Hallucinated rain in a mirage of gutter. Conjured by its sound, the summer downpour frying in the puddles rinsed between the teeth of drains. This insubstantial torrent, sluicing a cholesterol of styrofoam and dogend from the city's dead, gray veins. A phantom, speculated city, somewhere else, that had its night voice netted once, then chloroformed, pinned to a specimen board of magnetic tape, revived to flutter weakly here tonight--who knows how long since it was captured, or how far away. Where do the Yarmouth breakers detonate, a distant Semtex, when we are away from Yarmouth? Where do the lights of London flare when we are not here? What non-euclidean map includes the places we are gone from? Say its name, the absent town, the city in remove and there it rises in the backyard of our eyes, some common landmark snapshot first, and then, specific street, and house, and room, specific chair. Say "Birmingham", and the rotunda rears within us, our imagination squinting in the traveler's fair glare of Newstreet Station. Or say "Folkston", and recall the quay side sudden still beneath our feet. These are the towns of light, built from remembered brick, conjectured beam, that stand in Hilbert Space, a plane of concept and idea where thought is form. Where the recalled smell of fresh paint upon forgotten stairs is an event in place and time. These detailed weightless urban sprawls we carry in our fragile skull, that teem with reminiscent traffics, populace with bias, opinion, rumor, legend, lie. Locations we shall never visit that yet have their hearsay substance in our lives, and so are never far from us. They rest in occult Mercators where distance is not marked from point to solid point, but calibrated there between the spark gaps of our free associations, yielding geographies with Land's End next to John O'Grouts, an Earth with poles adjacent. Continent, nation, mapped outside of matter, state of mind. Metropolis erected out of nothing, only metaphor, and ringed with slums of dream. Mnemonic highways made from smears of field glimpsed once through glass at speed, or from the jaundiced strobe of gone-by sodium lamps. Hot amber necklace on the night's bare throat, monoxide dabbed upon her pulse-points. Strung between the shimmering fabricated towns, inroads of anecdote, synaptic rails to bear the trains of thought, a beaded web across our gazetteer of the interior. Seen from above, the glittering threads of meaning run like mercury, converge on the imaginary capital: a shadow London, our idea of London, flickering in the forebrain. When we are not here, this apparition is our only London.
-- Alan Moore, "The Map Drawn in Vapour" (excerpt)
