Ian Sansom - Paper - An Elegy

And here perhaps lies the source of our contemporary guilt and confusion about turning trees into paper; here is the heart of the sylvan darkness. It’s not that we can’t see the wood for the trees: we can’t even see the trees. When we gaze into the forest mirror we see ourselves. The anthropologist Maurice Bloch, in an article, ‘Why Trees, Too, are Good to Think With: Towards an Anthropology of the Meaning of Life’ (1998), argues that ‘the symbolic power of trees comes from the fact that they are good substitutes for humans’. Are we human? Or are we dryad? In the growth and maturation of a tree we are reminded of the growth and maturation of a person. In tree parts, for better and for worse, we see body parts: branches, limbs; leaves, hair; bark, skin; trunk, torso; sap, blood. Lavinia, in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus , has her hands, ‘her two branches’, ‘loppd’ and ‘hew’d’; in his poem ‘Tree at my Window’, Robert Frost has Fate put man and tree together, ‘Your head so much concerned with outer/Mine with inner, weather’. Living trees clearly symbolise the regeneration and continuation of human life: the transformation of wood into paper is therefore a kind of self-annihilation, a diabolical transformation, the reverse of the transformation of the wine into the blood of Christ during Mass. Black Mass = white sheet. In one of the most extraordinary passages about tree worship in the whole of The Golden Bough , Frazer writes:

How serious the worship was in former times may be gathered from the ferocious penalty appointed by the old German laws for such as dared to peel the bark of a standing tree. The culprit’s navel was to be cut out and nailed to a part of the tree which he had peeled and he was to be driven round and round the tree until all his guts were wound around its trunk. The intention of the punishment clearly was to replace the dead bark by a living substitute; it was a life for a life, the life of a man for the life of a tree.

Such narratives and fantasies of punishment and self-punishment characterise much contemporary Western nature writing, which often reads like an experiment in narcissism, in that true sense of Narcissus being unable to distinguish between himself and his reflection. The theoretical branch of nature writing is a form of literary criticism called ecopoetics (from the Greek ‘ oikos ’, home or dwelling place, and ‘ poiesis ’, ‘making’), which wrestles with difficult issues of selfhood and self-sufficiency. According to Jonathan Bate, one of the most brilliant proponents of ecopoetics, ‘our inner ecology cannot be sustained without the health of ecosystems’. In his book The Song of the Earth (2000), a tour de force , or at least a tour de chant , Bate argues that ‘The dream of deep ecology will never be realized upon the earth, but our survival as a species may be dependent on our capacity to dream it in the work of our imagination.’ The means by which we might do this, according to Bate, borrowing his terms from the American poet Gary Snyder and the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, is to understand works of art as ‘imaginary states of nature, imaginary ideal ecosystems, and by reading them, by inhabiting them, we can start to imagine what it might be like to live differently upon the earth’. In a riddling conclusion to his book, Bate writes that ‘If mortals dwell in that they save the earth and if poetry is the original admission of dwelling, then poetry is the place where we save the earth.’

Book plate of Erich Saffert, Doctor of Agriculture and Forestry Surveying, Austria, early twentieth century ( courtesy Sieglinde Robinson )

Bad news: poetry is probably not the place where we will save the earth. And there is probably little evidence either for Bate’s contention that ‘mortals dwell in that they save the earth’. Mortals dwell, rather – or certainly have dwelt – in that they use the earth, from the Romans and the Saxons clearing British woodland for developing iron-smelting works, to the development of Forstwissenschaft (forest science) in Germany, where algebra and geometry combined to produce a kind of mathematics of the forest, by which foresters could calculate volumes of wood and timber and therefore plan for felling and replanting. Ecopoetics yearns for oneness with the natural world, but all of our experience suggests that separation from nature – domination, despoliation – is the norm.

So how to continue in this difficult relationship? How to find our way through the gloom? How to dwell with forests and with paper? Might we perhaps restrict ourselves solely to rotefallen , or wyndfallen wood, so-called cablish (from the Latin ‘ cableicium ’, or ‘ cablicium ’), in order to provide ourselves with fuel and with fibre for our books? Should we all become little Thoreaus, building cabins from small white pines? Perhaps we should further investigate alternatives to wood pulp in paper production – alternatives which include sustainable crops such as hemp, straw, flax and kenaf? At the very least we should respect our paper – if nothing else, as a sign of respect for ourselves.

Woodcut map printed on paper, sixteenth century

Redrawn from Capability Brown’s plan for Burghley House

© The Omnipotent Magician, Jane Brown , Chatto & Windus

‘Maps are drawn by men and not turned out automatically by machines,’ wrote the geographer J.K. Wright in his classic essay ‘Map Makers are Human’ in 1942. Times have changed: these days, maps are turned out automatically by machines, or at least by humans using machines known as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the computer hardware and software that’s used to capture, store and display geographical and topographical data and which, according to one standard introduction to GIS, ‘is changing the world and almost everything in it’. Computer mapping systems were first developed by the Canadian government and then at Harvard University during the 1960s, and by now we’re all accustomed to maps that we can simply download, pinch, zoom and click rather than scribble on, fold and leave to rot at the bottom of a rucksack: atlases at our fingertips, giant globes in our pockets. Logically, the paper map should already be consigned to the glove compartment of history. But it isn’t.

This may be due to the fact that people simply like the look and feel of paper maps – with some people of course liking the look and feel of them much more than others. In 2006, a man called Edward Forbes Smiley III was jailed for stealing more than a hundred maps, worth $3 million, from collections at Yale, Harvard and the British Library. Smiley sliced the maps out of books using a razor blade, in much the same fashion as another famous map thief, Gilbert Bland, an antiques dealer from Florida, apparently as unassuming as his name, who was in fact, according to his biographer, the ‘Al Capone of cartography’ – though without the violence, bootlegging, bribery and late-stage neurosyphilis. Bland, like Smiley, was really just a petty thief with a taste for antique paper.

So why do people steal maps? For the same reason they steal money and books, of course: because they’re paper marked with symbols that make them valuable. But perhaps more especially, people steal maps because a map is a symbol of conquest, so the theft of a map somehow represents the ultimate conquest: the possession of the means of possession, as it were. At least, that’s my theory. No gangster mapper, I have to admit that the temptation to snaffle old paper maps has occasionally been all but overwhelming: the seventeenth-century, gold-enriched, handcoloured, multi-tinted maps issued by Willem Janszoon Blaeu and sons, for example, on display in the Dutch Maritime Museum in Amsterdam, are so extraordinary and so exquisite that only the most dimly pixel-fixated could fail to feel the stirrings of desire (Blaeu had to design and build his own printing presses in order to produce work of such quality). Or the maps produced by Christopher Saxton under the authority of Queen Elizabeth in the sixteenth century, the first ever maps of the English counties, beautiful, simple, restrained, lovingly hand-crafted by engravers and artists imported from the map-pioneering Low Countries, and popularly reproduced on playing cards. Or John Seller’s seventeenth-century sea charts: full-fathom masterpieces. Or the maps of the great Sanson family of France – no relation – whose work, in the words of one authority, was ‘always dignified and attractive, with an ornamental cartouche’. If only.