When I was a child, before north became strange to me—or, more precisely, estranged from me—because of the carnal logic that grounded and guided me, I almost never felt lost in the world, even if I often felt lost among directional signs. Occupying the sure and selfish ground of my own interests in the world, existing as the center of my own universe, I nearly always knew where I was and where I was going. With north as the way I was facing, the world radiated out not merely around me but from me.2 Others might think I was lost, but—as I, at the age of four, hotly told my mother, who once called the police because she couldn't find me—“I knew where I was all the time!”3 Such absolute confidence seems a far cry from my confusion now as an adult when I stand before the floor map in the University Research Library and try to figure out where I am relative to its signal pronouncement: “You are here.”4 Distrustful after north betrayed me, I never developed a sure sense of direction or geography, far too aware that both are arbitrary systems of locating oneself in the world. Negotiating unfamiliar worldly space is, for me, frequently an anxious state, always mutable and potentially threatening. Thus, the “being lost” I want to explore here is not equivalent to the pleasurable and aimless meandering of the flaneur, whose very lack of a specific destination enables him always to get there.5
What follows, then, is a palimpsest of three phenomenological meditations on “being lost” that draws data from personal experience and a variety of secondary sources to thematize the “lived geography” of being disoriented in worldly space. Less exhaustive than suggestive, these meditations are meant to foreground (each differently) the spatiotemporal and affective shape of experience and to demonstrate that both our normative systems of spatial orientation and their descriptive vocabularies tend to be extremely limited, however practically useful. There is much more to be said about losing oneself in worldly space than can be referenced—or remedied—by recourse to the abstract objectivity of a map.
BEING (DIS)ORIENTED
“Omar!” the old man croaked. “Do you know the way? Are you a guide?…There are jinns in Ténéré, Omar, bad spirits. If a jinn gets into your head, you don't know east from west. The jinn spins your head around. They make you think you know the way when you don't”—MICHAEL ASHER, Impossible Journey
In Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science Patrick Heelan describes what he calls the “hyperbolic” curved space of our lived and embodied experience and shows how it is incommensurable with the spaces “engineered” by the Euclidean geometry and Cartesian perceptions of perspectival space that have dominated Western culture since the Renaissance.6 According to Heelan we perceive and navigate both kinds of space, although never at once—even if, in the near mid-distance, the “shape” of both spaces is isomorphic. (Hence, perhaps, my childish mistake about north as simultaneously grounded in my body and motivating a Cartesian sign system.) Exploring the hermeneutic and context-dependent character of embodied visual perception, Heelan's project is to “show that, despite the fact that we perceive a visual Cartesian world, our natural mode of unaided visual perception is hyperbolic: mediating our everyday perception of a Cartesian world is the carpentered environment that we have learned to ‘read' like a ‘text'” (xiii). In this regard, as James BarryJr. points out, it is important to realize that “as the latest of post-Renaissance perceivers,” our quotidian perception is “not so much in what we take it to be as in what we overlook or deny in it” and that the “geometrical approach of Renaissance perspective” was once a “new form of revelation, a new world possibility.”7 Thus, he reminds us (quoting Maurice Merleau-Ponty) that Renaissance perspective
is “not an ‘infallible' device; it is only a particular case, a date, a moment in a poetic investigation of the world which continues after it.”…The fact that we continue to follow the historical lines drawn by this perceptual form, continue to take it as at least potentially infallible and currently applicable, is not a recognition of its historical truth and power, but rather a diminution of the same…. The transformation of perception by technology holds as its most negative, historical possibility, the danger of entirely forgetting itself as perception and appearance.8
Against this normative “forgetting,” against this culturally dominant experience of “the” (rather than “our”) physical environment as Cartesian and Euclidean in visual arrangement, Heelan notes that “from time to time we actually experience it as laid out before us in a non-Euclidean visual space, in one belonging to the family known as ‘finite hyperbolic spaces.'” Unlike Euclidean visual space, the geometrical structure of visual hyperbolic space is essentially curved; thus, “scenes—real scenes—construed in such visual spaces will appear to be distorted in specific ways” (28). Heelan broadly characterizes this sense of distortion in relation to the appearance of objects in various divisions of space as they are proximate to the embodied subject viewing them. In the “near zone” directly in front of the viewer “visual shapes are clearly defined and differ little from their familiar physical shapes,” but on the periphery of this “Newtonian oasis, depth appears to be dilated,” and “frontal surfaces appear to bulge convexly.” Furthermore, “parallel lines appear to diverge, as if seen in reverse perspective” (29). Other distortions appear in the “distant zone.” Rather than appearing to extend infinitely, space seems “finite, shallow in depth, and slightly concave,” and “distant phenomena are experienced visually as if seen through a telephoto lens”; that is, they appear to be “closer, flatter, and with their surface planes turned to face the viewer.” In addition, parallel lines “bend upward and come together to meet at a point in front of the viewer on the horizon and at a finite distance” (29). Looking at an extended horizon below eye level “such as the sea seen from the top of a cliff,” the viewer “seems to be at the center of a great bowl with its rim on the horizon.” An extended horizon above eye level, such as the sky, is experienced as “a vaulted structure.” Finally, the “apparent size of very distant objects” in hyperbolic space is mutable and “depends on whether there are local cues and how these are construed” (31).9
Because Euclidean visual space is culturally normative, the terms used to describe hyperbolic space (“distortion,” “optical illusion”) connote aberrance from the norm—yet it is hyperbolic visual space that is grounded in the human body, its phenomeno-logic informed not only by external material forces but also by the intentional directedness of consciousness toward its objects. As Heelan puts it: “A Body defines the human subject functionally in relation to a World as the ground for an interlocking set of environing horizons. Being-in-the-World implies being now related to one horizon, now to another” (13). Which horizon, which system of orientation and coordination one lives, depends ultimately on what “makes sense” in a specific context. For a situation to provide “a Euclidean perceptual opportunity,…it must…be virtually populated with familiar (stationary) standards of length and distance, and be equipped with instantaneous means for communicating information about