A217

A great mystery in my life has finally been solved.  Often, as I have driven through Cheam or Sutton I have passed a broad road, the A217.  Somehow, it has never seemed to fit.  By that I mean that neither was the road - a dual carriageway which always appeared empty - congruent with its suburban surroundings, nor did it have any obvious direction.  I simply could not see where this road could lead to, or why it was needed.  For me, it came to be one of those mysterious strips of no man's land, belonging nowhere, always in-between.

But no more.  I have driven that road and lived to tell the tale.  Inevitably gaining that knowledge has proved disillusioning.  Instead of a secret path leading who knows where, the A217 now turns out to join A to B in an ordinary functional manner.  As it happens, my decipherment of this route plugs a long-standing gap in my familiarity with this area.  Now Cheam, Merton, and Sutton hold few terrors for me. It is as if that final stretch of the A217 bridged two headlands of knowledge; as if two long tunnels under a mountain have been joined in the middle by the last push.

And of course I feel immeasurably the poorer for having wiped out that grey area, that absence on my own personal atlas.  What was before a region replete with possibilities because unknown and therefore uncircumscribed turns out to be just another extension of suburbia.  Worse, that suburbia turns out to be extensive and complete, admitting no fantastical exceptions.

Gaining knowledge was always like this, a fundamentally ambivalent operation.  For every fact gained, there is a kingdom lost.  This was nowhere more true than in the exploration of Africa.  Not for nothing was it called the Dark Continent.  Dark because utterly unknown.  From the earliest times other nations had speculated on its hidden riches and fabulous realms.  From Prester John to She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, images of the extraordinary have been common.  It is equally symptomatic that it was the Victorians who succeeded in mapping out most of Africa.  This was not just the colonial itch.  More importantly for them, it represented the conquering of ignorance – theirs.

Once the full extent of that ignorance had been mapped, they were driven to negate it. And yet as they chipped away at the dark areas on their maps, so in some sense they diminished their quest.  It was almost as if their energy and zeal fed off the unknown.  As with Balzac's wild ass's skin, the smaller Dark Africa grew, the more enfeebled the race became.

This is certainly true today.  Everyone, if only unconsciously, feels the lack of the mysterious, the sense that we are pushing against our physical limitations.  Simply, there is nowhere left on earth to discover, nowhere for monsters and wonders to reside.  True, there is still outer space, but there we have only taken our first very faltering steps.  Instead people are thrust upon themselves, to explore the dark inner spaces.  This is partly why drugs are so attractive; they promise danger and the possibility of things beyond knowledge.  Perhaps we should never have driven down that last A217.

(22.6.86)

See also Moody Sonnets – On Stupidity

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