Getting Lost:
Where Navigation Meets the Self
ESSAY
© Clara Richard — The Corn and the Failing Compass
The kite descended into the vast cornfield like a blue bird diving into a green sea, visible for one breathless moment before vanishing entirely. Without hesitation, I plunged after it into the maze of stalks. Twenty minutes later, surrounded by walls of corn that towered above my head, I discovered what it truly meant to be lost; not simply unable to find the kite, but unable to find myself, as if my very consciousness had come unmoored from its coordinates in space and time. This disorientation in a Savoyard cornfield would later illuminate my understanding of how our brains navigate not only physical mazes but the abstract territories of memory, relationship, and meaning itself.
The cornfield was a masterpiece of repetition with variation, like a Philip Glass composition played on leaves and stalks. Each plant appeared identical to its neighbour: jade-green leaves at precise intervals, silk tassels catching the light, that particular dusty smell of corn in late summer. Yet within this symphony of sameness lived a thousand small rebellions against uniformity. This leaf bore a brown spot like a burn from a miniature sun. That stalk curved as if recoiling from some invisible touch. Here, a spider had strung diamonds of dew between leaves. There, something, voles, perhaps, had gnawed the lower stems, leaving wounds that wept sweet sap.
Between the rows, the air hung thick as water, green-tinged and heavy with the scent of chlorophyll and dark earth. Sound behaved like a living thing in this vertical maze, twisting and doubling back on itself. My own breathing came to me from impossible directions, too close, then suddenly distant, as if belonging to someone else. When a hawk cried overhead, its call scattered through the corn until it seemed to come from the earth itself, directionless and strange.
I'd entered with absolute confidence, my eye tracking the kite’s fall, my brain calculating angles and distances with unconscious precision. The retrieval would be simple geometry, a straight line in, a quick grab, a straight line out. But cornfields operate by non-Euclidean rules. What appeared as orderly rows from outside revealed themselves as subtle spirals within. Each step demanded microscopic negotiations: a lean here to avoid dense clusters, a half-turn there where stalks pressed close. These tiny corrections accumulated like rounding errors in a calculation, each one rotating my internal compass by undetectable degrees until, with a sensation like missing a stair in the dark, I realised I had absolutely no idea which way I faced.
Deep in my temporal lobe, my hippocampus, that ancient seahorse-shaped structure we share with every mammal that ever needed to find its way home, was desperately trying to build a map. Place cells, those remarkable neurons John O'Keefe discovered firing in specific locations, were searching for something, anything, to anchor themselves to. But the cornfield offered only a paradox: every location unique in its details yet identical in its gestalt. Like trying to navigate through a house where every room has different furniture but the same wallpaper, the same dimensions, the same light. The neurons fired in frustrated bursts, encoding positions that immediately dissolved into uncertainty.
My perception began to fracture along strange lines. Intellectually, I knew the field couldn't be more than a few hectares, bordered by the familiar Alpine landscape of Haute-Savoie. But my senses insisted I'd entered something vast, possibly infinite, a green universe with its own laws. Time liquefied: had I been searching for minutes or hours? The sun seemed to reverse its course, which my rational mind knew was impossible. Yet there it was, or wasn't, playing tricks with shadows that shouldn't exist.
The cornfield began revealing its secret life. I discovered a hollow where something substantial, a roe deer, maybe a fox, had slept, the stalks pressed into a crude nest. Everywhere were signs of previous passages: stems snapped at different heights, leaves shredded by various teeth, paths that began promisingly then dissolved into walls of green. Half-eaten cobs lay scattered like abandoned projects, their exposed kernels turned black and soft, releasing a smell of fermentation that made my empty stomach clench. These traces of other creatures should have been reassuring, proof that the maze had solutions. Instead, they emphasised my peculiar incompetence. Every other animal knew how to read this green text. Only I was illiterate.
The grid cells that May-Britt and Edvard Moser would later win the Nobel Prize for discovering create a coordinate system in the brain, firing in hexagonal patterns that tile mental space like a honeycomb. But they need landmarks, borders, some architectural consistency to organise around. In the cornfield, my grid cells were experiencing something like a navigation seizure, the patterns forming and dissolving, forming and dissolving, unable to stabilise into anything useful. Too much similarity creating neural snow blindness, too much variation preventing any pattern from emerging.
I felt myself becoming something more primitive, my behaviour stripped down to basic animal searching. I found myself testing the air with my nose, as if I could smell the way out. I dropped to hands and knees, peering through the forest of stalks at ground level, looking for any glimpse of the world beyond. I almost tasted a corn leaf, some desperate part of my brain suggesting that perhaps my tongue knew something my eyes had missed. The elegant navigation systems that separate humans from other animals were failing, and older, mammalian ways of finding home were taking over.
The kite itself had become abstract, almost mythological. I could no longer conjure its exact shade of blue, couldn't remember if it had a tail or not. The hippocampus, overwhelmed by the crisis of spatial processing, had apparently jettisoned everything non-essential. The kite had transformed from an object to be retrieved into a concept, a reason for being here that no longer seemed particularly reasonable.
What haunts me still is how completely the cornfield exposed the illusion of our certainty. We navigate our lives believing our internal maps correspond to external reality, that our sense of place is solid, reliable, true. But it takes surprisingly little, a few too many identical landmarks, a few too many turns, for the entire system to collapse. The self, it turns out, is largely a matter of knowing where we are. Lose that knowledge, and we begin to dissolve.
I tried to impose order through method. Follow one row to its absolute end. Turn precisely right. Count thirty steps. Turn right again. But even this systematic approach felt like madness, how could I know if I was covering new ground or retracing my own footsteps? The stalks I deliberately broke as markers were indistinguishable from those broken by wind, by animals, by time. The field absorbed every attempt at organisation, like trying to write on water.
Finding the edge came not through navigation but through exhausted surrender. I simply walked, no longer maintaining any pretence of direction, no longer searching for anything. I moved because stillness had become unbearable, because even pointless motion was better than the pressing weight of lostness. And then, with the suddenness of waking, the corn ended. I stumbled into openness at the field's far corner, blinking in the sudden space like something newborn.
The relief was cellular, every part of me seemed to exhale at once. There were the Alps, still wearing September snow like ermine. There stood the village church, its steeple a compass needle pointing at heaven. Above it all, the vast architecture of clouds, those towering cumulus formations that had seemed to shift and reverse while I wandered lost, now held steady in their slow drift eastward. The red-tiled roofs, the meandering road, the whole careful human geometry of Haute-Savoie reassembled itself, and with it, I reassembled too. The coordinates of self snapped back into place: I was here, I had been there, the world had structure again.
Yet something fundamental had shifted. The kite remained in the field, perhaps still tangled in stalks, perhaps rotting into memory, perhaps found by someone with better navigation than mine. I had entered seeking an object and emerged having lost something larger; the unconscious trust in my own orientation, while gaining something stranger: an understanding of how provisional our sense of place really is, how we construct self and meaning from materials as fragile as corn silk.
Years later, studying the neuroscience of spatial cognition, I would return often to that cornfield. How it demonstrated that consciousness itself might be navigation, the constant process of locating ourselves not just in physical space but in the abstract territories of time, society, meaning. We ask “Where am I?” but also “When am I?” and “Who am I?” and “What does this mean?”, all using the same ancient neural machinery that tried and failed to find a blue kite in a green maze.
Merleau-Ponty stated that we know where we are only by knowing where we've been and where we're going. The cornfield disrupted all three temporalities, leaving me suspended in a present without past or future, a pure now that was paradoxically timeless. In that disruption, I glimpsed something essential: our sense of location, self, and meaning isn't given but constantly generated, vulnerable to dissolution, forever requiring reconstruction.
We are always navigating between the map and the territory, translating sensation into story, experience into meaning. Usually the translation is smooth enough that we don't notice it happening. But sometimes it fails spectacularly, and we find ourselves lost in our own lives, searching for something we can no longer quite remember, discovering in that search something we weren't looking for; the beautiful, terrible fragility of consciousness itself, forever trying to find its way home through territories that shift even as we map them.
The kite remains in that field, suspended in memory between falling and finding, a blue afterimage against green. Perhaps that's the only honest ending: not every search succeeds, not every loss can be recovered, not every map leads where we intended. But in getting lost, in failing to find what we sought, we sometimes discover what we are: not creatures who navigate, but navigation itself: pure movement through spaces both real and imagined, both mapped and unmappable, both found and forever in the process of being sought.
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© /Clara — NeurAstra 2025