The metaphysics of the lost and found department

 

Why does Dante’s Divine Comedy start with the poet being lost in the middle of a forest?

Or rather, the way is lost:  ché la diritta via era smarrita.

To ask this question, one must ponder the difference between the meaning of loss in “being lost” and the meaning of loss in “the way was lost”. The second lost might imply the first – but the implication skips over the material condition of ways. Roads, objects that are not alive – these cannot be lost in the same way Dante was lost. The way never loses the way. The loss, here, is purely human.

The scholastics like to puzzle over such paradoxes as: can God make a boulder too heavy for him to lift? As far as I know, they did not puzzle over a simpler paradox: can God get lost. It would seem to me, at least, that all the higher creatures can get lost. Not only humans: dogs, birds, giraffes, etc., all things with “territories” can get lost. Fish probably can get lost – surely dolphins can get lost.  Yet God, in the Judeo-Christian sense, seemingly can’t get lost. Nor can the Greek gods get lost.

As a silly old man, I find myself pondering the philological-philosophical frolic of lost-ness – of losing, of being lost, of things that are lost – quite a lot. Even as a silly young man, I found the word “loser” to contain a world. There was something about “being a loser” in America that I found, on the one hand, distressing, and on the other hand, perversely inviting. For certainly, since I was kneehigh to a three volume set of Capital, I’ve been pretty suspicious of winners. There is something about winning, and especially about being born to win, born to winners, that distorts the character. Well, one could say the same about losing, of course. After I was kneehigh – after I expanded my mental lineaments within the unwilled expansion of all my other lineaments – I came across Nietzsche, took to heart the lesson about resentment, and lost – as much as it was possible to lose – my prejudice against happy winners. Although of course neither I nor Nietzsche could shed the slave morality simply by taking thought. It was more a matter of imagining a state I would never really reach.

There is nothing more metaphysical than a lost and found department. I always smile at the phrase.  Another question for God: if he or she or they are never lost, how could they be found? All problems which stem from the idea of a God with self-consciousness. A god without self-consciousness is such a harsh thing that I rather hope there is no such a thing, but a God with self-consciousness poses a lot of questions about divinity.

In 1893, there were a number of stories about the lost and found department at the Chicago Exposition – the fair that inspired Henry Adams’s chapter on the Dynamo, and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. The Scientific American wrote about the array of objects lost and wondered if there was some statistical significance to the great number of umbrellas. The Chicago Tribune wrote about the man who was put in charge of it, Edward Hood. Hood set it up on a scientific basis, creating a record-keeping system On June 19, 1893, the Tribune reported that there were 550 unclaimed items in the department already, and then gave forth with a few Horatio Alger-esque stories about valuable jewelry lost by wealthy women and returned by humble working men to the department.

“People visiting the Fair seem prone to forgetfulness. Mr. Hood is of the opinion that the glories of the Exposition are so overpowering that little things like umbrellas, canes, and wraps are forgotten in the contemplation of novel sights.”

To be overwhelmed is a condition which, at least in my experience, is conducive to getting lost or losing something. As I grow older, I become more like Beckett’s beggar every day, continually checking my pockets for keys, wallet, phone, etc. There Paris police prefecture has long operated a service of objets trouvés. A city, like an elementary school, is full of people rushing about with loads of things on them. Our packs. A dream: to go out naked, unpacked, unencumbered. But the dream always leads to embarrassment. As pack animals, we like and need our packs. The dream of being naked, nakedness itself, and being lost are connected by many unconscious capillaries.

Alex Purves, in Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative, considers such stories of being lost as Homer’s Odyssey and the Anabasis of Xenophon. Dante in the woods could be a reincarnation of Odysseus, who, as Purves acutely notes, is not only a sea captain who has lost his way home through most of the poem, but who also carries a fate predicted by Tiresias in Hades:  

[Tiresias] bid me to go to many cities of men

Holding in my hands a well-fitted oar,

Until I should ccome upon a people who do not know of the sea,

Who do not eat food that has been mixed with salt,

And who know  nothing of peruple-cheeked ships,

Or of well fitted oars, which are the wings of ships.

But he told this cear sign to me that I will not hide from you.

Whenever some other traveler coming across me in the road

Should say that I carry a winnowing shovel upon my gleaming

Shoulder,

Then he told me to fix the well-fitted oar in the earth,

And to carry out auspicious sacrifices to lord Poseidon

A ram and a bull and a boar who mounts sows,

Then to return home, and to accomplish holy hecatombs

To the Immortal gods who hold Olympus

All of them in order. Death will come to me from the sea…

Purves notes that being lost in spatial terms  is one thing, but being lost so that the very signs and conventions one holds are also lost is to be lost indeed. It is only from within that state of extreme loss that Odysseus can make his peace with Poseidon, his old enemy. In a sense, Poseidon as the god of the sea commands loss, or lostness, as his domain.

Purves quotes an essay by architectural critic Mark Wigley: being lost is defined by an “indeterminate sense of immersion, in which the body cannot separate itself from the space it inhabits.” This is Edward Hood’s Chicago Fair observation about the items in his lost and found department all over again. The sense of being overwhelmed is, of course, a moment in Kant’s construction of the sublime. With the addition of something like a divine instance: one’s consciousness of that grandeur – in the flash of which, human intellectual superiority, or the superiority of reason itself, is redeemed.

Lost, losing, things lost and people lost and people gone and myself gone all the way into this concept I can’t really sum up: these moments of failure I shore against the overwhelming madness of American success. Sooner or later, I’ll take up an oar and hoist it on my shoulder and walk some road alone.