The University of the Self #59 Part 2

Finding the Way: when words are not enough

Finding the Way: when words are not enough

Image description: a white rectangle piece of paper is painted with a number of abstract circular shapes, and circular lines, and circular spirals. The colours used are shades of blue, green, yellow and brown.

Image 1: Place Cells

Content warning: this essay mentions depression, PTSD, mental health and loneliness.

Welcome back to part two (part one is here). Thank you for coming back (if you have), it is much appreciated. A quick refresh: I am attempting to write about two recent books I have read and discuss the impact they have had on my thinking, via a digression or two here and there.

The second book I have recently read was Wayfinding, by Michael Bond (Pan Macmillian, 2020). It is such a fascinating book, which delves deeply into how out brains make maps, and how place is related to our memories – though it is difficult to sum up a book like this into such a nutshell. I loved reading chapter one, ‘The First Wayfinders’, which discusses the importance of naming topographical features as a first means of mapping unfamiliar places, and I recognised this immediately in myself, and how I map unfamiliar external geography.

“The names are highly descriptive and appropriate to their place: in terrain where it can be easy to lose your way, this wayfinder’s lexicon was designed to prevent you from doing so.” (Bond, 2020, p.11)

Such namings are a vital part of navigation for me: remember, I tell myself, that grassy bank as you turn left past the —— charity shop. Remember the view of the hills should be on your left as you walk back up from Holyroodhouse.

“A sequence of place names constitutes a set of directions: so equipped, you can make your journeys.” (Bond, 2020, p.12)

My sensorium was overwhelmed, overexcited and thrilled. Most exciting of all, I discovered, as I read on, that we have place cells inside our brains – actual place cells. PLACE CELLS. Place cells. Can I say this enough? They were named so in 1971, by John O’Keefe. This was also the year I was born, and I have a habit of noticing what I feel are mystical connections (probably daft, I know) between the timeline of my life and interesting occurrences that mean something to me. I immediately had a powerful mental picture of beautiful island-like cells, in Earth-like colours planted all over, and the contents of our minds travelling amongst and around them, visiting them, dwelling upon them, in a joy of placing and placedness. Sort of a little like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, only instead of the world resting on elephants resting on a giant turtle, I imagined our minds resting on islands resting on more islands.

And then I sang and sang Islands in the Stream (by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers) because that’s the way I roll (and saying things like this is probably why universites don’t want me — excuse me, Burn, but this is not an academic source). Because we aren’t just islands in a stream — our inner streams are filled with islands, like floaters in a glass of children’s party pop. And yes, I have an island in my head dedicated to Dolly Parton. I love her very much.

You might be able to sense that I got more than a little carried away – no wonder we need place so much, develop such powerful relationships with place. It's wired into us since birth. It’s right there, at fundamental cellular level. I have written before about how we are literally made from space (we are made from atoms and atoms are made from space, etc), but now I can safely say we are made from place too, and no longer sound like a wally while I’m saying it.

The next day after reading this was a bit of a blur as I wandered round in a state of pleasant agitation. I read on and discovered that we also have more of these incredible cells:

“The place, head-direction, grid and boundary cells work together to give us a picture of the external world and allow us to do remarkable things with that knowledge: without them we’d never be able to find our way anywhere.” (Bond, 2020, p.43)

Mental fireworks! There is one thing this book has done for me – a very important thing. For the first time ever, it made me feel a rush of love for my mind and it hit me like a wave. I have always feared, resented, felt antipathy or sadness towards, and sometimes even hated my mind (and I feel terrible guilt at that admittance). I have known my mind as an inconvenience, a barrier, as something that impacts my behaviour in so many negative ways, as something that I cannot change. I have learned over the decades, to internalise the negativity that has been shown towards it, and I have held this gloom and distrust at the forefront of it for too long. My mind has tried to keep me safe – it knows how important it is to spend time in places we know well – this is why we return to the places we love, to places that hold meaning for us.

“…when an animal enters a space for the first time, a unique combination of place cells in its hippocampus is activated as it explores, and whenever it re-enters that space, the same combination of place cells re-activates…this pattern is the cognitive map that tells the animal it has been there before…The more often an animal re-visits a space and re-activates that same sequence of place cells, the stronger the connections…the more robust its memory” (Bond, 2020, p.44, 45)

Now, I wanted to hold my mind like a puppy in my lap and pet its soft ears, tell it what a clever poppet it is. I wanted to tell it how sorry I was for failing to love it when all it has been doing, for years, is guide me as best it could through the assorted environments I’ve encountered (though we have made some real messes together of this), and bring me to where I am right now, filling article after article with what it has helped me to learn about place, and how integral it is to my soul. I want to cry over its bruised, neglected mass. I am on a very slow road to trusting it a little more to chaperone me through the painful acres of life.

I must think more kindly about my hippocampus in future. I got to thinking about the promise I made when I was young, as a Brownie/Guide, and altered it a little to match this moment:

“I promise that I will do my best to my duty to my mind,
and forgive it, and forgive myself and to help one another when we can.”

I really enjoyed reading about the connections between space, place and memory. I think here of the Keith Basso quote – “placeless events are an impossibility”. Place helps us to store memory., and therefore maps our inner world too.

“The brain’s spatial system seems to use maps not just to represent space, but to organise knowledge of many different types. It is just as good at helping us navigate our inner worlds as out outer ones.” (Bond, 2020, p.83)

I did get sad reading about how mental health issues can affect the hippocampus and its ability to create cognitive maps, and I cannot stop wondering if this is why, no matter where I am, I am somehow always lost. I think about my difficulties navigating any kind of social life. There are mentions of loneliness in this book which I have found incredibly harrowing to read. I suffer from deeply complex, unsolvable layers of loneliness that cannot be solved in any ‘easy’ fashion. I know I have a tendency to believe what I am reading – after all, this is a book, a big, massive book full of clever, academic-y chapters, and therefore must have been written by someone who knows better than me. Is what I am reading correct, I wonder – or am I finding it particularly traumatic because it is true?

“Depression is above all a disease of loneliness. Seriously depressed people inhabit an ante-world: they watch from the cave of their mind as life passes them by…It is hard to overestimate the terror of such isolation…It is the terror of being lost…Being lost is not the same as being depressed, but they share some of the emotional and psychological consequences…In depression there is no safe space.” (Bond, 2020, p.87, 88)

I wonder too if this is why I have this attraction to place that I cannot fully define. Does my mind instinctively have a need for place? Does it search notions of place for some sort of an antidote to myself? Here I am, going down a negative road again. This is internalised ableism. I apologise. Perhaps I mean that place is a medicine to me – a precious herbal elixir that helps me when everything else fails. This might seem tangled, but I am thinking out loud, and it is helpful to me to think this way, otherwise I forget what I have thunk.

“…building a cognitive map…is the road to cognitive riches. This may be especially true for those whose hippocampi have been damaged by depression, PTSD or other [mental health issues]…spatial navigation – which requires focusing on the relationships between landmarks – can be a template for a healthy mental life and a foil against loneliness and even depression…to counter inward-looking orientation…” (Bond, 2020, p.93)

I have mentioned in my other articles on here how much I believe imaginary places and imagining place have a vital part in the placewriting genre, especially if, like me, finances and health impact your opportunities for physical travel.

“…the loss of space can crush us, the judicious and creative use of it can bring salvation…by embarking on flights of imagination…to benefit from special imagining…Stories are a way of re-drawing maps and finding new destinations.” (Bond, 2020, p.91, 92)

Mapping and place can help me. I believe that, otherwise why would it remain so important to me? “To be able to wayfind ourselves into a positive state of mind sounds too good to be true.” (Bond, 2020, p94) Is it?

Dear reader, you may have been wondering about the title of this essay: Finding the Way: when words are not enough. I get to its meaning now. This book, and the book from part one filled my mind to such an extent it was scrambled. I couldn’t sensibly articulate any of my thoughts as there were simply too many squabbling to emerge all at once. At times like this, I remember how helpful asemic writing has been to me, how it has helped me process emotional avalanches to the point where I can eventually translate them through asemic un-writing through to writing more recognisable words on a page. I had a forceful desire to represent the impact the knowledge of place, boundary and grid cells had had upon my mind. My mind had conjured its own mental pictures of how they might appear, and I realised I must allow these an escape route if I was to access that which lay behind them. I made two artworks – the first is at the top of this article and the second is below. After I had expressed these, I finally felt able to write.

Image description: a white rectangle piece of paper is painted with a number of abstract square and rectangle shapes. There are many straight lines cross-crossing the painting. The colours used are black, red, brown and dark pink.

Image 2: Boundary Cells

Where does this book leave me? Still questing, is the answer. Still learning, interpreting, analysing, pursuing. Still enthusiastic about place, and other writer’s opinions and theories upon this seemingly inexhaustible subject. I end this essay with a quote from Kirill V. Istomin as used in Bond’s book:

“When you travel the tundra, you always think ‘Have I taken the right direction?’ and ‘Have I not missed the place I am going to?’ Everyone has these fears, especially if you believe that you should have already reached a place but you cannot see any sign of it around, these fears become really strong. Now, you should not surrender to these fears. You should be brave! It is not easy, especially when you are alone in the darkness…you should not change the course. If you keep on the same course, you will eventually come somewhere, maybe not to the place you wanted, but still to a place you know.” (Bond, 2020, p.149. 150)

So here I am. Still searching. Still attempting to navigate. Still travelling hopefully. I have to believe my place is out there somewhere, waiting patiently for me to arrive, with its arms wide in welcome. I run towards them and suddenly, finally, blissfully, I am home.

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