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2 FoUdore and the Sense ofPlace I 'placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. -WALLACE STEVENS, "Anecdote of the Jar" She was the single artificer ofthe world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever selfit had, became the self That was her song,for she was the maker. Then we, As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there never was a worldfor her Except the one she sang and, singing, made. -WALLACE STEVENS, "The Idea of Order at Key West" Folklore and Geography Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar" reminds us of the necessary role that artifacts of human intelligence play in organizing our surroundings and making them meaningful. His jar imposes a pattern on the wilderness chaos; things can be located in relation to the fixed center which it provides; its symmetrical, geometrical shape seems to diffuse a sense of calm and structure as the woods surround the jar in a ring echoing the container's circular form. The wilderness takes on the character of the ordering human intelligence of which the jar is the emissary : it "sprawled around," says Stevens later in the poem, "no longer wild." Other human constructs serve similar ordering functions in our contemplation of geography-with maps, as we have seen, providing the best-known example. Maps take a random lump of geography and flatten it out, reduce it to graphic symbols, draw grids and coordinates on it, clearly mark the important parts, and generally translate it into a form that we can easily get our minds around. We're lost, we pass a prominent 53 landmark, we find it on the map: oh, so that's where I am. Among their other functions, maps translate geography into clearly understood locations , routes, and spatial relationships. With map in hand, we find that the world is no longer wild; we find where we are, establish ourselves as a center, and thus make the slovenly wilderness surround us. We needn't, and in fact don't, entrust professional cartographers with all of the important business of mapmaking. As geographers and psychologists have established, we are all perforce cartographers of a sort. In his influential book The Image o/the City, Kevin Lynch broached the idea of the "environmental image"-"the generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world that is held by an individual. This image is the product both of immediate sensation and of the memory of past experience , and it is used to interpret information and to guide action." 1 The environmental image that we hold of our surroundings is vital to our sense of orientation and to wayfinding-our ability to simply get around in our physical milieu. Building on Lynch's approach, Roger M. Downs and David Stea have suggested that people actually organize the components of their environmental images into cartographic form-that they construct "cognitive maps" of the worlds in which they live from day to day, on which they have pinpointed the important locations, landmarks, and routes of those worlds, and which they "follow" as they go about their quotidian travels. "A cognitive map is . . . a person's organized representation of some part of the spatial environment. . . . We use schools, stores, parks, and so on, in everyday life and so we need to know their locations, how far away they are, what's there, how good they are, and how to get to them. Cognitive mapping is our way of acquiring and storing this essential information, of being able to use it to decide where to go and how to get there."2 Like explorers drafting charts of newly discovered lands, we draw these cognitive maps as a result of our needs and experiences in a particular environment. Depending as they do largely on experience, they tend to be highly subjective-our sense of distance may be wildly inaccurate, for instance, and we will only remember and "mark down" places that are for some reason important to us. Nevertheless, people inevitably act as mental cartographers of their immediate milieux, producing representations of the local geography that they could transcribe onto paper if they were asked to. As they would with conventional maps, though, they would want to talk about the symbols that they drew, to explain the nature and meaning of their experiences in geographical space, not merely to indicate the bald fact that they had experiences in geographical...

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