Freud was dying of cancer of the mouth, and sternly refused any painkillers other than aspirin. The progress of the disease was so advanced and deforming that his beloved pet dog wouldn’t go near him. The ladders. These are the only objects. They are single without exception and vary greatly in size. The shortest measure not less than six metres. Some are fitted with a sliding extension. They are propped against the wall without regard to harmony. Bolt upright on the top rung of the tallest the tallest climbers can touch the ceiling with their fingertips.”

Out of the door and down the road in the old hat and coat like after the war, no, not that again. Five foot square, six high, no way in, none out, try for him there. The narrator is scatter-minded – he chews his words, relishing the strange and new and intriguing. “One body per square meter, or two hundred bodies in all” he breathes tenderly as he roams through this story, his feet padding across the length and width of the floor. He’s spread out a painter’s cloth, stained with color and grime, which ripples and bunches at the edges. It is this bleak, almost lunar landscape which the tiny figures call home, and it creates a deeply unsettling apprehension, as if you were out at a restaurant and had a waiter standing next to you at all times, one hand on the tablecloth, ready to yank it all away. How suddenly mortal we all are, indeed, if our universe can so easily be scooped up and rolled aside!

Project Overview

In The Lost Ones, we find a similarly uncompromising but finely crafted paysage raisonné within a detailed though uneasy microcosm of modernity.

The cylinder has three separate, informal bands of activity. Around the periphery are the climbers waiting for their turns on the ladders. The periphery is also where the sedentary and vanquished lost ones prefer to lean against the wall, uninterested in searching or climbing anymore. As they are underfoot of the climbers, they are viewed as an annoyance. Just in from the outer band is a single-file line of lost ones who are weary of searching in the center of the sphere, where most of the lost ones reside. In 2008, Sarah Kenderdine and Jeffrey Shaw created an art installation based on The Lost Ones, which they called Unmakeablelove. They used motion capture technology to animate the characters in the short story. The audience are able to see the characters only through the use of virtual torches, which interact with the animations creating a mixed reality. Unmakeablelove has been exhibited at Le Volcan in Le Havre, the Shanghai Museum of Science and Technology, and the Hong Kong International Art Fair.

THE LOST ONES

M. John Harrison, in a now infamous 2007 blog post, criticized the impulse toward the kind of encyclopedic worldbuilding that has gripped science fiction and fantasy ever since Tolkien: For in The Lost Ones there is compassion for our human condition - real, hard-won, heartfelt compassion. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2014-07-28 18:05:27.590174 Bookplateleaf 0010 Boxid IA1137422 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Containerid S0022 Donor Then, the task is to slay the Minotaur with our accumulated insight, and, like Mallarme’s Igitur, to lie down on the tomb of our ancestors without rancour and blow out our candle... This story was begun in 1966, completed in 1970 – written in French, of course, then translated by the author into English. It’s essentially a prose exploration of a section of The Inferno: one of the particular torments of Hell. (Is it an actual story from the Inferno? I don’t know.) But it’s very mechanical – it sounds almost like a Sears catalog:

The Lost Ones runs thru Nov 14, 2010 at the Spooky Action Theater, 1810 16th St NW, Washington, DC. The two zones form a roughly circular whole. As though outlined by a trembling hand. Diameter. Careful. Say one furlong.

I didn’t make the connection at the time, just over a year after I first read The Lost Ones, but the final destination on my travels in Latin America was a place that resembled, in some respects, the enclosed space of the story. The port city of Valparaíso in Chile is built around a circular bay on dozens of hillsides overlooking the Pacific, with a ‘New World’ grid of public and commercial buildings at its lower level and a labyrinth of residential streets and cobblestone alleyways in its upper levels. Connecting the two are precipitous and dilapidated ascensores, or funiculars, of various heights and capacities.