These maps point me in no direction
Friday, August 6, 2010 at 11:58AM At a certain point in the process of making This Is All I Need, I wandered around my apartment looking for things that I can’t explain why I own. I had trouble doing so, until I opened up a cabinet and found a large stack of maps. Not the useful kind of maps that people might have in their glove compartments, but maps saved from National Geographic magazines or topographical maps pulled out of Free Stuff boxes at the library or city maps of foreign cities from long-ago travels. I’ve had most of them for years. I can’t say definitively why.
Partly, they’re just aesthetically pleasing to me. But I don’t take them out and look at them frequently. Or ever. I don’t consciously think of them as a collection. Really, I think that they somehow represent an opportunity for me: someday, I tell myself, I will Do Something with them. And while it’s true that I have used them on occasion (they have made great wrapping paper), the Something that I tell myself I will Do is grander than that. Maybe I will make amazing art pieces with them someday. But I don’t really make visual art, and I’m not much of a crafter. Maybe I simply don’t want these lovely things to go to waste, so I hold on to them. But they're just taking up space in a cabinet, doing nothing. Logically I should get rid or them, yet I've never been able to bring myself to do so.
I think this is a large part of Mugwumpin's fascination with our possessions: we undeniably have relationships with the inanimate objects in our life, but they are decidedly one-sided. Anything we get back from these objects is the result of anthropomorphizing or magical thinking. But it's still a relationship, not so very different from the relationships we have with people. There is still a connection. But while relationships between two people are infinitely more complex (both people, after all, are probably engaging in all sorts of magical thinking and illogic and projection), our connections with our things allow us to look at the inexplicable ways we behave in relationship with others, while isolating the source of complexity. Our things, after all, want nothing from us. (Right?)
Naturally, I brought the maps to rehearsal to see if they would prove useful. While they didn’t find a place in the show, this type of relationship with our stuff has fascinated us: potent, illogical, unexplainable. And above all, personal. Thank you to the cast, production team, and numerous friends and family members who have plunged into their mysterious relationships with their stuff to enrich this performance.
Reader Comments (3)
Maps are going to be a thing of the past. Children growing up today may never know what a paper map looks like. Maybe holding on to those maps will turn out to a good idea one day.
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