Hic Sunt Dracones // Art Isn't Real

Do you know what “Hic Sunt Dracones” means? It’s Latin for “Here be Dragons”. It’s what cartographers used to put on all the uncharted parts of their maps, back when the world was unexplored and still very threatening. The artistically inclined would decorate these areas with drawings of monsters, great leviathans and krakens, behemoths and wyrms dotting the landscape, as a warning to foolhardy explorers. “Go not here, or face the consequences of the unknown”.

Or, that’s the popular myth. In truth there’s only one known historical map that has “Dracones” on it: the Hunt-Lenox Globe, circa 1504. But as a sarcastic man once said, don’t cloud the issue with facts… and besides, this makes for a better story.

Art isn’t real. You can’t hold a song in your hand. No matter how talented the painter, no canvas bears an exact replica of its subject. In literature, even non-fiction is only an author’s account of events, their best guess at the objective truth, cobbled together from different sources, different perspectives. Art tells a story. And it’s the truth behind the fiction that tells you what you really need to know.

“Here there be Dragons”. Really? Have you seen any? The irony of labeling an as yet unexplored map is that one can’t possibly know what lies there. What they really mean is that they don’t know. No one knows. And there it is - the truth behind the lie; it’s not the dragon you fear, not really. You fear the mystery. You fear a future marred by the consequences of decisions you haven’t made, and cannot yet understand. The curtain is drawn. The mirror is revealed. The dragon is you.

Human nature is fearing the unknown. Art is making something anyways.

Here be the terror. Here be the unknown. May I find the courage to face it.