Materially embedded and positioned in a worldly space usually experienced as discontinuous and not of their own making, women find asking for directions from others a familiar, mundane, and reassuring activity that provokes no existential crisis. Rather, it creates social continuity as a substitute for fragmented spatial contiguity. Furthermore, asking for directions is also consistent with regularly living one's body in the world as a hermeneutic problem. Men, however, cannot generally accept negotiating space as a hermeneutic problem. They disavow the possibility of being lost, even if they sometimes do admit to being spatially “mistaken.”39 Unlike women, who often view maps as arbitrary in relation to their own bodies (the “You are here” on the library map, to me, the confusing equivalent of Magritte's painting about representation, This Is Not a Pipe [1926]), men see maps as confirmations of and continuous with their spatial location. Thus, maps, for men, do not offer “solutions” to a present disorientation; rather, they are taken up as potential and future extensions of a bodily being that always knows (or should) where it stands in the world. For a man in our culture to acknowledge being lost in worldly space would be to generate an existential crisis—for he would be admitting he was lost in the very intentional spaces his agency had supposedly posited. He would be admitting also to an experience in which he perceived the ground beneath his feet (here) as discontiguous with the projected space of his intentions (yonder). Given the threat it poses to the literal grounding of male identity, being lost is an experience of space that men struggle to repress. Refusal, denial, disavowal, displaced anger thus both manifestly affirm this experience and fend off the existential vertigo, panic, and loss of identity it provokes. (In this regard it is particularly telling that in the aforementioned film The Blair Witch Project, there is a significant scene in which one of the lost male filmmakers rages at the uselessness of their map and throws it away in a nearby stream.)
Among the three different forms of being lost we have seen that “not knowing where you are” is the most global and existentially threatening and “not knowing how to get to where you want to go” the most local and mundane. In the scenario about Tom and Mary recounted in the epigraph that began this section, given his assumed “mastery of the universe,” Tom hears Mary interrogate the very subjective ground of his existence and identity when she suggests that he ask for directions, and he is defensive and coldly furious at the implication that he doesn't know where he is. Mary, however, used to moving herself about as an object in unfamiliar spaces not of her own making, makes reference to that other much more mundane, localized, and, to her, familiar form of being lost—“not knowing how to get to where you want to go”—and, both consciously and somatically, she cannot comprehend either Tom's excessive reaction or the shape of the cosmos he is presently in danger of losing. In a culture where Tom and Mary posit and are positioned in space differently, in which they live and value their embodied relations with space differently, is it any wonder that they don't understand each other, the space of being lost (or mistaken) now become the shape of the distance between them?
After north betrayed my body and my forward-looking purposiveness to become an abstract sign, after I lost my child's confidence that I was the compass of the world and became a girl, I never developed a really sure sense of direction or geography. Both “direction” and “geography” seemed to me the discontiguous and arbitrary systems of others rather than projected possibilities for the fluid orientation of my own being. Now definitely field-dependent, I have to walk through a space and have it become a concrete and contiguous here for me if I am to later remember it as coherent. I also feel more secure locating an unknown place if I follow a narrative trajectory involving a series of grounded landmarks rather than the abstract schematic orientations of a map. Even then, however, sometimes I experience the metallic taste of fear when I try to follow someone's directions to somewhere new and an anticipated McDonald's on a corner or the carwash to follow on the left don't appear quite soon enough to assure me that I am, indeed, going the right way. It is at these moments that I force myself to remember what I've disclosed here, take a deep breath, and attempt to posit the world before me as a set of possibilities that are not inherently terrifying. What really dissipates my anxiety, however (and also makes me smile), is remembering that, despite the fact it was Hansel who had “a sense of direction,” Gretel was the one who killed the wicked witch, sprung her brother, and found the way out of the forest and safely back home.
1. As a child I also had a problem with “right” and “left” since my “sides” didn't enjoy the hierarchical privilege of my “front.” Although it seemed clear that north was always in front of—and never in back of—me, the designations “right” and “left” (as well as east and west) seemed arbitrary, directions one had to remember rather than orientations one lived. So, regularly, I wore mnemonic Band-Aids on the fingers of my left hand to guide me through the tasks of my childish life—like putting my right hand over my heart (on the left side) to say the Pledge of Allegiance at school. See, for elaboration of this typical phenomenon, Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), esp. chap. 4, “Body, Personal Relations, and Spatial Values,” 34-50. Tuan writes that regardless of their culture or spatial schemas, “[p]eople do not mistake prone for upright, nor front for back, but the right and left sides of the body as well as the spaces extrapolated from them are easily confused. In our experience as mobile animals, front and back are primary, right and left are secondary” (42).
2. On this anthropocentric and carnal logic see Tuan, Space and Place, who writes: “In a literal sense, the human body is the measure of direction, location, and distance” (44). He further points out that “spatial prepositions are necessarily anthropocentric, whether they are nouns derived from parts of the human body or not,” that “folk measures of length are derived from parts of the body,” as in “an arm's length” or “feet,” as are measures of capacity such as “a handful” or “an armful” (45-47).
3. Certainly, children get lost and, more important, feel lost. But, if they're independent and confident, they may often feel it's their parent or caretaker who has gotten lost rather than themselves. This latter experience (which marks both a child's confidence in his or her own location and a displacement of his or her fear of getting lost) is wonderfully expressed in “Disobedience,” a poem in A. A. Milne's When We Were Very Young (London: Methuen, 1924; Puffin Edition, 1992), 32-35. The poem tells of a three-year-old who warns his mother “never to go down to the end of town” without him—and, when she does, she gets “lost, or stolen or strayed!”
4. As an adult woman (and getting ever older), apparently I am not alone in feeling disoriented in front of such maps. Age and gender and the perceived relation of objective markers to one's body emerge as significant variables in spatial processing according to Jocelyn B. Aubrey, Karen Z. H. Li, and Allen R. Dobbs, “Age Differences in the Interpretation of Misaligned ‘You-Are-Here' Maps,” Journal of Gerontology 49 (1994): 29-31. Their essay abstract reads: “ ‘You-Are-Here' (YAH) maps, common in shopping malls and office buildings, are difficult to interpret if not aligned with their surroundings. Younger and older adults made direction decisions after viewing simple maps representing a university campus. YAH arrows were either upright and coordinated with viewer position or contra-aligned 180°. Contra-alignment caused subjects, especially older adults, to take more time and be less accurate. Women were slower on contra-aligned maps, although no less accurate, than men. The need to mentally realign such incongruent maps in order to make correct direction decisions can cause serious difficulty for older adults trying to navigate through large, complex environments” (29).
5. My gender selection here is purposeful and references the flâneur of the nineteenth century,