Document Type
Editorial Comment
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Ancient mapmakers relied upon the presence of celestial bodies for their conceptualization of the world, for their external knowledge-making tools, as if a far-off body could help to make sense of our terrestrial life/as if it couldn't. Cosmology, as a practice, relied on the construction of an external body of knowledge that the local meaning-maker could situate him- or herself into, and more broadly, their entire society and culture -- the interior is determined by its relationship to the exterior (or the exteriorized). For the ancient Greeks then, the font of Western culture, this cosmology works at once to legitimate the presence of humanity on this terrestrial sphere, as well as providing proof, facticity, for the mapmaker's art: Cosmology not only gives humanity a narrative of its coming into being, but also a rationale for humanity to exist as part of a whole universe. Hesiod, in his relating of the beginnings of terrestrial history, begins with Chaos, with the yawning chasm of the unfilled cosmos -- the eternal vacuum. Into this Chaos, Gaia is parthenogenically born, the first entity, as Hesiod explains that Chaos is no entity at all, but the absence of identity. But whence the earth, dialectical identity is confirmed. And Gaia firstly gives birth to Sky, to blanket her, for comfort. An into this sky, Erebos, the lightless depths of the night, and Nyx, pure night. To them is born Aither, the light of heaven, and Hemera, the day. Gaia proceeds to give birth to her terrestrial children, the mountains, the rivers and seas, the deserts, and the forested wilderness; her first concerns are creating those land-marks that humanity will come to know itself by. Both the person and the tribe, the latter a faulty category imposed by the perception of the world lived in, and the geographical barriers between people. Later, Prometheus and Epimetheus will distinguish humanity from the other animals of the Earth, but through a dependency on their lack -- as if Gaia's gift of a terrestrially founded identity was insufficient.
Repository Citation
Wolf-Meyer, Matthew, and Davin Heckman. "Navigating the Starless Night: Strategies for Understanding Autobiogeography." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 2, no. 3, 2002, pp. 1–19. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol2/iss3/1
Included in
Cosmology, Relativity, and Gravity Commons, Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Geography Commons, Metaphysics Commons