Wayfinding along a crooked road

This blog is influenced by my interest in what I refer to, for now, as “wayfinding.” In its usual uses, wayfinding refers to the many ways people orient themselves to their world and find their way from place to place. The subject is wide: Aboriginal Australian finding their place and way among stars and landmarks. Various forms of cartography. Locational technologies: compasses, GP devices. More recently, wayfinding in the bureaucratic guise refers to approaches to signage, architecture and urban planning aimed at 'aiding' and ‘managing’ the movement of people.

Most meanings and uses of wayfinding, apart from the Aboriginal instance, refer to activities and technologies that have been closely aligned with commercial, religious and state power, the history of mapping being but one example. In these common contexts wayfinding usually suggests considerable confidence in the ability to name how things are and how to get from A to B.

I begin elsewhere. Here the critical element of wayfinding is lack of confidence in how the powers that be shape and describe where we are. Here wayfinding begins with the existential uncertainties and questions, applied to history, memory, the present, and possible futures. The best ‘travel’ books, like W.G. Sebald’s, are wayfinding books. Where am I? Where have I come from? What am I doing here? What is home? Where am I going? '

The usual ‘maps’ give kind of answer - answers aligned with power - to such questions. I’m with the great journeyer Melville when he suggests what is worth finding “is not drawn on any map; true places never are. "

The journeys of Sebald the archaeologist (a wayfinder who digs down/through a modern violence that seems to instantly bury, forget and deny, itself), take us to scenes of the buried, repressed, denied (as well as the lives of whose on the edges who suffer in memory: the refugees, dreamers, migrants, artists of the Wadi Halfa cafe), which in turn cast light on where we are now (the innocent-appearing what simply “is” of the official maps/pronouncements) and where we moderns keep returning: Guantánamo, S-21, Terezin ….

David Woodward: I first heard of David Woodward – now dead, but the instigator of an amazing critical project on the history of cartography - during a radio interview as we drove across the Nullabor plain, one of the longest, straightest roads on earth. It was Woodward who was connecting the many usual meanings of wayfinding with the state, but also seeing something else important in the concept: those more essential questions, asked critically, referred to above.

The west coast Salish once told stories suggesting their shock (and laughter) at how the new westerners (clear cutters, road builders, industrial fishermen) worked compulsively, til death, “making all the crooked ways straight.” ‘Wayfinding’ here is a crooked ways journey through both this straightening and its results and, I hope, some encounters with some places not found on any map.

Tom