In the early pages of Field Guide to Getting Lost, Solnit talks about "terra incognita," the unknown or unexplored land masses on old maps. It got me thinking about maps and the cartography of being human.
If I imagine my mind as a map, printed not on paper but Silly Putty, what my mind knows is like the familiar countries, continents and cities on a map; what I don't have a clue about--that's terra incognita. Both are always shifting in size and shape depending on the extent to which I stretch and pound and pull on the Silly Putty.
There's a jokey post card in which the state of Texas is half at the size of the whole of America and all the other states are shrunk. It speaks to the outsized Texas ego--we're bigger, more important, than the other 49 states combined. Probably my own maps are as distorted as the one on that postcard--though it could be an inflated or deflated state of mind rather than an actual state.
Every time, I learn something new, I think or say, "Oh, I didn't know that!" and my Inner Iowa grows bigger after that, more interesting. The roads that lead to it are wider, and I can get There from Here. If I keep hearing/reading/doing the same things over and over, my Inner Iowa is static.
When a revelation pops through in a book or conversation, new trees and flowers sprout in my Iowa, and little mountains pop up in the middle of the prairie.
The known lands can change drastically, too--when what was formerly familiar erodes or changes beyond recognition.
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