On my brother's wall in Toronto are the false maps. Old portraits of Ceylon. The result of sightings, glances from trading vessels, the theories of the sextant. The shapes differ so much they seem to be translations -- by Ptolemy, Mercator, François Valentyn, Mortier, and Heydt -- growing from mythic shapes into eventual accuracy. Amoeba, then stout rectangle, and then the island as we know it now, a pendant off the ear of India. Around it, a blue combed ocean busy with dolphin and sea-horse, cherub and compass. Ceylon floats on the Indian Ocean and holds its naive mountains, drawings of cassowary and boar who leap without perspective across imagine "desertum" and plain. (53)
A passage from Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family (1982), a book I read some thirty years ago when it was still easy to read Ondaatje's oeuvre in a week. Most of these books I am still digesting, apart from In the Skin of a Lion (1987), which my enteric system rejected for its passive-aggressive sentimentality. I should try reading it again, see if those tears I now cry for certain of my own pasts have made my stomach immune to the tugs of others.
But right now I am re-reading MO's "memoir", seeing in his false maps the piece of dinosaur Bruce Chatwin grew up touching, the one his grandmother(?) kept in a cabinet and excited his interest in exploring Patagonia, which he did (though some dispute this), and which gave the world one of my favourite books, ever -- In Patagonia (1977). (Funny, in looking for a map of Patagonia I came across one whose shape and colour is reminiscent of the dinosaur part that Chatwin describes.)
No comments:
Post a Comment