A part of me wonders if I am sleeping while I write this, if the words are scarcely audible, scarcely coherent dream mumblings.  The expression "geographic illiteracy" stumbles to the forefront over a shadowy cerebral dip in the old cranial gray matter.  "I am geographically illiterate" is an expression I began using some time in my twenties to describe the condition of my foggy not-quite fixed point in the universe, and it's still accurate now a few decades later.  I haven't had that many occasions to use the words out loud but when I have it's because someone has asked me specifics of a location and then I have to profess to my illiteracy with a shrug and vague smile.  Oddly enough, though I don't believe the person knows exactly what I mean by this response, there is a slight affirming nod as if the gist has been gotten, roger-wilco that.  I find the reaction validates the phenomenon.  Charlotte, a main character in Joan Didion's novel "A Book of Common Prayer" is described as having a similar trait.  I only have a dim recollection of the quotable specifics but here is a visual overview:  if given a cookie-cutter map of the world, the continents being jigsaw blocks with little pegs to lodge them in place - out of the pile of pieces to assemble it would take me days to get the nebulous whole put together.  Even then edges would not be seamlessly sealed but perhaps broken off, fist-pounded in and adhered with chewing gum to make a rough half-assed composite.  This is one more example as to why I consider myself an inadequate citizen of the world but even Ms. Didion allowed that Charlotte was not necessarily an atypical American of her time and place.

Maps are actually a sort of useful art which I find quite aesthetically pleasing.  I love maps rolled like scrolls for discovery, pulled down like a ladder to adventure from the ceiling, or ornately framed and whispering secret scenarios of history.  I love maps in museums and in antique shops, and even once found a cardboard-mounted one of varnished brown I rescued out of garbage on the street.  Maps, like globes, conjure cartography, a sort of celestial yet very organic language scientifically poetic as topographical terrain raised by Paper Mache textures to convey mountain ranges or the indigo ink waves of oceans. Even back in grade school when we had mathematical questions concerning maps I liked the sample diagrams which used different colored lines to denote say, streets vs. highways, or broken dotted dashes to denote some other mode as a means to a destination.  There were little side charts in bold bordered rectangles which enclosed these rainbow Geometric symbols to help one become oriented regarding how to navigate from point A to point B etc., and I astonished myself by often being able to figure out how to correctly do just that.  Throw in algebraic equations, however, regarding certain departure times going X MPH vs. another journeying party leaving by hot air balloon while transporting a herd of sheep impacting speed against gravity depending on how much velocity when Mercury is in retrograde, and some amount of confused anxiety would begin to set in for me as to what the cinematic problem even was, let alone how to solve it. Call a taxi is inevitably the answer I gave.  Before GPS, unfolding the unwieldy paper road map across the dashboard to try and help the driver locate the correct exit on a six-lane turnpike of clovers and figure-eights designed by a sociopath who loves scrambler rides at carnivals , was a challenge not only on mental focus but also on vocal chords shouting "pull over, please pull over" - (there hopefully even being a shoulder or rest stop to pause and have a refreshing nervous breakdown in.)

Directionally-challenged is another handy phrase from my lexicon of general geographical obtuseness.  Yes, this is bad.  I know my right from my left but sometimes actually have to raise the left hand and right for the figurative gears of my brain to catch up with the literal mechanics of which is which when instructed to use one or the other.  Furthermore, when asked directions, my arms start going into the motions of some interpretative dance to explain the meandering twists and turns as they are visualized into verbalization one corner at a time.  I will also most likely provide such unhelpful extraneous details such as  -there will be a new mini-mart/car wash/burger joint outside your passenger window which used to be a yellow colonial house with a lovely Elm in its front yard. Drivers then usually pull away from me with something akin to grunting sorry they asked.  Ah, misunderstood again no matter how much the intentions were good.  

I used to get fairly inwardly disgruntled and eventually semi-terrified when my own lack of sense of direction put me in a tail-spin, as if there were someone in my past or a larger cosmic being responsible for the existential state.  Perhaps this is one interpretation for the myriad of ways a person can be mad at the universe, cursing one's fate, innately knowing doom is destiny and all fortunes, ill.  Perhaps this is a Victorian throwback to the mad as in just bloody stark-raving crazy, the fault being in my own stars for some misdeed or cruelty, even one which stems from karmic reincarnation and the possibility I was perhaps Vlad the Impaler! Ah, why must ego enter into the misery, the needle eye which is the tornado eye through which threads the idea that I am the center of those most vastly conspired against in all  of creation?  

Once, lost in Paris, after a night flight of little sleep between time zones I remember my elation for the beauty of the city gradually souring to a typical out-of-towners grumpiness hid in a shy smiling unspoken plead of damn it, somebody help me. I am a person of such a nature that the wind itself can discombobulate if the gusts blur and tear vision, shove against the body with a tremendous invisible force of an unwarranted hostile aggression. This is also how the temporary neurosis of being lost feels, especially when one does not know the language and all passing mouths of strangers seem to be opening and closing like bowl-round bound guppies. But -  Edith Piaf, and Cocteau and Jean Marais (amour, amour!) - how hitherto I had swooned to the French tongue, fell sway to its nuances, swept spellbound, enchanted, in love with love only to now want to pawn my illusions, spit with the bitterness of the unrequited.  Here was the usual scenario of the best-laid-plans gone bust for upon landing I was supposed to meet my friend at the base of the Eiffel Tower and then, perhaps imbibing on a delicious croissant and cafe au lait, continue on our way to the hotel she picked out.  The only problem was it did not occur to me that the base of the Eiffel is 410 feet on each side not counting the mobs of tourists on the concrete block surrounding it.  The only problem was my friend did not show up, having slept in.

Up to that point I'd been feeling pretty good about myself, seeming to glide as if on a moving sidewalk from the Charles de Gaulle to the 7th arrondissement , noting the cheery bonhomie of people strolling with their little terriers everywhere while smoking gauloises with such regal civility. Now, marooned, I was back to the old pattern of my life and my thinking, that interior landscape of basic gauzy dread I'd hope to leave behind.  Yes, I was a Giacometti sculpture come to life,  walking in Dante circles with my converted francs zipped in a special hidden pouch strapped beneath my shirt.  I had the phone number of my friend's German ex-pat acquaintance but at that time the pay phones seemed to take credit cards.  I would attempt to ask directions with my ugly American accent trying to melodiously emphasize some voulez-vou sound in every syllable, but seemed to project a mien of helplessly gauche foreigner derangement . The word neurasthenia came to mind, as did the concept of vapors and smelling salts.  The protagonist from Anne Tyler's "The Accidental Tourist", also kept popping into my thoughts, a gentle wounded character who writes travel books for people who hate to leave home.  Unlike an instinctive grasp of maps, none of this was of great assistance, yet somehow putting a good face on by evening I found my way into a hostel, a phone which took coins, and the German ex-pat got my friend to collect me like a bedraggled stray adopted before the gas pellets dropped.

Oddly enough, I bounced back quickly but in retrospect I see that I have inhabited a temperament who was born to and used to being lost.  I'm the sort of person who sort of fell onto earth and then into it at birth.  I'm the sort of person whose been sort of falling through it ever since, at some points trying to articulate that and hold on, at other points OK just to float.  A bullied arty effeminate gay teen making it to graduation the same year AIDS broke out, I never really had what one might consider five-year or ten-year plans.  My main goal was to try and not commit suicide and hurt my family.  Given the societal prejudices they were reared with all I could feel is fear of rejection at the idea of coming out to them, their anger and hurt a big supposition as to what would only increase mine. My only "vision boards" were to paint and to write, living vicariously via imagination and the late-blooming snail's pace of wallflower shrinking violets.  Coming into my own, if that's what I've done, has taken decades and now, over the hill, I'm kind of surprised to still be alive.

As an attempt at organized preparation, in 2014 I initiated correspondence with an LGBTQI art foundation to find a lay-away plan for all the stacks of unsold art I've done in my life.  At their encouraging advice I went ahead and paid a fee to name them as benefactors of this work in my Will. As opposed to it being buried in a landfill, the idea was for them to sell it to help with their own operational costs.  Recently I thought it was time to get the ball rolling on this idea yet when I contacted them they made no acknowledgement of having records for this deal. Aside from alluding to the idea that they perhaps might take a piece or two for their collection I was pretty much back to square one.  To be honest, as a fairly solitary creature with no heirs, this detour into disillusionment seems more up my alley than any sort of illusory immortality I may have had by my work living on via others.  To some degree, don't we all want our stories to be heard and for our lives to have meant something?  Why else the proliferation of social media, a cyberspace footprint as legacy?

Having lived a life of being predominantly lost and trying to figure out what path I am on, perhaps even sometimes by creating it, I am feeling at peace with a denouement that is far from such loudness. I like to think of real space as quiet.  I conceive that space begins in the air which surrounds us and which we respire. The oxygen gets thinner as we go up but when we leave the confines of this planet what is there but more vastness, and, of course, the stars?  Some people's recipes rightly get handed down since the quickly-eaten dish was already an ephemeral work of art.  Some people's recipes don't.  Still, I like to believe the effort of energy lasts. In between, the art of our living is prismatic holographs.