Passing through Terra Incognita

“Maps are the image of ourselves—and our own relationship to everything else—as we seek out paths on this floating globe traveling through space, as we travel through our own space.”

Where the hell am I?

This is a question, asked by many a pilgrim throughout history, that I mutter to myself every day now. Tell me the truth: when you look into the possible future four months from now, can you say with any degree of certainty where the world—and you within it—will be? If you can, your certitude is impressive. 

But I believe we are passing through “Terra Incognita,” the unknown land. An unrecognizable path forward into a world not yet illuminated by what will happen between this time and the next. 

In the early Renaissance, the Church proclaimed that all knowledge, everything there was to know, was now known. But even then, most maps of the world contained large swaths of Terra Incognita. For people back then, it was enough to know that there were places they did not know and had not been, and it was enough to understand, “don’t go there.” Perhaps you might fall off the edge of the earth, or maybe the dragons and demons would get you. It was best to avoid the unknown, a convenient corollary to an age when all that was known was declared to be all there was to know.

Certitude was final, except when you fell off its edge to be consumed by the unknown. 

This is the history of the world and the history of our humanity. Humankind is a pattern-seeking species, but we are also wayfinders. Somehow, we have the ability to build new neural pathways into our floppy brains, and burn them onto our floppy world in the form of maps. Maps are the image of ourselves—and our own relationship to everything else—as we seek out paths on this floating globe traveling through space, as we travel through our own space. 

In my previous essay, Mapa Wiya:We don’t need your freakin’ maps, I may have implied maps were not essential. That was not my point. Maps ARE useful, but just as useful is the development of your wayfinding instincts.  And, you have to know which is the right map to pick for your journey. 

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Lear's Loft Bathroom at the Zetter Townhouse (photo by Darren Chung)

I once stayed in a hotel room at a place called the Zetter Townhouse in London, where the walls were papered with maps . The places and town names seemed familiar, but I could not place them even though I thought I was pretty good at geography.  After much study, I realized that the maps were fantastical—made up, but in a most clever way. They consisted of real names and parts of various maps cut and pasted together to form new geography. What looked true was actually reformulated. 

I subsequently discovered that these curiously realistic but fake maps were concocted during WWII , when Great Britain was under siege by the Luftwaffe. That chaotic and transitional time, with their food shortages, lack of freedom to move around, and general despair of being at war, is not unlike our own current situation. 

Maps can provide direction—how to get from here to there.  They can also provide a sense of the relationship between where you are and what’s around you. The maps on the wall of my London hotel room created a relationship between whatever was going on outside of the hotel and a seemingly familiar yet different world. During such a stressful time as WWII London, they must have provided the direction from the chaos outside the door to a peaceful countryside, with familiar-looking town names, little inlets to the sea, and swaths of green showing where the forests started. These were the maps back to the way it was, and to how it still could be. 

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Now, in the fall of 2020, I ask myself,  where the hell am I? How do I get from “here” to “there,” with this “there” being anywhere but here? We could use a map like the ones in the Zetter, with their paths leading back to something familiar and comforting but safely removed. But that would be as much of a cut-and-paste job as anything on the Zetter wall. 

Rather, we need to map out the way forward, through all of this, beyond our current Terra Incognita. A map is nothing without its maker, the one who observes it. Then the map becomes a tool of strategy, of navigation. If we were to draw a map of our time, and the directions of how we get from here to there, what might that map look like?

What if the map we need is something new and unique, something which can serve as a complement tp our age and the times? Most people believe that maps must depict flat lines on a flat surface, but let’s explode this myth. For instance, take a look at and listen to Andrew Pekler’s “Phantom Islands” project.  

Sound on: one of the soundscape islands you can listen to through Andrew Pekler’s Phantom Islands map.

Peckler creates a sonic atlas of lost islands, what he calls their “musical, biophonic, and geophonic soundscapes.” This atlas looks and sounds so strange and wonderful, and the histories of each place seem slightly familiar. This is a map of the world which still has something to explore and discover. A world which contains mystery and imagination. It does not seek to avoid Terra Incognita. It embraces it. It’s the equivalent of the Zetter wallpaper maps, if they were also to depict Narnia. The back of the wardrobe is a portal to a completely new, mysterious and wonderful land. 

This is the sort of map I need today. I cannot abide by warnings of “here be dragons” when looking out over the time horizon of the next few months. I already know that—the dragons are nipping at my heels. Rather, my map needs to show worlds unexplored and undiscovered, perhaps even long forgotten, but wishing to be remembered. Re-remembered. Things, places, people, emotions, memories, reconnected to us, with us, by us—re-attached.  What I know is the map of our recent past is full of lines and paths which have been broken. The map of our old world has its cliff edge and beyond that, the world has fallen away. Terra Incognita. This is where we live today. It’s okay. Here be dragons, but here also are new horizons and new lands beyond.  

Consider the humility of not knowing where you are going, but continuing anyway.  This is true wayfinding. To find the way, when you are not sure of the way.  Why do humans do this? What is in our nature that we would naturally proceed, against our good sense and bad odds? There must be another calculation involved. 

It is for this reason that we already have our map, even though it might still be buried deep in our own wardrobe, somewhere behind those old coats, pants that no longer fit, forgotten boxes of  love letters, and lost bills that might not have been paid on time. This map says that you go forward because you must, because you can, because you will.

It’s a cut-and-paste map, with those familiar routes and names, but it may also have some phantom islands—lost for now, but waiting to be found. Your map, the one you were not sure you even had, may have been right there all along, simply hidden in the back of a familiar space you never bothered to explore. 

A map of Narnia by artist Daniel Reeve.