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NOMEDIAN CARTOGRAPHY or the unsolved riddle
by Pr. Purley- Schmitt
I propose in this article to study with greater precision the map known as “Antipodic Nomedia”, the very same one found on Rimida Łwokoban when she was forcibly committed, on the 17 th of April 1953, to the Sous-le-Vent psychiatric hospital in Port-au-Prince.
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The one and only possession of Rimida Łwokoban, an almost totally amnesic case, who could barely remember her name - apparently invented, though polish sounding - a woman of about 30 to 55 years according to witnesses, this map, said to come from Antipodic Nomedia, has inspired many interpretations, especially after its unexplained diffusion in 1959, no doubt via the agency of an unscrupulous member of the staff in this establishment1. I will not refer again to the inexpressible power that emanated from this blank map. Its author had carried the realism - or rather say, its verism - to the point of making the major summits (five in all) coincide with existing, listed, sub-marine volcanoes2 in activity at the time (one became extinct in 1979). For a map that spoke for itself would no doubt have awakened fewer crazy passions and even less vocations. The means enabling the reproduction of documents being what they were in the 50's and 60’s, the map circulated in relatively confidential circles, each author having to - and in some cases, not without pleasure3 - include the names of imaginary places, it must be admitted, some more happily than others. Some are onomastic and even semiological masterpieces. Let me quote but one example, the so called Spirited map of Nomedia , which anonymous author has succeeded in evoking a coherent universe where Ursula K. Le Guin, situated the (brief) adventures of his heroine Rimyda 4, this very name paying homage to the map’s “finder”. During her twenty-six years internment, Rimida Łwokoban never stopped evoking to concepts all of which referred to notions of inversion, reversal and projection. Unceasingly, Dr. Morphy sought to understand the meaning - or at least, what was 1 It goes without saying that the probity of the various doctors who treated Rimida Lwokoban, cannot be questioned, in particular that of Dr. Morphy to whom I here give my regards. 2 ‘Guyots’ to use the accepted, technical term. 3 As in the case of, to quote only one, of the sumptuous map named the Nomedia of Empedocles, a truly classical tapestry, executed on a restored loom dating from 1879, by Mrs widow Terwilliker of Media, Pennsylvania (in the suburbs of Philadelphia) and exposed since her death in 1967 in the Cobb room of the Fortitude museum in Media (visits on request only). The work's unachievement in no way diminishes the impact made on visitors; its size (4,88mby2,33m) is no doubt a contributing factor. 4 In Lasting Loops, a short story broadcast on the web, untranslated, 2007.
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implied - by his patient’s systematically resorting to notions maybe too much psychoanalytical for the doctor who, until the very end, practised his art, and received his fellows praise. The solution, for there was one, even if it does not throw any light whatever on Rimida Łwokoban’s past, was not discovered by him ; for that, it took a true artist.
Some people - such as the art critic Savoy Nerecim, in his famous article “Do not touch Nomedia, it will touch you”5 - plainly state that only an artist could understand anything whatsoever concerning the Misplaced Continent. If this is true, then Nomedia seekers are under some sort of a “mild spell”, for they will never heal, at least not by the means of orthodox medicine. Thus it was in 1984 - a highly symbolic year if there ever was one - five years after the Rimida Łwokoban's death, that plastic artist Vrilya Hrönir, a young, 21 years-old Islandic-Estonian woman, who’d graduated from the Helsinki School of Arts, was taking her first steps towards a promising carreer, when she put on exhibition her work “Global Warning, or C’est la Mappemonde à l’envers”6, which I’m going to describe in detail, and this for two reasons. The first being that the work was destroyed by the artist herself (illegally, for against the authority’s judgment), on the 7 th of June 1987; there is a film of this destruction, entitled: “A thousand days were enough or Nataq crossed every isthmus ” and constitutes all that’s left of the work. The second reason arises from a more private quarter and will earn me some remonstrance on behalf of my medical colleagues, but readers will grant it all the importance they wish. It so happens that I have seen, contemplated and admired in person Vrilya Hrönir's ‘Mappemonde ’, during the summer of 1985 when, as a young student destined 5 6
Vague N° 177, July 1967 In English and French in the text.
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to medicine but being riddled with doubts, I had chosen to hike around northern Europe, with but a back-pack and unlimited confidence in my fellow humans to my credit. I admit that I didn’t go into the Ethnic-cultural Museum in Oslo by chance - that would be stretching credibility too far. I was already familiar with the tale of Antipodic Nomedia, having devoted to it my doctoral thesis. And how great was my surprise when, landing in Oslo, I discovered in some of those tourist brochures, that someone was presenting a work on the very same subject. For me, a visit was a must, and constituted a natural stop along my route; I was unaware of the importance it would gain.
In order to better describe how I felt, I think I must first of all speak a little about Oslo Ethnic-cultural Museum, a very particular place if there is such one on earth. It’s more of a park than a museum in fact, where different ages and historical sites of Scandinavia are scattered hither and thither, along a circuit that one can follow at one's leisure. Only the “Drakkars”, for preservation's sake, are shut in a building. One can visit, amongst other things, as you wind your way through wooded hills, an 18 th century Norwegian village, a 13 th century church built of wood that was brought from the northern part of the country, a trading post of the kind you could find at the back of the most remote fjords (as far as Iceland), a sawmill and a mill, medieval hamlets nestling in the charming combs (at least charming in summer), composed of cottages in which welcoming young women cook, especially for you, tasty offerings, together with many other marvels. The most impressive - that is, what impressed me most - was the Suomi village7, reconstructed in the most remote corner of the park-museum. The surprise is a whopper, for in the public’s imagination, the Suomi have a vaguely nomadic status, they are thought to be hunters and gatherers and not supposed to own any architecture at all. In 7
We say “Lapp” or “Lappish” for reasons to do with semiology.
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fact, they are nomads only in summer, while in winter they find shelter in buildings that force admiration. For the suomi houses are not only log cabins made up with tree trunks measuring up to a 1,50 m. diameter, their simple assembling and stunning solidity seeming to require the kind of solidarity you would have trouble finding in our alleged civilised cultures, but also each house is ‘guarded’, presided over or decorated, as you please, by a pair of totems hewn in trunks as massive as those that make up the house itself. I here humbly admit: no modern work, no dream-like representation, no fantastic tale, has ever8 - and hasn’t since - provoked a sensation comparable to the one I experienced when, breasting a wood-clad knoll, I discovered my first totem. These enormous figures, thick set and grimacing, these monsters, who in no way let on as to whether their smiles are sniggers of fun or menace, those wooden faces who seem as frightening as they are pacifying, represent for me and by far, a visual and tactile experience (for at the Ethnic-cultural Museum one can touch) the most extreme I’ve ever been through. Now, it’s precisely in one of those monumental cabins that Vrilya Hrönir had chosen to install her Mappemonde à l’envers, her Global Warning. The museum staff had been instructed not to reveal to curious visitors where it could be found. They had to look for themselves, and sometimes didn’t even know what they were looking for9. As for those who knew (or thought they knew) given the time it took to find it, they had forgotten all about it, so that the surprise was intact, polymorphous, clever. When you pass between the two totems (which are not identical) flanking the entrance of a suomi house, you can not avoid hunching your shoulders a little, and then smile at your childish reaction. As soon as you cross the first threshold, you find yourself in a kind of intersection above the ground; for suomi homes, being on stilts, are 8 9
Apart from, maybe, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Mark J. Danielewsky's House of Leaves. This is a typical Norwegian trait; those who succeeded in finding the Mausoleum of Vigeland’s damned brother, will not gainsay me.
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surrounded by a floorless balcony. This balcony serves to isolate the dwelling within from the cold, polar winter outside. If the floor is open (you move across it by jumping from one joist to another), it’s because it is used as a convenience; at minus 40°C, going outside turns into more than an adventure, it is a lethal risk. After taking a turn round the corner, (no visitor can resist the urge to go and see what’s at the end of the two lateral corridors; the answer being: nothing; and you can’t go all the way round the house, since the balcony covers only three sides), you enter into the actual dwelling itself: a unique room, square or rectangular, vast, provided with a central hearth above which a moveable ridge allows the smoke to get out. All nomadic people on earth use this shape: it is that of a yurt, a teepee, a tent.
And then I saw the globe, resting on its tripod in the centre of the hearth. It was illuminated by two sources of light: one in the roof, vertical and vaguely mystical; one in the entrance, horizontal and disturbed by the shadow that I fatally produced on going in, slightly bent forward (for the door is very low). I knew straightaway that the sphere had exactly the same diameter as the logs making up the building; a little more than a meter. The harmonising effect was obvious, striking even, and all the more powerful in that the material of the sphere contrasted ambiguously against the dark wood. The matter in question was of a smooth, grey-green metal with a polished surface just asking, yet again, to be touched. The second thing that struck me after noticing all this, was the almost total absence of relief and patterns on the globe’s surface. It was plain that it didn’t turn on itself; one thing only indicated that it was the Earth: the Mediterranean sea had been scooped out of the metallic envelope (not more than one centimetre thick). According to the scale, its extent seemed modest compared to the immensity of the rest of the planet.
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The sphere was hollow - not to suggest that the earth is also empty - but to allow the light through. As you came closer and began to go round it (the Mediterranean facing the entrance, whilst keeping its position above the equator, the latter being parallel to the floor and not inclined as the earth actually is), you suddenly glimpse a streak of light inside the globe. Intrigued, you bend down, move nearer, stick your nose somewhere above the Maghreb in order to get a look inside. And then, suddenly you see it. On the other side of the world, an opening lets the light pass. The forms are complicated and it is difficult to take everything in at once. Nevertheless, intrigued, you go round the sphere in order to see the strange continent that doesn’t mean a thing to you. That is ‘it’: Nomedia, the same one as on Rimida Łwokoban’s map, on its own, in the middle of this grey-green hemisphere, easily recognisable for those who have often contemplated Rimida Łwokoban’s folly. It seems as though it were in its rightful place but it only looks so - because it is difficult to get one’s bearings since the only other element allowing that is the Mediterranean on the other side, that you can see at the same time and which… Dumbfounded, you go round the globe again (but which way? To retrace your steps or continue your circumnavigation? And what if you get lost?) Then you gaze down again, shove your nose into (you would put your whole head inside if could, but the opening is too small; only a child could manage it) the cut out Mediterranean. In total disbelief, you look opposite, through the world, through its heart. In fact, what is over there, is also the Mediterranean, but upside down, twice reversed, from west to east and north to south. A projection which focus would be the earth’s centre itself...
I remained in the Suomi house for quite a long while. I can’t say exactly how long but probably several hours, for when I finally emerged, the sky had taken on that amber
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colouring particular to Norway where summer nights are never completely black. I realised I had missed the Museum closing time, and that no one had come, either to warn me or to chase me out. Unable to quench a smile, I laid out my sleeping bag in a corner of the hut (facing the sphere, of course) and fell fast asleep. In the morning, the sources of light were reversed and the Mediterranean seemed to exude a milky substance where specks of dust danced like tiny organisms under the microscope. There were no comments by the artist, no paper explaining what conclusions one should make; for instance, concerning the fact that the doctors and geographers had missed the principal issue and that Vrilya Hrönir was the only one to have understood. This absence of text, of wording, wasn’t only proof of Vrilya Hrönir’s modesty; it also acknowledged that this discovery, this solved riddle, meant nothing, served no purpose to anyone, and didn’t reveal who Rimida Łwokoban had been, e. g. where she came from. Before leaving with a heavy heart, inventing reasons to stay as absurd as those for going, I did something I hadn’t thought of doing during the length of my stay; something which, however, became quite obvious once it was put into action, and that was: striking the sphere with a single, sharp blow, knuckles bent as if to knock on a door when one knows that someone is waiting inside for you, you and no one else. The sound didn’t seem very loud at first; it rung like a bell, a bell made of bronze, the kind you can still find almost everywhere in Europe. But, just as it began to quieten down, something in the metal boomed in response10 and, I don’t know how, amplified the note, making it swell louder and louder, to such a pitch that, after a few minutes, the sound flung me backwards physically, for I felt my diaphragm vibrate in an alarming manner and I began to feel sick. 10 I believe, but am no longer sure today, that the two Mediterraneans at the level of their Columns of Hercules, presented a tiny fissure, as thin as a single hair that then lost itself in the massive structure of the sphere, under the verdigris varnish. There was perhaps another one where the Suez canal lies, invisible to the naked eye.
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When I found myself outside, in the morning light, my ears ringing, I turned back towards the entrance to the house, with faltering steps. The totems were still grinning. And I saw that their features were exactly those of New-Zealand Maori warriors when they dance the Haka. Then I, too, began to make faces, and other visitors I ran into moved aside to let me pass. I didn’t loose that grin until I boarded the ferry for England.
Of course, weeks later, in a quiet library, I verified my impressions, comparing a document on the Pacific Islands with a book on Suomi culture; I was incapable of deciding if the resemblance that had seemed so striking, was due to my own subjective feelings or constituted a conclusive, scientific approach. Had Vrilya Hrönir’s, in a single genial intuition, reduced the idea of Nomedia to nought? It is difficult - painful even - to admit it. The impact made on the public by the Misplaced Continent has never been very strong; much less, all things considered, than that provoked by such secular myths as Atlantis, Mu, the Hollow Earth or the Selenites. No doubt, the reasons behind this indifference are due to the absence of promises on the part of its storytellers, rather than to their rarity. Or else to the fact that they are not trying to sell something and make profit with their ideas. The fact remains that Nomedia lost some momentum in the 1980’s and especially in the 1990’s. Over the period 1985-1999, in all, only one listed Nomediac case was found in the world, that of Esteban Arboras, a Philippino student in linguistics, who fled from his country to be - ironically - interned in the U.S.A. in 1994. Right at the beginning of 1999, some loony millenarians suddenly “remembered” that they had a “mission” and talked about it in an attempt to come out of the shadows where a dull calendar had maintained them. However, thanks to the terror of the “Computer Bug” ably orchestrated by silicone traders, all these alarmist voices were shelved at once. None,
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to tell the truth, was very serious and Vrilya Hrönir’s solution had locked quite a number of doors that could have opened on new possibilities. So it was only after the year 2000, that slowly the phenomenon reappeared. Now that science has proved that Nomedia can not exist, (satellites confirm that there is nothing over there; besides, you can check it with the naked eye on GoogleEarth®) and art having shown that, if Nomedia is some where, it can not be over there, a new generation of seekers has appeared. What is their field of predilection? I still do not know. Which discipline will stand in their way to overrule them on behalf of its virtuous and adamant beliefs? I can not see now. Music, maybe, who knows? Or economics. What I do know today - other than the fact that I’ve devoted 38 years of my life in defending an idea that’s worthwhile, precisely because it is not mine, but theirs, that of those who are “sick of this world” (with all the ambiguity that statement contains), is perhaps best expressed in the words of writer Vladimir Nabokov11 about another land, no less imaginary:
“It was owing, among other things, to this ‘scientifically ungraspable’ concourse of divergences that minds bien rangés (not apt to unhobble hobgoblins) rejected Terra as a fad or a fantom, and deranged minds (ready to plunge into any abyss) accepted it in support and token of their own irrationality. / As Van Veen himself was to find out, at the time of his passionate research in Terrology (then a branch of psychiatry) even the deepest thinkers, the purest philosophers, Paar of Chose and Zapater of Aardvark, were emotionally divided in their attitude toward the possibility that there existed a ‘distortive glass of our distorted glebe’, as a scholar who desires to remain unnamed has put it with such a euphonic wit”. 12
11
A friend who likes playing with words, brought to my notice that ‘Lolita’ was an anagram of I, Atoll, that’s why I’m reminded of this trilingual artist. 12 In Ada or ardour: a family chronical, New York, 1969.
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A distortive glass of our distorted glebe …. Isn’t that an astonishing description of “The Apoptheosis”, one of the ultimate works of Vrilya Hrönir? Had she understood who Rimida Łwokoban was, and if so, have we also succeeded in finding out? Do we understand them both? If I have a wish to make today, it is that it be not too late.
translated frome the french by Suzanne Cayre (revised by the author)
