Tattered Maps in the Desert

Some while back, Jordan pointed me in the direction of Strange Maps, whose most recent post reminded me of something. Introducing what was at one time the world's largest map, they write:

When this 130 by 166 foot plot of polished terrazzo tiling was inaugurated at New York’s 1964 World’s Fair, it was the largest map in the world. A facsimile extrapolation of a New York State road map by Rand McNally, the half-acre-sized piece of cartography today would still be the world’s largest map - if it had actually survived. But decades of human neglect and hard work by the elements have left their mark on the plywood tiles.

The Texaco-sponsored map was one of the eyecatchers at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, serving as the floor of the Tent of Tomorrow, which was later turned into a concert venue but fell into disuse by the late Sixties. By the early Seventies, the plywood tiles were covered with a layer of polyurethane and the area was used as a skating rink. It now is part of the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens. With Ozymandias-like predictability, the Tent of Tomorrow’s 16 concrete pillars now support little more than sky. The only part of the New York State contribution to the Fair to survive unscathed is the Queens Theater in the Park, once the pavilion’s Theaterama.

I was immediately struck by the parallels with Jorge Luis Borges' brief story, "On Exactitude in Science" (this translation from his Collected Fictions):

...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

And in turn, Borges' phrase about the Deserts of the West made me think about our trip down to Imperial Valley, and in particular, our brief excursion to Slab City.

Do the fleets of Snowbirds that come down for the winter think of themselves as "Animals and Beggars"? Probably not, but I think there's something suggestive about this place (about the whole valley, perhaps) as a material record of a way of thinking about the world. Slab City is built on the slabs of an old internment camp: The past persists in fragments.