Journal Entry 10.19.23

There are so many kinds of maps: bodies of water, maps that show the shape of the land, weather maps, maps denoting ownership, shell maps of ocean currents, Chinese medicinal maps of the body, Peruvian knot maps, cosmological maps, maps of the stars, maps made with the hands of skiers memorizing a race, metaphorical maps depicting bodies in the land or in the skies, maps of house plans, maps of absence, maps of meaning.

I have continued to read Victoria Finley’s, Fabric. She writes about bark cloth and the oral literature of the Ömie people in Papua New Guinea. She writes about the first woman who goes from ignorance to knowing. She became knowing by “by taking a piece of tapa, soaking it in red river mud to symbolise her menstrual blood and her potential for having children, and then painting on it pictures of mountains and rivers, the beaks of birds and and leaves on jungle vines, butterflies and belly buttons and slugs and eggs. And so by the very act of painting, she began to be one who knows.” The first woman mapped herself by painting.