Silences
‘…that which is absent from maps is as much a proper field
for enquiry as that which is present’
J. B. Harley
This is not a horse.
Though if you were to listen hard,
You could smell the herd.
*
This is not a shoal
of fish. This is not silver
that’s shifting, but light.
*
This is not a church.
This is a flustered sparrow
in a cage of straw.
*
This is not a map.
This is my voice, passing through
a field of ripe wheat.
*
No, this is not a
mountain. This is memory
waiting for your boots.
About this poem
This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2014. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2014 was Roderick Watson.
Author's note:
Just before I began my work as Bartholomew Writer in Residence at the National Library of Scotland, a friend recommended that I read an essay by JB Harley, ‘Deconstructing the Map'. My understanding of his ideas may be patchy, but the essay contained three concepts that became important to my own discoveries. The first is that maps have a rhetorical function: they present an ‘argument’ of sorts, composed of 'utterances' and 'silences'. An 'utterance' is anything that appears on the map; a 'silence' that which does not. 'Silence' carries (to my mind) a greater weight than 'absence', as it suggests the agency behind the selection: that about which the mapmaker chooses to be silent. At its most obvious, this applies to maps of colonisation (see the post-1715 maps of the Highlands), but it also, more playfully, acknowledges that which cannot appear on a map – the breeze, that robin there, ephemeras of place and time. Because, of course, all maps are fictions (to be interrogated), they can be no more an exact representation of reality than a novel or a poem. But, by the same token, they have limitless possibilities. These are Silences which do not appear on the map; if their meaning shimmers beyond grasp, that too is part of their meaning.
