Chapter 1: Metageographic Alternatives

Before we talk about metageographic alternatives, we should talk about what metageography even is. What is part of the "natural" landscape is geography. The roads, buildings, etc, are the metageography. And the maps too. The way we use and understand our usage of space and place. To put liminality into perspective we must contextualize it within the larger metageography. +the exercise Kal would do with students, walking around the city in a different way. The ocean. The international date line. Time zones. The equator. The sky. In the village of East Dover there was a retired couple from Norway, John and Sandy. One night when we were talking at a party they regaled us with some of their traveling stories. The most unbelievable involved fake passports. For several decades John ran a company with a few other people. At some point they were looking at a map and, pointing at the black line-the border between two countries-someone asked, why don't we travel there! Someone immediately upped the anti and said, why don't we tell people we are from there! They took this much further and made passports for their home country. Not just pieces of paper. PASSPORTS! But they did not stop there. At the airport, on their next trip abroad, they tucked away their real passports and presented the ones from Lavantaria. "Lavantaria!" exclaimed the attendent. "I've never heard of it". Oh we get that all the time the men said, explaining how strange it was to live in a country that is actually represented as lines on a map. "Huh!". He stamped their passports and away they went. In time a few more people in the company earned themselves passports and began collecting stamps at each airport they went to. In the age of 9/11 this is impossible to fathom but it really happened. I saw one of the passports myself. One might be tempted to say, as one often is of many things, that the attendent must have been stupid. But it was not just one attendent at one airport; it was many attendents at different airports around the world. I think the answer is rather simple: Those lines are a place? Huh, I guess so. Why not. We can put a fence three feet wide on the border, why not ten feet wide? Why not a house? A country? And it got me thinking, of course, about those lines. What is that space/place? In mathematical terms, is it accounted for on the map? Where does one country end and another begin? I mean at what EXACT point? Or are the lines just there to suggest something? But in some places, as we know, there is actually a wall, or a fence. This side. That side. I hate to think of what it would be like if there was a wall at every border. I believe that, encountering a wall everywhere we went, we would percieve not that there were "walls" everywhere but a single wall. I believe we would call it "the wall". We can control people on one side of the wall, or both, but the wall takes care of itself, no one can live inside of it. It's just a line. Look on a map. Just lines. They don't really exist. Do they? Anarchist Meta-geographies American Gypsy as someone who travels and moves across space. Intermodal in the urban dictionary. Underground traveling subcultures. Migrant punks. Gypsies. Hoboes. I AM STUDYING AN UNDERGROUND TRAVELING SUBCULTURE.