The Eight Map Man (or Eighpman for short) is a term I came up with the other day when I realized that the terrain I was covering by bicycle, train, and foot, on a weekly basis, required 8 OS Landranger maps to do it justice. I had already identified this terrain some months ago when I did a post called Home Range, and was keen to find out just how large it was, say, compared with the range of an eagle or a large bird of prey. Or, for that matter, another indigenous human being who has not dislocated his self from his own locomotive force or his environment, and who regularly covers vast areas as he stalks and hunts across his territory.
Naturally, my 'hunting' and stalking' is not for deer or bear, but for insight. This is my food before all else. If I cannot see properly, then it stands to reason that my food might not be what I think it is. Our insight as a species has deteriorated in proportion to our being overwhelmed with technologies that propose to see for us.
I am a stalker (in the Tarkovskian sense) after all, someone who realizes the endgame of science, technology and progress, and attempts to circumvent it by doing what comes naturally, namely, locomoting through my territory, in search of 'food' and insight.
There are various definitions of what a home range actually is. Burt (1943:352) outlined the basic concept of an animal’s home range as we now understand it: That area traversed by an individual in its normal activities of food gathering, mating, and caring for young. Occasional sallies outside the area, perhaps exploratory in nature, should not be considered part of the home range.
It has also been proposed that the best concept of a home range is that
part of an animal’s cognitive map of its environment that it chooses
to keep updated.
As a species, it is worrying to see that we have lost touch with our home ranges, because we have lost touch with our auto-mobility (and allowed it to be usurped by machines which we have designed). A car or a conveyance device that subtracts your metabolism and vital force from you cannot confer a home range. Indeed, it destructures your home by carrying you and thus infecting your metabolism. A home can only be homed in on, by using your own steam. Any other way is simply delusion and detraction.
So the Eighpman is where I'm at for the moment. Or if you prefer, the landranger. Sure, I bend the rules a little, by taking trains here and there, within reason. But no cars. Where the bicycle is perhaps one of man's more noble inventions, the motor car is possibly one of man's worst (along with the cathode ray tube, and perhaps even the printing press...). It has divested the human of his soil, and of his contact with the earth. In effect, the motor car has unearthed the human and created man.
The question everyone needs to be asking themselves in this conceited and artificial world of carrying devices and their resulting pollution, is how expansive is your home range. Do you even have a home range? Or are you carried, like a big baby that has never been allowed to grow up, everywhere? Where do your horizons end? And what uninterrupted views have you of the place where you live? Indeed, and perhaps the most important question for someone who has abandoned their own vital force: are you even alive?
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