THE NAVEL OF THE WORLD
chapter 1 and 2. INITIATING AND RESPONSE #2
This post has been translated from Dutch into English with DeepL. It will be manually edited and streamlined soon.
This is a sequel to:
THE IMAGE: twice the trigram of Heaven. Heaven above and Heaven below.
THE IMAGE: twice the trigram of Earth. Earth above and Earth below.
'Really - are you going to New Zealand? That's news to me, I really hadn't thought. And, are you going permanently, or first trying out what life is like there for a while?'
'No, our house is already on sale. We're really moving over.'
'Wow, to the end of the world! America is still doable, to go back and forth once in a while, but New Zealand is really far away.'
But far away from where? What is near and where is far? Shall we measure the distance to 'far away' starting from your home, the place where you live? With the end of the tape measure held against the threshold and see how far we get from there. Through the streets of the neighbourhood, which is doable, to the other side of the city, where you rarely go, then across the ring road and a final industrial estate and then farmland. That already feels very far from home. From the house where we had started measuring.
Depending on the direction you take - and assuming the tape measure is long enough - you will eventually arrive in the Far North, the Deep South, the Wild West or the Far East. However, if your house is in the latter region and you were to map the world from there, where is the 'far east'? The Americas would probably be the 'near east' then, so this 'far east' would have to be Europe.
Chinese call the country they live in 'the land of the middle'. Other peoples may have other names for their country, but they too are equally convinced they are in the exact middle of the world. Everyone is an inhabitant of the middle land. One's home is in the navel of the world, indeed, it ìs the navel.
A child's world is compact and unified. Navel, body, bed, mum, dad and home are all still close together. An ideal base from which to go on an adventure, out into the world, returning to it again and again.
School history lessons start with those about the homeland, and then often get stuck there, in the mud of repetition and national single-mindedness. Who among us learnt at school about Emperor Asoka, the cities of the Incas or the songlines? And geography lessons. That was supposed to cover the entire realm of the earth, but was ostentatiously limited to the veenkoloniën and the geestgronden (Dutch localities). This interpretation of education cannot fail to contribute greatly to ethnocentrism.
Since Copernicus and Galilei, we have known that Mother Earth is in an obscure corner of the universe. At the time, that original line of thought caused a huge scandal - a storm of indignation, a shock, totally unhinging the relationship between man and the world. Now, thankfully, we have grown completely over the disappointment of not being the centre of creation. Geocentrism, Eurocentrism and own-folk-first-ism have been undermined by this and similar insights, but gone? Surely you would have expected that. The truth is that the observer is deeply conditioned to experience his own body - and thus his immediate environment and country - as the centre of the world and the measure of things. And for now, this conditioning still seems much stronger than the Copernican understanding of what our real position is.
Perception of the environment is selective. Only a small part of reality passes the filters of the neurological processing of sensory impulses. Where we are convinced that we perceive completeness, we only come into contact with an internally constructed reduction of it. Which we then use as a starting point to design and print a map on a flat piece of paper. Reduction upon reduction.
The subjectivity of the mapmaker and that of his society, our inherently limited sensory perception and the necessary reduction in the process of cartography make a map a specific interpretation and huge simplification of reality. Not so much wrong, but alongside the world map with the Netherlands as its navel, there is an equally valid map with New Zealand at its centre. A remarkable phenomenon.
When such a map appears on the classroom wall, or is printed in books and newspapers, it steers readers in the direction of their hidden or consciously chosen suggestion. If the world map produced in Europe is seen enough - consciously, but certainly also unconsciously - the reality suggested on it eventually becomes inescapable. We live in the centre of it, that is how it is and nothing else. The remedy? That lies in diversity. In the schoolroom, hang several world maps side by side. Turn a chewed-out map is a quarter turn, or flip it completely. Be open to the fact that there are many different forms of perceptions and visions and just as many possible maps.
Maps are not purely objective creations. They reflect the values, standards, and limitations of their creators. Models are most useful when we consider them in the context in which they were created. What was the cartographer trying to achieve? How does this influence what is depicted in the map?
fs.blog/map-and-territory
On one side, the belief system of the mapmaker and the making of the map. On the other, the map reader and his formation. The maker's specific worldview is projected in the map and this map reflects it back, shaping and reshaping the reader's understanding and misunderstanding. Chapters 1 and 2 interact with each other incessantly.
To be continued soon ...