by Philip Monte Verde
"How do you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" This quote from the ancient philosopher Meno appears on page four of "A Field Guide to Getting Lost," but for author Rebecca Solnit it may as well have been the writing prompt at the top of each blank page on her word processor. Her book is full of self-described 'maps," attempts to demonstrate how she has navigated towards that undefined "thing." It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone at this point that incessant busyness and multitasking aren't the surest way to find that thing. That thing sneaks in in overlooked places. It takes the talent of being lost, that is making the conscious choice to be fully present.
Across the yard where I write is a 6-foot wooden fence. A spider, probably of zero consequences size-wise, has zig-zagged webs across the picket tips. This would hardly be worth breaking my book-review-narrative up had the little bug-eating bugger not then had the nerve to somehow propel its tiny body five feet off the fence and three feet down to the back of a chair in the grass. I can only pray that it is now making the scaling trek back up a wood slat, only to leap and leap again to create a web the size of which no one of its species could ever dream.
The point of that, of course, is that you have to look up sometimes. In particular you have to look up at 9:45 a.m., in late June, when the sun is breaking perfectly through the maple leaves to show off the long, thin hair of that one strand of web. Just time it right.
Looking up is a start anyways. "Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark," Solnit councils. Leaving it ajar, perhaps then it is important to acknowledge the threshold exists, and proceed to walk through that opening. To truly be lost, and to find, may require getting up from the patio table, the deep sunk couch, or the ergonomically designed, highly adjustable, $949.99 Aeron desk chair by Herman Miller.
"Lose the whole world...get lost in it, and find your soul." We've been retracing the same maps. When we say 'follow in someone else's footsteps,' it is meant quite literally. It's an easy habit to get into. As an infant, we would be devoured by wolves, or their modern equivalent raccoons, if we didn't have older humans to protect us and for us to emulate. Like migrating elephants, we follow these older humans trunk to tail through the first quarter, or third, or half(!) of our lives. A midlife crisis, classically defined, can really occur at any age. It's the moment you raise your now jumbo-sized head up and see the savanna alongside the trail. To see your body has grown stronger (or weaker) and that you've made plenty of money (or not), but that your soul isn't carried on this caravan.
"How do you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" This quote from the ancient philosopher Meno appears on page four of "A Field Guide to Getting Lost," but for author Rebecca Solnit it may as well have been the writing prompt at the top of each blank page on her word processor. Her book is full of self-described 'maps," attempts to demonstrate how she has navigated towards that undefined "thing." It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone at this point that incessant busyness and multitasking aren't the surest way to find that thing. That thing sneaks in in overlooked places. It takes the talent of being lost, that is making the conscious choice to be fully present.
Across the yard where I write is a 6-foot wooden fence. A spider, probably of zero consequences size-wise, has zig-zagged webs across the picket tips. This would hardly be worth breaking my book-review-narrative up had the little bug-eating bugger not then had the nerve to somehow propel its tiny body five feet off the fence and three feet down to the back of a chair in the grass. I can only pray that it is now making the scaling trek back up a wood slat, only to leap and leap again to create a web the size of which no one of its species could ever dream.
The point of that, of course, is that you have to look up sometimes. In particular you have to look up at 9:45 a.m., in late June, when the sun is breaking perfectly through the maple leaves to show off the long, thin hair of that one strand of web. Just time it right.
Looking up is a start anyways. "Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark," Solnit councils. Leaving it ajar, perhaps then it is important to acknowledge the threshold exists, and proceed to walk through that opening. To truly be lost, and to find, may require getting up from the patio table, the deep sunk couch, or the ergonomically designed, highly adjustable, $949.99 Aeron desk chair by Herman Miller.
"Lose the whole world...get lost in it, and find your soul." We've been retracing the same maps. When we say 'follow in someone else's footsteps,' it is meant quite literally. It's an easy habit to get into. As an infant, we would be devoured by wolves, or their modern equivalent raccoons, if we didn't have older humans to protect us and for us to emulate. Like migrating elephants, we follow these older humans trunk to tail through the first quarter, or third, or half(!) of our lives. A midlife crisis, classically defined, can really occur at any age. It's the moment you raise your now jumbo-sized head up and see the savanna alongside the trail. To see your body has grown stronger (or weaker) and that you've made plenty of money (or not), but that your soul isn't carried on this caravan.
IG: @hipnihilist
So where is our soul then? Solnit seems to love a little organization to her being lost, because every other chapter is entitled "The Blue of Distance". Yesterday, I had the privilege to go with a friend to an art show on the 26th floor of what used to be called the Chase Tower, here in Rochester New York. I can't recall the new name of the building, but tell a local you mean the big white skyscraper and they'll get what you mean. The art was blasé, but the view was magnifique. In my time I've set foot in every visible square mile of the panorama afforded, but of course it's different up here. Being able to see the breadth of Lake Ontario and the Genesee Valley that feeds it and feeds off it with one turn of the head was a real treat. In both cases we saw Solnit's blue of distance. It takes little imagination to picture how the blue of lake water interchanges with the blue of sky above Canada, but the effect in the south is more thought-provoking. The blue at the horizon is a "melancholy blue."
According to Solnit, "light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us." I guess it just gives up? So here my buddy and I are looking southeast towards Avon and beyond. From here, if you tilt your head towards your toes and lift up, your eyes briefly pass the vertigo-inducing view of the sidewalk far far below, sweep past the orange ants of construction workers placing new flooring down on the roof of the 12-story building next door, fly up through the narrow space between two skyscrapers like a field goal kick, rise above the South Wedge, the University of Rochester, Mt. Hope Cemetery, the Erie Canal, Henrietta, and beyond across fields of trees as small as moss from your God's eye view. And then, like the lazy blue light that traveled all those millions of miles from the sun, the view just quits. The cosmic painter takes their melancholy blue and brushes it over the wavy horizon hills. 'Did you see you all the detail I put into the city streets?' (s)he roars, 'don't be so ungrateful!'
Don't be so ungrateful indeed. Setting aside the thing whose nature is unknown to us, even that which we think we wish to attain is elusive. This is constantly evident when we look at the hordes of the never-satisfied rich. Even they (and we, and I) must be at least dimly aware that their map is faulty, yet they continue to, as Rumi says, fumble in the money bag for coins. Those hills above Avon we've spoken of, I've been to them and they were not blue. They were green when we drove past them on Father's Day, in February they were white. If I climbed them today they'd be green, they'd be brown, they'd be silver, and perhaps just maybe speckles of yellow, orange, and red would be dancing along their tree limbs. But that particular blue would not be attained. It would remain of distance. If we made the modest hike up the hill's spine, and then the more perilous climb of its cell phone tower, we would find that "deeper, dreamier blue" to have retreated further to the hills of Geneseo as surely as the retreating glaciers that carved all in our line of sight.
We may never be meant to get there, so Solnit presents us with a radical idea: "We treat desire as a problem to be solved...(focusing on) how to acquire it, rather then on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue as to distance?" To appreciate desire for desire's sake. Part of me thinks I have a better shot at driving south twenty miles to find myself in the thick of a melancholy blue haze.
According to Solnit, "light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us." I guess it just gives up? So here my buddy and I are looking southeast towards Avon and beyond. From here, if you tilt your head towards your toes and lift up, your eyes briefly pass the vertigo-inducing view of the sidewalk far far below, sweep past the orange ants of construction workers placing new flooring down on the roof of the 12-story building next door, fly up through the narrow space between two skyscrapers like a field goal kick, rise above the South Wedge, the University of Rochester, Mt. Hope Cemetery, the Erie Canal, Henrietta, and beyond across fields of trees as small as moss from your God's eye view. And then, like the lazy blue light that traveled all those millions of miles from the sun, the view just quits. The cosmic painter takes their melancholy blue and brushes it over the wavy horizon hills. 'Did you see you all the detail I put into the city streets?' (s)he roars, 'don't be so ungrateful!'
Don't be so ungrateful indeed. Setting aside the thing whose nature is unknown to us, even that which we think we wish to attain is elusive. This is constantly evident when we look at the hordes of the never-satisfied rich. Even they (and we, and I) must be at least dimly aware that their map is faulty, yet they continue to, as Rumi says, fumble in the money bag for coins. Those hills above Avon we've spoken of, I've been to them and they were not blue. They were green when we drove past them on Father's Day, in February they were white. If I climbed them today they'd be green, they'd be brown, they'd be silver, and perhaps just maybe speckles of yellow, orange, and red would be dancing along their tree limbs. But that particular blue would not be attained. It would remain of distance. If we made the modest hike up the hill's spine, and then the more perilous climb of its cell phone tower, we would find that "deeper, dreamier blue" to have retreated further to the hills of Geneseo as surely as the retreating glaciers that carved all in our line of sight.
We may never be meant to get there, so Solnit presents us with a radical idea: "We treat desire as a problem to be solved...(focusing on) how to acquire it, rather then on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue as to distance?" To appreciate desire for desire's sake. Part of me thinks I have a better shot at driving south twenty miles to find myself in the thick of a melancholy blue haze.
