A Field Guide to Getting Lost

1. Embrace the Unknown: The Path to Discovery

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark.

Seek the unforeseen. Life's most transformative experiences often emerge from venturing into the unknown, beyond the boundaries of what we already comprehend. This isn't about mere ignorance, but a conscious choice to surrender to uncertainty, a "voluptuous surrender" that allows for profound self-extension and becoming. Artists and scientists alike operate at this "edge of mystery," though artists, unlike scientists, invite you into that dark sea rather than hauling the unknown into the known.

Calculate on the unforeseen. The tactical question in life, as posed by the pre-Socratic Meno, is "How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" This paradox requires an art of recognizing the unforeseen's role, maintaining balance amidst surprises, and collaborating with chance. It means accepting essential mysteries and limits to control, fostering a "Negative Capability" to exist in uncertainties without irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Childhood roaming. The author reflects on how childhood roaming, often curtailed by parental fears, fostered self-reliance, a sense of direction, adventure, and imagination. This ability to get a little lost and find one's way back is crucial for developing the capacity to navigate life's larger uncertainties. To truly "lose oneself" in a city or a forest, as Walter Benjamin suggests, requires a different schooling—a full presence in the moment, capable of embracing mystery.

2. The Blue of Distance: Longing for the Unreachable

Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.

Light that gets lost. The world appears blue at its edges and depths because blue light scatters and disperses, failing to travel the full distance to our eyes. This lost light, the "blue of distance," imbues remote horizons, mountains, and anything far away with a dreamy, melancholic hue. It is the color of solitude and desire, representing "there seen from here," a place you can never truly reach, for the blue resides in the atmospheric distance itself, not the destination.

Desire's nature. We often treat desire as a problem to be solved, focusing on acquiring the object of longing rather than appreciating the sensation of desire itself. Yet, the distance between us and the desired object is precisely what fills the space with this blue. Like the mountains that cease to be blue upon arrival, longing is merely relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition. This inherent human condition, like the blue to distance, can be cherished on its own terms, finding beauty in the unpossessable.

Artistic evocation. European painters from the fifteenth century began to capture this "blue of distance," exaggerating it to give depth and dimension to their works. Leonardo da Vinci, for instance, advised making distant buildings progressively bluer. This artistic phenomenon suggests a world where one could walk into a "blue country," where everything, even oneself, might turn blue. This concept was literally realized in nineteenth-century cyanotypes, or blue photographs, which depicted entire worlds in shades of blue and white, as if seen through a melancholy atmosphere.

3. Transformation Through Loss: Shedding Old Selves

The process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

Disintegration and reform. Life's transitions often involve a profound disintegration of the old self before a new one can emerge, much like a caterpillar rotting within its chrysalis before becoming a butterfly. This phase of decay, withdrawal, and ending is rarely celebrated or even adequately described in our language, yet it is a violent, necessary precursor to beginning. The Greek word for butterfly, "psyche," also means soul, highlighting this deep connection between transformation and the human spirit.

Captivity narratives. Historical accounts of captives, like Cabeza de Vaca or Eunice Williams, starkly illustrate this metamorphosis. Initially feeling "lost" and far from home, they often reached a point of stunning reversal where they became "at home" in their new, unfamiliar surroundings, and their old longings faded. This adaptation, a matter of survival, required shedding old identities, languages, and memories—a steep cost, but one that allowed them to flourish in new lives.

Molting and instars. Just as a caterpillar molts its skin repeatedly, or a hermit crab outgrows its shell, humans undergo "instars"—stages between successive changes where they are no longer the same, yet not fully transformed. These changes, though often lacking formal rituals of recognition, are continuous. The "molt" is a risky, vulnerable moment, but it is essential for growth, implying that change is a "buried star," oscillating between the near and the far, a constant process of becoming.

4. The Allure of Ruins: Life in Decay and Abandon

Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life.

Human construction, nature's reclaim. Ruins are human creations abandoned to nature, offering a glimpse of wilderness within the city. They embody the promise of the unknown, with both epiphanies and dangers. While cities are built by humans, they decay by natural processes—rot, erosion, rust—and the return of plants and animals, creating a complex order that dismantles human-imposed simplicity. This decay is often triggered by economic or political neglect, or by human acts of vandalism and war.

Symbolic home. In the 1980s, urban ruins became emblematic, shaping the aesthetic and ethic of punk culture. They were landscapes of "abandon"—both the neglect that created them and the passionate surrender of those who inhabited them. For the author, these spaces offered a "generative death," like a corpse feeding flowers, falling outside the city's economic life to become an ideal home for art that also existed beyond ordinary production and consumption.

Underworld realms. Ruins, like the underworld, represent everything outside the law and conventional order. They offer a specific kind of wildness—erotic, intoxicating, transgressive—more easily found in cities than in literal wilderness. This resonates with the myth of Persephone, who gained power and adulthood as queen of Hades, suggesting that true life might require embracing the darkness and fatality that youth often welcomes as an enlargement, a reassurance of exits from the "prison" of adulthood.

5. Truth's Fluidity: Shifting Narratives and Identity

But all histories and photographs do that, public as well as private.

Unstable past. Family histories, like photographs, can be as unstable as everything else. The author's paternal family history, marked by disappearances and shifting national borders, reflects a world where truth was not a fixed quantity, poured back and forth between languages. This instability is mirrored in the way personal memories fade or transform, becoming "fixed in letters" or losing their "mobile unreliability" once written down, ceasing to be solely one's own.

Willful forgetting. The author speculates that her ancestors' refusal to tell tales or their "willful forgetting" of their lost homeland might have stemmed from a desire for their descendants to become "native to the New World." This suggests that sometimes, losing the past—abandoning memory and old ties—is the steep cost of adaptation and integration into a new reality, a psychological metamorphosis as profound as a cultural one.

Narrative as construction. The author's own search for her great-grandmother's story, initially imagining her stepping onto the prairie, reveals how personal desire shapes the narratives we construct to fill voids of unknowability. When the "true" story of incarceration emerges, the imagined image vanishes, becoming an "impersonal image." This highlights that truth lies not only in incidents but in hopes and needs, and that histories are often "crossroads, branchings, and tangles" rather than straight lines.

6. Place as Memory: Landscape as a Deep Anchor

The places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal.

Landscape as love. In country music, particularly the older tunes, the landscape often serves as a deeper anchor for being and the object of an enduring love, even more so than human protagonists. Names of bridges, mountains, valleys, towns, states, and rivers are recited like incantations, and psychic states themselves become places like "Lost Highway" or "Lonely Street." These places, where significant events occurred, become embedded with emotion, allowing their recovery to trigger memory and feeling.

Tangible memory. While time erodes human connections and memories, places remain, becoming the "tangible landscape of memory." They are what you can possess, what is immortal, and what, in the end, possesses you. The author's longing to return to and know old places more deeply, rather than seeking new ones, reflects this profound connection. This suggests that place, even in absence, takes on another life as a "sense of place," a summoning in the imagination with all the atmospheric effect of a powerful emotion.

Storied land. Indigenous cultures, like the Chemehuevi, navigated vast arid terrains with "song maps" that described geographical routes through evocative place names. These songs were not just navigational tools but embodied a deep, orderly connection to the world, where birds dropped out of the flock into their own places, and the land itself was the "Storied Land" of myths. This contrasts sharply with the pioneers who perceived the same landscape as an "empty quarter," highlighting how cultural understanding shapes one's relationship to place.

7. The Art of Being Lost: Navigating Uncertainty

To acknowledge the unknown is part of knowledge, and the unknown is visible as terra incognita but invisible as selection.

Beyond calculation. The "art of being at home in the unknown" means that being in its midst isn't cause for panic or suffering. This capability aligns with Keats's "Negative Capability"—being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts. While modern tools like cell phones and GPS offer substitutes for this skill, true navigation involves reading the earth's language: weather, landmarks, celestial bodies, water flow. The "lost" are often illiterate in this language, or unwilling to pause and read it.

Maps and their limits. Old maps, with their "Terra Incognita" labels, acknowledged the limits of knowledge, signifying that cartographers knew what they didn't know. This awareness is crucial, as "to destroy false notions... is one of the ways to advance knowledge." Modern maps, though seemingly comprehensive, are deeply selective, unable to depict the infinite layers of a place or keep pace with constant change. They are partial representations, and knowledge itself is an island surrounded by oceans of the unknown.

The unknown knowns. Beyond "known knowns" and "known unknowns," there are "unknown unknowns"—things we don't know we don't know—which proved crucial in the Iraq War. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek added a fourth category: "unknown knowns," the Freudian unconscious, "knowledge that doesn't know itself." This suggests that true dangers lie in disavowed beliefs and practices. The "terra incognita" on maps, therefore, not only marks what is unvanquished but also hints at the hidden complexities within ourselves and the world.

8. Knowledge's Limits: Acknowledging Terra Incognita

To imagine that you know, to populate the unknown with projections, is very different from knowing that you don’t, and the old maps depict both states of mind, the Shangri-las and terra incognitas, the unknown northwest coast and the imagined island of California.

The illusion of knowing. We often prefer "ugly scenarios" to the pure unknown, filling maps with fantasies rather than admitting their inherent limitations. Ancient Greek and Roman maps, for instance, depicted mythical creatures or vast, fabricated continents like Terra Australis, reflecting a human tendency to populate the unknown with projections rather than simply acknowledging ignorance. This contrasts with mapmakers like Ptolemy who, by leaving areas open to "further investigation," embraced the possibility of the unknown.

Unexplored territories. Even into the 19th and 20th centuries, parts of the American West remained "unexplored" or "strangely blank" on maps, sometimes due to their harshness, sometimes due to military secrecy. This highlights that "terra incognita" is not just a historical artifact but a continuous reality, whether due to physical inaccessibility, lack of data, or deliberate concealment. The very act of mapping, while creating knowledge, simultaneously defines and often shrinks the perceived unknown.

Beyond the visible. Yves Klein's art, particularly his blue monochromes and relief maps, sought to transcend or annihilate representation itself, aiming for an art of immediacy and presence, even of the immaterial or the void. By painting a globe entirely blue, he created a world without divisions, making it all "terra incognita," indivisible and unconquerable. This act was a "ferocious act of mysticism," reminding us that maps, however beautiful, are tools of empire and capital, and that true knowledge might lie beyond their charted lines.

9. The Power of Vulnerability: Calling Out for Help

It’s okay to realize that life has a mysterious quality to it, it has an element of uncertainty, it’s okay to realize that we do need help, that calling out for help is a very generous act because it allows others to help us and it allows us to be helped.

Barriers and calls. Life presents impassable barriers, moments when we don't know what to do next. The story of the blind "Turtle Man" who simply stood on the curb and called "help, help, help" until someone assisted him across the street illustrates a profound acceptance of vulnerability. He didn't know who would come, or if anyone would, but he trusted in the possibility of assistance, demonstrating a "defiance of common sense" and conventionality.

Generosity of asking. Calling out for help is not a sign of weakness but a "very generous act." It creates an opportunity for others to offer assistance, fostering a reciprocal relationship where help is both received and given. This transforms a potentially hostile world into a different place, one where interdependence is acknowledged and embraced. It lessens the "urgency and desperation" of a world determined solely by individual will.

Beyond self-reliance. While self-reliance is valued, the "excellent training of Turtle Man" suggests that sometimes, having no option but to ask for help is the only way forward. This challenges the notion that we must always be competent and in control. The practice of awareness, as taught in Zen, encourages us to acknowledge the "drama of our inner dialogue" and the inherent uncertainty of life, allowing us to be okay with not knowing and to welcome the unexpected support that arises.

10. Animals as Guides: The Vanishing Language of the Wild

Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.

Wordless messages. Wild animals bring a wordless message: that the world is wild, life is unpredictable in its goodness and danger, and the world is larger than our imagination. Encounters with creatures like the kangaroo mouse, rattlesnake, or desert tortoise offer moments of profound connection and surprise, reminding us of a symbolic order that the human world often obscures. These interactions can feel like serendipitous coincidences, suggesting a surrender to a larger story.

Carrying the tortoise. The author's dream of carrying a leaking tortoise, a creature symbolic of endurance and survival for the Chemehuevi people, becomes a metaphor for carrying a profound, transformative experience. Her earlier physical act of moving a tortoise from a road, despite the rule against touching them, highlights a necessary transgression for protection. This "compass, a visa, an amulet" ultimately helps her navigate out of her childhood home, symbolizing a release from past burdens.

Loss of abundance. The disappearance of species, like the desert tortoise, represents a tragic silencing of this "old language of the imagination." Biologists estimate that millions of species remain unknown, yet both known and unknown species are vanishing at an alarming rate. This "scarcity is real, and growing," transforming the present from a "golden age" of abundance into a "Noah's ark" where greed and development are marching animals and plants over the edge, emptying out the world and diminishing our capacity for wonder and understanding.

Last updated: August 13, 2025