Reorientation

Maps by Holly Ordway

Antique maps, with curlicues of ink

As borders, framing what we know, like pages

From a book of travelers’ tales: look,

Here in the margin, tiny ships at sail.

No-nonsense maps from family trips: each state

Traced out in color-coded numbered highways,

A web of roads with labeled city-dots

Punctuating the route and its slow stories.

Now GPS puts me right at the center,

A Ptolemaic shift in my perspective.

Pinned where I am, right now, somewhere, I turn

And turn to orient myself. I have

Directions calculated, maps at hand:

Hopelessly lost till I look up at last.

 I have been reading a curated collection of poems for Lent by Malcolm Guite in his book, The Word in the Wilderness. Ordway’s poem about 3 different maps captured my imagination as I was preparing for a faculty recital at Grace College. Antique maps can sometimes be pieces of art. They are functional but care has been taken to make them beautiful as well. The old Rand McNally road maps I grew up with are more pragmatic – providing accurate information but not in a package one would want to frame and hang on their wall. The third type of map in our smart phone obsessed age is the GPS. I love Ordway’s insight that the GPS, all social media for that matter, puts us at the center. Her perceptive metaphor of the Ptolemaic shift – Ptolemy was the 2nd Century philosopher who proposed that Earth was the center of the universe.

Our culture places us at the center as consumers or even commodities. Good art (literature, theater, visual, music etc.) reorients us with its own narrative and asks us to wrestle with it. Art, both for the ones creating it and for those receiving it, ignites our imagination and exercises the muscle of creativity. One of the reasons I love learning the music of other composers is that it puts me inside their musical vision, allowing me to encounter their musical world and to experience their musical language.