. Ultimately, as my weak understanding of entropy would suggest, matter accumulates into mass and tangible things, collapsing, finally dissipating into heat death, a state of definitive equilibrium, of total distance and incommunicability, an all engulfing black silence. None of this I will experience, none of us will. “There was a long rumble of sound, and it seemed to him that he was falling down a vast and interminable stairway. And somewhere at the bottom he fell into darkness. That much he knew. He had fallen into darkness. And at the instant he knew, he ceased to know” (Martin Eden, Jack London). My late grandfather spoke to me about Martin Eden, yet I came around reading it in my 30s. In a creative writing class my grandmother wrote about staring at the hills outside of her house when she was a child, sick at home, her nose pressed against the window, and thinking that beyond that mountain there was nothing. We will never reach that bottomless stairway, our path ends just as it started.

Recently I’ve stared at again, but actually saw for the first time, “The Pillars of Creation” photograph by the Hubble Telescope, with its portrayal of the colossal gaseous tusks of the Eagle Nebula, 7,000 light years away. That formation might be no more, probably hasn’t been for incomprehensible amounts of time, but for us, and there is an “us” as a shared common territory and matter, experience and fate, such dust is still erupting an emerald cloud of awful beauty. “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain” (Roy Batty in Blade Runner). Sights not meant for our eyes, yet we strive for them, cursed, unable to experience them, ever, if not in numbers, a language I do not understand. The quest for knowledge, unattainable, Promethean, bound for failure.

Hopelessly lying on the sofa, being told I’m fulfilling my duty as a citizen by doing nothing, I watched “The Terror”, “Interstellar”, “The Looming Towers”, “Childhood’s End”, “High Life”, “Uncut Gems”, the works of Jon Rafman, the documentaries of Werner Herzog, “The Anthropocene”, “Blade Runner”, “Dune”, “Ad Astra”, “The Conversation”, “Into Eternity”, “Chernobyl”, I attempted reading “The Denial of Death” by Ernest Becker, “Pereira Maintains” by Antonio Tabucchi, “Idoru” by William Gibson, the works of Jon Kabat-Zinn, wasting time yet crying over waste, telling myself my experience does matter, that this breath this moment this here is all I’ve got, yet the quest is gruelling and harsh, I fall and everything around me seems to follow as well.

The track goes nowhere, fading into silence, with a few final notes perhaps inspired by Shigeru Umebayashi’s “In the Mood for Love” theme and the sound of something being washed ashore, getting nearer, then farther, in open sea, dragged by invisible currents. The last moments of quiet, as the tempo slows down, into an even slower silence, stretched into filaments of unbearable speed.

All of this is a demonstration of how deeply flawed my own nature is, or maybe natura as whole, as I worry about impossible distances and incalculable time while neglecting those I love here and now, and the world around me is crumbling. I wish I were here, but I’m nowhere.

All of these musing I’ve done before, during, and after the composition was completed or even conceived. As offspring of no particular time. Incomplete, unanswered, partial, wrong, beyond recovery, unmapped.