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Psychic MapsMarch 09, 2010 Here's another one from To Be Rather Than to Seem. This isn't my last word on the subject, no way, not by a long shot. The theme slithers between the lines and often breaks through the surface of lots of my writing. Last week I gave a talk to the local Rotary Club about psychic maps, with a focus (surprise!) on Martha's Vineyard. Martha's Vineyard isn't even mentioned here. Watch this space. We'll get there, we'll get there . . . In an independent study seminar on U.S. labor history that I took as a Penn undergrad, the instructor had each of us draw what he called a "psychic map"[1] of Philadelphia. The point wasn't to duplicate from memory the Philadelphia found in road maps and tourist guides. We were supposed to map our own personal Philadelphias, Philadelphia as each of us knew and experienced it. My Philadelphia was an oblong. At the left end was the Penn campus, with all the streets named and numbered and several buildings indicated with little squares. At the right end was the downtown bus station. Market Street bisected the oblong horizontally. A couple of other east–west streets were sketched in, and a few numbered north–south streets. Somewhat to the left of center was the 30th Street train station, which was within walking distance of the Penn campus if you weren't carrying a heavy suitcase. That was my Philadelphia all right. I spent a little less than two years in the city, but I didn't really live there. I lived on and around the Penn campus. Whenever I could, I went back to D.C. to hang out with my friends there. At holiday time, I could sometimes bum a ride; more often I took the bus or the train. Not for nothing did the Greyhound and Amtrak stations loom far larger in my mind than the city's museums, historic sites, and restaurants. In the lavatory at home hung a framed map, done in antique style, titled "A New Englander's View of the United States." New England was drawn to scale. The West Coast was recognizable. The three thousand miles between New York and California were compressed into maybe three inches, their only feature a few clumps of grass; all that was missing was the "Here be dragons" of pre-Columbian days when the earth was flat. My own psychic map included the Eastern Seaboard between Virginia and Massachusetts, but other than that it wasn't unlike "A New Englander's View of the United States." My Massachusetts featured Routes 9, 20, and 30 running to and from Boston in glowing neon, the Mass Pike extension as far as the Storrow Drive exit, and the arc of 128 that linked them. Less prominent threads led north to the Franconia, in New Hampshire's White Mountains, and south toward Woods Hole. Points west of Framingham -- where the old Shoppers World mall was a frequent shopping destination -- were vague and vaguer. The Berkshires and Springfield were slightly more real than Nebraska, but not much. I was an avid news watcher before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, on April 4, 1968. I knew about segregation, desegregation, and the civil rights movement. I knew that Bull Connor and George Wallace were bad guys. I knew who Martin Luther King was, but I didn't know who he was. My school gave students and faculty permission to skip classes in order to attend a memorial gathering on Boston Common. I was astonished by the number of memorial-goers gathering in the hall. I thought they were just trying to get out of class. If I had drawn a psychic map of my evening news, anything related to the Middle East would have been in the foreground. Most everything else was sketchy. I could identify and explain the significance of the Sykes-Picot agreement, the Balfour Declaration, and the Treaty of Sèvres, but I doubt I could have located Dienbienphu or explained its historical significance. When Robert Kennedy was assassinated a scant two months later, I felt personally connected to the event: the assassin was a Jordanian and he was motivated by Kennedy's pro-Israel foreign policy. I had recently shifted my allegiance from Kennedy to Eugene McCarthy because McCarthy seemed aware that "the Arab-Israeli crisis" had a history and that uncritical support for Israel wasn't going to solve anything. My school's commencement ceremony was held two days after RFK's death. In those days the entire school attended, and the entire student body wore white. A classmate and I were wearing black armbands when we lined up with the rest of the junior class. Our homeroom teacher told us to take them off. We refused. She said we couldn't march in with our class if we insisted on wearing the armbands; it was the seniors' day, she said, and we were distracting attention from them. We said fine, we won't go to graduation. Some high-level conferring went on that didn't include us. The upshot was that we kept our armbands on and marched in with our class. In late spring and early summer, in the wake of Dr. King's death, St. Peter's Episcopal Church held a series of talks called "Where Is Racism?" I'd attended Sunday school at St. Peter's, but I had dropped out after eighth grade, when I got confirmed and aged out of the junior choir. But I went to all the talks, read all the readings, and wound up volunteering at METCO, a nonprofit organization that arranged for black students from Boston to attend participating, mostly white, suburban schools. METCO's office was in Roxbury, a mostly black section of Boston. I was seventeen; I had my driver's license. The first time I went to the METCO office, I headed down Route 9 in my father's VW Bug convertible, a Boston street map spread on the passenger's seat. I knew Route 9 well: my grandmother lived within a stone's throw of it in Brookline, and when I drove to school (having dropped my father off at the Riverside MTA stop en route), I took Route 9, often stopping to pick up my friend Lisa on the way, then hung a left on Longwood Avenue and drove through the hospital district to school. Going to METCO, I turned a little sooner, and to the right, on Tremont -- and entered a world whose existence I hadn't even suspected. Even in midsummer, green was scarce; shop signs were faded, most storefronts built of unpretentious brick, and nearly everyone on the street was black. I had no idea that the Roxbury I saw on the news, usually when something bad happened, was so close to Route 9. On my street map the proximity was obvious. In my psychic map they were in parallel universes that never touched -- until the first time I drove from one to the other. Psychic maps. Two people who live at the same address may not live in the same world. They probably don't. One of the most important and useful concepts I've ever learned. What happens when you come to the frontier of your psychic map? What if you fall off the edge? What if invaders cross the border and head for the walled city in the middle where you're quietly going about your life? To Be Rather Than to Seem is the story of my psychic map.
[1] A quick Web search turned up the information that this is generally called a "cognitive map." I've been calling them psychic maps ever since I drew my first one, and I'm going to stick with it.
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