Spacial Awareness Within My Head

So strange that you can read reasonably extensively about a place and still have no idea where it is. I realised earlier whilst catching up on some more politically oriented blogs that I didn't have a clue where within the Middle East Iraq was. I have general awareness of, and even some opinions on, its leaders, its former leaders, its citizens, its terrorists and its most recent war. Before today I had no idea where it physically was. The situation was only slightly less severe for Israel.

So I went and dug up a map of the Middle East. And it was a good thing I was sitting down, because whilst events are easy enough to follow and I try to keep informed, I didn't have a clue where any of these places were.

I was reading an article on the West Bank. Having realised that I needed to pay more attention to the geography of matters, I tried to work out with a certain degree of clarity where this might be. Well, I thought, it's a fairly descriptive name for a place, it can't be too difficult. And then I spent far too long trying to work out which way was west. Then, once I'd done that, hang on. West Bank of what, exactly? I thought the Mediterranean was to the west, which would make the whole thing an east bank, and had I got my east and west mixed up again? No, I hadn't, it all made sense once I pulled up the map. But I felt very stupid for my confusion.

I thought most of these countries were much smaller. Iran is, like... well it's really big! Bigger than Saudi Arabia, and why didn't anybody tell me?

Iraq seems much bigger than I thought it was as well. And more up and to the right than I had considered it. I know I knew it was on the Persian Gulf but for some reason I never quite connected the two.

I thought a fairly sizeable chunk of Egypt was a part of Israel, I thought most of the region was sort of squished underneath Turkey, and I thought Lebanon-was-a-bit-next-to-Tunisia-ohmigod-I-need-to-be-shot.

Afghanistan? I thought that was on the other side of India. Sort of. I don't know what I thought.

I know I had to do a double take when I saw that Sudan was in Africa. Sudan, in Africa!

Then I noticed Abu Dhabi, where my former next-door neighbours moved and my parents recently visited. Would you look at that. United Arab Emirates, I had no idea Abu Dhabi was there. Besides, I thought the U.A.E. was more in the middle of the peninsula, a tiny little place rather landlocked between what I can now see are Oman and Yemen. Turns out, not so much.

Lastly, all those times I've watched reporters on aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf on televisian. On a map, I could've pointed to exactly where the Persian Gulf was. In my head, when I watched tv? It was annexed by the Mediterranean.

For I will abuse the exclamation points and italics, and all shall forgive me, as they shall be too busy being awed by my complete and utter ignorance on other matters to care much.

Let's get one thing clear. I'm overeducated, I've attended a veritable plethora of different types of school, a couple of which were those classy respected joints that make it into the papers for reasons that make parents coo. I've only recently emerged from the system. Arguably, as a student (or hopeful student) I'm still a part of that system. I come from that middle-class culture where education is all, and I've always taken my duty to qualify myself as an academic snob seriously. I read. I travel. Practically my entire life so far has been about getting 'educated'. I know far more junk than can possibly be of use, and an alarming quantity of it comes directly from textbooks rather than Tolkien.

So how could my scandalous ignorance come to be? Maybe it's arrogant of me, but I'm confused. I know I'm supposed to know these things, but if I think about it carefully I'm not at all sure when I'm supposed to have picked them up. Geography at school was dropped just before gcse, but we never studied countries and capitals and, y'know, where stuff is. It was all about bits of rock and types of weather and populations doing various things. Volcanoes and earthquakes and ye olde tectonic plate theory. I got my leg stuck down a grike on a field trip, and cookies to whoever can tell me what one of those is without clicking on the link.

My ignorance is a personal failing, and I'm taking it incredibly personally. If I want to know things it's up to me to educate myself. But I can't help feeling the education system I've been through has let me down a bit my missing such a fundamental aspect of geography, the presentation of, as I so eloquently put it in my last paragraph, where stuff is.

I need to sit down and read an atlas, cover to cover, one of the ones without much writing. Spend a couple of hours on each picture, just coming to terms with the world. In particular, it would be truly outrageous, I think, to continue to invest as much time as I do reading about a region that I have such an inaccurate locational concept of.

The only problem being that the only atlas I own is a second hand one of Middle Earth. Believe me when I say I would probably be far more confident sketching out a picture of what that fantastical world looks like than how various parts of this one appear. And the features of Beleriand, and Numenor, and all the more obscure places that came before the more widely known Middle Earth.

Posted by Missiedith at July 11, 2004 9:22 AM | TrackBack