It makes no sense to try to think through the notion of deep mapping as conversation unless I’m first clear about what the word conversation refers to in this context. Perhaps the best place to start here is with a claim made by the curator Monica Szewczyk in an article called ‘Art of Conversation, Part 1’ in e-flux journal no 3 – February 2009. There she writes: “… if, as an art, conversation is the creation of worlds, we could say that to choose to have a conversation with someone is to admit them into the field where worlds are constructed. And this ultimately runs the risk of redefining not only the ‘other’ but us as well” (italics mine). While I believe this may indeed be the case, it clearly does not refer to the type of verbal exchange referred to as “conversation” that most of us have most of the time.
Arguably the most important quality that marks out a genuine conversation has nothing to do with what it’s about, what the participants say, but is rather to do with the quality of how they listen to each other. Someone once observed that, if you listen carefully to two academics having a discussion, you’ll soon come to realise that when one is silent it’s not because he’s actually listening to what the other is saying but, instead, is mentally preparing what he’s going to say next. This is even more obvious in political exchanges and interviews on TV.
To really listen to another person requires something close to an act of unconditional care towards that person, one in which the listener tries as far as possible to let go of her or his own concerns; the desire to win an argument, to impress, to ingratiate themselves, to flatter, to demonstrate superior knowledge, wit, or “woke-ness”. In short, to set aside the assumption of exchange as something based on having an agenda, whether explicit or tacit. To attempt a genuine conversation, an exchange not already predetermined by the mental parameters within which you are willing to attend to what another person says, is indeed an art, one that requires a great deal of practice to develop. To really listen to another person requires both the willingness and the ability to set aside one’s own positions and pre-judgements. To attempt to hear what they say on their own terms and without the habitual series of reactive judgements that usually accompany my listening. All of which matters because, unless I’m willing at least to attempt this, I have no chance of touching on what my friend Siân refers to as our “core commonality”. Of course all this is an ideal, one that most of us will fail to reach, but we can remember Samuel Becket’s advice and keep making the attempt, failing again no doubt, but hopefully failing better.
It’s attempting genuine listening that opens into what Szewczyk calls conversation as an art, as the creation of worlds. It’s also this attempt that links us to what I referred to earlier as the unending conversation or exchange that grounds us through attending to the world in its fullest sense. And, because conversation is by definition a two-way process, it must ultimately involve us in attending – both in the sense of attentively listening, as when a teacher asks her class to “pay attention” to her or to each other, and in the sense of an act of caring for or attending to, an act predicated on that open listening.
Arguably, then, it’s because people, particularly those with power and authority, refuse to attempt the art of conversation, that so much of the world’s suffering happens. It happens, in short, because they (we?) don’t want to run the risk of being in a situation that might redefine not only the responses of others but, in the process, our sense of ourself.
At present, it might seem that the obvious examples of the lack of genuine listening and conversation relate to extreme examples, for example the wars we see reported daily in the media. But in the UK there is real everyday suffering caused by the simple refusal of those with power and authority to genuinely listen to others. To go into this in any real depth would take me a long way from my main concern here. However, I can point to an example, one that’s very much part of my own experience. It’s a situation that’s the consequence of professional people not listening, of failing to attempt to engage in genuine conversations in order to protect their sense of professional authority, something that perfectly illustrates the point I want to make. You can find this example online at a site set up by my wife called Dialogues – ME/CFS.
What has all this to do with deep mapping?
Put very simply, deep mapping can be seen as an attempt to enter into a genuine conversation, only not with another person but rather with a place. As suggested earlier, that involves a two-way process between person and place. It involves listening to, attending to, manifestations of the multiple, indeed probably endless, particular qualities of a place, seen as the taskscape over time of human and other-than-human life. It also involves attending, not only to the multiplicities of place as they immediately appear or are currently represented, its literal presence as the sum of a plurality of relationships, but also to all those aspects of the specific place that have not been “heard”, that is to say recognised or acknowledged. And, if one really listens to a place, it will speak back to . If we attend to those aspects of a place that have been consciously or unconsciously overlooked, neglected or repressed, it repays our attention by subtly changing, reconfiguring itself. Again, all this requires practice and patience, a particular act of care.
We can begin, however, by attending to some particular aspect of a place. Attending, that is, not to the given categories that are used to define a place, but to what strikes our own curiosity in terms of how some particular aspect of it starts to solicit attention, which is how it speaks. That aspect can, in turn, offer a starting-point for sketching out the working limits of what a deep mapping might attempt.
If, for example, I was to consider begining a deep mapping of Farlands, I might start by reflecting on the implications of a simple change of name in relation to what appears, physically, when I walk around the place. The building currently named as Broadmeadows, which lies just south of the mire that feeds into the beck that runs approximately north north east through Farlands, was previously called Bogmire. What this suggests to me is either thatthere has been an actual drying out of the area, perhaps through a process of draining, that enabled an area of bog to be transformed into meadow, or else it simply reflects a change of ownership and with it a change to a more picturesque name. A change that might also reflect a shift of attitude towards bogs as “unproductive” wetland. Either way, listening to, attending to, that change of name and its implications, is enough to begin the process of listening to the place as a whole through how it solicits my attention.
It may be that, as an aspect of the transformation of Farlands, some form of deep mapping activity also takes place. Whether or not that happens is entirely up to Will and Charlotte but, if that is indee what happens, I hope to be part of the conversation.