created, 2025-02-05 & modified, =this.modified
rel: Survey of Being Lost
Why I'm reading
“How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?
Artists, and Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “live always at the ‘edge of mystery’—the boundary of the unknown.”
“Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance — nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for quite a different schooling.” - Walter Benjamin
To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away.
Literal Lost
There’s an art of attending to weather, to the route you take, to the landmarks along the way, to how if you turn around you can see how different the journey back looks from the journey out, to reading the sun and moon and stars to orient yourself, to the direction of running water, to the thousand things that make the wild a text that can be read by the literate. The lost are often illiterate in this language that is the language of the earth itself, or don’t stop to read it.
Early explorers were always lost, because they were in completely unfamiliar places that nobody had been before. They never expected to know exactly where they were, but they knew their instruments well and had an sense of optimism about surviving and finding their way.
Lost is the familiar falling away, and the unfamiliar appearing. Getting lost is the case where the world has become larger than your knowledge of it.
Lost, Distant Blue
The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.
Distant blue, beautiful, and never possessed.
Shul
Tibetan concept, shul, which is a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by i.e. a footprint, a channel worn through rock, indentation in the grass. The impression that something once was there.
Mourning Wars
Iroquois engaged in a practice called Mourning Wars which was vengeance for those lost. Occasionally captives were assimilated into the tribe as a direct replacement for the one lost.
Individuals taken would often be placed into the role of the individual they were supposed to replace. A young man replacing a fallen warrior, (if assimilated) would take his place and be considered the new son of the fallen man’s mother, take any wives the fallen man had had, etc. A woman captured to replace a fallen woman would take her spot just as closely, becoming the new wife of whomever had lost theirs.
The main factor in determining if a family would adopt or execute a captive was the the proximity of their grief. If the death that prompted their participation in the Mourning War was recent or sudden, their captive would likely meet an untimely end; if the family’s grief had some time to abate naturally, then they’d usually be more willing to adopt the captive.
The adoptee became the deceased’s heir, inheriting their name and perhaps their social privileges if they were found to be deserving of such ranks.
Ruin
A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life. With ruins a city springs free of its plans into something as intricate as life, something that can be explored but perhaps not mapped.
An urban ruin is a place that has fallen outside the economic life of the city, and it is in some way an ideal home for the art that also falls outside the ordinary production and consumption of the city.
Terra Incognita
Borges’ parable The Parable of the Palace by Borges speaks to how knowledge is an Islands surrounded by the oceans of the unknown. They signify that the cartographers knew that they did not know, and awareness of ignorance is not just ignorance; it is awareness of knowledge’s limited.
A Roman named Crates made a globe based on the theory that the earth had four continents, three of them unknown. He abandoned the idea of a world encompassed by water, of a circumfluent ‘oceanus’ relatively close by. Before Crates, maps depicted a known world surrounded by water.