The memory of cities. I can feel this place take shape in my mind. Somewhere, I suppose in my hippocampus, the grid acquires names, assumes its real shape. Images find homes, and by doing so become able to associate with one another. Neighborhoods take on definite character. I remember quite clearly when I first pulled off the freeway, (or expressway, as they say here) somewhere around Damen or Western, how rapidly I became disoriented. I knew in theory that the street names would tell me whether they ran north-south or east-west, but even that conceptual framework, which would have saved me no end of trouble in San Francisco in the streets around Market, can be inverted. What is more, there is a profound difference between navigating a map and blindly following directions (even when those directions are the ones given oneself after reading a map). Nothing is in relation to anything else: sensations have nowhere to be stored, and so jumble together in a miasma. But now, after only two weeks, what seemed formless falls into shape: I begin to take possession of the land.

There is a tremendous pleasure in acquiring the topography of a place. On my drive out I stopped for a couple days of backpacking in Canyonlands National Park, and I had the good fortune to purchase a detailed topographic map of the Needles region. One night sitting in my tent, after finishing Felix Krull and having nothing else to read, I examined the map in great detail. Perhaps because I had consciously decided to pay close attention to landscape on the trip, or perhaps because the trail was obscurely marked in places and required a lot of consultations with the map, something clicked as I studied it that night. It is of course obvious to everyone that maps correspond to the places they purport to represent, but there is a profound difference between the notional assent all of us give that fact, and a real ability to read maps. Most of us use maps for the paths on them; we remember to get on such-and-such a trail and turn left at the third fork. The intervening land doesn’t matter as long as we can stay on the trail. But a good topographic map represents the land, and I realized, with something of a shock, that I could look at any point on my route, and by constructing the topography in my mind, remember exactly what things had looked like there. Not, of course, down to every tree and blade of grass, but what the land looked like, and whether it was, for instance, meadow or pinyon scrub. And because the topography determines the ecology, the memory was one.

Chicago does not have any topography to speak of, in the strict sense, but it supports a human landscape of great, probably greater, complexity. Architecture, neighborhoods, stores that fulfill the various needs of Homo sapiens urbanis, the interlocking ecology of social, ethnic, and economic niches. I remember, back when I was visiting FB here, her pleasure at showing me around and demonstrating her mastery of her new home (she had the most remarkable spatial self-assurance of anyone I have ever met). I was unable to understand her enjoyment, inured to my well-trod cow paths in Berkeley, and perhaps I even resented it as a result, and feared it would replace me. There is a bitter irony, I must admit, in being the age she was then, and finding that pleasure myself in precisely the same place where I could not learn it from sympathy. It does not help that from time to time I come across places we went together, and if I could I would forbid those streets from finding their way into my map. They do not belong to me now, I have torn them out…

To avoid ending on that note (which in all honesty is struck only in an area of about four square blocks, easily avoided) I will make one more reflection, which is that on my return to California two weeks ago it became clear to me that the compass of my mind had clearly and irrevocably shifted to another footing. I of course remembered where everything was, and nothing had physically changed, but the light seemed unnaturally bright and I found that even the most familiar places—indeed, especially those places—had acquired an aura of utter strangeness, as if I were seeing them in a dream or an especially prolonged episode of déjà vu. This was a sensation distinct from, and in many ways completely opposite to, what I had experienced prior to leaving. Then it was difficult to imagine that in some fixed amount of time I would be gone; on my return it was difficult to recall that I had ever belonged there, except in the hearts of my friends, where I hope I still am.

(cdm | MemoryOfCities)