Essay No. 5
Nothing Shown
On the empty squares, the places where the map has nothing to say, and a long Tuesday I spent sitting in one of them.
There is a square on the map near my house where nothing happens.
It is a kilometre by a kilometre, a single box of the grid on the Land’s End sheet, and if you look at it you will see almost nothing at all. A few contours, gentle and far apart, wandering across it as if they had somewhere better to be. The little tufted symbol for rough grassland, scattered about like seeds. A dashed line where a parish boundary runs through. One small black dot near the top corner with a height beside it. That is all. No roads. No buildings. No names except the one for the common, printed across it in thin, spaced capitals, which takes up most of the room.
I have been looking at that square for years. Last month, on a Tuesday, I went and sat in it from nine in the morning until the light went, to find out what it had left out.
I should say what I expected, because I was wrong. I expected to be bored, slightly, and to write something wry about the virtues of boredom. I took a flask and a folding stool and a notebook and the map, and a sandwich, and a second sandwich, because I know myself.
What I wrote down, over the course of the day, in the order I wrote it:
A wren, very close, very cross. The wind, from the west, smelling of the sea though I could not see it. A plastic feed sack, blue, caught in the gorse, with the name of a merchant in Hayle on it. A stone with a groove worn in it that might have been a gatepost once. Bracken, browning at the edges. Two buzzards, mewing at each other over the ridge. A path, which was not on the map, and which went from nowhere in particular to nowhere in particular with great confidence. A sheep’s jawbone, very white. A low curving bank, almost lost in the heather, which I walked along and found came back round to where it started: a circle about the size of my kitchen. Somebody’s house, probably, three thousand years ago. Small yellow flowers I could not name. More of the wind.1It was tormentil, I found out later, from a book. I am bad at flowers. The Survey did not map flowers, and I have used this as an excuse for thirty-five years.
At around two, a man came over the ridge with a spaniel and asked if I was all right. I said I was. He asked if I was lost, which was fair; I was a woman of fifty-eight sitting on a stool in the middle of a moor with a map on her knees. I said no, I knew exactly where I was. I just didn’t know what was here. He thought about that for a moment, and then he told me that the bank I had found was where his grandfather used to say the piskies danced, and that you weren’t to sit inside it after dark, and that the path went to a spring that had dried up in the seventies but that the sheep still remembered. Then he went on, and the spaniel went on, and I wrote all of that down too.
There is a phrase on some maps, printed in the middle of the places nobody has surveyed, or nobody could: nothing shown. Or no data, or unsurveyed, or, on the very old charts, nothing at all, just the white of the paper. People like to say that the old mapmakers filled those spaces with sea monsters, and occasionally they did, but mostly they left them honestly empty. I think about those blanks a good deal. I spent my working life making sure there were fewer of them.
But I had never really thought about the other kind of blank: the square that has been surveyed, carefully, by people who knew what they were doing, and which has been found to contain nothing worth a symbol. That square is not empty because nobody looked. It is empty because somebody looked and decided, reasonably, that a wren, a feed sack, a jawbone, a dried-up spring, a dance floor for piskies and a man’s grandfather were not the kind of thing a map is for.
They were right. I would have made the same decision. I did make it, thousands of times, at a desk, about squares just like this one. And I don’t regret it, exactly; a map that held all of that would be the size of the moor. But I spent a whole day in one of my own decisions, and found it was crowded.
My mother, towards the end, lost the names of things first. Not the things themselves. She could make tea perfectly well; she just could not tell you that it was called a kettle. She would point at it, and frown, and say the, the, and then give up and make the tea anyway, with the same small, exact movements she had always made. The names went, one by one, like the lights going off in a street. The kettle stayed. The garden stayed, and the way to the shop, and the shape of my face. It was as if the map had been taken away and she was left, quite calmly, with the ground.
I thought about her a great deal on the Tuesday. I thought: this is what it is like, a square with nothing shown. Not nothing. Just nothing that has been written down.
At about half past seven the light went orange and then grey, and the wind dropped, and the wren came back for a final complaint. I packed up my stool. I did not sit in the circle. I walked home in the dusk across the empty square, which was full, and when I got in I took the map down from the shelf and found the place and looked at it for a long time, at its gentle contours and its little tufts of grass and its one spot height, and I didn’t add anything. I just knew, now, what it wasn’t saying. That seems to me to be most of what it means to know a place.