Press, 2002), 7.
10. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 15.
PART ONE
Sensible Scenes
1
Breadcrumbs in the Forest
Three Meditations on Being Lost in Space
It was dark night when they woke up, and Hansel comforted his little sister. “Gretel,” he said, “just wait till the moon rises; then we'll see the breadcrumbs I strewed and they'll show us the way home.” When the moon rose, they started out, but they didn't find any breadcrumbs, because the thousands of birds that fly around in the forests and fields had eaten them all up. Hansel said to GretelI: “Don't worry, we'll find the way,” but they didn't find it.—”HANSEL AND GRETEL,” Grimms' Tales
What does it mean to be embodied in the multiple and shifting spaces of the world—not only the familiar spaces that seem of our own making and whose meanings we take up and live as “given” but also those spaces that seem to us strange or “foreign” in their shape and value?
When I was a child, I always thought north was the way I was facing. Sure then in my purposeful direction, there was a compelling logic to this phenomenological assumption. Bringing into convergence flesh and sign, north conflated in my child's consciousness the design of my body and the design of an atlas page. Except when I was dancing or, as a child will, walking backwards, I moved in the direction my eyes were looking—in front and ahead of me. Although I was aware of the space behind and to the sides of me, it was the space in front of me—the space I could see—that was clearly privileged, my whole body directed toward it in the accomplishment of my childish projects. I realize now, of course, that printed maps were also responsible for confusing me. The little compass on every atlas page was composed so that north enjoyed a larger or bolder arrow than did the other directional markers, and this was always pointed in a similar direction as the forward-looking trajectory of my eyes as I read. Maps were positioned on the page so that the important spaces of the world were read “in front” and “ahead” of my body just as they were in my child's world. As a directional concept, an orientational point, north thus resonated with the naive faith I had in my own sure direction, in the confidence I had that I would eventually encompass and conquer the world that lay before me. Indeed, this arbitrary and culturally determined semiologic echoed and confirmed my carnal phenomenologic and gave it an (im)proper name: north. As I got a little older and less confident, however, north became increasingly unstable. As I began to recognize it as all-encompassing, it became disorienting and useless. Everywhere I turned and looked was north, and I started to feel that something was dreadfully wrong.1
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
