Certainty - March 23 2025

 

Certainty

March 23 2025

I love old maps.

Their dragons

mermaids

compound Latin names.

Back when the world was unknown

and could be freely imagined

by any man who dared.

Beautiful maps

in which whole continents were missing,

inland seas

depicted as oceans,

coastlines

a guess at best.

Like a precocious child

drawing in crayon

and colouring in.

So anything was possible

out to the edge of the world,

and dead reckoning

could very well end

in sailing over it.

A myth, I know;

even the ancient Greeks knew perfectly well

that the world was round.

But we enjoy patronizing the past

and feeling smug,

as if we’re somehow more advanced

than stone age man

because we’ve cut our hair and put on clothes.

Now, we no longer imagine.

We fly over

map ocean floors

and see earth from space,

measuring

to the nth degree.

So where our forbears’s burden was ignorance,

today

it’s our certainty;

deluding ourselves

that borders are fixed,

the earth immutable,

our place is sure.

Even though

there are wars and invasions.

Earthquakes and tidal waves,

melting ice and changing seas.

Fugue states

in which the searching or confused

wander trance-like

and end up someplace

no map can tell.

Inspired by this opinion piece published in the Globe and Mail of March 22 2025:

https://globe2go.pressreader.com/article/282578793834107