"The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery." - Rebecca Solnit 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost'
"'But aren't you even interested?' 'In what?' 'In what you might find out?" - Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
These are the words which inspired me to get lost.
Going to a new climbing boulder didn't seem like much of a radical move in retrospect, but it definitely brought me a new experience.
The late evening sunshine bathed the park in a golden glow. I climbed until my fingers got sore, which was approximately thirty minutes, then sat down next to the two guys who I'd been having a chat with. Like some sort of stoner movie from the 70's, the guy turns around to me and asks: "You want some of this?" I must have shouted "Is that a spliff?", (I was never known for being a covert drug user) and gladly partook. We talked about planes going through holes in cliffs and the slightly insane sport, offwidth climbing.
When finished, I cycled (stoned) through the cemetery (I'm not entirely sure that's allowed) and saw the gothic scenery of decrepit, moss covered graves; trees with branches reaching down, as if to pull the occupants out of them.
I exited the cemetery and saw the ouroboros (snake eating it's own tale) on the gates. Oddly enough, something I'd read about earlier in Gravity's Rainbow: "The Serpent that announces: 'The World is a closed thing, cyclical, eternally returning'." I don't know how this relates to my trip, or whether it shows Thomas Pynchon (have I mentioned him enough?) to be a master of blending fiction with reality, and thus providing me with some sort of stoned paranoia.
Who knows? I'm lost.
