ORIGINS
My column in the February edition of Inside The City, which arrived in my mail today, deals in part with my longtime fascination with world globes. Below is a sort of prosy narrative poem about the origins of my globe fetish.
CARTOUCHE AND ANALEMMA
I always seemed to sit next to the globe
In every room of my parochial school,
So when the nun who stood before us in her robe
And wimple started slowly to unspool
In soporific tones some moralistic lesson
On this or that religious question
Of limited interest and dubious worth,
I’d let my attention drift to the Earth
Sitting nearby on a low wooden shelf.
I’d turn it before class so that I could look
At what I wanted to see. I found myself
Fascinated by the way the Pacific
Was used by publishers of globes and maps
As if it were the opening pages of a book.
They’d clutter that blue space between the icy caps
With legends, copyright data, and specific
Information about abbreviations and boundaries,
City population sizes and the depths of the seas.
The globes were of various makes and styles.
Most were for desktops, but between two library aisles
Was a floor globe perched on a wooden stand.
Some had bumps and rises meant to imitate
The topography of both the sea floor and the land.
Some used staves of swirling lines to indicate
The way the world’s ocean currents run.
Their seas came in many shades, from tan to viridian.
And so that these little Earths could be spun
By curious students or geography teachers
Each was suspended in a metal meridian.
And all of them shared at least two other features:
Their manufacturers had given each one of them a
Cartouche as well as an analemma.
The cartouche was often found just below
The Aleutian archipelago
And just above the Hawaiian isles
A watery void of countless square miles.
Upon this largely empty space,
Like the eye at the top of a Cyclops’ face,
Lay an oblong enclosure with the name and the date
That the globe maker began to operate
(“A Quality Globe from the George F. Cram Co.
Publishers since 1867” read
The cartouche on a typical globe’s forehead.)
But not all cartouches were located just so.
On other globes they might appear below
The south Pacific isles of French Polynesia,
Near the Antarctic (where even summers can freeze you)
Or, if the maker was struck by the notion,
In the midst of the Atlantic or the Indian Ocean.
According to dictionaries the word
“Cartouche” originally referred
To paper packets of gunpowder and is akin
To “cartridge,” the cylinder bullets come in.
And the way most cartouches were bedecked
Like shields with griffons or tongues of flame,
Crossed swords, or an eagle poised for killing,
Seemed calculated by their makers to reflect
The martial origins of the object’s name,
Which back in those days I found thrilling.
The analemma on the contrary
Didn’t move around at all.
A long and skinny figure eight,
Its purpose is to illustrate
The spot where each day sunbeams fall,
Directly down on land and sea.
Out where the earth is bare and lorn
Of land, it sheath-like sits affixed
To the belt of the Pacific betwixt
The tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
From Pitcairn Island down below
It stretches upwards till it reaches
A spot just west of Mexico.
A careful study of it teaches
The clever student how to track
The sunlight’s path throughout the year.
Up from the southern hemisphere,
Into the north then slowly back,
This double loop upon the ocean
Is an almanac in miniature,
Which illustrates the sunlight’s motion
And demonstrates how the earth is hung
Atilt on its axis, and the curvature
Of its elliptical path around the sun.
Every classroom globe wears one.
At least they did when I was young.
In my head I devised an ongoing fable
In which Cartouche and Analemma both,
Instead of merely a chart and a label,
Were actual landmasses out in the brine,
With people and houses, with vegetable growth
In vast tropic forests, with cities and towns,
With doctors and lawyers and makers of wine,
With butchers and farmers and judges in gowns,
With armies and navies and senates and laws,
With bright-colored parakeets, cranes, and macaws.
Over time I developed personalities,
Individual cultures, and histories
For each of these fabulous continents
And their multifarious residents.
Cartouche was a man-made body of land
That rested on thousands of motorized floats,
Built long ago by a renegade band
Of Analemmans grown sick and tired
Of plying the seas in small, dangerous boats,
A band of pirates who strongly desired
A monstrous ship the size of Peru,
Stretching hundreds of miles from fore to abaft,
For conquering not just watercraft,
But islands, atolls, and small continents too.
Thus Cartouche like its sometime neighbor Australia
Was founded by thieves and killers, inter alia.
But through the long years both law and order
Evolved until, from border to border,
Cartouche became a conservative place,
Dedicated to Capital, Guns, and God
(A trio their erstwhile countrymen found odd),
And faith in the supremacy of its race.
The women were all required to comport
Themselves in a way that showed deference to men.
The men were required to master a sport
Or be castigated as feminine.
So great was this passion for all kinds of balls
That a certain holiness was imparted
To athletic greats, while stadia were regarded
As tantamount to religious halls.
The Cartoucheans thought Man was created for
The making of money and children and war,
But when they could find no war to pursue,
The men of Cartouche were forced to make due
With rugby or football (tackle, not touch),
With soccer and boxing and hockey and such.
The Analemmans, on the other hand,
All prided themselves on creating a land
Of tolerant people with open hearts
Who worshipped the sciences and the arts.
They had no patience with superstition,
And thus they outlawed all religion.
Shaped like a teardrop and its own reflection
Or the mathematical sign for infinity,
The land was peopled by aesthetes who thought
The quest for that chimera, Perfection –
In music, in medicine, in poetry,
And other types of human endeavor –
Was the only thing at all worth doing,
And so they found themselves always pursuing
An elusive beast they knew would never
Allow itself to be cornered and caught.
Yet such was their passion for art and science
They remained undaunted by the beast’s defiance.
It is understandable, then, that a state
Of open distrust, hostility, and hate
Developed between these disparate peoples,
Those who worshipped in labs and museums,
And those who worshipped beneath white steeples
Or the scoreboards of massive sports coliseums.
At night in my room, when I wasn’t tuned in
To far-off voices on my radio,
Or making imaginary love
To a female classmate I was enamored of
(Her skin so fair as she pulled off her dress,
Her fingertips fondling – but I digress)
I often would take a hold of and spin
My own 9-inch Rand McNally & Co.
Terrestrial globe, which sat on a shelf
Beside my bed, and I’d find myself
Wondering how things were faring between
Those fantasy continents that only I
Of all dwellers in the non-fantasy world
(As far as I was aware of) had seen.
And as that little globe of mine twirled
Around on its axis and time zones whizzed by
I would pose to myself the same old query:
Which one of those two imaginary
Pacific nations would you rather live on –
Conservative Cartouche with its worship of brawn
And balls and guns and God and wealth
(Back then I admired these things myself)
Or Analemma with its passion for art
And science and knowledge and secularism?
While pondering this, there grew in my heart
(Although at the time I didn’t know it)
The first fissures of an internal schism
That would cause me to finally leave in the lurch
My passion for sports, great riches, the church,
And gradually embrace the life of a poet.
But I don’t dwell in Analemma,
And therein lies a serious problem. A
Vast majority of people, it seems,
Care not a whit for poetry, and deem
Those who spin rhyming verses from dreams
Worthy of little (if any) esteem,
Much less any kind of patronage
Or employment at a livable wage.
And often since graduating from school
I’ve asked myself if I wasn’t a fool,
Bewitched by books and blinded by stardust,
To have traveled the path of the aspiring artist.
I wonder sometimes how my life might have been
Had I made myself more of a Cartouchean
And chased after money and material things
Like medals and trophies and championship rings.
Had I spent more time on my knees in the house
Of the King of Kings, a believer and prayer,
Would I still find myself growing older and grayer
And wholly dependent on a generous spouse?
I don’t know the answer, I cannot say,
But an anecdote from the other day
Might help me to give the reader a sense
Of the overwhelming ambivalence
I feel to this day about the way I was led
By the globes of my youth to forsake the way
Of regular hours and steady pay
And travel a poetry path instead.
I was out shopping in early September
With my oldest stepdaughter for school supplies
For her own young children when we came to an aisle
Where maps and globes were stocked. I remember
There came to my face then a small knowing smile
That Andrea caught with her eager eyes.
“Should I buy a globe for the kids, do you think,
To help them to study geography with?”
I will not report that I felt my heart sink
Or a sudden compulsion to turn and run out,
As the aisle dredged up from my memory the myth
Of Cartouche and Analemma I’d spun
In my younger days while gazing at globes
While my fellow students were learning about
Columbus and gerunds, the Stamp Act and microbes,
Or how the Battle of the Bulge was won,
But I did get a wistful glimpse of myself
As a youth, when Andrea walked to the shelf
Where a small collection of globes was arrayed.
She pointed to the smallest and cheapest of them, a
Globe with no legend or analemma,
Or much of anything else displayed
On its surface except the generic stuff
Of third-rate globe-makers everywhere.
“I’d buy them a big one, but I don’t have enough,”
She said with a slightly rueful air.
“Is this one okay? Do you think it will do?”
Nearby was a much more elaborate orb
(With shipping routes given in nautical miles,
A compass rose next to the Mascarene Isles,
A cartouche, analemma, and time dial, too)
Whose cost I knew she could never absorb,
But, thanks to her mother, I knew that I could,
Although I was far from certain I should.
Did I really think it was wise to bestow
On my family’s newest generation
A globe like the ones that I so long ago
Would stare at in school for hours and hours,
Entranced and beguiled by their mystical powers?
Did I really want some grandchild of mine
To find himself in my own situation,
Exiled more or less permanently
In a land shaped like tears and infinity,
Beset with a need to write line after line
Of totally unremunerative verse,
With nary a marketable skill to his name?
Wouldn’t a gift like that be a curse?
Did I really want to be stuck with the blame
If Christina or Mallory or little Jess
Found themselves drawn by the analemma
To a life of poetry and joblessness?
A man on the horns of a painful dilemma,
I stood there and watched as my lovely stepdaughter
Inspected the cheap little globe there beside her,
And I thought of the dancing and musical lessons,
The skiing vacations and equestrienne sessions,
And everything else that I might have bought her
Had I been at all a reliable provider.
All that her little girl’s heart had desired
I might have gone out and easily acquired
If, while my classmates were studying math,
The lives of Marie Curie and Paul Revere
To prepare themselves for a conventional career,
I too had followed the selfsame path.
But I had created a fantasyland
And had the bad luck to get swallowed up in it.
“Well?” said my stepdaughter, growing impatient.
And taking the cheap little globe in her hand,
She stood there awaiting my recommendation.
“I’m thinking,” I told her. “Give me a minute.”