MIDDLE EARTH IMAGINARY

Having recently visited England, I disagree somewhat with J.R.R. Tolkien's statement that "subcreation" is the invention of a totally imaginary, fully articulated world. In truth, it seems to me that the "subcreation" springs from the physical world and landscape in which one already lives and usually is not "totally imaginary." At least in Tolkien's case, the philologist of medieval Scandinavian languages lived in a land of ancient trees and ancient Druidic mysteries (England) which informed at least some substrate of his fertile imagination.

Could Middle Earth have been subcreated in the Outback of Australia, if one had no knowledge of rural England? Tolkien, it seems to me, remade--subcreated--the England he knew into a fanciful fantasy land and used biblical themes of the ultimate struggle between forces of light and darkness. His English sense of (real) place became the Middle Earth sense of imaginary place.

To me, England wears antiquity like Sherlock Holmes wears his overcape (coming to a theatre near you [starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law]).

ENGLOBED MINDS

A famous quote by T. S. Eliot, part of a poem in his Four Quartets, has stuck in my mind for years because I realize very personally its meaning, and informs some of my thinking about the geographic imagination. The latter I define simply as how we see the world and our place in it. I have altered his poem to read thusly:

We shall not cease from [self-]exploration
And the end of all our [mental] exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
and know the place [--and ourselves--] for the first time.

As we come to understand ourselves in relation to the local places where we dwell and the globalized world in which we increasingly inhabit, we will come to know ourselves to that degree.

Humans today are englobed (or ensphered) intellects, hopefully rooted to a particular place, and also aware of the world as a whole, as a unity. We are thus "glocal" (local and global) cosmopolitans, mindfully dwelling in a place and responsibly inhabiting, living on, the globe.

CONNECTIVITY OF THE GEOGRAPHIC IMAGINARY

New sociospatial realities require new maps (but, as always, designed from a point of view reflecting social choices) and new mental maps and geographic imaginaries. The term telegeography indicates electronic and “cyber-geographic” space/nonspace/meta-space (or "cyberspace") and gathers in the global electronic village.

This global spatial reality is indicated by a map that is wallpaper on my school computer, showing a world map of “world-around” (Bucky Fuller’s term) Web connections, with an oblique view so that the connecting lines rise off the Earth’s surface and descend to the connected territories.

It’s a small, connected world, after all.