Words are not my first language.<\/p>\n
For ten years I have written\u00a0in images. I have reduced our archipelago’s scabrous coastlines and unforgiving shoals to gentle contours and benign gradients. I have flattened the world’s summits, filled in\u00a0its trenches,\u00a0repealed its\u00a0third dimension. There are no histories in my images. No footnotes. No grisly explanations for\u00a0the borders that separate our island-states. The streets of our cities\u00a0are narrow, vacant lanes on my parchment, unpeopled by penniless children, unsullied by spilled blood.<\/p>\n
For ten years I have been a mapmaker, and for ten years I have\u00a0told my stories in curves,\u00a0hachures,\u00a0and inlays.<\/p>\n
Not here. Here I must employ\u00a0sentences, paragraphs, and chapters — devices that\u00a0are as foreign to me as alidades and azimuths must be to you. For this place cannot be charted, and no combination of routes and waypoints can\u00a0describe\u00a0the\u00a0strange journey\u00a0that brought\u00a0me here. I am beyond the limits of my own cartography, lost\u00a0to dead reckoning.<\/p>\n
Forgive me, therefore,\u00a0if I ramble. Excuse me, dear reader, if I mislead.\u00a0I am an unpracticed writer, working with an\u00a0unfamiliar\u00a0alphabet. I can only hope to improve as I go along.<\/p>\n
And there is something else.<\/p>\n
In maps, entire\u00a0continents\u00a0are laid out at once, as a bird might survey them from above, and readers are free to inspect\u00a0whatever points they find most intriguing, in\u00a0whatever order they please. But the events\u00a0of a written narrative\u00a0are revealed sequentially, over the course of a finite\u00a0timeline. This is a constraint\u00a0of the medium itself, for a reader’s eyes cannot absorb thousands of words\u00a0in one fell swoop,\u00a0as they might\u00a0a map or a picture. Words\u00a0are like bricks:\u00a0individually meaningless, useful only in the context of their accumulation.<\/p>\n
But I am ten years a mapmaker. I will not write upon\u00a0an axis. I will not mold my plot\u00a0to\u00a0fit a bell curve or a sinusoid.\u00a0I do not subscribe to the notion that a story should begin once, at the beginning, or terminate at the end, or even at all. Time is not so simple, in my experience. And for precisely that reason, I will make no apologies for any lingering effects that this account has\u00a0upon its readers\u2019 sense of linearity \u2013 which is to say, upon their sense.<\/p>\n
The last vestige of great Atlantis now rests upon a rotting table in its capitol’s highest tower. It is a letter, scrawled in a curious script upon alien paper, and though it is all that remains of my country, it contains on a single page its whole tragic history.<\/p>\n
I might have reproduced it here and avoided all of this miserable recordkeeping, save for two problems. First, that you’d have not understood it. And second, that it does not start at the center. We must begin at the center.<\/p>\n
At the center of the world is an island, and at the center of that island is the Adytum, and at the center of the Adytum is the world.<\/em><\/p>\n This is the first maxim in\u00a0our\u00a0catechism, a formula that\u00a0children are made to recite before they are old enough to grasp its\u00a0absurdity. There are six hundred and fourteen maxims in the Atlantan catechism, one for each\u00a0island in our archipelago, and they are all absurd. More specifically, each is\u00a0a recursion<\/em>, a nauseating form of paradox\u00a0that pretends\u00a0to build toward some point\u00a0only to fold\u00a0in on itself, to collapse, to self-destruct. Our suicidal\u00a0maxims are\u00a0as memorable as they are useless.<\/p>\n But the Adytum itself is eminently\u00a0useful. It is sacred to all\u00a0Atlantans, and\u00a0particularly to we cartographers. This is because of the atlas upon its floor, the\u00a0map of our archipelago, of our world, from which all other maps are born. It\u00a0is etched\u00a0into an immense\u00a0plate of orichalcum, a disc some three hundred yards in diameter. Upon its surface our world is reproduced in such minute detail that a man walking across it might discover a new lake\u00a0on some distant peninsula simply by pausing\u00a0to catch his breath, or revisit the hill on which he was born by kneeling to retrieve a dropped\u00a0coin. Doubtless the map owes some of its precision\u00a0to the\u00a0sheer\u00a0scale of the strange canvas upon which it is drawn. But anyone who visits that ancient place, as I have done, cannot help but wonder whether it owes some of its impossible intricacy to\u00a0a physics very different from our own.<\/p>\n Indeed, it is said that before they made the world, the gods created the Adytum as a kind of headquarters, a command center, and that the map on the floor of\u00a0that place is\u00a0the blueprint from which they worked.<\/p>\n I have\u00a0little faith\u00a0in such mythologies, and less in the men who peddle\u00a0them. But it is true enough that the Adytum has been there for as long as anyone can remember, and that there are references to it in the earliest of our texts. It is true, too — though I cringe to admit it\u00a0— that the images cast\u00a0upon that colossal wheel\u00a0have proven so accurate over the decades\u00a0that our guild of mapmakers has devolved to a company\u00a0of profiteering scribes, content to copy sections of the Adytum onto canvas for sale to merchants and sea captains. We seldom\u00a0mount our own expeditions. Too many of them, bankrolled\u00a0by some romantic\u00a0doge, have ended in our merely\u00a0confirming what was already in the Adytum for all to see. And so our expertise\u00a0has shifted from cartography to calligraphy. We take the Adytum’s map on faith, and we add to it place names, scales,\u00a0compass roses and\u00a0other such\u00a0flourishes.<\/p>\n There is one legitimate form of cartography, however, that we still practice: the mapping of Atlantan cities, which are conspicuously absent on the floor of the Adytum. Some posit that the Adytum’s map simply predates our cities, and thus could not have accounted for them. Others\u00a0believe that the map is a representation of\u00a0Atlantis’s future, and interpret the omission of our cities as evidence that some vengeful pantheon will one day strike\u00a0our race\u00a0from the face of the earth. Until that time, anyway,\u00a0the task of\u00a0mapping\u00a0Atlantis’s cities falls to\u00a0my guild.<\/p>\n Most of our population is clustered around fourteen islands toward the center of the archipelago, where the weather is most temperate and the seas most placid. But there are small towns and settlements sprinkled across more distant islands — colonies of outcasts, military outposts, mining outfits, and the like. It was upon a mapping excursion to one such far-flung community that I found — or, rather, was led to — a lagoon.<\/p>\n It should not have been there. The Adytum depicted\u00a0dry land at its coordinates, and the Adytum is incontrovertible.<\/p>\n But it was there nonetheless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Words are not my first language. For ten years I have written\u00a0in images. I have reduced our archipelago’s scabrous coastlines and unforgiving shoals to gentle contours and benign gradients. I have flattened the world’s summits, filled in\u00a0its trenches,\u00a0repealed its\u00a0third dimension. There are no histories in my images. No footnotes. No grisly explanations for\u00a0the borders that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":716,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-doomed-archipelago"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=712"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1430,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions\/1430"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}