A Prose and Visual Diary-Style Map of My Self-Guided Tour Through New Market
From the Commonplace Book:
Trevor M. Harris, author of “Deep Geography-Deep Mapping,” suggests that a “narrative voice refers not to the layers of information or to media but to the themes, interaction, and experiences that run through such geographies that link the physical and cultural worlds with the the fictional, symbolic, and the imaginary” (42). When thinking about deep mapping, I always return to this concept of narrative mapping and the question of how I can possibly map the human imagination and experience of being in and walking through a particular space, place or landscape. In searching for a solution to this dilemma, I decided that I certainly had my own experience within this place. My experience is that which I can understand and process most fully, most deeply; I have the ability to document those cognitive thoughts and reactions as they occur in real time in a real space as it is today. With modern technology, I can visually document those places that trigger those thoughts in my subjectivity. With this in mind, I concluded that a form of visual diary, consisting of my photographs and quoted thoughts, would both allow me to map my experience internally and allow you to explore New Market through the effects it has on the human body and mind.
As I reflect now after having completed this deep map of my two car and walking trips in the New Market quadrangle, I am struck by how predetermined my movement through the landscape was. There were so many factors that played into where I traveled. Historically, the land itself determined where settlers chose to build, where the best land was for farming and where the best hill was for building a church. The highway, built as a fairly straight line down the length of the state determined my entrance into the quadrangle, as I, like much of society, have learned location off of major interstates, those which move us most swiftly through space. My time restraint on returning the college car or returning to campus for class all dictated where I chose to stop, what I prioritized as most significant to see stopped, not from the moving car window. I was influenced by both of my two friends in the car, as they suggested their interests and commented on what they liked; when I felt they were getting more antsy about wandering around, I sped up my pace so as to not frustrate them. All these factors, shaped by the land and societal values, crafted the two routes you see above. While they are merely lines on a map from above, they have demonstrated to me, and I hope to whoever views this, that they are really how the human actually lacks autonomy as one moves “freely” through space.
