"Life is like topography, Hobbes. There are summits of happiness and success... ...Flat stretches of boring routine... ...And valleys of frustration and failure." - Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes
The Guy and The Topographer. His map is spread out on a table. The topographer gestures across it.
THE TOPOGRAPHER
The world in relief.
THE GUY
I used to love looking at topographical maps. All the shapes inside other shapes, some of them so close they almost overlapped. Like rings on a tree trunk…
THE TOPOGRAPHER
The roughness of the face of the world…
THE GUY
Smoothed out, yet readable.
THE TOPOGRAPHER
I like the ones where different elevations are different colors.
THE GUY
Oh yeah!
THE TOPOGRAPHER
They look like those heat vision things…
THE GUY
I love how our views of the world in maps always elaborate the world. You take the face of Earth and reassign its textures and irregularities lines and colors. Like art.
THE TOPOGRAPHER
Not art. Art isn’t an objective thing.
THE GUY
Like art. Not art necessarily…
THE TOPOGRAPHER
Topography is fact. Art isn’t.
THE GUY
Artful, then. You turn it into something artful.
THE TOPOGRAPHER
You know, in an older sense, topography wasn’t just the study of the details of the surface of things. It meant more than that. Topographers studied the idea of place. Not just the elevations of a piece of the Earth but its culture, its traditions – local detail.
We don’t understand it that way anymore. It’s just “a mountain goes here” and “a valley goes there” now.
THE GUY
This is one of those plays where nothing happens, and we just spin on an idea, isn’t it?
THE TOPOGRAPHER
Yup.
THE GUY
I bet if you laid out this play from end to end, surfaced a room with each page in order, you’d see the topography of a life.
Everything, if you look at it hard enough, will show you its landscape.
I’ve inhabited my life for thirty years now, and this is the first stretch of all that time that I’ve really had a means to look at the shape of it. And I can see, even in myself, “a mountain goes here, a valley goes there.”
And relationships! I mean, they have them, too. We’re just all surging forward so fast we never stand back and survey the landscape.
THE TOPOGRAPHER
There are days I want to make a topographical map of myself. Outline my self on a white sheet of paper and mark the elevations all across myself.
And not just the physical.
I want to mark every fault line where my heart was broken, every mountain that sprang up when something wonderful happened to me, every desert stretch where there was nothing to speak of either good or bad. An elevation map of the person I’ve become.
So that I can see myself like this.
Artful. Like you say.
THE GUY
Artful…
They consider. The lights go down.
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1 comment:
I LOVE the way your mind works! . . . the depths at which you think of things and the way that you verbalize them to others to make them think and see things from a different prospective. I don't think of myself as a shallow person, but I love the way you challenge my mind. Thanks!
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