The year I drowned, I took the No. 6 train uptown in New York to the Hispanic Society of America to visit their collection of ancient maps. Among them are large maps, drawn by men who were claiming the new world not only for Spain but for Christianity. One had a crucifix at the top, and another was adorned with a Madonna. Still another had a Muslim soldier with a sword on one side of a map of Africa and an armed European on the other.
The pride of the museum was Juan Vespucci’s map of the world, mappa mundi, completed in 1526. They keep it in a private room available only to scholars who sign up well in advance. I knocked on the door without much hope, but the thin, polite man who opened it said, “Of course,” and let me in. Crowded into a small space were a number of wooden desks with a few people working at them, who looked up, then went back to their books and papers. On one whole wall was an old gold curtain with tasseled fringe, like something you would find in a drawing room. The man drew it back, and there it was: all that was known of the world. Africa very much in place; South America a crooked, narrow knee; North America only a scrap of land, surrounded by watery blurs where all knowledge ran out.
I was directed upstairs to an exhibit of smaller maps, laid out in glass cases in two darkened rooms. These maps were specific, precise, and individual, drawn by the pilots of ships, “to preserve,” as the curator put it, “the Mediterranean sailors’ firsthand experience of their own sea.”
They were so carefully and beautifully decorated—castles with flags marked cities, compass roses and fleurs-de-lis were drawn along the edges— they may not have been working charts to be kept on board but beautiful replications of where the sailors had been and what they had seen, what the curator called “subjective truth.”
Among the maps were practical books and charts called derroteros (in English, “courses” or “pathways”) made by rutters or coastal pilots. These guides, with their close focus, aided mariners who plied both local and more international waterways and provided a bird’s- eye view of shoreline elevations. The journals accompanying the maps had notes on the stars and entries regarding harbors and ports. One particular derrotero was displayed with its original hand- stitched hemp case. It was a painstaking map of a shoreline, with hundreds of tiny inscriptions and notes and small perfect houses drawn along the water’s edge. Only by reading back and forth between different maps was a sailor able to orient himself.
I walked among these maps, often the only person in the dark rooms. And I began to see that I was navigating between the larger mappa mundi of organized religion and philosophies— Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and not to ignore, the Church of Atheism— big cosmologies with so much history and tradition, and so many power struggles behind them. Firm ideas. Fixed points. And my own derrotero, my firsthand experience of my own sea, my own subjective truth.
What principally drove the makers of the large maps was conquest; the smaller ones, discovery. My derrotero would be of the smaller coastline, the individual rock. I would draw it to tell others what to watch out for, what I learned. Or what I knitted together, what sufficed. No Essential Truth, but a geography worth recording.
We know from the work of biochemists that the very material from which life arose was dust blown here from some distant star that we will never see. That the carbon dioxide atoms that surround us today may have been breathed out by a woman or a man who lived here hundreds of years ago. That the world is made of shapes and materials that move and change, things we cannot know exactly but can often only apprehend.
Our desire to apprehend this world is often couched as a passive state, as Belief, a dumb acceptance. And sometimes I suppose it is. But the struggle to grasp what lies just outside our firm knowledge is in fact energetic. Reason runs out, and we reach beyond it, toward the blur at the edge of the map. And beyond that, toward what cannot be known. And this urgent need to reach beyond ourselves is not “real” until it has been worked through a human life, in its specificity, its particulars. Our lives, our bodies, are its mediums. Whatever the reality of this thing beyond us, the struggle toward it remains, oddly, individual. Like truth, what we sometimes call “faith” is alive. It changes. What drives us, as it drove those sixteenth- century sailors, is discovery. Who knows in the end what we shall find out to be true; perhaps
it’s only what we ourselves held to honestly.
Like crossing a border
From one country to another in a second.
This is what I wrote down when I got home. I wrote it in a notebook and then added, There will come a time in my life when the doctor says, “I am sorry. There is nothing I can do.” I know this now, not in theory.
It was an ordinary day. I had almost not gone to the doctor.
Dr. Lowe looked at my right eye. He said, “Darn.” And I dropped out of the world I lived in, where I thought I knew about disease and vulnerability and death and all that, and entered another country. It was a spookily familiar world, same streets, same buildings, same people— a sci- fi version of my streets, my buildings, my people— but it was as if the furniture were slightly rearranged, the people not quite right. It was not like another place; it was another country. It was like falling into Oz.
I walked right over the border without knowing I was crossing it. It had no border patrol. I did no planning. I had no map. Dr. Lowe handed me the passport. I had it in my hands before I knew what it was. My ideas about illness and medicine and then “God” would soon be revealed for what they were: tickets on a train that had left the station.
The man Jesus had had quite a lot to say about losing. He was— now I understand— preoccupied with loss: lost sheep, lost coins, lost sons. His own lost life. The Hebrew scriptures emphasize exile. Islam: the stranger. The Buddhist Noble Truths: suffering. I had understood these sayings as metaphors. Not anymore.
In the end, I lost three things, and one of them was my faith.
I crossed Bath Street, parallel to Santa Barbara’s hospital, and headed toward Castillo Street. I was careful to use the crosswalk. I felt the nearness of my own life, its centrality, its concreteness. Even then, early in my sojourn, in what I hoped was only a visit, not my destination, what was brought home to me was that I had taken my life for granted. A group of doctors in white coats was coming toward me, one eating a sandwich, another carrying a folder; a middle-aged woman was talking on her cell phone— all of them just walking dully along as if their lives were not fragile. As if their lives were balloons . . . not a huge raft that had to be lugged along the sidewalk, a large body not possible to ignore because it . . . had . . . something . . . wrong . . .with . . . it. The raft is me. I am it. They are all walking around, nurses, doctors, visitors, on this block, and all over the world, as if their bodies were clothes or whatever, . . . They are— here is the right word— oblivious.
I had been there, not knowing that this was my creed, until ten minutes ago. The sick? Not me. The dying? Never. I had thought I knew. I’d had the flu. I’d had a cold. But these were not enough to dump me into Oz. Because I knew that eventually I’d get well. My time in the land of the sick had always been so short, it was like a layover. I saw Thailand but only from the airport. To pass into this place, you have to not know whether you are going to get out.