One of the most striking parts of Scott Eberle's Elements of Play, described as a linear, but also complex and dynamic sequence, is the element of anticipation. Anticipation creates the absence in which Surprise and then Pleasure can strike. While any good thriller capitalises on this same mechanism, albeit underwritten by fear, the same is true for play and play's form of delight—granted that we feel safe enough to become enthralled.
A simple example which has been a really helpful metaphor to picture Eberle's diagram is any archetypal EDM or techno song that suspends you with the build-up and satisfies when the beat drops. (Gauge your own tolerance for how much the DJ can tease you in the pre-beat drop)
Sometimes this notion of "an idea whose time has come" (courtesy of Victor Hugo) is also like a proverbial beat drop. Sometimes it gets extended to a particular activity, or book, or taste, or even relationship. I don't believe it's simply the anticipation that does the necessary preparation work. Sometimes it's a very conscious act of working on something over a period of time that allows for these gleaming moments of 'rightness'. By this I certainly don't mean a moral rightness, rather a sense of the stars aligning, or tuning to reach the perfect pitch, the sweet spot, or the guttural and involuntary "mm" that succeeds an exquisitely prepared meal.
From Here to There
Late into the night, and over the threshold of morning, I found myself reading deeper into Michael Bond's Wayfinding1. It's a book whose time has come. Its owner, a retiree, is currently on a 6-month long motorbike expedition through Africa, as inspired by said book, and I've been given the task2 of looking after it. It's a book that's come to me, probably at the right time.
I have grander thoughts about the approach to a book or an idea or an author—about how books are best read when they have a ripened quality to them. It takes longer to read a book when everything is new, but when it is set in a space you know well, I find it becomes a different experience.
“Ah, yes, the mountains of Greek mythology have taken on a lovely sunset glow in this Shakespearean play”
or
“This character is obviously going through this very specific iteration of anger, this is a stony outcropping I too have traversed.”
In the case of Wayfinding, none of the concepts are entirely new, they all have a certain 'truth-feel' to them—to borrow a term from Tim Morton—mostly because they seem to be the capitulation of themes that have been weaving around me, now collapsed to a single book. I know this sounds abstract; I almost wrote "A case for why Michael Bond's book has been following me around and reading my thoughts for the last few months"3. For now, I want to talk about how this book is holding within it some of these beat drops, like a precipice on which I am now permitted to waver.
I wonder if it's still technically anticipation if you didn't know the anticipation was there? If you look back once that moment comes, are any signs of anticipation free from the bias of hindsight? A nice story I'd like to tell myself is that curiosity is the practice of always anticipating, hopefully not in a fearful way. Surprise is then the tax the universe pays for your consistent attention. Delight and pleasure is then an indulgence that is left for us to choose. On some days, this delight sits on a side plate on the table, next to the laptop or book in which I am immersed. Some days, I sit and watch the small square of ocean I can see when I sit right up against the window, and I savour every bite—these days are quite rare. I wonder if this kind of delight is what Liz Gilbert means when she talks about genius being a spritely visitor who will find her hard at work, when and if she is found.
There or here?
'There' is a present concept. There are many 'there's. Most simply, 'there' is where I am not. This could be good or bad. There are much fewer 'here's. The introduction to the book ends with a story about the author's grandmother (or mother), when towards the end of her lifetime would experience bouts of confusion or untethering of memory. The part that stuck with me was the question that seemed to stick with the author: "Am I here?"
Held up in the mirror of my own feeling, this is similar to Sylvia Plath's:
“Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.”
It is the practice of Marion Milner's careful reconstruction of each day, it's the desperate plight of the distant and haunting scream of the real. The moment when all comes into focus—this is overwhelming, terrifying, and induces a wild awe.
This is what is conjured in a burst of the moment when I feel this idea whose time has come.4 A deep gravitational chord like the horn of a ship. How delightful that this book is an exposition of our relationship with place, with spaces, and how our neural infrastructure for space is also the tools with which we map these other forms of thinking and existing.
Wayfinding in Spacetime? or Here and Now? There and just now?
Could we, for a second, think of time5 as a place6? For the time to have come could then be to have stumbled into a place that has a familiarity to it. Or perhaps it's when an object is placed in a room and it feels just right. Those deep 'knowings' that 'resonate'. Is it like when you arrive somewhere that feels like home, that feeling of the right time or right place?
And now, and now, and now.
I don't know how to sustain that feeling, or even how to access it. I think I'm reasonably attentive as a person. But sometimes it doesn't sink in. It's like pressing record but there's no tape in the recorder. (Bond’s book finds its home in the Hippocampus, that place of memory and being)
This doesn't seem to hinder imaginative capability or even spatial navigation, but it does mean I don't recognise what is here and now. However, the power of the coming time of a thing—book, idea, change, or otherwise—feels like it recognises me first7 and runs towards me, and I just get to jump right into surprise. How then does one consistently act upon these emerging impulses? Is this the impulse born of yearning and tenderness that Sue Pam-Grant likes to talk about?
Wayfinding Field Notes
Wayfinding is a new word for me. The pivotal theme in my thesis was Navigation, specifically, Mastering the Art of Navigation, and I discovered that I didn’t know how to do it well — so, there are deeper themes in this book for me. The book also frequently talks about the terrifying experience of being lost. I wonder about being lost in time, which I would call the terrifying eternal present and is related to the Gestalt concept of Impasse8. And for being lost I have returned frequently to this David Wagoner poem called Lost.
From the Table of Contents, here are some offshoots and recommendations:
The First Wayfinders
A lot about maps and geography as a cultural practice. Tells a better story of the origins of human history and culture too. Think Sapiens, but better.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi also has a compelling retelling of this story in Good Business.
This heartbreakingly beautiful story about culture and Wayfaring is something that’s played over in my mind a few times since EHB shared it in a
thread. It's heavily laden with grief and possibility. It's ripe with story and cultural practice.9The “Am I here?” question finds its mirror in You Are Here by Nicholas Crane, which is a delightful book of geography essays.
Toponyms! Dig here at your own peril. Also, I think this is what’s been so effective about SPG’s Masterclass, as we are seeking names for the geographical interior.10
I’ve got Chene Swart singing in the back of my mind here. See Re-Authoring the World.
Navigating is crucial to our development as a species; I also like thinking about maps, which is not quite what’s happening in this chapter, but here are some peripheral ideas about belonging, vertical thinking, and our place in society11
Right to Roam
Geography’s roots in childhood impact development, quality of experience, and more. This was about the right to roam, and having the space to roam. How was yours?
This Anita Barrows character does a lot of wandering and develops a rich inner world. I think someone gets lost in this book too. The study of lost children is discussed in this chapter too.
I met Tim Gill at an event and I’ve been thinking about this image from his presentation for the Urban Playgrounds book, which is also in Wayfinding.
This ARUP report on Designing for Urban Childhoods also overlaps.
The meandering nature of children’s wandering reminded me of this video on The Rhizome.
Free play as crucial for development: I am struck by ideas of posture
“You must learn while you are young that you are capable of anything, that you can survive and find your way.”
Maps in the mind
There are a lot of sad things that get done to rats here.
Here’s a less upsetting article about rats driving tiny cars to lower stress.
At some point, I joined a Clubhouse knock-off in the pandemic and once met someone doing neuroscience AI who sent me this link:
It appears that in certain regions it has been published as “From Here to There”, presumably to avoid confusion with a book published only a year before titled “Wayfinding” by MR O’Connor that appears to cover very similar topics… perhaps there’s something to look into here. Here is a nice triangle, as Bond references McFarlane in the book, and this is an article by McFarlane about Bond and O’Connor’s work.
“Today as I perused a literary collection for books that I could tend to for the next four to six months while their own is out chasing a fantastical and outlandish journey, it may have been one of the last books I added to my small library. I don’t think I would’ve taken it if it wasn’t for the recommendation, but here we are. I do believe that this is a book whose time has come for me at least.”
“Sometimes it’s enjoyable to enter a foreign world of feeling to be reminded that so much exists beyond one’s scope, other times to come upon a familiar sight or feeling is forgotten since childhood can be a balm. But to open a book and feel like this very book had been spying on your life and came into being immediately upon your discovery of said book and write to you as if it had been saving up all these conversations to have with you until you had opened the book. Alternatively, it’s useful sometimes to put a book down and read some of what the author is talking about, or to read around the book so that there’s a better-shared reference between you.”
A delightful quote from Liz Gilbert: “When she was growing up in rural Virginia she would be out working in the fields and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape and she said it was like a thunderous train of air and it would come barrelling down at her over the landscape. And she said that when she felt it coming – because it would shake the earth under her feet – she knew that she had only one thing to do at that point and that was to, in her words, ‘run like hell’ and she would run like hell to the house, being chased by this poem. And the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and pencil fast enough so when it thundered through her she could collect it and grab it on the page.” — (link)
For more thoughts on time, I’d recommend visiting this excellent piece:
Forgive me, I’ve been reading Frank Wilczek again. The passage in A Beautiful Question that deals with this: “The Yoga of general relativity, according to John Wheeler: Space-time tells matter how to move*. Matter tells space-time how to curve**. * Move as straight as you can! ** Let’s be anamorphic!” from here
“The chief use of the ‘meaning’ of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be (for here again I am speaking of some kinds of poetry and not all) to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house-dog. This is a normal situation of which I approve.” — T. S. Eliot
(Which is to say, in sum of the whole of this piece, that this is what certain poems do, and to truly experience the poem, one must stop trying to be clever and solve the puzzle of the poem, and instead engage with the sensitivity and tenderness of feeling that will evoke feeling before, if ever, understanding comes.)
“An impasse is experienced when a person’s customary supports are not available and new supports have not yet been mobilized. The experience is existentially one of terror. The person cannot go back and does not know whether he or she can survive going forward. People in the impasse are paralyzed, with forward and backward energy fighting each other. This experience is often expressed in metaphorical terms: void, hollow, blackness, going off a cliff, drowning, or being sucked into a whirlpool.” — Gary Yontef & Lynne Jacobs
How can one find one’s way when the landscape keeps changing? If the earth swallows the sea whole, how can you know where to turn? Something here about the trees. Do animals and insects use trees to navigate? Surely squirrels do. What then of the trees in Newlands? I went to the gardens to listen to the chainsaws.
What would these be as toponyms? Think about toponyms for the interior next.
“In 1960 when Bolt wrote the play he found what "we now think more important" are the ways society shapes human behavior. Readers were interested in the reasons behind political machinations, not just the historical details. Bolt argues that instead of society shaping behavior, human behavior shapes society. Historical movements come from the thoughts, actions, and decisions of individuals.” (link) I recommend reading the preface to A Man For All Seasons.