A Field Guide to Getting Lost
El blau de la distància: 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. || 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.
El canvi i la distància en les etapes de la vida: These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were. Seldom is it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something of this journey between the near and the far goes on in every life. Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment.
Les runes: What is a ruin, after all? It is a human construction abandoned to nature, and one of the allures of ruins in the city is that of wilderness: a place full of the promise of the unknown with all its epiphanies and dangers. Cities are built by men (and to a lesser extent, women), but they decay by nature, from earthquakes and hurricanes to the incremental processes of rot, erosion, rust, the microbial breakdown of concrete, stone, wood, and brick, the return of plants and animals making their own complex order that further dismantles the simple order of men.
Carreteres, vida nòmada, Route66 Orange Blossom Special
La vida com un viatge: That life is a journey is a given in these songs whose background after all is the urbanization of rural whites and northern migration of southern blacks, but the intense love of place frames this journey not as an enlightenment narrative of discovery of the unknown but an insular tale of loss of the formative terra cognita that exists in the song only as memory, a map written in the darkness of your guts, readable in a cross section of your autopsied heart. Nobody gets over anything; time doesn’t heal any wounds; if he stopped loving her today, as one of George Jones’s most famous songs has it, it’s because he’s dead. The landscape in which identity is supposed to be grounded is not solid stuff; it’s made out of memory and desire, rather than rock and soil, as are the songs.
Els crancs ermitans: Male hermit crabs often drag a female around by her claw, fighting off rival suitors, until she molts. Only when she is between shells can they mate.
Yves Klein
Tot es perd i és transitori: It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. Think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time of the hundreds of billions of dreams dreamt since the language to describe them emerged, how few names, how few wishes, how few languages even, how we don’t know what tongues the people who erected the standing stones of Britain and Ireland spoke or what the stones meant, don’t know much of the language of the Gabrielanos of Los Angeles or the Miwoks of Marin, don’t know how or why they drew the giant pictures on the desert floor in Nazca, Peru, don’t know much even about Shakespeare or Li Po.
Wanderlust
Caminar i pensar: The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse.
THE MIND AT THREE MILES AN HOUR I. PEDESTRIAN ARCHITECTURE: Rousseau, Processons, Kierkegaard, Peregrinatges, Peace Pilgrim
the end of belief that divine intervention alone was adequate: She foreshadowed this shift in the nature of the pilgrimage, from appealing for divine intervention or holy miracle to demanding political change, making the audience no longer God or the gods, but the public. Perhaps the postwar era marked the end of belief that divine intervention alone was adequate; God had failed to prevent the Jewish Holocaust, and the Jews had seized their promised land through political and military means. African Americans, who had long used metaphors of the Promised Land, stopped waiting too. At the height of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King said that he was going to Birmingham to lead demonstrations until “Pharaoh lets God’s people go.” The collective walk brings together the iconography of the pilgrimage with that of the military march and the labor strike and demonstration: it is a show of strength as well as conviction, and an appeal to temporal rather than spiritual powers—or perhaps, in the case of the civil rights movement, both.
Les carreteres i camins no es poden percebre senceres, cal moure’s: Part of what makes roads, trails, and paths so unique as built structures is that they cannot be perceived as a whole all at once by a sendentary onlooker. They unfold in time as one travels along them, just as a story does as one listens or reads, and a hairpin turn is like a plot twist, a steep ascent a building of suspense to the view at the summit, a fork in the road an introduction of a new storyline, arrival the end of the story.
la vida com a viatge: If life is a journey, then when we are actually journeying our lives have become tangible, with goals we can move toward, progress we can see, achievement we can understand, metaphors united with actions. Labyrinths, pilgrimages, mountain climbs, hikes with clear and desirable destinations, all allow us to take our allotted time as a literal journey with spiritual dimensions we can understand through the senses. If journeying and walking are central metaphors, then all journeys, all walks, let us enter the same symbolic space as mazes and rituals do, if not so compellingly.
Dels jardins a la naturalesa: Wordsworth, Carl Moritz, el jardí anglès, Claude Lorraine, la naturalesa com a jardí, Muir i el Sierra club. El Peak District i la lluita per caminar.
When we are attracted, we draw near; when we draw near, the sight that attracted us dissolves: as Egeria found, the mountain itself changes shape again and again as one ascends. The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an allegory about this perceptual paradox. When we are attracted, we draw near; when we draw near, the sight that attracted us dissolves: the face of the beloved blurs or fractures as one draws near for a kiss, the smooth cone of Mount Fuji becomes rough rock rising from underfoot to blot out the sky in Hokusai’s print of the mountain pilgrims.
Benjamin sobre perdre’s en una ciutat: “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. Then signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a crackling twig under his feet, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its center. Paris taught me this art of straying,”
La tecnologia ens aïlla: We’ve all heard of that future, and it sounds pretty lonely. In the next century, the line of thinking goes, everyone will work at home, shop at home, watch movies at home and communicate with all their friends through videophones and e-mail. It’s as if science and culture have progressed for one purpose only: to keep us from ever having to get out of our pajamas.—SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
[viurem comunicant-nos per mòbil, enviant-nos imatges retocades, viatjant a parcs temàtics de mentida amb experiències enllaunades]
La cinta de córrer, el bronzejat artificial, The body that used to have the status of a work animal now has the status of a pet: it does not provide real transport, as a horse might have; instead, the body is exercised as one might walk a dog.
Walking: a constellation whose three stars are the body, the imagination, and the wide-open world: Walking has been one of the constellations in the starry sky of human culture, a constellation whose three stars are the body, the imagination, and the wide-open world, and though all three exist independently, it is the lines drawn between them—drawn by the act of walking for cultural purposes—that makes them a constellation. Constellations are not natural phenomena but cultural impositions; the lines drawn between stars are like paths worn by the imagination of those who have gone before. This constellation called walking has a history, the history trod out by all those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers, but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are traveled still.