Two Prayers for the Lost Souls in the Endless Night; Part 3:
A Stranger in Angel Town: Finding Home and a Philosophy for The Lost
One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.
-Margaret Mead
Phase One: Daybreak at the Edge of Conclusions
Home as a concept is tough to explore amicably. We may find that somewhere between our discussions of the subject that we may flit between ‘home is where the heart is’ per mid-2000s suburban Americana, or we may, in our darkest recollections come to see home as a place that in theory has never existed, or has done so as one that is the antithesis to the reality we come to expect of the idea itself. Home, in the conversation of what it means to be lost comes to us in an even more complex modality, where those of us among the lost, often face a troubling task in defining where and when that home as an idea may be. To those of us wandering out beyond the mists of Dreamland, in the wildwoods of uncertainty, there is a question to be asked that comes quite obviously, but never often: where is home?
In the ubiquitous poem by Frost, we are tasked to imagine the road less travelled, to again question the differences made in taking the path aside the well-travelled. What we do not ask of Frost, let alone stand to ponder ourselves is, in a word, where in the passage of this journey does home lie. Home is convenient on our journey to find what it means to be lost, either where we begin our journey that lends us to being lost, or where our journey out of loss may be leading us. Curiously, it can so many times be the starting point and the ending point simultaneously. But in a frustrating intrusion on the part of Hegel, we do find ourselves now grappling with the dialectic of home. This dialectic, which for those souls fortunate enough to have escaped a reading of Hegel, is best summarized in, of all places, a short essay by Joseph Stalin titled Dialectical and Historical Materialism which presents a simplified definition of dialectical thought: “Dialectics comes from the Greek dialego, to discourse, to debate. In ancient times dialectics was the art of arriving at the truth by disclosing the contradictions in the argument of an opponent and overcoming these contradictions. There were philosophers in ancient times who believed that the disclosure of contradictions in thought and the clash of opposite opinions was the best method of arriving at the truth” (1938). In essence, the notion of dialectics is simply that life, nature, and the compositional elements of the world around us are built on everyday contradictions. An example of this more simply put is illustrative of how a flower may come to exist in reality, at every moment of a flower’s life cycle, from seedling through blooming, the flower is fighting the contradictory forces of nature. It contradicts the wind blowing against it by remaining standing, and the droughts by conserving water, it contradicts the natural force of death by virtue of bees and their pollination. Life is a struggle at all times, according to this discursive lens, a battle between existing and fading, remaining memorable and being forgotten, loving and hating, crying and smiling. There are thousands of these dialectical struggles in any given moment of our being in time.
The dialectics of home, in a cross-section of this theory can be summarized here as a sense of conflict between trying to determine where on our path through the wildwoods of uncertainty does home lie in contextual comparison to where we exist at a given moment. Is home the shattered ruin behind us that fuels our flight? Or is home the heart and hearth waiting to greet us in warmth and love at the end of the path forward? This struggle, against the backdrop of what constitutes a feeling of being lost, I.E. the negation of a current conceptualization of our personhood in a space we may call home, becomes paramount to our quest for the nature of what it means to exist in a state of being lost. Are we lost because of home, or rather what we may consider home? Or are we lost searching for home? Is that loss of geographic and social directionality predicated on an escape or a quest to find what we may seek? Unfortunately, as with all investigations of a social nature, we are not so fortunate that we may reconcile a concept of our inquiry into a simplistic duality. We may, very readily be pushed to find a home, without a home, to escape a home, and all the while situate home in experiential moments, a partner, an animal companion, family, or even those aesthetic points so complex as tastes, smells, and memories. Ours is a story of sociality that is inherently and infuriatingly complex to explore such that we may never find ourselves found in a search for that which is lost insofar as that which contributes to our finding of ourselves is that which contributes to that which pushes others to a state of loss of self in the momentary passages of time at hand.
So then, how are we to even approach such a question? Where may we even begin to situate a semblance of self and social in such a place as to even dare to define what is loss before even attempting to assert a sense of found, let alone a sense of what may define home.
I will not be so mildly romantic in a suburban sense as to say that home is where the heart is, nor will I say that home is where we go when we’ve run out of homes, per Le Carre, but still somewhere in the mires of both sentimentality and the tradecraft of running until we run out of places to run to there lies a middle ground of both nostalgic warming safety and the cold isolation of our final refuge. Home exists as space both physically and socially, where the nature of one determines the presence and presentation of the reality of the other. Where home is spatially situated in the material world, where the physicality of space itself is what lends a sense of stability and a sense of being at home, the nature of home as social becomes murkier to carry with us, and when home is in our hearts and our internal socialities, the physical space of home becomes immaterial to our needs of defining where indeed our feet may fall on the path.
In the social vein, we may also at times facilitate a sense of home in being with a specific person, wherein our sentimentality and capacity for bonding in the social becomes the sensation of existing in a sensibly safe space that we may operably consider to be ‘home’. The challenge here is that the nature of being soundly safe in the presence of others is that we must question the degree to which being home with someone is itself a sensation of being truly home, or if the hallmarks of our symbolic exchange of meaning between ourselves is itself merely a veil of what home could be. This is a hallmark pitfall of the state of being lost at the crest of 25, in that we may at times overly romantically establish a sense of home in the presence of someone else, and in doing so we curate an experience of homecoming that becomes fleeting, impermanent, and bordering on that ever-commodified notion of ‘codependency’ that has penetrated the public lexicon from a pseudo-clinical side of social media.
Codependent existence is now fashionably constrained to a side of social existence that is continually evaluated to be ‘toxic’ and unfavorable. Somewhere in the annals of clinical psychology, there is no doubt some credence to be paid to the pathologizing of this typology of relational coupling. Psychology Today, in an undated and non-attributed article describes codependency as: “A dysfunctional relationship dynamic where one person assumes the role of “the giver,” sacrificing their own needs and well-being for the sake of the other, “the taker””. We may also fear not, as this article was ‘reviewed’ by their staff, and in my experience with the publication, they only ever publish mildly questionable material. Pettiness aside, the question of codependence is one of defining relational roles and subsequently classifying relationships as transactional exchanges of roles as a means of pathologizing potential relational inconsistencies that may lead to ‘toxicity’ and further abusive realities. This is not to disregard the idea of codependency as a pathological state of being that is detrimental, but rather we must question the degree to which a relationship may itself qualify as codependent.
A brief scroll through social media will have every element of a relationship in some capacity (unofficially) clinically defined as codependent. One partner cooks more? Codependent. One partner is the only one that drives when both are capable? Massive relational imbalance. This is not a specific example, but it reflects the broader pattern of social media pseudo-psychology and the broader issue of popular sources sensationalizing clinical discourse for public consumption. It makes it much easier to classify and understand the metaphysical nature of our relationships when we have an entire lexicon of therapy speak to hyper-analyze all elements of what every moment may mean. I myself have experienced this both in external classifications of my own relationships, and in knowing people who have used the term freely to describe vague problems they have had in interpersonal connections.
At the risk of again diving back to Marx, there is a point of exploration here I may draw us to: if we are to classify toxic relationships under a criterion of codependency, have we not then also commodified the relational structures themselves? Do we then not commodify the individual into a labourer on one ‘side’ of their relationship? Does this not then reduce the nuance and complexity of every singular human affective coupling to a sense of market share distributions and cost/benefit analysis? If we see ourselves being home to our partner, are we then the pathological giver enabling the taker? Since when are relationships a question of giving and taking, and then what is the ideal point of co-existence? Do we dare propose a Marxist answer? Does the ideal typology of the human relationship devoid of toxic commodity exchange imbalance reflect a post-socialist communism of the self and social? Are we to advocate for the seizing of the means of love production? Can we implement the latter without evoking a Zizek-esque innuendo? One can hope not.
In that vein, should we play out the metaphor the seizing of the means of relational production would mean that those of us connected to one another would then be the masters of our own production of our relationships, where the moments, exchanges and socioepistemologies are of our own design. In this sense, the dialectical problem then presents itself: are relationships not already self-determined? In the sense that we may make our decisions about how we may approach and exist within coupling, and in this sense, where indeed is the concentration of the means of production? Collectively shared between partners. And so where then does codependency exist in this spectrum? If there are givers and takers and a prevailing wind of enabling, where indeed is the dominion of dependency located? Where is the conduit of what is allowed to be, or the directives of manufacture of relational bonding to facilitate the commodification of exchanges that can then be reframed in line with what we may consider to be giving and taking? If we cannot establish a market or economy of exchange for such things, where and how may we classify relational bondage as giving and taking? Where is the battlefield of exchange wherein commodified gestures, existences, or realities are composed to be packaged and either given or taken? What is the currency of this exchange, and how in the sense of the typical pairing do we find a sense of what may classify as taking or giving in any way other than the natural flow of interactional exchange? Where is the classification line that pushes typical exchange, solidarity and coexistence to the cursed warrens of codependency?
Is this to say that I am wholly condemning the notion itself? No. Moreso, we must instead focus our condemnation where it is far more applicable: the prevailing voice of the social out beyond our lives that dictates a perpetual collective understanding of such ideas. This is a mildly inflated way of saying that we must tread carefully when the subject of allowing the external forces of the social world to define elements of our states of being in the world. This is not to say that we must ignore, or that the individual definitions of life and being are infallible to the tides of the social, but that somehow in the murkiness of the world beyond and the world within, we must find a balanced place wherein self-determination of our reality is not swayed perpetually by the tides beyond, but one where we may also allow for the caring words of others to be valued and reciprocated in our understanding of life and existence. All of this to say that we cannot fully ignore the social world in how it defines reality for us, but we also must not fully slip into the self-imposed psychosis of building our entire reality solo.
Effectively, in the context of this tangential wandering, we cannot fully condemn those that find home within the presence of others to be ‘toxic’ or ‘codependent,’ and we cannot so simply classify these relationships as being predicated on taking and giving. Instead, we must focus closer on that which consummates the nature of feeling at home within the arms of our lovers, and why that sense of home may conceal a potentially dark undercurrent to the overall reality of being while lost. In the sentiments of Le Carre, if home is indeed where we run to when we’ve run out of homes, what does this say about facilitating a sense of home in another person? Does it refer to the practice of running from people until you have found the ‘right’ one? And further, what constitutes the ‘right’ one? These ideas present too many terminal questions to fully facilitate a discussion without purely devolving into romantic optimism or nihilistic cynicism, and so the razor’s edge in the middle ground between being lost in the bliss of seeing home in another person, and the more languishing reality of still being trapped somewhere between leaving and arriving presents a worryingly difficult balance to strike. It speaks more broadly beyond the simplicity of home, which itself is wildly complex, to the conflict of leaving, staying, travelling and arriving, to instead grow beyond the dualism of extreme poles of being and instead to propel us into a nearly indescribable spectrum of blurred existential and metaphysical ontologies. Somewhere here in the misty grey hues, there is some form of pathway forward, somewhere a definition of what direction ‘forward’ may be, and even more so, a definitive answer to the question of whether or not ‘forward’ is even the correct direction.
At the core of this conflict lies not the definition of home, nor the sophomoric condemnations of TikTok psychologists diagnosing everything as codependent, but instead a parable reflective of the human experience in both the definition of self and social and the broader making of meaning in our progressions through space, place and time on the basis of knowing ourselves in the contexts of our being as a means of grounding our epistemological ways of knowing about everything from the exchange of love and affection, to the rattling despair of seeing our self fragment into oblivion as we turn 25. It is a quest of the souls lost to find out what being found means, and this meaning both can and cannot be found simply in saying home is another person. Despite the romantic bliss of believing or hoping the notion to be true, we cannot be so bold to define a sense of home in another, not for the aforementioned toxicity of codependency, but instead on the basis of the idea that we cannot ourselves find home while lost, and we cannot expect the others in our environs to themselves be existing in the antithesis of loss. There is not definitive means of understanding where indeed we are supposed to be in the mirrored reflection of the symbolic interactions with others in terms of intimacy, this instead provides warmth, safety, companionship, and all of the other positives, but in a way that must be reframed. Rather than positing that home is another, we may instead say that these others, these torches in our darkness, the colours in our grey, the love in our loneliness, those voices that speak words of courage and serenity to our hearts directly are instead of the ideal manifestation of home, the embodied archetypical fellow traveller.
Therefore, the framing of a feeling of home within the arms, presence or relationships with others is itself a mislabeling of the feeling, it is not being home, but being accompanied on the pathways through the wildwoods of uncertainty. It is not that the softness of a kiss, the warmth of a hug, the fires of passion, or the solemnity of consolation are not elementary foundations of a home, but instead that they themselves do not ‘make’ a home. We cannot place that much responsibility on others, nor can we expect it of ourselves. It is beyond exhaustive to the human spirit to consider itself responsible for the domestic manifestation of a home for itself or others, instead, we are to complement that which may take on the definition of home in the moment, for those we love, to facilitate an augmented warmth to the home that we occupy. Our fellow travellers then, and more specifically their actions and interactions are less the ‘home’ and more the fire in the fireplace, the quilt on the bed, the soup in the pot, the water in the bath, the comfort in darkness and the orgasms in the mornings. We are inversely this to our others, being some part sage, guide, journeyman, fool, thief, lover, villain, magi, carpenter, mother, father, brother, sister, and so on ad Infinium. We are, in a word, infinite, in our potentiality for what we may facilitate in the homes of others, and this, this tragically infinite world of complex interrelations is not itself a pathway to the salvation of being found, but it is instead a maelstrom of potentialities, each with the ability to steer us closer to the path home, or to mislead us in treachery of the heart, the body or the mind in directions stretching out under the stars that spell a certain doom for us in one arena or another. And so we may consider the dualistic contradictory nature of our paths as they unfold in the clash of our state of being both giver and taker and any given moment to any given traveller on our path. We may, in a moment of abject destruction take on the role of the huddled mass in the rain-drenched doorway, wherein those tangential hearts to ours may become the warmth of the entryway extended outwards, in the next breath we may find ourselves being the sea wall between the oncoming surges and the most intimately loveable parts of those others we choose to know.
But this is not home.
This is a stopover, a momentary lapse in the journey, a place of rest, not a place of residing, be that physical space or metaphysical place. Those moments in life wherein our home briefly becomes those arms of another, we may fall into the illusory pattern of thinking that we have wandered far enough into the mysteries of existence that we may find ourselves on the crest of searching and at the breach of exploring, but this is an illusion itself. This is not to say that we may not be so boldly lucky to find our ‘home’ in a partner or close social connection by 25, and it is not to say that all coupling we do in this phase of life is one that should be cynically projected as toxic, problematic to our own journey or any other barrier to a more intimate self-internalization of movement through time, but it is imperative that we at the very least take a moment to understand the distinction in these relational pairings that step beyond the search for home. As I have said, those others with us, whom we may lean on in our darkest nights, and who we may in turn, lean upon, are fellow wanderers on our pathways through the night, and not the final destination. This is to say that should we have found serenity and safety in the love of others, we cannot stay there indefinitely. This itself is neither condemnation nor cynicism, but an invitation, an invitation to have the courage to continue on, to strive for that sense out there beyond the mists that itself more fully and completely situates itself in our boundaries as having truly been an element of what it means to be home.
Phase Two: Towards a Boundless Night Painted in Shades of Contradiction
“In restless dreams, I walked alone. Narrow streets of cobblestone, 'neath the halo of a streetlamp, I turned my collar to the cold and damp. When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light, that split the night, and touched the sound of silence.”
-A Poet and a One-Man Band (1964)
We seek out home on our wanderings through the mists of being lost, and from the winding lanes of Dreamland, we are led to a place in our own knowing of our being where we must drastically and desperately scream out into the darknesses of our lives to seek if only for a passing fanciful moment, a question: where am I meant to be?
The home we are searching for is the places and spaces we hope to occupy, where we may feel our hearts grow softly content in the security of familiarity and it is therefore critical in our expansive wandering ever-forward, that we do not falter in our recollection of this very critical point of desire in our existence: that need to feel some semblance of security in our knowing of ourselves. This is independent of physical and social space and instead finds itself playing out on the stages of our metaphysical internal realities. These spaces exist only to us, and only in the momentary flutterings of us in the moments that we can stop to acknowledge upon their passing. This is to say that we may know our self-imposed metaphysical sense of familiarity only insofar as we may opt to allow ourselves the chance to observe these passing moments. Time then becomes a criticality of our perceptual knowledge of what constitutes space and place and what distinguishes these spaces and places from those wandering outposts beyond the canopies of the wildwoods of our own uncertainty. This is to say that time, as we come to observe in its passing leads us to a point of meditative reflection not only on our temporal reality but those realities existing co-operatively in space and place in the same moments. It is there in the acknowledgement of time as it stands still in passing that we may come to recognize if only for that singular mortal moment a chance at guessing what our current consideration of home is in relation to place, space and time.
It is in this reverence for the power of space, place and time that we may come ever closer to not advancing on our journey from lost to found, but at least grounding two key elementary forms of this journey: its beginning and its end. Without these two terminal points on the spectrum between coming and going, we are unable to even stand still on our path, as the termination points of a journey, frustratingly, define what it means to be leaving, or arriving. In short, we cannot hope to know where we have come from, or where we are going without a sense of where we originate from, and it is therefore in the quest of growing from dreamer to lost wanderer, to someone who has somehow found themselves to not only define where it is we are going, but where we have come from in the hope of contrasting those darker points of origin from the sunny places out on the horizon between then and now.
“And when you ran to me
Your cheeks flushed with the night
We walked on frosted fields
of juniper and lamplight
I held your hand”
For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her
(1966)
Some time ago, in another exchange of transatlantic musings, my dear friend Adrian and I discussed the fabric of the nature of what we consider to be home. He had recently composed this piece of writing, which not only spurred the titling of this series, but in its compositional elements and the conversations swirling it, we came to the collective exploration of the nature of finding a home in this wild and insane world. At the time, I was on the precipice of a month in France and he had the glimmer of a chance at a homestead there as well. As providence would have it, neither of our experiences in France proved to be what we expected and again life found us across the Atlantic from one another, I with my Rocky Mountain arctic blasts and him in the glowing hills of the Portuguese springtime.
Our musings collided in an interesting piece of reflection for me now, as I recline back into routine and the eccentricities of that routine I am again reminded of the call from both of us, and one echoed by many others of our temporal cohort. This notion that the dream to home, to finding ourselves in this journey, the ends of our paths, culminates in the simple idea of buying some land somewhere, building a cottage, and facilitating a home there for us and others where creativity, sustainability, and a sense of quiet peace can emerge. We do not dream of the high-rise apartments of our forebears (or some of our peers yet to see the light), and instead, it is the silences of nowhere that call us as siren songs. The idea of a homestead somewhere in a peaceful glen away from the insanity of modernity. My daydreamt homestead lies in the quiet green forests of Lithuania, and his on the island of Mallorca. These echoes though are not ours alone, many if not all of the creative 20-somethings I have come to know in my experience have a similar desire to put down their own eccentric roots somewhere and stand at home with their toes in the moss.
Curiously for me, my physical home, both now and in childhood is often the place that many a dreamer comes to find themselves in their roots. It becomes a point of contention in some of my local musings the degree to which I despise the new influx of dreamers on their ways to their new homes. Partially this stems from the skyrocketing of cost of living under their gentrification (when in reality the local realtors and real estate agents who sell them their dreams are far more to blame than them), and because it is odd to me to see my home become something more than home for others who have yet to fully experience what it means to call this land home. Somewhere in my soul it does not bother me that Outside Magazine calls my little county road one of the best places for biking in the country, nor that scores of people flock up that road to ride bikes that cost more than my ageing Volkswagen or my 12x18 homestead on ‘world-class’ mountain biking trails. Where I think I lose myself in despair is not in seeing the $100k Mercedes Sprinter Vans decked out with Starlink satellite hookups parked for the entire summer in the meadows I used to walk in as a kid. I understand the allure of the digital nomad lifestyle to an extent, being that I am basically that although instead of slinging jargon in tech bro Zoom meetings, I sling critical thinking in classrooms. The latter pays far less, but at the end of the day I can sleep soundly not being the prophesized Miles Dyson of Terminator infamy.
I think where I feel the despair of searching for home in these smiling faces plastering my home over their Instagram is in knowing that I will never feel that sense of unbridled joy where I live because it has always been home. This is not to say that home now is somehow boring or less than pristine or any less beautiful than it always is (minus the sprinter vans), but to say that I will never experience that wonder of running here as my final escape. This has always been my refuge and at times, a place I have maybe not run from, but briskly striven out for a taste of the real world. My valley walls are quite adept in creating the safety of home, but they unfortunately can themselves compose a bubble around those of us that grow up here. I am fortunate to have broken out of the bubble in 2012 at the age of 18 to go to university, and from there even further to grad school first in Oregon, then on to the Great White North, but in every case I came home often as this has always been my grounding place. Rather than seeing the mountain towering over the valley in a magazine and dreaming of making this place home, I have always seen that mountain as the view from my front yard, and so I have not had the need to dream of it, where my imagination of it was and is always just the knowledge that rather than it being a sign of a new beginning, it is a marker of being home.
Here, far out of town in the shadows of the piñons in the soft sandy dirt that the sagebrush and Indian paintbrushes grows in, I feel a grounding to both my ancestral roots here in this valley as well as something more unknowable, in the grassy glen down the ancient deer path on the bank of the creek that flows through to feed into the ranching fields around us, there is a magic that pulls me deep into a sense of peace here. Something calming, but not in the commodified forest bathing way, something deeper in the roots of that which grounds me to myself. It’s the quiet I think, and the stillness, and the evidence all around me of other forms of life making this space their quiet refuge from the world of humanity around them too. I am not a master of this space, I am a visitor as vulnerable to the elements and predators as my counterparts making nests in the trees and bedding down at their trunks for the season. When I make the trek up the mountain to the shores of the lake that sits just below the trailhead for the ascent, I do so not as an outdoorsman seeking the trout that the Forest Service stock into the pond, nor the paddleboarding craze, nor the hiking. I go there to exist out of time. Down in the trees beyond the lake are the remnants of a cabin that my grandfather and his father and uncle would live in all summer as they grazed their cattle just below the treeline in the temperate beauty of the aspen forests. That is where I go to re-experience these moments out of time in my own history that I could never have remembered or experienced.
In moments like this I reflect on the curiosity of what has led me to be there on a Tuesday afternoon in September. I come from real cowboys, rough and tumble range folk with nicknames like “Sunshine” or “Noose” who had a history of saloon brawls, stellar horsemanship, a reputation for building the straightest and most level fences in the area (many of which are still standing), and for the rugged honesty that comes from a life on the frontiers of the American West. A great-something grandfather was the first frontier doctor of our town back when Queen Victoria was still around, and at his realization that the surgical responsibilities of the cow-town doctor were not to his tastes, he turned to the great wide open spaces of cattle rearing in the gem of nature that makes this place. My grandfather grew up the son of a certified cowboy and decided at some point after flying airplanes across the Alaskan tundra for the Air Force, that he had had enough of the smell and hassle of cows. He turned to logging our expansive forests as they were being ravaged by pine beetles and strove out to preserve these fragile ecosystems with selective and carefully professional forestry. My dad has worked in this field almost every day of his 60 years, where his earliest memories are sitting in bulldozer seats or log loader cabins helping his dad with the monumental task of taking care of where we live. The curiosity for me is that I eschewed all of my ancestral ties here for the strange reality of academia, sociology, philosophy, and whatever the hell it is I do these days. This is my grandmother’s influence I think. She made the long trek as a modern day pioneer from the stuffy private schools of New England (and the city of East Orange, New Jersey) to instead study geology and education at this little university in Boulder, Colorado (before it became a party centre of the front range). She landed up the river in Redstone, Colorado in a tiny pink house originally built by John Osgood’s mining company during the golden age of mining in Redstone. She worked as a waitress in Aspen’s prestigious Hotel Jerome (a once classy establishment now overrun by the upper-class establishment) before eventually becoming a teacher, public servant, educator, and wildly popular local politician in Pitkin County. She is most likely one of the very few real Aspen people who knew Hunter Thompson quite well and unlike the throngs of tangential acquaintances out of the woodwork, found him to be a deeply obnoxious neighbour in Woody Creek. When asked even today, she’ll roll her eyes and make a joke about the loud dogs, the constant gunshots and the infernal peacocks.
I think my sense of who I am, which lays the groundwork for my relationship to this place and my consideration of home in general is an amalgam of these tracts before. Some mixture of the rugged cowboy who is content to sit down in the door of my cabin as the lightning crashes around the valley and love where I am, part logger, content to strive out into the woods far away from any civilization and set up a log camp to make sure the generations ahead of me can also enjoy the peaceful serenity of walking through a lodgepole pine forest, and part pioneering academic with a keen interest in the social and political realities of the world. I have, to date, stayed out of local politics insofar as I have not sought office, but a certain local school board would argue that I have not strayed from the arenas of politics entirely.
This is what home means to me: a combination of the quiet spaces out among the hawks, deer, bobcats and mountain lions, towering mountain guardians, and all the essence of those ancestors of mine that created, through their own paths towards finding home, a sense of home for me here in the wilderness of my own private wild west.
Then why, do I experience this calling away to strive out and make my own home? I am not unhappy in my little one-room cabin surrounded by my books on the side of a mountain. I do not despair in rarely venturing to town for anything more than a trip to the grocery store. I do not feel lonely or isolated or that I am missing anything, and yet, the notion of home eludes me still. I think this is in the impossibility of what it means to define home. I feel at home with my dogs, around my grandparent’s wood stove, working on cars or logging machinery with my dad in the weekend sun, with my dog Denali as we wander together in aspen stands at 10,000 feet in the shadow of our mountain home, I feel at home with a good book in bed, in the arms of my partner on a snowy winter’s night, and at my keyboard. But I fear I do not feel at home in my own mind on many more occasions than not. This is not because (unlike the aforementioned digital nomads) I feel as if I am missing anything, nor that anything needs to be striven out and fought for. My dreams of home I think are more a sense of stability or privacy or sanctuary that exists in the minds of others near my age: we want to make ourselves something unique from where we came from, and we want to put the darker parts of our origins behind us and wander ever-forward into the wildwoods of uncertainty to find something that resembles that path not always taken that Frost was so vague about. We want to go our own ways to find that sensational feeling of being in a place that is ours. And that place is not just a physical space we own. I could, at the drop of a hat go and homestead a lonely acre of land in northern California that is deeded to my name on top of its own mountain overlooking the town of Alturas. I could make my own pioneering venture westward in a matter of months, but I have not. The square lot is itself beautiful, and someday I dream to host a writing retreat in those trees for my dearest creative friends. But I have neither drive nor desire to live there full-time. My mother has offered me a bedroom in her home at the point where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean, which I could easily also venture to as early as tomorrow. But that would not be home either (namely because I think my bones have had enough of the Pacific Northwest’s climate to last a lifetime). It places me again in this loop of questioning what it means to be home, and how that contradiction and the dissonance between the space of home and the place of home is something so maddeningly difficult to define.
Home is place, meaning the sociality of that which is around us, the safety and serenity that comes from existing in perpetual company with those that fill us with warmth and love. If this were the case, any hotel room I’ve shared with my partner is home. A small camping pod outside Glasgow is home, this cabin is home, my childhood home is still home, as are the trees dotting our property, as is my grandparent’s home. But still, in each space there is a call beyond the sociality of these physical locations and the people within them. I have had my own homes in my past. Two apartments in Corvallis, Oregon were “home” meaning that was where my books and bed were. A two-bedroom townhouse in Victoria, British Columbia was ‘home’ for four years but home in that case was a constant psychological battlefield where survival was at times a questionable future. Home has, at times, been the driver’s seat of my car where blasting across the interstate at odd hours in pure darkness has been some semblance of homecoming for me. I have felt home in the booth of my radio station with Jimi Hendrix blasting across the speakers at 1 in the morning, in much the same ways that the floor of my office in Canada was my home for almost the same four years the aforementioned townhouse was. I have conversely felt home in the words of some of my favourite novels. The Honourable Schoolboy in its complex weirdness as a spy novel has felt somehow akin to home for me at times as I exist with Jerry Westerby in his travels across Asia, just as I have felt at home with George Smiley in Smiley’s People or with Robert Langdon in Paris, or (perhaps more concerningly) with Hannibal Lecter in my rereading of Thomas Harris’ series of the infamous psychiatrist with a discerning taste every couple of years. Sometimes I feel home in some of the films I count among my favourites (Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, The French Dispatch, and The Darjeeling Limited among them) where in the rewatching experiences of these films, I can experience a sense of familiar grounding in time and space. This is the joy of literature and film, that we can re-experience our favourites in various spaces in our own passages of time and find ourselves anew and revisiting nostalgic moments at the same time. When I was in my undergraduate degree, in the first three years I lived entirely alone in a singular dormitory on campus. I watched a lot of films there. On the occasions my dad would make the trek over the mountains to where I went to school, we would invariably venture to a Target or Walmart and in addition to groceries, I would often pick up a Blu-ray of a film I had seen and enjoyed, or one that I had wanted to. I also had the new-fangled technology of Netflix through a sleek R2-D2 themed XBOX 360 and so my time between writing in my journals and doing school work, I consumed a lot of good media. Early in our childhoods, my brother and I took up the drug of audiobooks and at first, we would indulge every night with Harry Potter books on cassette tapes (often fighting over who would get up and flip the tape to the next side or change to the next cassette). We graduated shortly to another new technology: Audible. Suddenly, on a monthly basis, a new world of fiction would come to our ears in the night. Somehow, we landed on Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons as some of our nighttime listening and still to this day, we can almost directly recite the audiobooks of each story to one another at the drop of a hat. I do not know what spirit possessed us in our early teen years to fall asleep to fantastical stories of conspiracies, Catholicism and murder, but the more things change for humanity, the more they stay the same, it seems. Ender’s Game and the subsequent Shadow Series of Orson Scott Card captured our imaginations as well, and so in those texts, I find myself called home, not to a place, but to a moment in time.
This recollection then leads us to a curious discovery.
Home, it seems, can be a place existent in memory, and then we may question at that moment the nature of what space and place in memory truly means. The Ego Memorium or the past-self, this version of ourselves existing beyond the waves of conscious experience somewhere in the mists of what has happened (or at the very least, what we assume to have happened) becomes both a special place and a key to the puzzle of this very terribly long and incoherent meditation. It is not a physicality of space-defining home that we run from, the first steps of our journey into being lost do not come from the physical geographic locales we are raised from. No, instead this exodus, this quest for home comes from those spaces and places we occupied in the historicity of our lives. This is the maddening contradiction in all of its shame: that home itself as we define it casually does not push us to run away, the walls and windows are themselves only neutral observers in our passing through memory beneath and within them. No, instead it is the sociality of memory that places a drive in our feet to set out into the great unknowns of the future to find what we feel we have lost, and in this perception of having lost something, we unfortunately start down the path of losing ourselves.
What is the something that it is that we lose? It is unfortunately a common refrain across angsty Instagram captions and indie movies that we are searching for this unnamed something that we have lost somewhere in the journey between then and now, and so we must question the nature of this something in our quest to understand what it means to ultimately be found along this path. But losing something, searching for something is not being lost. It is a functional component of the state of being lost, but it is not the reality of being lost itself. Home is a thing to some, and it is in the framing of home as a thing to be found, rather than a sociality to embody, a place of spaces, that is why we feel so compelled away from the nature of feeling found in our loss of self. It is in conceptualizing our journeys forward as pathways towards the tangible that we unconsciously contribute to a sense of loss of self in and of itself. There is something dark in the conceptualization of being lost on the slow decline from 25 as a need to find through acquisition. It is often in this misguided path that we limit ourselves to guessing whether or not we can add things to our being in order to placate the sense of being lost. In reality, I think, this process is more a compounding of loss of things that ultimately leads to being found somewhere along the roads under our feet. That is, what may we lose in order to find ourselves? Not asceticism, but a cautious letting go. We need not revert to the hermit’s existence to find ourselves unless the eight-fold path is a path we opt to follow. But lacking the philosophy of the Middle Way, we may articulate a philosophy of the lost for and of ourselves.
Phase Three: A Philosophy of the Lost
“Strangers waitin'
Up and down the boulevard
Their shadows searchin' in the night
Streetlights, people
Livin' just to find emotion
Hidin', somewhere in the night”
-Journey via Steve Perry (1981)
An Invitation to the Notion
If there is a point to this collection of essays beyond the simple musings between two friends barreling down the Scottish highlands in an old Fiat Panda, reminiscing about Glastonbury and Reading, it is in the attempt to draw a line in the dark towards an ultimate proposition for a philosophy of the lost. Readers and indeed many friends would say to me simply that this is just existentialism for Oasis fans. To this I evoke a comment from my doctoral advisor on a particularly weird section of my dissertation: “I do not understand why you did this, but don’t listen to me about that.” In that spirit and in respectful deference to the spirits of Kierkegaard, Camus, Wittgenstein for posterity, and to a lesser extent, Jean-Paul, I propose the following as neither an existentialism for the lost nor as a metaphysic for what cannot be found.
To theorize a philosophy of the lost it is difficult to not return to my metaphorical forest of the lost, and to the pathways winding through the wilds of uncertainty. Unknowing and uncertainty are key components of understanding the nature of being lost, the streets of Dreamland too guide us when we are asleep in the glens between valleys in the wooded vale. However, a philosophy of the lost is not an ontology of what it means to be lost, instead it is for the lost themselves. This philosophy of the lost is, through an accidental and unplanned stroke of thought at this late early hour one of the first of the two prayers for the lost. Even in this case, it evokes the opposite meaning of a prayer, where we traditionally may conceive of a prayer as a message sent out in moments of tragedy, desperation or in quiet meditation. Ultimately, prayer is a terminal communique where we may vaguely expect an answer with the knowledge (at least in the praying faiths) that this answer can be either immediate, noticeable and prophetically miraculous, or vague and extrapolated out into the currents of mystery. In the sense of this collection of works though, we are now faced with the need to realign our notion of prayer and to do so in a way that radically redefines the experiential act of prayer from an outgoing transmission to an incoming letter in a bottle. Maybe, somewhere there is not a need for this reframing where instead we may just position ourselves as the answerer of prayers to the lost, and while I appreciate the elegance of this solution, I do not feel I possess such divinity to say that I am the one the lost pray to. We must then ground the existence of prayer in a philosophical sense thusly: a prayer is an offering of a lantern in the din of the misty marshes of our journey from lost to found. There is an implication in this definition that the one offering the lantern is somehow unlost and we must be careful to not assume this. In order to compose a philosophy for the lost there too must be an understanding that any such ontology is also conveyed from one who is lost. That is to say that this proposed philosophical notion is less a map through the wildwoods of uncertainty, and much more a proverbial breadcrumb left by a traveller perhaps only a few steps ahead. It is then not an ultimate or universal signpost to becoming found, but instead, something of a note scrawled on some carelessly forgotten paper swirling in the steam on the streets of Dreamland left in the hope that other visitors to that damned and doomed city of dreamscapes may chance upon it and find its inscription with the hope that perhaps a small blink of light may unfurl upon the paths we all walk. It is not a philosophy of being, or of non-being, but a point of questioning that inky in-between of each, where it may exist adjacent to the void of angst that we must leap over in faith.
Whereupon a Premise We May Go
Those of us who are lost are compounding contradictions in three movements. First and foremost, we are lost, in spatial, temporal, social, and metaphysical terms. Our state of being is one of being lost. Second, we dream. We compose in our waking moments realities, memories, and futures that lend to our definitions of our spatial and temporal sense of loss of self, and we invoke these dreams in the abandoned yet inhabited streets of Dreamland. We see our futures as definitive, if dissonant aspirations. Third, we have left all follies of home behind us, having the sense that we are missing something from where we came and that we are travelling towards that which we need. We are creatures outside of the boundaries of those inconvenient trappings of life and reality that ground us in places of uncertainty, contrarians to the notion of contentment and dreamers of the wild idea that something better exists outside of our present reality. We are those in a self-imposed exile of self, beyond the waves of conventionality, and this existence is for us, a source of an unknowable existential angst. It is our conviction to the path forward that entices us to a space of recognition that we are lost, and in this linear movement through time, outside of time, we are teased with the places we may end up and the feelings that there, somewhere in the mists, we may find ourselves again.
To the lost we may offer the first of two prayers: a philosophy for the lost. The premise of this is quite simple, while the pragmatic body of it is more complex than words may be able to fully endear it to our minds. This prayer being offered not as a call for serenity and safety, but as an answer to the wordless prayers of those fellow wanders on the mossy paths ahead. It is our responsibility in the offering of this prayer to our fellows along the lost roads to attempt to the best of our abilities to place down in the distance a glowing candle of safe haven in the long and winding journey.
In the curious nature of being lost, being that existence is now torn between non-being and being, and between three coexisting temporalities, such a philosophy must itself be fragmented across time, space, being, and non-being. Where, in this impasse of impossible locales does such a line of inquiry stand? It stands in the most terrifying of places we may occupy. Neither in what is real, or non-real, neither in reality or dreams, nor past, present or future. It is outside of what we may consider to be rational, sane, or even plausibly real.
In order to offer down this lantern we must embrace a third space of being: anti-being. In classical existentialism, there is a distinction between being and nothingness, Sartre’s famous duality, where that which is experienced here and now is done so freely, while what exists outside of these actions is an infinite event horizon of nothing, a total and complete vacuum of external reality, where nothing serves as the cold reality of invalidation of our actions in our conscious movement through sentience. Non-being lies in this void as well, albeit in different spaces. Non-being is the entire history of existence prior to our awareness of ours, and the infinity of non-existence following the cessation of our ability to continually experience more. It is the spaces buffering the brief time in which we are alive, sentient, active and agentic. It is the pre-birth nonexistence and the post-death nonbeing. Where in each expanse we carry some token sociality in some way or another in proportional relativity to our times of birth and death. Prior to our birth, from inception to conception, through gestation and eventual birth we are a thought placed over a physicality existing in absentia. Our parents are aware of our existence then, and so we enter into the sociality of our reality first as a conceived formative element of imagination. The choosing of our name, the imagined futurity of our existence across all affective spectrums, the most innocent of all imaginings, speculation as to who we will eventually be once our form manifests into materiality from the world of forms. Post-death, we linger on in social interactions, in memoriam in the lives, memories, experiences and subsequent interactions by those that knew us. If we die old, these interactions may spread very far, should the time between our nonbeing times be shorter than typical, we will have less such memorial interactions. We are beings that exist socially prior to, and after our lives expand beyond infancy and conception, not in a biological sense, but in a sense of living in a fractured non-existent sense of either imagined or remembered sociality. In this sense, non-being and non-existence have a form to them, they have substance, however limited and however abstracted, there is a sense of socialized materiality to our realities when we ourselves are not a part of it.
So then where, in a continuum between this voided nonbeing and the exigency of lived social and metaphysical realities do we define the anti of being? The antithesis of being is not nonbeing, both are contingent upon each other and therefore cannot exist antithetically to one another. We cannot experience nonbeing prior to birth or after death without having experienced either. There is a material requirement for our entrance into the state of being in any capacity. It is therefore necessary for a third space, this third, alternate, nonexistent existence, the anti-reality. It is not enough to not exist as a means of defining where and when a philosophy of the lost may exist, instead, it is a recognition of a critical point of philosophical inquiry: that being lost, as a functional state of being that is itself being, nonbeing and atemporal, well outside the realms of material actuality cannot in any capacity be considered in an exploratory sense if the assumption is made that being and existence are binary systems of reality. The tertiary anti of life, of being, of existence is then where loss is felt, it is the globe upon which our forests of wandering are constructed, the plane outside the being/nonbeing dichotomy that facilitates our understanding and defining of ourselves as lost as being the in-between realizing we are neither home nor happy, and the pathways out into oblivion that may quell that deconstructing of self in the social as we round 25.
Coming to Know the Anti-Being and the Nature of Anti-Reality
In conceiving of the antithesis to reality and being, we may be inclined to attempt to imagine nonbeing first as a place to begin our descent into anti-reality. We are destined to find ourselves losing ourselves in this endeavour. There is no reliable way to effectively situate ourselves in experiential nonbeing, what we have in this regard is memories and imaginings, which are, quite frustratingly, also the hallmarks of being lost. So should we attempt to offer a philosophy for the lost from the lost, we cannot reliably situate ourselves well enough to reflect on the very nature we are attempting to deconstruct. While we cannot posit a philosophy of the lost from a place of unloss either, there exists only one place that we may define as a starting line for this investigation. This place is the anti-reality, the anti-being. Both metaphysical concepts so wildly unimaginable that to attempt to do so blind will compound our loss of self beyond the capacity of what it means to consider and conceptualize the very fabric of our own sentience. Instead, there is a softer, albeit less flexible place to begin. If our reality in materiality is filtered and interpreted through the lens of the social, and then if through materiality, into immateriality the social also in a reflective feedback loop provides us a sensation of social realness to our internal and external social realities, it is there that we may begin. The social, the ebbing and flowing river of interactive symbolism that winds through every singular moment of our being is the agentic activity from which our entire ontological knowledge of the world stems. It is the fabric of our truths and the material within which these truths are melded, created, destroyed and enjoyed. To the lost, the social is a maelstrom of imagined futures, memories of that which we are missing, and a presence of non-direction in our being and conceptualization of self. That is to say, there is no absence of the social. Even too, in our non-being pre and post-death, there is a sociality to our being. We are remembered, our futures are imagined for us. Sociality is in this sense at its most fundamental core notion, the existence of our existence in the perception of the others. To live in the minds of the others is to possess some modicum of sociality, and so, in this possession of sociality, we are granted some symbolic concrete form of being in ourselves, even if that self is long dead, or unformed. It is in this curiosity of being and nonbeing at the confluence of our existence socially within another’s reality that we may find the first unbeaten path of anti-sociality. Anti-sociality is not the classical sensationalized form of the term reflective of a disdain for existing socially, instead, the anti of social existence is in the disconnect between existing in the minds of others, and not yet or no longer in the minds of ourselves.
To seek the anti-sociality in life is difficult, we cannot return to our nonbeing prior to birth as our existence and birth themselves negate that potentiality, and nor can we hope to sit in a position of introspective investigation should we find ourselves on the other side of the veil of death. We must then compose a plane of philosophical reality, somewhere in our nebulous movements through the wildwoods of uncertainty to place a sturdy enough footing beneath us to question the nature of that wherein we do not exist and never have. Dreamland may be a place of anti-sociality, but the nature of its streets being shared, but never visited together negate that potential as well. Our sleeping dreams may be places we do not exist in the social of others if only for the fact that we construe the sociality of others in the composition of our subconscious dreamstates. So where, in our expanse of existence, may we find that space wherein we are not perceptually existent in the minds and social realities of others?
A problem with this pathway that keen observers will see is that we frustratingly already exist socially to others by the very nature of social life and existing reality now. We are perceived, and we do leave imprints of our symbolic natures of sociality in our worlds and we may never be able to fully exist again in the anti-social. However, there are moments we may seek to exploit to exist in the antithesis of the social if only for a limited span of time as we live our lives. What we must then do, in the task of composing this prayer for the lost is to find a means of approximating ourselves to the antithesis of the social in an imagined or hypothetical sense, and from there, through an empathetic openness to the nature of that which defines us as social, we may extrapolate further into anti-being, and anti-reality. Only from that space may we be able to even begin to compose our philosophy for the lost.
Entering the Anti-Social
“I wander not for lust, but for the loss that comes from finding what to lose.”
To begin the descent into anti-being, via the channel of the anti-social a core element of the nature of being lost is required to first lose ourselves in the antithesis of being. Social interaction, the foundation of our construction of reality takes place in several dimensions at once. Internally, on the metaphysical scale, interactions through the hallowed performances of dramaturgy, in our backstages at the recesses of our performance of self situate a natural state of being. Through this, to the materiality of the others, the front stage, the limelights whose glow reflects upon us in our performances of self outwards to the others, wherein our innermost intentionality and identity manifest forwards in a pantomime of sociality. This is the external, the real, the material, the tangible. Our performances cross the barrier between that which is physically real and that which is metaphysically real, and in this transcendence of the barrier, we create reality that is itself tangible effectively as much as it is physically. In the externalization of the interior, in the blending of the material and immaterial, our sense of sociality is grounded in the performance, the effort, the staging, the reception. These represent the first two-dimensional planes of our existence, where the third and perhaps more distinctively complex lies somewhere in the mists beyond both the immaterial and the material. Our third realm of existence is in the temporality of self, or in social time.
Social time being, in a singular instance, the past that shapes our performances, the present that sees them, and the futures they bring forth. In this sense, the self, this fluid embodiment of all that is social is traditionally considered to tread water in all three oceans of time at once. Adapting to the lessons of the past, the changes of the moment, and either the optimism or the angst of the future. This assumption is not complete. We do not embody a singular self that moves freely from each. To imply such a notion would imply the lack of sociality in the composition of the self itself. If we can simply exist in the past, present, and future all at once, then where indeed is the interactional reality of that performance of self? We cannot conceive of the self without interaction, without the exchange of symbolic meaning from moment to moment, and so there must be some other mechanism at play in our conceiving of ourselves. We are not then a self divided, but instead a collective of interactions across three distinct areas of social time. Our past, our past-self, the memories and histories of our own being are not a bank of lessons to draw from, they are memories held by some element of who we are and as such, a recollection of memory, a remembering of past experience, a judgment of such experience, these are not actions undertaken in the present moment, recall is not a mechanical function of our state of being. Instead, there exists another version of us that exists only in the past, only in our history. A self of the past that is in all regards, the self that we once were, but also an agentically autonomous self that is wholly divested from who we are in the present moment. In a word, the ego memoriam. The memory of who we were, which in our cordial consultations with them provide us insights into how we may pass into the next moments and how we may process those in the very fleeting instances of continually passing time. Our present self is who we consider to be us and it is this interactive body that liaises with the ego memoriam to situate themselves in a position to grapple with the crossroads of what lies in the future of our being, the grand abstraction of that which has yet to occur. Interaction then, within ourselves, with an audience, and with an unknown future are all distinctly divergent points of existence in social time. We are, in a sense, a body of three at any given moment. The present self preparing to execute a performance of self, the ego memoriam providing sharp and often wildly biased recollected histories of our own past presents, and then this shadowy futurity of what may come to bear from our interactive tryst in the murk of our own minds. In this, it is critical that we note only the most important factor in our quest for the underlands of antithetical being: social time is fractured into three basic statutes of being, past, present, and future.
Simply recognizing the existence of social time is not enough to fall into anti-sociality. There exist two other considerations we must face. First, social time, like physical time, is relativistic. Not in the sense of faster-than-light travel, where lonely astronauts on a starship screaming across the cosmos near or at the speed of light experience a slower passage of time than their comrades planetside, but in the sense that social time is not rooted to any universal or cosmological constant in any known universe. A tree’s time is not an infant’s time, which is not a stone’s time, which is not a teen’s time and so on. At all levels of sentience and all levels of existence, even beyond or beneath sentience, there is a variation of infinite magnitude in the experiential nature of social time. A tree to the human grows over a lifetime. Humanity, to the trees have blinked into existence in a relativistic decade. The parent watches their child grow and remarks on the speed at which time is passing, while the child wishes to be grown already. Our faithful dogs watch us with loving eyes from under greying eyelashes as for an eternity of their lives we have not changed, but to us, ten short years cannot last long enough. Social time is infinitely relative. There is a chaos in its infinity, where we cannot hope to maintain our security in the solidity of time if it is relative to such a varying an infinite degree. When we cannot reconcile how the canyon experiences millennia, with our short 80 years, when some of our 24 hours per day slip by without notice, while others drag us on for years in themselves, we cannot hope to maintain sanity at the attempt to collate all of this relativity into one understandable pattern of recognition.
And so, what do we do for deliverance from this madness?
We collectively consent to a generalized understanding of social time. It is in our collective consent to allow the existence of social temporality, that we allow ourselves a space to save the frames of our mind that could not otherwise survive this knowledge. We tell ourselves and each other that social time is linear, fixed, and universal. The past is something that happened prior to the present in a linear space, and the future happens after the present. This is easy for us to handle in our daily existence. Time becomes something we may rely upon. Because of this collective consent, we may then deduce that active participation in the act of being in time is also something that requires a consent in both the held notion of social temporality and in the collective itself. We therefore exist as a means of consenting to the nature of existence itself in the collectively held assumptions of social time as a temporal flux of reality. Therefore, it can be further extrapolated that existence in the social begs consent of the self into the consensual agreement of the collective. If then, it exists that we are required to consent in the passage of time to allow for a social reality to exist, then there is the inverted notion that we must also actively consent to the antithesis of anti-being, meaning that in the composition of our being by virtue of collective consent in existence, we are actively disengaged with the agreeability of existence in the anti-reality of anti-being. Social time consent allows for the existence of nonbeing, where nonbeing is a requisite for the contrasting existential guarantee of being, and in this duality, there becomes a modality by which we may then consent to the antithesis, to anti-being.
If we take social time as relativistic and linear, we may then also reason that in our consent to these points, our consent extends further to the antithetical findings that anti-being possesses an anti-time in terms of social reality. If the anti-social is indeed the quantum duality of that which we characterize as reality, then it must have directly inverse qualities of realistic being. This is to say that to visualize anti-being we may retract and invert the notions that give being a sense of reality. Therefore, anti-being possesses a non-relativistic social time, where past, present, and future exist on a plane of continuity that is universally simultaneous, where the blending of past, present, and future selves cannot exist as separate, but instead as a singular relativistic trans-temporal being, experiencing our past, present and future at the singular instance of being. Being cannot be counted in a singular instance as it is always experiencing these fractures. By this we land at the conclusion that social time in the anti-reality is neither relativistic, nor existent at all. A social time of the anti-social is existence outside of time. Timelessness in anti-being then requires a suspension of the social boundaries of time itself, which extends the challenge in composing a philosophy for the lost that we must do so in this timeless vacuum of anti-being. Where then can we hope to occupy a sense of timelessness close to the nature of the anti-social?
In our search for the anti-time, we cannot look to classical notions of ‘timelessness’ in terms of nostalgia or historicity, instead, we must attempt to imagine a realm where time and temporality cease to exist as threads holding our fabric of reality together. It is then the moments out of time that compel an understanding of the empathy of anti-being. From places beyond the reaches of social time, we are able then to articulate our best approximation of what the anti-reality may be.
Poetically, the places that hold the most of this anti-time are places already known to the lost, places that have been ‘forgotten’ by time, and abandoned spaces dripping with liminality and neglect. These places are often dark and possess a tinge of the horrors previously wrought within them. It is here that we experience the unease, the sickness of anti-being in a minuscule percentage of concentration. The dread in our hearts in an abandoned place, the cold seemingly on our breath as we exhale, the sense of expansive emptiness and isolation at the precipice of a destroyed building, or an abandoned shopping mall, this is our visceral reaction to the anti-reality. It is not a glowing or welcoming space, it is a dark inverse of our day-to-day being. Much in the same way quantum particles of matter and antimatter annihilate one another upon contact, we feel our sociality and anti-sociality annihilate in the breaths between shivers in our awestruck recoiling from these spaces. It is the ghosts of social time haunting these spaces of liminality that reach out to us and offer the smallest taste of what it means to exist out of time. In short, the places where we feel our hearts tell us we ought not be are the places we most strongly may interpret the antithesis of reality and being, as existing and being in these spaces presents us with the undeniably primal realization that our presence is neither allowed nor welcome. We, being social and being real do not belong in these conduits of the anti and we know this on some deep evolutionary level.
Therefore, to enter the anti-social we must strive to compose an encapsulation of liminality in our frames of mind and through these reflections in dark glasses find ourselves enough of an anchor in the uncanny uncertainty of space we are not to occupy so that we may light the lamp for those wanderers just out of sight behind us on the path. Be that us visualizing a crumbling cathedral, an abandoned asylum, or a never-ending hallway, this is where we are required to go in our minds in order to even begin to taste the anti-reality.
From the Anti-Social to Anti-Being via Daily Escapes into the Blue
Mechanically it is wildly inefficient to require one to venture to places of such danger and dread simply for the composition of a philosophy for the lost, we may romanticize the urban exploration fad, but it is not required for the journeys we are taking. If an existence out of time leads to an existence out of reality, there are far safer ways to facilitate these experiences than mandating that those that are lost find those abandoned spheres of liminality. In order to facilitate this anti-reality, we must then conceptualize otherworldly, grounded spaces that are out of time. This task is not easy on the part of the theorist as we have already established that reality and being are collective consensual relationships and interactional realities with a linear passage of social and physical time. We then have to break the consensus of our collectivity in order to descend into an out-of-time experience. To do so means that we cannot enter anti-being or the anti-social in the presence of others, in other words, our sense of being lost is ours to walk alone. Companions, for their benefit and ours cannot follow us off of the beaten path in the wildwoods of uncertainty into the vale of anti-being. We must descend alone.
How then do we find a place out of time in our social experience of linear relativistic social temporality? Where is the anti-social?
To begin we may establish two metaphysical points of grounding in our search for the anti-social: first, that all individuals of a social nature comprising humanity are themselves, per Agnes Heller, particular (1984), meaning we each possess in our own winding and wandering through the labyrinths of life our own particularities to our very nature, meaning that in our capacity to hold a conscious awareness of our existence, we invariably possess a uniqueness to our own spirits. In a contradiction to Heller, we can discard the notion that consciousness is a purely human reality as she presents and instead draw on Haraway (2016) and instead assert a proposed kinship with the string figures of our natural environment. That is to say that our first grounding position of the anti-social is that we are both unique in our individual experience of isolated loss of self, and that in our isolation we are kin not to others on the paths around us, but to the moss, the trees, the path itself. We have within our conscious reality a nature to respond to, and see ourselves composed of nature itself. This is again, not the trend of forest bathing, but instead a deeper connection of sociality to that which is natural around us, an affinity for the stones in the path, the patterns of the bark of the trees overhead, and a reverence to a specific witchcraft of the solitary paths we wander. We must then begin our descent in the grounded space of the natural world. To find the spaces out of time we must exist in the temporal relativity of times that pass at different speeds to that which governs our daily reality. That is, we must first consent to breaking the compact of sociality with linear time and instead place ourselves into the passage of a time that is itself asocial. We do this by reconciling our particularity of the nature of our individuality with the infinity of complex natural social relationships that we may experience when we place ourselves in a position to commune with and make kin with the string figures of ecological entanglement.
This kinship is not itself the dissolution of the boundaries of collective consent to social temporality, instead it is simply the means by which we may find our setting for doing so. We cannot find this space to exist the temporality of the social if we are in a physical and social space that is ideally conducive to the consensual existence in social time. Meaning, we cannot disconnect from social time if our surroundings are themselves inter-connected to social time. This reflects a need then for a disconnection from that which binds us to others in a social sense. We do not ourselves need to venture to that idyllic naturescape in order to do this, instead we must simply allow ourselves existence in a place that allows for the artificial suspension of social interaction. This is not entirely possible, but with effort we may allow ourselves closer to the ideal positionality. That is, in a total disconnection from the digital existence, the constraints of our responsibilities, our obligations and connections. Crucial observers may draw parallels herein to the Buddhist practice of meditation, with the goal of total disconnection with desire and suffering in the search for nirvana. If that is the process by which readers may be able to conceptualize this practice, then that is entirely a valid approach, but one I will refrain from postulating here. Not to say that meditation of the Buddhist tradition is not a means by which we may achieve this disconnection, but we need not rely on the spiritual overtones, nor the need to concern ourselves with the practice’s inherent grappling with mortality, instead a methodology of kinship in order to facilitate our descent needs to place the question of mortality outside of the needs of our exercise of social obligation. Ideally, an escape to nature is our best option for this disentanglement, to truly exist with the roots and the moss and the grass is where our minds are freest to do this excision, but we may do it in the very solitary social space of our own beds under the gaze of the moon. We can make kin with the string figures of our surroundings in this space, disentangled from digitality, and prior to our descent to the antithesis of being. In our darkness we are placed next to the same social temporal relativity that we may experience in the wooded thicket. In the night, time does not flow as it does in the day. The passing of every breeze is itself removed from our consideration, as are the follies of the existence of the others. When the world sleeps, time is suspended. In the same way that the trees see a passage of time entirely unknowable to us, the night, in our isolated solitude bears a passage of time we cannot comprehend. Not that the passage of time is unknowable, we are aware of this passage of time, and so, again, it is not ideal. But if we are able to make kin with the night, to see ourselves as wholly engulfed in the spread of darkness in the absence of light, both in physicality, and in the dimming of those social currents that demand us, we may place ourselves into a new thread of being where the social suspends itself in the hours of darkness we may inhabit.
It is here, in the nocturnal spaces, when humanity is collectively asleep, that we may position ourselves in the space needed to actively reject the consensual existence in that collectivity. The night of existence is the space in our being where these foundations of disentanglement may become apparent. A secluded forest at midday is ideal, but not accessible for everyone, and so, we may retreat then to our beds in the night to fully and most completely dissociate from the whims of the social around us. This is why the search for home is so crucial to the lost, because even in order to consider a place to disentangle we must have that space be one that freely presents that notion, and when we are in the throes of leaving home to find what we seek, and subsequently seeking out that which is truly home, we exist in the ether between, where a bed at night may be some lonely airport floor, a tent in the cork tree woods, or a bench in the empty streets. We do not require a home to disentangle fully from the social, nor do we, the lost have the luxury always of having found that space, but what we can do very, very simply to situate ourselves in a space to allow the antithesis of reality to enter is to find ourselves alone in the night, somewhere.
Once we have established our nocturnality, in a space as secluded and as close to the streets of Dreamland that we may muster, we are prepared then for the second metaphysical grounding of inviting the anti-reality. In our darkness we must draw on the singular place in human social existence that exists outside of time and temporality.
From Ernst Bloch, the Principle of Hope, Volume One (1959):
We Start Out Empty
I Move. From early on we are searching. All we do is crave, cry out. Do not have what we want.
Much Tastes of More
But we also learn to wait. Because what a child wishes seldom comes in time. We even wait for wishing itself, until it becomes clearer. A child grasps at everything to find out what it means. Tosses everything aside again, is restlessly curious and does not know what about. But already here is the freshness, the otherness lives, of which we dream. Boys destroy what they are given, they search for more, unpack the box. Nobody could name it or has ever received it, so what is ours slips away, is not yet here.
Daily Into the Blue
Later we reach out more confidently. Wish ourselves where things are more clearly. The child wants to be a bus conductor or a confectioner. Seeks long journeys, far away, cake every day. That seems like real living.
With animals too we dream we are big. With small ones especially, they are less frightening, they run into our hands. Or can be caught in nets; distant wishing becomes active in this way. The confectioner turns into a hunter, in a strangely filled outdoors. Green and blue runs the lizard, something elusively colorful flies as a butterfly. Even the stones are alive, but do not run away, we can play with them, they join in, ‘I want everything to be like that’ said a child, meaning the marble which rolled away but then waited for the child. Play is transformation though within what is safe and returns. As he wishes, play changes, the child himself, his friends, all his things into strangely familiar stock, the floor of the playroom itself becomes a forest full of wild animals or a lake on which every chair is a boat. But fear breaks out if what we are used to runs too far away, or if it does not smoothly slip back into its former aspect. ‘Look, the button is a witch’, creamed a child in play and then would not touch the button even later on. It had become no more than this child had wished it to be, but it had stayed that way too long. The homely den must never venture too far into the cream. It must remain a place the lizard has not yet violated, the butterfly not yet threatened. From here what we like doing best is playing and collecting window-views, deep and brief glimpses into otherness. The colorful animal is itself a colorful window, behind which the wished-for distance lies. Soon it is no different than a stamp, which tells of foreign countries. It is like the shell in which the sea roars when we hold it close enough to our ears. The boy sallies forth, collects from everywhere what is sent his way. This may also bear witness to the things the boy must go to bed too early to see. When he is gazing at a colored stone many of those things germinate which he later wishes for himself.
Hiding-Place and Beautiful Foreign Lands
By ourselves
Here too the fun of being invisible ourselves. We seek out a corner, it protects and conceals. It feels good in a narrow space, but we know can do what we want there. A woman relates, ‘I wished I could be under the cupboard; I wanted to live there and play with the dog.’ A man relates, ‘As boys we built ourselves a platform between the branches which could not be seen from below. When we were sitting up there, when we pulled up the ladder and cut ourselves off completely from the ground, then we felt perfectly happy.’ Our own room is prefigured here, the free life that is coming.
Ernst Bloch, in his triumvirate masterwork The Principle of Hope (1959) presents us these prelatures of wishing in the introduction to the first volume. They chronicle the growth of the human self from Freud’s Id through a development of not only delaying of gratification but the capacity for the consummate construction of those worlds and lands that exist in only our minds. This is where we may, in our nocturnality finally find a means of entering the liminality of the antithesis of social being.
I may now confess to the dearest of readers that this realization did not dawn upon me for over two years after first reading the above passages. I did not realize that the breakthrough answer to the seemingly impossible descent into antithetical being was present in the purest form of human being. And further, I did not realize until embarking upon this particular foray on the concept of hope, that the breakthrough I experienced was itself reflected in my reading of Bloch.
This is to say, my breakthrough did not come nestled in bed with one of these philosophical tomes. Instead, quite innocently, it began as a manically suggested coffee shop date late in the summer of 2023. In a night of wandering through my writings in isolation, while my partner slept nearby, I realized that in order to theorize the anti-being, I had to break my isolated and unproductive patterns. So, when we were both conscious I said somewhat too forcefully: “I have a project for us today, we are going to go to town, buy coffee at Bonfire, and then go sit in the park for a bit, because we need to discover how to exist outside of existence.” Being a perpetual muse to my insane musings, this unhinged request in the din of waking was not only met with enthusiasm but determination. In the pavilion at the park, I expounded on this problem, of this impossibility. How might we even hope to conceptualize something that by its very definition cannot be defined? As I poured over my ragged decoupaged notebook of prewriting mania and sipped the horrifically burnt and bitter espresso, it continued to elude me. I interrogated my partner on quantum physics, entanglement, and multiverses, and all of the expertise I could glean from my theoretical physicist muse. Being that I am not an empirical person, and further compounded by my inability to even articulate this end-destination of our journey, nothing continued to allow for a breakthrough. The stimulants of the espresso and nicotine were waning into the soul-crushing crash, coupled with a lack of sleep and a building hunger in my stomach, I was losing the edge to this investigation and falling prey to the imposter syndrome that comes from a stimulant crash on zero sleep. While I was absentmindedly tearing out two clippings from the day’s Aspen Times for my book, they offered some hope:
“Today, it’s not what you know or who you know, it’s how you present the knowledge. Less is more. Quiet confidence will convey a sense of power that helps people settle in and get down to work”
-Gemini (My) Horoscope
“Dead? Cash Paid for many vehicles, incl. wrecks”
-Towing company advertisement in the classifieds section
The profundity of these words escaped me then, at that moment they were words and nothing else. Looking back, seeing they had preceded this breakthrough, they seem divined from somewhere in the universe.
The breakthrough I arrived at there in the park, which I will lovingly dub the Sopris Park Breakthrough was itself spurred not by astrological prophecy, nor the clipart grim reaper in the advert. Instead, it came from the very, very loud sound of children playing at the nearby playground, specifically the shrill and sudden demands of their caretakers telling them that their playtime was over. For a moment I reflected on the reality that this must have just been personal because there I was, a tall bearded man hunched over a notebook sitting in the middle of the park. If I ever was one to have children, I myself would probably have behaved the same way, especially if I knew the man in the pavilion was a philosopher. (Note: per the words of the caregivers, the reason for the departure is that they had lost track of time and were late to a picnic with the children’s grandmother). But it was in this chaos that the breakthrough came. It was in watching these children having built an entire world of non-reality in the steel and gravel of the playground, and in the curiosity of watching the walls and pillars of that world falling to the wayside of actuality in a moment’s breath.
I have experienced this many times myself and so I could empathize with the children’s dismay at having their fantasy so sharply disconnected.
In penning this now, I am thrown back into a particularly fond memory of mine from a day at recess in second grade. I was a new student in a class of eleven students at my small little hippie school that year. For the first years of my formal education, I was somewhat isolated socially in the public school system. I therefore spent a great deal of time in school in my own head imagining certain realities and fantasies. This has not left me to this day. When I was seven, we moved from our house in town to where I still reside today, a satellite outstation in the unincorporated parts of the county. We traded a cul-de-sac for a dirt driveway, a manicured and sprinkler-equipped backyard for eight acres of sprawling sagebrush steppe, and a world that would most likely have been shattered by reality too early for a wilderness that became infinite otherworlds in childhood. Our dad encouraged our imaginative explorations of the infinite worlds adjacent to the real one. On many occasions would he, after 12 hours of hard work in the woods, come home and, per our requests, drag out his small wire-feed welder to help us reattach a metal rod that had broken in half, or, in the fantasy of our experience, he was reforging a magical and ancient sword into a new blade. It was a quick tacking weld on bad metal that was barely going to hold, on the surface, but to my brother and I, watching from a distance under borrowed welding helmets, we were standing beside Elrond as he supervised the reforging of Aragorn’s sword in the Return of the King. In other instances, while working out in the deep woods for a week without coming home, my dad brought us what to outsiders would appear to be simple tree limbs. The way these were presented to us though, were infinitely more mystical. He said: “I thought these looked cool, like wizard staffs or something.” They were perfect wizard staffs. One slightly taller than the other, perfect for my brother and I to each have our own the right height. Over the course of the next few days, borrowing a drawknife and hatchets from our dad, we shaped and carved these staffs to meet our individual needs. From then, not only did we have swords reforged in elven fires, we had ancient staffs imbued with the mysteries of the universe. When the winter came, snow-foes were constructed, and we slayed many a villain with our staffs and swords. The driveways became the roadways of The Shire, and our elderly neighbour, in her golden SUV and disregard for ‘safe driving speeds’ became roaming Ringwraiths we dramatically dove into ditches and behind boulders to avoid. The rolling hills of home became otherworlds for us. We would disappear during summers for hours on end, trailing in as the light faded behind the appropriately named Sunlight Mountain peak and the dark crept in. Other summers, we would dramatically leap across logging equipment, firetruck beds, fifth-wheel trailers, and a whole host of other obstacles in epic pirate duels, we would venture out with an old tire innertube and float down the irrigation ditch below the house on some whirlwind expedition, then opting to lug the nearly 100-pound blocks of rubber up sheer cliffs and across a half mile of agricultural ranchland to reach home. In particularly heavy snowfall one winter, in the neighbour’s field below our house, with snow reaching our chests, we dug in behind foam sleds on opposite sides and proceeded to experience our own Battle of the Bulge with snowballs. This was the imaginative play that inspired me as a child and that which occupied a very large portion of my time outside of school.
But in writing this treatise here, in reflecting on the breakthrough I am not drawn to the memories of these otherworlds entirely. Instead, it is a singular moment in second grade, as the new kid, trying to adjust to a group of people, that I learned (and still know) were very different from me in terms of what our home lives were like with respect to imagination.
I was at recess, trying to play with the other boys in my class. I cannot remember the exact game we were playing, but at one point I brandished a stick that I had shaped with a broken brick and a smaller sharp stone I found on the play yard (three cheers for experiential education), in brandishing this stick I proclaimed quite confidently that it was a sword. To me, it was a precious steel I had honed on a whetstone that I would then use to slay dragons or invading raiders, or something equally fantastical.
To this, a boy who would become a sort of rival and bully to me during these years very pompously said to me: “No, that’s a stick.” To which I offered the most scathing rhetorical takedown of my entire life, one whose flamboyance and superiority still tinge my memories to this moment: “Ever heard of PRETEND?!” Truly an icon even in my earliest days.
Unnecessary Tangent:
That rival/bully interestingly and unbeknownst to me was from a very, very wealthy family and I do believe he has a somewhat cushioned job in finance or something similar. He recently wrote an article that was published in some periodical. I read it and in fierce tribute to my younger self who had experienced some years of torment from this person, I may just offer to younger Tucker that your writing is operationally, rhetorically and technically better. Congrats kid, we win in the end. As an aside to the reader, I can excuse and appreciate writing that is underdeveloped technically or rhetorically, I can appreciate works in styles I do not typically enjoy or employ, I also never claim to be good at this nonsense, nor can I take compliments on my own performance of the craft. But, I cannot excuse writing that itself exudes a rampant narcissism. It is not difficult to read a piece that is objectively terrible for all of the wrong reasons, and to know that the author fully believes it is not just good, but profound. There’s a specific type of narcissism in such pieces, and readers here who read often know precisely what I mean. Its akin to reading a letter to the editor in your local newspaper that uses twenty-five SAT prep words to complain about the mail taking two days longer to arrive. Elucidate on that.
This thought, while petty and irrelevant and slightly schizophrenically presented here (the last time I described my writing that way, a deeply insecure person made an off-color joke at my expense about it, so I’m owning the adjective now, operationally speaking), takes me back to the Sopris Park Breakthrough and that is this:
Imaginative play and imagined fantasy realities are where we may exist as close as possible to anti-being without ourselves dissolving into non-being. The imagined worlds of children’s play are the ideal frontiers for an excursion to anti-reality. The fantasy reality of imagined play is out of social time, it possesses its own laws of nature, of ontology, of being, of existing, and of historicity and temporality. In a moment, we may be explorers crash-landed in a biplane in some faraway jungle, needing to make camp for the night, while at the same instance, at the drop of a safari hat, we may be medieval knights raiding a dragon’s horde, or soldiers on a battlefield. In the very same instance, also from Bloch we may meditate on the secondary compositional place wherein our descent into the anti-being may begin: the unseen otherworlds. Not solely those imagined, but those spaces that represent for us a masking of our being in the eyes of others, those cupboards that relate us to spaces where we feel most succinctly away from the basis of perception of the other.
I recall again another instance from my second-grade year, where the mother of a friend interviewed various students for what I now in hindsight see to be a graduate school research project. She asked us where we felt most safe. I, after having just read a book in our reading loft in the classroom on Howard Carter’s ‘discovery’ of Tutankhamun’s tomb, and specifically the layout and design of the tomb in both physical and metaphysical terms, answered “In my basement at home.” I said this because the idea of the underworlds granted me a sense of safety that I cannot tangibly relay at present, but it is a primal reality that offers some form of shielding from the worlds out beyond the walls and wires of home. My dad still teases me about this answer to this day, saying something to the effect of: “I don’t know what they thought of us when you said you feel most safe in your basement.” But for me, I understood the question on the basis of something more existentially primal than how my classmates may have, to me, safety in that context was not something I fully comprehended on a social or emotional level, instead, I felt something more metaphysical, something more grounded in my own mind and for some reason, eight feet underground was ‘safety’.
This is reflected in Bloch’s characterization of the unseen spaces, these small dark secure places that we hide ourselves fully in, in order to situate ourselves away from the prying eyes and minds of the others. Is this something that fully leaves us in childhood? I do not believe so, but I have yet to find myself entering into a fantasty world in the cupboard, and instead take my isolation in rooms with higher ceilings. But the isolatory element of these escapes, coupled with the imagined world of the child at play are our keys to even beginning an attempt of theorizing a philosophy for the lost.
Both of these places, the imagined world, and the unseen otherworld are places that share a particularly strong thread of similarity to that ever-elusive concept of home we have been searching for in futility.
This is to say that if we combine our nocturnality, the quiet space between days, when the world outside is silent, with our imagined places and our unseen spaces, we are finally ready to descend to the madness of the anti-being.
The Ascent into Descent
“The pleasure of despair. But then, it is in despair that we find the most acute pleasure, especially when we are aware of the hopelessness of the situation...everything is a mess in which it is impossible to tell what's what, but that despite this impossibility and deception it still hurts you, and the less you can understand, the more it hurts.”
-Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground (1864)
"Whoever seeks shouldn't stop until they find. When they find, they'll be disturbed. When they're disturbed, they'll be […] amazed, and reign over the All."
-The Gospel of Thomas
“Growing Up is Not So Tough, Except for When I Have Had Enough”
-Well-known French-Canadian Sociopath Caillou
And so it begins, we have situated ourselves in our nighttime respite of choice, we have unplugged from the social world abound outside our walls, we have nestled ever-so-gently into our beds for the evening. Let the time slip past midnight, into the witching hour of our madness. Breathe. Dream. Imagine your ascent into descent. We are walking together, onwards towards a place out of space, out of time, out of the pulls of everything that binds us to what it means to be social in our sociality. Lose yourself in your loss. Call forward in your mind the place you dream most of being. Imagine what it would be like to no longer be lost. Allow the fantasy to play out in your mind until it fills your physical shell with a feeling somewhere between tingling and tremors. Expect the unexpected, but retain total and complete control of what images flash across your mind’s projector. Fixate on this thought: what would your perfection look like? Imagine that perfection and push your mind as hard as you can to manifest that imagined perfection just there in the boundaries of your own inner worlds. Seek out those spaces you feel most safe, most loved, most content. There are no boundaries of reality here, so allow for all that is fantastical to grow into the spaces between the trees of loss. Abandon, if only for a moment the unending walk onwards through the mires of uncertainty and instead draw up a chair at the inn of serenity. You’re home, you’re safe, you’re found.
Through a psychosocial alchemy, we may in our minds constitute the requisite environment for the composition of our philosophy for the lost. This is not yet to say that we may know, nor verbalize its application, but in order to apply we must first come to a recognition of the state we ought to exist in prior to praxis. That is, before we may offer the torch to those lost behind us, or even understand what that may even mean, there is a need to first verbalize what we hope to establish in this mindset in the antithesis of reality.
To first construct this reality, we must, at the expense of our physicality push our minds to the absolute brink of existence. Some readers may suggest psychedelics at this stage, and I cannot attest to the efficacy of this methodology, nor recommend it. Instead, we possess all of the necessary psychoses in our own tangled experiences of being that we need not augment ourselves synthetically. In sleep exhaustion, beyond the waking hours of the mortals, there is indeed enough magic in our minds to facilitate the ascent to the descent. Once we deprive ourselves of a visit to Dreamland, we must then focus our thoughts to seek out our escape into the blue. This may sound horrific, but can be done with equal light to the dark, should one’s heart tend more towards the warmth of positivity. In effect, you are to, in your isolation from digitality, from sociality, and in the witching hours of the early morning not just imagine a fantasy reality, but you are required to experience it to a degree that it becomes real in those moments. It is in this embodiment of your fantasy that you can build the necessary metaphysical escape velocity to sit in the cosmos of anti-being.
If we continue to assume that those seeking a philosophy of the lost are themselves also lost, then we rather conveniently possess the needed rationale for this fantastical imagined reality. Imagine then, in your sleep-deprived isolation what it would feel like to not be lost. Look past the limitations of reality that are at present keeping you in a focal nexus of loss-being, and reflect those stressors instead into an idealized future reality of pure bliss. Imagine, to your heart’s content, the idea of home, the idea of love, of companionship, of financial stability, of freedom to exist, whatever binds you to your loss, visualize it beyond gone, visualize it as a resolution. This is not to ‘manifest’ as modern consumerist spiritualism would have you, but instead to blot out the contrasts of life to see the underpainting beneath. What are your desires? What are the stressors barring you from them? Picture these in your mind’s eye and then eradicate them. Imagine yourself in your isolated Italian villa, sipping limoncello in the arms of your love, imagine wealth, freedom, success, fame, whatever it is your heart desires. We must cast out the superego’s tempering voice here, and instead inwardly visualize an overly optimistic hedonism of the self. Rather than falling prey to unchecked optimism in reality, where our fantasies can damage us as ledges to fall off of, doing so in the controlled environment of self-induced psychosocial psychosis, we can experience the prospective joy of the end of our journey while knowing it is in the pursuit of a system of knowing our loss more prominently, rather than an escape for the sake of sanity. We must then trade sanity, for a moment, for the insanity of hope and imagined ideals of the futures we desire. We do this not for gratification, but for a science of loss. In visualizing the ultimate pleasures of life, of our ultimate road less travelled, we can then do something that eludes us in the quest for ourselves in the wildwoods of uncertainty: we may come to more intimately know the roots of our loss of self.
In materializing the solutions to those pains that drive us into the unseen uncertainties of being lost, we can then more clearly and diagnostically reconcile the nature of those very obstacles. It is a reverse investigation of our moments of being, wherein a mildly sad reality, we use the falsely imagined life without the need for solutions in the moment to facilitate a knowing of why we need solutions to begin with. This then is a deeply powerful form of ‘soul searching’ where in our imagined world free of stress and pain we are covertly interrogating ourselves to find what it means for us to be lost. This is why the philosophy for the lost cannot be universal, but rather it requires a communal composition. We the lost are required to partake in these ascents to the descents to facilitate a lexicon of the lost for those ever-so-slightly behind us on the road. That is, we may strive to be just found enough to offer any kernel of wisdom we might hope to offer. In an ideal world, this would manifest itself as a collection of essays from fellow travellers on the roads of the lost, but in this inception, it is instead incumbent upon us to form this collective telepathically and independently.
So, to the reader I ask this of you, should you be at the mercy of the trappings of being lost, imagine yourself into the antithesis of being and record what you find. Share it if you desire, but for the most part, internalize your findings. We are now all embarking on an autoethnographic journey of the lost together, apart, and it is of the most critical importance in our collectivity to strive ever-forward to compose our own philosophies of the lost for ourselves. I, in these essays, cannot offer the route to being found, but instead can only ever offer my own findings and so shall in due course. However now, at the beginning of this journey together we must recognize that knowledge of our loss is the philosophy of the lost, for and by us on the roads to somewhere in the voids ahead.
Here are the tenets that we may hold close to our lost hearts on our descent into the ascent:
1. Embrace the Chaos:
Let’s face it: life is a twisted carnival ride through a hurricane. Embrace the chaos. Revel in the uncertainty. The only real answer is that there are no answers, just an endless stream of strange questions on the winding road of being lost between here and home.
2. Find Meaning in the Madness:
It ultimately is not the destination of being found that imparts upon us a sense of needing a philosophy for the lost; it’s the ride. The search itself is the point. Personal growth, resilience, and a touch of madness are all part of the descent. We have to face the insanity of mortal existence if only to finally introspectively define what it means for us to be unlost.
3. Stay in Your Now:
Recognize that the you of the past and the you that may exist in the future are people fully and radically disconnected from you. They are not of you, nor are you of them. Forget yesterday’s hangovers and ignore tomorrow’s nightmares.
4. Seek the Freaks:
Surround yourself with kindred spirits. Share the madness, the highs, and the lows. There’s strength in numbers, especially when you’re all equally lost and loving it. Solidarity begets a sense of knowing, even if that only extends to the next step forward.
5. Experiment Like a Mad Scientist:
Dive into the unknown with reckless abandon. Try everything. Explore new perspectives, dive into new experiences, and see where the trip takes you. The more insane, the better.
6. Dive into the Abyss of Your Mind:
Take a long, hard look in the mirror. Engage in wild bouts of introspection. Understand your demons, your desires, and your deepest fears. The truth is out there, buried deep in the craziness of your own mind. Find your nocturnality and dive headfirst into the imagined sanguinity of perfect existence if only for the feeling of knowing what constitutes loss itself.
7. Shapeshift with the Times:
Identity is a fluid, slippery thing. Embrace it. Being lost is a chance to reinvent yourself. Tear down the old and build something new. Become the mad genius you were meant to be.
8. Celebrate the Small Victories:
Every tiny step forward is a victory in this twisted game of life. Revel in the minor triumphs. They’re the breadcrumbs that lead you through the labyrinth.
9. Create or Die:
Channel the chaos into creation. Write, paint, howl at the moon. Use your madness to fuel your art. It’s the only way to stay sane in an insane world.
10. Cultivate a Savage Resilience:
Face the storms with a grin and a middle finger to the sky. The only way out is through. Learn from the setbacks, and let them make you stronger. Resilience is your armour in the battle against the void.
Phase Four: Harvest Home; Notes of Vetiver and Argan
“Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.”
-John Le Carre, "The Chancellor Who Agreed to Play Spy", The New York Times, May 8, 1974
“She said the son never shines on closed doors
I open to find only hurricanes blow
Take me away to the green fields of may
Because the son never shines on closed doors
And we all go the same way home
Yeah, we all go the same way home”
-Dave King (2002)
The Homes We Run Away From
As we crest the hill of our first quarter-century of life, those paths we take through the winding and misty woods of uncertainty take us to many realizations, and for a fair few of us the path always begins at home. Home being an amalgam of all that have made us who we are until this very critical juncture where we begin to stop dreaming for that which may unfold and instead strive out into the wandering voids of our own lives to discover that which may lead us someday down the road to being found. Home, in this case, is not a physical space. It is neither building nor rooms, nor anything tangible, but rather the physicality of the homespace grows into something new once we cast off the reigns of our childhood of dreaming. Home, the space, the walls and windows and floors become characters in the plays of our memories, where in tangible movement with the supporting casts of our families, our friends, our enemies and the countless unknown others beyond the scope of our knowing we come to see such things play out their roles in the exaggerated pantomime of memories. Nostalgia is the cloak costuming our ideas of home, somewhere between beauty and horror where we may see our most terribly dark memories veiled in something resembling a chance at light in the dark, while our warmth and light may themselves hide a shadowy underway of abject desperation.
The nostalgia of home is a toxic pleasure. One where in our most private of recollections we may see the spaces and places, and the memories of each come together as wildly incoherent meshes of who we were and who we thought we were to be. There is not a singular memory of home that is not somehow aligned with our sense of direction as we wander forward into the nights of loss, but there is also an entire fragile balance between how our home may guide our march into the dawns of life.
To determine how we are lost, we must ask ourselves what is the nature of our departure from home? Do we leave with a bundle over our shoulders filled with sandwiches and love notes wishing us well on our journeys through the mists? Or do we leave in the dead of night under the cover of darkness with nothing but our wits to guide us? Home is, then, the place where we first come to discover that we are in fact, lost. That loss of self comes first from a steeping in life as it was before we have come to know some small slice of the world beyond the care of home. When we come to know the currents beyond the walls, there is something that shifts in us, where home itself becomes something far less definite. We can no longer rely on old adages or pleasantries to define home, it is no longer ‘the space we feel safe’ or a house, apartment or tent. Instead, it is a feeling, a complexity of being that is both affective and experiential. We no longer live in our homes, but we exist in these spaces as a co-character in their stories as they impart upon us that last great lesson a childhood home can teach a weary traveller: when it is time to set foot to the paths of life.
These paths that wind onward through the forests of uncertainty that build questions infinitum for how we may come to know ourselves all track themselves to our earliest notions of where our home may be. This transcends the ideas of nationality, locale, region, or even the very walls of our own dwellings to land squarely in the central locus of our hearts. It is in our hearts that nostalgia is nurtured and the pains that push us away from home are also stoked. We must then reconcile this contradiction for the fact that the things that pain us in our hearts are the ones that push us out into the wildwoods of uncertainty. This reality is such that we may establish one carnal fact of this whole journey of being lost: that it is in its eventuality a journey towards horizons that are brighter, grass that is ‘greener’ so to say. It is then permissible to allow us a breath of hope if only for a moment.
If a philosophy of the lost is to allow us a means of reflecting on the nature of the homes we have left, if in our nocturnal descent into the ascent of anti-reality, we may conceptualize our nature of being from where we came, where we have stopped along the way, and more importantly, where we hope to exist, this is indeed the most critical of all steps towards an eventual reconnection to what it is we have lost in ourselves as we grow beyond the worlds of our own internal historicity. It is in this realization that we may recognize that in order to find ourselves, we must find home and in finding home, we must do so from a place well entrenched in the madness, where the insanity of the world that has pushed us out of the fireglow of warmth and homehearth, is what pushes us ever-closer to trying to claim a stake for ourselves in ourselves. Being lost is not then a trauma or a tragedy, it is a challenge of the heart and soul to seek out those spaces in life and limerence that establish a sociality of the self where we are most safely situated to exist as we conceptualize ourselves most definitively in authenticity. This is to then say that being lost, and the search of being unlost is the nature of finding the power within ourselves to exist authentically to ourselves, and in doing so we also have the ability to establish the reality that a social space and physical place of home is critical in the definition of authenticity of the self. We cannot indulge the performances of the self in pure authenticity if we do not possess the canvas of where to exist to do so in the first place. It is in this that home is both he beginning of our journey, teaching us what it is we desire in life and existence, and it is also the end of a particular leg of our journeys, where we may finally reside in a momentary place in the universe to begin to really and truly ask ourselves the deep questions to furnish our philosophy of the lost. Home is the first step of this journey, not the endpoint, and the homes we seek are only the midpoint of a long and winding road to the centre of our own conceptualizations of what it means to be us.
What we must do in our paths through loss of self is to recognize that we are not searching for home as others may think of it. This is not a treatise on the benefits of home ownership, nor some techbro manifesto to encourage you to become a landlord or whatever other horrorscape[1]. Instead recognize that home can be anywhere you are, or in the far off invisible places of your imagined realities, if we can lean into the notion of home-making in our momentary passing experiences, when all the lights fade and the noise of social life mutes, we can start to lay the brickwork for a home of the heart, a social home of being inside our own minds, and this is the key to first finding our footing in pursuit of the knowledge of our own being that leads to an authentic self-experience. That is the practicality of a philosophy of the lost, not a means of constructing home for the physicality, but of finding what pushed us out into the woods, and somehow modelling a home in the heart and mind so that we may, in those inky moments of comradery, find one another and offer that torch out into the world.
If we plant the seeds of home in our minds, care for them against the storms of uncertainty, and above all, offer them as warm respites to those wandering with us, with time we may reap the experience of harvesting a sense of home from whatever destitute corner of madness we find ourselves hiding in.
References
Bloch, Ernst. 1959. The Principle of Hope: Volume One. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Haraway, Donna, J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham North Carolina: Duke University Press.
Heller, Agnes. 1984. Everyday Life. London: Routledge.
Stalin, Joseph. 1938. Dialectical and Historical Materialism. New York: Communist Party of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.
[1] Good god do not for a moment think this invites you to even consider speaking to a realtor or real estate agent, they’re vampires. In fact, if you wanted to visualize what it would be like to never find yourself in authenticity just look at your local real estate office.