Cave of the Mandarins
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Adroit cartographers over the centuries have learned to communicate by inserting discrete visual clues or codes into their maps. An expert in the discipline can pick them out and, from time to time, discussion about them has entered into scholarly discourse, even if the practice is more playful than serious. Scholars must laugh like the rest of us.

That they do so amidst arcane analyses for a small audience comes as just another  flourish in an otherwise routine culture that the academy prizes.

Recently, linguists from the University of Modena, Italy, have applied new translation techniques to this exclusive tradition. Coupling algorithms refined to detect subtext and structure in comparative groups of visual signs with newly conceived oneiric interpretations, they have produced a quixotic yet compelling narrative that has unearthed some disturbing values. 
 
Maps portray landscapes, natural and urban. They also portray something of the dreamlife that unconsciously goes on when awake, and which, however much cartographers guard against it, seeps into their work. This does not mean that their maps are incorrect. They aren’t, given the historical period in which they drew their maps and the information they had to draw them. It does mean, however, that cartographers knew or felt or intuited, as they drew, that the line, circle, squiggle or vector spoke to them in a language that the clues or codes they left on the map referred to.

Here, though, is what our linguist group has found.

Figured bodies of land or water, outlined and inset with geographic features – such as plains, lakes, rivers, highlands, mountains, valleys, islands and the like – provoke erotic images; a tendency quite natural to us and which, I must admit, is a predilection of my own. When viewed straight on or obliquely, images emerge. And however blurred or haphazard they might appear at first, a kind of latent visual subtext, more pronounced here, less pronounced there, they slowly clarify and then, as if part of the pulsation that keeps us alive, disappear. A slow natural flickering subsumes the map. Suggestive couplings, routine seductive poses, wide glistening ecstatic eyes, moist curving lips, full breasts, an erect penis, a tangled vagina, the bare shoulder that slopes to the top of the arm, a hand with long reaching fingers, the slope of the ankle, a turned wrist, a sweaty cheek and other anatomical signs, many of which, beyond their status as cultural clichés, suddenly compel; transforming the map into a palimpsest of desire, both compassionate and cruel. Apparently, the visual clues or codes that cartographers inset into their maps attest to this unique facility, this envisioning, by drawing our attention to different areas whose boundaries interact. And what was once a recognizable geographic shape, complete in itself, alters.

The terrestrial cartography of surficial bodies becomes a medium that allows viewers to see, as it rises and as it passes, what attracts them most in this infectious momentum. The study group has also noted an eccentric disposition that figures, not humans, but animals in rut as well as large insects whose mating choreographies are as complex as they are savage, with death and ingestion a concomitant outcome; the female its dominatrix. Whether or not the translation of other animate creatures into visible images will occur, how they accord with their roles in nature, what sex leads and what sex follows, which is prey to instinctual hunger, whether or not mimicry, masking and nurturance claim their pedigree are questions, surely among others yet defined, for further study.

Gregg Simpson and Allan Graubard