It’s as dizzying as the (fashionable in commercials a few years ago) multi-camera panoramic shots that swirled around a key player/object.     It feels a bit like being in an annotated version of Second Life.   

Well, that become a little personal and emotional, and yes, a bit TMI, so I’m not including the link. WSU is a place that’s been the defining constant in my last 20+ years, so it became rather overwhelming and messy charting my days from an International student who was literally abandoned by her sponsor  to a grad student / teaching assistant, staff member and finally faculty member .   It was sometimes depressing, but overall it was, yes, exhausting, but mostly it’s formed a sort of alt cv for me.  One that looks very circumscribed --  a major case of bloom where you’re planted (one of my most hated bromides)  --  but also one that’s deep rather than wide.  I’m an introverted expat who really doesn’t like travel or physical adventure.  I’m already living abroad, leave me alone!  There’s a library, that’s enough!

It looks as if I’ve travelled from the basement of one building (the TA offices in the library) to the 4^th floor of an
adjacent one (a faculty office in Millett) and took 20 years to do it.  All without much daylight.  WSU has something that can’t show on these particular maps --  it’s connected by tunnels.  Some of us (ahem, grad students and me) never go outside. We scurry along underground clutching our books, preciouses, and muttering.  Well, I do. 

Above ground WSU has many desire lines (the paths people actually want and use as opposed to the planned ones.)  No matter where the “real” paths are, we track across as we wish.  I’ve heard that smart planners, don’t put in paths too soon, but wait for the desire lines to show up.   WSU has paved some of the desire lines for us, but there are still worn bald paths here and there.   WSU is proud of being  extremely physically accessible --  in part because of the tunnel system  --  and on the whole its official narrative matches the reality.  When it doesn’t though it is all the more jarring. 

It’s also where the main emotional locus of my life has been.  My husband and I met there, and most of my other relationships are from there.  I could map embarrassing and TMI things there.  But I won’t.  It’s where most of my political life (since I have no vote) has focused as well.  I’ve been a union thug for the last year or two as the non-tenure eligible faculty fought for and won a union.  We’re negotiating our first contract right now --  part of why I look so tired and grumpy sometimes.  So I also have places where I have dug in my heels at various times. Shook fist at a Dean here, glowered at a Provost there.  But that would also be a false map.  Here’s dinner with the president for an award, here’s dinner with visiting speakers, here’s spending the evening with writers and students.  In short, here’s a full relationship with arguing and engagement.   And, like all relationships, the various tellers tell it differently.   

So, externalizing the interior personal experience even on a single moment’s or person’s basis is fascinating.  A snap shot of a place showing how all the folks there  are -- a composite existential moment --  pretty mindbending.  Over time, the river and flow of these things may reveal patterns, but is a pattern the only value, is it privileged over the moment?  Is the truth only an aggregate?  Let’s have the lapidary moment, too. 

But, then --  if we are set in stone, does that truth override the reality?  Is it the right sample?   Does a map reify?  Are we forever shown as the person who did x?   Does that river we never step in twice tell a better picture --  so the timeline becomes the real story?  Can we swim upstream?  Does seeing what happened in 2013 as we look at 1994 forever change how we look at 1994?  May be that moment isn’t in a flow or set in stone, we’re not flies in amber, we’re marshmallow in Jello.  (Two things I hate combined into a scary-salady object or terror here in in Ohio.) 

So we can challenge an “official” narrative / map of reality, but who makes the challenge? Can we all?  If we all do is there just  signal noise? Are we all just shouting our version?    Would it be unbearable if we did hear or feel
all that had happened?  Sci-fi tells us that we’d freak out  --  newly minted telepaths or empaths invariable
lose it.   We’re told it needs training and huge reserves of emotional and mental strength. As an introvert, I much
prefer some pretty strong filters on how people are feeling.  It gets overwhelming very fast.   

So often we look at a place and wonder…  who died in this house, who laughed in these rooms, what was fought for on this “empty” field?   Perhaps we don’t want to know --  it may be more banal than we can bear, or
more terrifying than we can contemplate.