Post-Navigation Stress Disorder

"And, young man, depend upon it, if you do not go back, wherever you go, you will meet with nothing but disasters and disappointments..."

— Robinson Crusoe

We at the CLP are elated to learn that Alex has been released from the Pongo de Mainique Infirmary. In fact, all of our absences from CLP have been fraught with peril. I have returned from the Mauritanian Ribbon Reef Labyrinth intact, though I must admit that I had to abandon my navigation. Egression saved my life and mind, even if it injured my pride. Our returns, the reasons for our absences, and above all, our support for Alex, give me occasion to explore a topic more pressing than ever.

We can now adumbrate the three great paradigms of labyrinthological peril. The Classicists, in their Aristotelian urge to classify, articulated object dangers. The famed Minotaur best typifies this class. The factious advents of Recursivism and Constructivism ushered in the paradigm of cognitive dangers. An eminent example, from Recursivist navigation and scholarship, is "telic liquidation": the dissolution of purpose, these thinkers posit, resulting from congression, or arrival at the center. Now, in our present era's push towards subjective and objective navigational integration, we discuss holistic dangers. I for one, and in deepest commiseration with our fellow labyrinthian, Alex, must speak to these.

Vast improvements in medical technology and psychiatric treatment have demonstrated the very real and grave consequences our psychological states have for our physical well-being. And, of course, the logical converse holds true here as well. To understand, then, my fateful experiences in the Mauritanian Ribbon Reef Labyrinth, and to convey them to you, I must recast holistic dangers in the parlance of the day: Post-Navigation Stress Disorder (PSND).

Much research has focused on the holistic dangers during navigation. Yet, while my colleague likewise is struggling to make sense of his recent navigation, I want to turn our labyrinthological eyes to those lingering, haunting, and, very literally, life-shaking, dangers of the labyrinth upon our egression -- as if the labyrinth navigates us long after we have navigated (yes, especially when in vain) the labyrinth.

PNSD is particularly acute after a navigator, regardless of the theory espoused, must egress the labyrinth prior to any significant navigational accomplishment. In the Ribbon Reef, I attained neither a sense of corridor nor center. As the foundational Yves Cruemer wisely observed in her monograph, The Encountered Labyrinth, "Failure of navigational accomplishment, regardless of theoretical intent, is the essence of deficient navigation."

Deficient navigation, I have come to understand upon personal reflection and research into PNSD studies, has a dual set of chronic symptoms. The first are physiological. I can attest to the real, physical feelings of sickness my failed navigation has incurred. Fatigue, hallucinations, hypoventilation, increased blood pressure, fever, and amyotonia are among some of the major symptoms. Researchers have described the physiological stress as "navigatorial dysbasia," post-navigation difficulty in walking. This general term is used to indicate displays of physiological stresses unique to navigation but not during navigation.

The second set of symptoms are psychological. I can also aver that deficient navigation causes one to feel as if in "suspended navigation." In this state, the post-navigator cannot recognize, much as with agnosia, ordinary objects, events, and, in extreme cases, people, for what they are. Instead, the phenomena of life are filtered only through the processes of navigation. For instance, doctors report high incidence of a fear of doors and hallways; one post-navigator described these architectural features as "dreadful decisions that I must but cannot confront."

We will discuss the symptoms of PNSD in greater depth as we learn more from Alex's first-hand accounts and as I better synthesize my own experiences with my current research.

In the meantime, I am offering two illustrations I sketched as I underwent my post-navigational therapy. (Dr. Izokawi's innovative visualization techniques, which developed in Japan in the 1980s, proved profoundly effective.) Perhaps they can offer us insight into the psycho-physiological experience of PNSD, but, most assuredly, they give us the courage to know we can overcome this powerful disorder.

"Blue Wall, No. 12," John K., late 2009

"A Third Door," John K., late 2009

J. Kelly's Ribbon Reef Navjournal: Selected Entry III

Navigation, Day 31: The Vestibule (1/28/2009)

I am surprised that Groverson and Afaaq are still sleeping when I wake in the dark. In the relative darkness, that is. Here, the moon and stars wash the coastline in a silver film. Their luminous spindles stick to the sand, the sand clings to the spindles.

Maybe I am anxious. Maybe I am dreaming. Above, the unbounded sky. The envy and contempt, the hope and reason of bounded earth, of the earth-bound. I am not sure where I am until I begin to hear motion, shapes.

Afaaq and Groverson are busy about a morning fire, behind them a violet swath of sunrise. "We'll be paying for this late start, won't we?" I ask, walking towards them.

"It's only a few kilometers from here," Afaaq responds. 

"And this no place to be alone," Groverson adds. "We go with you until you are suited." I can't tell whether he looks at me with respect, admiration, or whether he betrays admonition, bewilderment. 

We pack and set off with hushed, methodical deliberation. For the first time I admit I am uneasy.

* * *

You can see them a kilometer off. Rusted hulls, rusted rigs, rotted sails. Scuttled shells, desiccated bodies. Giant gravestones stuck into the sand, burial plots staked out of desperation, not design. We approach, haunted, reverent, reminded. Visible from satellite, Groverson tells us. To no one in particular, really, but something one should say in the presence of those decaying colossi. On the rocky sea shelves, a fort stands sentinel. Abandoned, but it casts a long strip of shadow onto the shoreline. We stand in its shade for protection from the sun, from the ships. 

Bret reviews the equipment. I have rehearsed all procedures, but there is something comforting in the routine one last time, something comforting in the final company. "There's no more delaying," I say. I do not remember if I said this out loud or to myself, but I do remember thinking it didn't matter either way. I  take out some bills. Both refuse, hands up and out, shaking my offer away. "Really, that's not necessary," Groverson says. Afaaq smiles graciously, but his gaze is out at sea, studying the position of the ships.

Groverson turns to go, Afaaq some moments after. I look up after securing my gear and zipping my wetsuit. Gone, soundlessly, their tracks already erased.

Solo navigation. The most authentic mode, perhaps. The authentic mode, and thus the most unsettling. This, too, I may have said aloud. Labyrinths are not the mere sites for cogitation, they are thought physically manifest. The boundaries of the known and unknown, of the knowable and unknowable.

* * *

I wade into the water, and I am in the labyrinth. The Ribbon Reef wastes no time, however. 

In many labyrinths, the vestibule is contiguous with the port of ingress. In others, the vestibule adjoins it. Not so here. Some claim it is no coincidence that the vessels ran aground where they did, especially given the notoriously unpredictable (and treacherous) currents there. Whatever the case, theory, too, runs aground as soon as the navigator crosses the threshold.

Suffice it to say the location of the vestibule changes in the Reef. And suffice it to say that many navigators have not advanced beyond this point.

Fact is, I am paying for the late start this morning. Behind me, past the deserted fort, the sun, vermilion, recedes. I have swam through and climbed up the eviscerated bellies of too many ships, finding nothing. Even tracking the ships has become difficult. The first stars are glowing through, the water releasing its heat.

I think of Afaaq. I think of scribes. And I remember the swirling constellations that night. I have nothing to lose, I think, as a spiral of shipwreck emerges before me. Do I see this, or do I create it? Neither matters, I conclude, coursing the whorl to reach the center vessel.

* * *

I discover the vestibule after sundown in the hold of the center vessel. Luck. Or maybe not. There is neither pure accident nor rigid causality in the logic of the labyrinth. A controlling, uncontrollable logic.

Still, the waters block my entrance. I peer into the passageway, seeing no further than its upper coral ring. Dark, cold, breathing, moving. This labyrinth is alive. Its coral corridors alive, themselves harboring life.

I do utter this aloud. I remember the dead surfaces of the reefership stealing my sound, my breath, my motion, as soon as they could reach the corroded walls of the hold. I have arrived at the boundary of a foreign physics.

The perishable cargo in the hold of the reefership had decomposed long ago. Subsumed by the sea that crawled up from the hole that rotted through the keel in one of the refrigeration chambers. The sea, voracious, inexorable. The sea, substantial, thick, viscous. The sea, an entity. All-moving, unmovable. I discard all  I thought I knew about the sea. Expectations, presumptions are dead weight in any labyrinth.

I search for the vessel's name, no longer legible on its half-bleached, half-rusted shell. Something to give the boat a hold over the water, to give me a hold over the boat. But I cannot waste my light. I find a dry refrigeration chamber adjacent to the vestibule and turn off my headlamp. The labyrinth moving, groaning below me. 

J. Kelly's Ribbon Reef Navjournal: Selected Entry II

Prenavigation, Day 30: Reaching Nouadhibou (1/27/2009)

Groverson rouses me before dawn, thrusting a small tin plate of karra, coffee, and a cigarette. I take them in reverse order, stilling lingering at the boundary of sleep.

"Where's Afaaq?" I ask him.

"He left in the middle of the night," Groverson answers. "He is already en route to Nouadhibou. He prefers to travel solo. Says he stops frequently to inspect the ground, the coastline, whatever is on the trail. A naturalist, he says. I don't ask questions. We'll see him when we get there." He pauses to look at the sky. "Pack up. It's about time to head off."

We decamp to the Mauritanian coast, traveling on camelback in the precious cool before sunup. Groverson is a quiet man. I suppose he reserves his speech for business. Or maybe his work is really in the line of listening. But I have little to say myself. 

He breaks the silence at last. I am grateful. The desert, the sun seem to feed off of silence. "It's been some time since I've seen anyone going into the Reef. Not since that boat shipwrecked a few years back. It killed all aboard." He turns toward me, looking at my tanks strapped to my camel. "It's hell to get those tanks, by the way. And there's not much customs is strict about in these parts. No one gives tanks for any kind of diving in the area. Contraband. Some did before the shipwreck, I should say, but not after the laws changed. Steep consequences. The zone ends at the tip of the Parc National Banc d'Arguin. And even there permits are scarce. But I don't ask questions." He didn't sound irked, though; stiffly matter-of-fact, maybe even a bit surprised. 

I didn't ask any questions either, although I had my share. It's easier to ignore the implications. Prenavigation is the fast before the fast, the gaze over the edge of the building before the jump. Negative capability.

* * *

The sun is almost halfway to its crest when the sand turns to water, where a rigged dhow awaits us. Money exchanges hands (the one universal gesture, I am certain), and in the rusty whir of the motor we sail north into the Gulf of Arguin.

We keep near the coastline. Countless fleet shorebirds fleck the sky. Black terns, grey plovers, white pelicans, scarlet flamingoes. Colors. Names. Innumerable fish mottle the surface of the sea. Grey, white, yellow mullets. Sawfish, guitarfish, hammerheads, leatherbacks, loggerheads. Shapes. Names. Sharp, unambiguous.

Our boat chops across the waters, up the notches of the spine of the world. Sun. Salt. Sleep. No one seems to mind me dozing off. But I remember noting how no one ever seems to sleep over here. Not even Groverson. 

* * *

Before nightfall we land in Nouadhibou. Money exchanges hands. The dhow whirs south. Afaaq has been expecting us. He sits before the fire, inking graceful arcs across canvas.

"Arabic?" I chance.

"The flights of birds," he corrects, not looking up.

Heating up karra over the fire, Groverson says, "We leave before dawn again. We'll guide you to the ship graveyard, where we part."

We eat, smoke, and retire. Not even the coiling constellations can take it off my mind.  

J. Kelly's Ribbon Reef Navjournal: Selected Entry I

Prenavigation, Day 29: Arrival in Nouakchott (1/26/2009)

Boundaries. Nouakchott is a land of boundaries.

The Sahara and Atlantic hem in Mauritania's capital city. Mosques rise above the streets, whose names bear their French colonial past. Neither rise above the dust. Urbanites squint in the haze, nomads slip past. Both unnoticed. Taxis clamor over the calls for prayer, the donkeys, the merchants. None the loudest, none unheard. All heeded, all the same under the sun.

I stand between the tide and the shadow of the dunes, no longer sure where water begins and earth ends, no longer sure there is any difference. 

My guide to the labyrinth is young, his face already wizened from sand and sun. He goes by Afaaq. He tells me it means the place where earth and sky meet. Himself a boundary. A Moor. Mauri. In antiquity, the land of the Moors. Greek for black. Now we cringe at this appellation, but we have forgotten the simplicity of it, the immediate perception. Places, people have colors. Named for colors. Subject tethered to object, object to subject. We have imposed our disjunctions on the past, have severed the tethers. 

His camel is laden with my supplies: jugs of fresh water, dried figs, jerky. In order of amount and importance, though not of weight. He rolls a cigarette. His English is as tight as his roll, even if his accent is heavier than the heat. We pitch our tents near the flooded sebkha north of the capital, where we wait for Groverson. Bret Groverson, British expatriate and self-styled international trader and explorer. He has procured my tanks. 

Heat, sun. Cold, moon. Boundaries.

* * *

Before the fire, Afaaq asks me if I am a scribe. My silence is ignorance. He repeats, "Scribe. Katib." I remind him of the Ribbon Reef  Labyrinth. He sighs, not impatiently. Maybe out of memory. "My ancestors were holy men. A sect of holy men. They were scribes, kuttab, a revered Islamic duty, fit only for the purest observers and preservers of Allah's word as recited by Mohammed. But they were condemned as heretics. They believed that Allah's truest name was written in the earth, in the sky, in the waters, in the sands, in the trees, in the stars. Allah's name uncorrupted by man's corruption, unspoken and unspeakable by man's broken tongues. They didn't speak themselves, though. Code, credo. For the clerics, that was only a minor objection, however. The sect wrote, but in no ordinary sense. It was shape, it was motion they were interested in. Motion. Pronouncing motion. The labyrinth, not a built environment, they believed, but Allah's name embedded, emerging from the earth. If one followed the right path in the labyrinth--"

Groverson arrives, late, interrupts Afaaq in Hassaniya Arabic. Afaaq rolls cigarettes for each of us.

The camels grunt, the fire hisses and snaps. Afaaq stares into the fire, as if deciphering. Groverson and I greet, review the morning's plans. But this, too, is of the silence that surrounds us. Our exhaustion reverent, grateful. We retire, the stars forming spiraling corridors above. 

New from the Mauritanian Front

Labyrinthians abroad, 

A freak storm in the otherwise placid late winter Atlantic has forced me to take longer-than-desired refuge in the Ribbon Reef's exquisite Great Room. While Stephon Crete's technomania oft chagrins me, his solar-celled blackberry has saved me in my current condition. Last week, I exhausted my supplies. At last recourse, I had to phone my emergency contact back on the coast; he shipped out some direly needed rations before the storm struck, allowing me another day in the aqua-lab. (This reminds me to discuss the ethics of the telephone in navigation, over which much ink has been spilled.) Unfortunately, my memory is low on the phone, so I cannot post any images just yet. But wait patiently. In my extended navigation I have encountered no other walkers, which, on top of the dangers I have already surmounted, has greatly amplified the challenge of this labyrinth. 

Upon my return, which will be soon (I cross my fingers), I will post my navijournal. Given my solitude, and given my delays, I think you have much to anticipate. Au revoir.

[Message sent via Blackberry.//3:07 am] 

Notes from the Ribbon Reef

Dear Labyrinthians,

I'm almost two weeks into my navigation of the Ribbon Reef Labyrinth. I have reached the second center. It is indeed paradisiacal, but this is truly terra incognita. Today marks my third day wandering the second center. A storm threatens, which will delay me for perhaps another week.  

I am trying not to lose hope and sanity. All across the coastline, there appears to be no entrance back into the reef corridors. The labyrinthecture is maniacal; no congression points, no regression points in sight.

My oxygen supply is sufficient, but my second center navigation has to be parsimonious and well-planned, else I risk wasting too much of my precious tanks. The Atlantic sun has singed my skin, which feels indelibly brackish despite my wetsuit. My provisions are perilously low, and I have been forced to forage flora and fauna that appear comestible and innocuous. (A word to the wise: Never navigate without Floyd Brendelmen's Field Guide to Labyrinth Foraging). Sharks, I think blacktip reef sharks, are patrolling what seems to be one of the more promising congression points. The dance of the light on the water is beautiful, mesmerizing, but the refraction titanically complicates the detection of third doors. 

I've taken a photo for your viewing and for the archives. Enjoy, but keep me in your thoughts. This will be one memorable navigation.

[Message sent via Blackberry_//.>Sent 9:26PM_._]

An Alarming Appropriation

Dear Readers,

Please forgive the typography of this post. I am writing to you via Blackberry on my way to the Ribbon Reef Labyrinth in the atoll lagoons off the Western coast of Mauritania. And wish me luck: aquatic labyrinths are among the most challenging and perilous. I will share with you my navijournal when I return.

We labyrinthians at the CLP hold ourselves to the highest journalistic standards, and thus we always strive to eschew any editorialization in our threads. However, we must also uphold the integrity of the labyrinth, and therefore we believe it is our sacred duty to report any disquieting and undignified labyrinthine phenomena.

As many of you know, the best of this nation's college football squads have squared off in the various matches of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS).  Advertisers and corporate sponsors lacked no creativity this year in their commercial promotions of the BCS. Yet, one advertisement employed an outrageous conceit: linemen, in caricatured lust for victory, careering the corridors of labyrinths to tackle their ways to the center.  

Watch the video, if you can stomach this egregious appropriation:

We at the CLP avoid prescriptivism, but this promotion displays two sinister misrepresentations which we cannot condone. First, navigation is not a competitive activity. Certainly, navigation has its athletic demands, but congression is not a gladiatorial sport in which one "wins" or "defeats" an opponent. Second, centers do not present the navigator with any kind of trophy. Arrival is its own reward, and there is no prize or treasure awaiting the navigator.

Labyrinths can indeed serve as rich metaphors, but, fellow labyrinthians, we cannot tolerate such co-option.