CONNOR FISHER

SPECULATIVE GEOGRAPHY

An essay

When I had walked enough, I stopped and turned around.

The trees were familiar. Nothing had changed.

*

I turned my back to the highway.

I heard the pleasure of traffic but could not join.

I slept below the road.

Imagine space to be a formal constraint. A responsible limit to being. I navigate time through ground, most recently the American interstate system: infinite repetition of a single point. Space, like the highway, preserves itself to maintain its own necessity.

The insecurity of trembling space staggers me.

Each line or shape holds spatial metonymy and forces itself to appear again. “Part for the whole” disguises the upward expansion of space while couched in the form of, restriction.

The whole is massive, plus think of time, steering over the surface not with confidence but trepid and overwhelmed by American sprawl.

I was not lost. 

I imagined forests shifted around me or scrolled beneath my feet, as I remained static.

Remember that “country” signifies both “nation” and “rural.”

That is where I stood: in the country.

A concept of space deepens and moves into the third dimension. The sovereignty of surficial land is challenged. Beneath each inch of American space lies its darker, hidden reflection: successive layers of sublimated spatial consciousness layer beneath one another and descend into the earth with geometrical complexity, each successive layer becoming marginally smaller, until American space shrinks and alters itself through tectonic plates and magma and finally joins the reflected and collapsed space of each country and ocean on Earth in an infinitely small, intensely metonymic, point at Earth’s center.

This metonymy is a linguistic move, played outward from the interior to the surface of our planet. From the central point of infinitely collapsed space (the result of ceaseless downward reflection and inward collapse) the Earth can expand again. An almost gestational process of speculative geography, linguistic play sees possibilities of reconfiguration in the nationless space of the dense, collapsed central point.

The mind forms an image of terrain it has seen and remembers. Untrustworthy, yes, but indelible in consciousness; the folds and synapse paths of the brain metonymically contoured to match American soil, highway, city, field, forest, mountain, and beach. When I dream I do not invent new landscape, but repurpose, recombine, and collage the places I have seen. Dreams make maps and access where my body stores these somatic memories.

Memory in the body begins in motion and trembling, begins in nature.

The landscape, the horizon: these exist as pure image, the finest network spread, delicate, along infinite paths which contract and expand; change shape, size, and material.

The stunning beauty lies flat, an image to drive.

The concept of a map resists its own status as mimetic image. Spatial reduction is absurd.

The success of any map hinges on scale; a proportionate reduction of spatial distance that remains bound to concepts of drafting, speculation, and the survey. A human projection of immanently inhuman space.

Each map models its own failure.

I felt space shift, as if a field were the center.

I began to recline on the earth.

I felt my legs and hips align with the horizon.

The affect of highways is one of numb repetition and boredom, punctuated with instances of divergence—exits, detours, stopped traffic, construction. 

Linear travel takes the form of a loop, indicated by green mileage signs. Each mile holds its highway as a singular unit; it expires and re-begins with the next mile number, without other visual or somatic shifts. Remember the somatic abstraction of highway travel: motion as an infinite loop.

Most cities and towns also form tropes of repetition. Small towns bring low speed limits and flashing school signs, tourist-trap storefronts and local-color quirks of flora and fauna. Large cities have uniform beltways which skirt suburbs and pass through run-down industrial districts. Here the loop of travel concretizes into a self-perpetuating asphalt ring.

A landscape of sand and rock confronted me. 

I had passed the trail of furrows.

After I slept, I walked deeper into the woods. 

The wind had stopped.

Nothing that I could see was growing, or even still moved.

I could only smell the soil.

The language of space pervades and influences our thinking. Its vocabulary creates—and limits—ways that I speak and think, not only about space, the city and the country, the highway and agriculture, but also what conversations can exist in surrounding fields: industry, manufacturing, cartography; the list extends in every direction. Through metaphor and analogical linguistic practices, outlines of thought can be presented that map spatial grammar onto other discursive areas.

Maybe the realm of the linguistic should be viewed more broadly. The development of means of trans-national travel have caused grammatical repercussions and shifts in contemporary geographical vocabulary, no less than language development has altered the consciousness of how individuals perceive American land and its uses. Materials, ideas, and spaces take on linguistic life and function.

I walked uphill; the path was not hard.

The earth shook and I shook with it.

I saw fog, pinned to the mountain. The rocks rolled down and under my feet.

Connor Fisher is the author of the chapbooks The Hinge (Epigraph Magazine, 2018) and Speculative Geography (Greying Ghost Press, forthcoming 2020). He has an MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English from the University of Georgia. His poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Typo, the Colorado Review, Tammy, Posit, Cloud Rodeo, and the Denver Quarterly.