No doubt you are aware that the winds have colour... A record of this belief will be found in the literature of all ancient peoples. There are four winds and eight sub-winds each with its own colour. The wind from the east is a deep purple, from the south a fine shining silver. The north wind is a hard black and the west is amber. People in the old days had the power of perceiving these colours and could spend a day sitting quietly on a hillside watching the beauty of the winds, their fall and rise and changing hues, the magic of neighbouring winds when they are inter-weaved like ribbons at a wedding. The sub-winds had colours of indescribable delicacy, a reddish-yellow half-way between silver and purple, a greyish-green which was related equally to black and brown. What could be more exquisite than a countryside swept lightly by cool rain reddened by the south-west breeze'.

From 'The Third Policeman, Flan O'Brien.

We arrived at Grizedale in the dark. This is true, perhaps, in more ways than one. It was late in the evening; the train had been delayed.. But the source of our disorientation was as much the Festival of Lying.

Arriving at a destination in the dark is an experience which comes with its own intrigue. There is an anticipation of waking the next day to find yourself somewhere new as if this happened by magic. In the dark, the place is doubly strange - unknown and obscured. In his essay 'Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia' , Roger Caillois considers the phenomenon of darkness and the effect which this has on us in relation to space. He suggest that the dark, rather than being an absence of light, has 'something positive about it'.

While light space is eliminated by the materiality of objects, darkness is "filled." it touches the individual directly, envelopes him, penetrates him, and even passes through him: hence... the feeling of mystery that one experiences at night would not come from anything else.

Flan O'Brien's metaphysical philosopher, de Selby, in 'The Third Policeman' , surely makes the same observation the basis for his belief that 'the night is an accretion of black sooty substances in the atmosphere'.

Looking round in the daylight, the next day, at the features of an unfamiliar location, we become aware again of the processes used unconsciously in the normal course of everyday events by which we orientate ourselves. The unfamiliar place, even with all its curious specificity revealed, seems for a moment to offer no features which we can take as distinguishing. Our gaze passes over the landscape unhindered and unseeing as if there were nothing there to see. We have none of the investment which is added by familiarity - by the "practice of being there". In the first moments of its apprehension, any and every detail of a new location could become just such a feature, and so none do.

It is a similar kind of experience which the artist Robert Smithson identifies in his exploration of an abandoned industrial sites, and which he describes, in an essay entitled, 'A Sedimentation of the Mind'. Descending down into the quarry, the familiar horizon of the Pennsylvanian landscape is obscured. In its place, all one can see is the slate rock face - the matter of the interior of the earth. For Smithson, to look at the relentless details of this surface is to be deprived of all points of orientation - to be mesmerised by its infinite complexity. He writes,

Banks of suspended slate hung over a greens-blue pond at the bottom of a deep quarry. All boundaries and distinctions lost their meaning in this ocean of slate and collapsed all notions of gestalt unity. The present fell forwards and backwards into a tumult of "de-differentiation,"... It was as though one was at the bottom of a petrified sea and gazing on countless stratographic horizons that had fallen into endless directions of steepness. Syncline (downward) and anticline (upward) outcroppings and the asymmetrical cave-ins caused minor swoons and vertigoes. The brittleness of the site seemed to swarm around one, causing a sense of displacement.

In Smithson's writing, this matter and the geological processes which caused its formation become analogous for thinking. Our reason is, he proposes, subject to the same entropic tendencies which cause the stuff of the earth to stratify, crystallise and erode over time. There is a potential for Smithson in the experience of confusion and disorientation. The question becomes how to make this available to the viewer through work. Art-making is also an activity of organization. 'Yet, if art is art it must have limits', he writes.. 'How can one contain the "oceanic" site?' The problem repeats itself again and again for Smithson through notions of the void, the abyss and the desert - each of which he want to evoke. The target in his work is our automatic abilities to always establish with apparent certainty where we are in terms of our thinking. But if SmithsonÕs writing contains a call for us to acknowledge the unsure foundations on which common sense is built, the way he writes has another effect. This is to expose the idiosyncratic route of his own thinking. 'A Sedimentation Of The MInd' is a map concocted out of fleeting details gleaned as if from early explorations. It exists as a testimony to his refusal in accepting that the unknown is also out of bounds.. The writing is a demonstration of resistance.

As organisms within a milieu, we rely on the stable specificities of our environment. When these are lost or obscured, even for a moment, the idea of 'the organism' itself threatens to collapse. Again, Caillois comments on the way in which these experiences of failed orientation bring us further from sense. He cites what he describes as 'the invariable response of schizophrenics to the question: where are you? I know where I am but I do not feel as though I'm at the spot where I find myself. To these dispossessed souls', Caillois writes;

'space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is "the convulsive possession."

This may be the extreme end of experience which is present to some degree more commonly in our relationship to space and to the complexity of the milieu. It is not so surprising, then, that attempts to orientate ourselves within complexities of other kinds might make use of the skills which we develop within the lived environment. The events of a novel often seem to happen not exactly in the place being described. Or rather, our imagination of the scene is a strange hybrid of landscapes, urban locations and interiors specific to our own remembered pasts rather than to any knowledge of the places in which the writer sets the story. And if a book is read twice, or if it is returned to after a long interval, we find ourselves quite unconsciously back in the same rooms, looking at a particular street corner from the same vantage point as was established when we first engaged in the narrative.

It is not only a reading and understanding of fiction which benefits from this kind of locating in remembered places. Philosophical arguments, concepts described, which become important for us in the development of our own thinking, can also find peculiarly specific locations as we rehearse our understanding of their structure. Michel Serres' remarks on Thermodynamics are situated in the vicinity of a small roundabout in North London. The unconscious, as Freud describes it, can be viewed from the raised pedestrian walkway on a local housing estate.

Perhaps these mechanisms are more specifically the experience of synesthetes - those whose mental functions unexplainably produce equations between different kinds of sensations. With synaesthesia, numbers have colours. Sounds are shapes too, which move in precise relation to one another. In 'The Mind of a Mnemonist' , Alex Luria describes his study, conducted over a period of thirty years, with a man indicated throughout the book only as "S." This mnemonist used a technique based on his synesthetic abilities in order to remember vast quantities of data which he could recall faithfully, from specific occasions even years later. Facts and images would be laid out in S's mind along, for example, a familiar street, making it possible for him as he invented a journey in this familiar territory, to recall also, the details of mundane information - lists of number and names given to him by Luria, or by members of his audience during a public performance. On occasions, when S. did have difficulty recalling any one incident of information, he would claim that it was not a flaw in his ability to memorize, but was caused by his accidental placing of a'white' detail, for instance, against a white wall in his mental schema, making it simply more difficult for him to see on his return to the imagined place. Similarly, if something distracted his attention during the memorizing feat, the particular detail would later manifest itself as partially obscured by something which he described as a 'puff of smoke' or steam'. The obfuscation might cause him to hesitate in his recitation for a moment while he strained to 'see the information through the interference. Luria argues that in cases such as this, where a synesthetic topography is used to order pieces of information, the capacity of the human memory is revealed as without limit.

Liars too, as the proverb says, require a good memory. And the memorising of the story is clearly an important part of the performances given at the Festival of Lying. The question arises as to just how the monologues delivered on stage at this event can be understood as lies. Surely the audience is not expecting to hear the truth from four men described as some of the 'worlds best liars'. Is it possible to lie when your listener is complicit? Is not lying, by necessity, an act of manipulation, a covert reorientating perpetrated by one against another? What becomes clear is the relationship between the stories told at the Festival of Lying, and the stand-up comic's art.. Even, apparently, with our full knowledge, the skilful orator can lead us to the edge of our familiar world. To laugh is an expression of the surprise of this disorientation - our words give up - admit defeat (or as Georges Bataille would say - commit suicide) as we find ourselves no longer safe within a familiar world.

So liars, comedians and artists too perhaps, share this programme which is in opposition to our usually automatic tendency to orientate ourselves around that which we know. Landmarks in our thinking, and in a more literal sense too, might be necessary for safety and integrity. But they quickly become obstacles which pen us within the familiar. And here, production comes to an end. To be lead to an understanding of precariousness of our certainty is an encouragement to see the instability of thinking, despite its discomfort, as productive. But the exposing of the contingent schematizing of the mind - the twisted route of thinking - has another benefit. It demonstrates the extent to which we are capable of producing what we need as resistance to the tyrannies which tell us that one thing or another is beyond our grasping.