Labyrinth

I write more like I’m painting. About 90% of the work is spent not writing. This is because a lot of time must be used navigating to the correct position. Imagine someone exploring a labyrinth, who has the forbearance to memorise how many steps they take and which directions they turn in, but without the force of mind needed to map their surroundings based on this information. They know that to get back they ought to walk 20 paces backwards, and turn right — no, left, since everything must be done in reverse — and they should step back with their right foot so that their backwards procession inverts their proambulation, since at first they stepped off with their left foot.

Stepping off first with my left foot, I knew that I had to count my steps as a precaution. Even if this would lengthen each step by many orders of magnitude, this was the most basic precaution I could take, and one proportional with the possibility of an unlimited, infinite imprisonment. So, even after taking my first ten paces, I knew I should stop to rest, in order to drill those steps thoroughly into my mind by rendering them down into a quantity, which considered in itself yielded its information to me: where it lies in my sequence of movements, and whether I ever again stepped 10 steps in some other part of the sequence. Now, my mind is so attuned to my purpose, that I cannot consider the number 10 without remembering first I took 10 steps forward, then I turned right, then I took another 10 steps forward, so that this number has forever been altered into the shape of this meaning and the next suggested meaning, for the sake of my survival.

That work by itself took so much out of me that I was drenched in spasms, a paralysis grabbed me in place with the force it took to imprint on me the true, embarrassing weight of each action. Because now everyone could see – after his initial reasonable ten steps, he had turned right, and everyone knows that in a labyrinth one ought to always turn left no matter what, to simplify the process of navigation and mapping. By always turning left, one was going down a path just as likely to be correct as any other path, while also committing a far easier set of variables to memory. He was now in the situation of having to memorise even fine-grained turnings, since some paths of the labyrinth were not strictly at right angles, as in the case of those poorly constructed labyrinths that work only in straight lines, but in the making of this master labyrinth, our Daedalus knew that only amateurs work in straight lines, they are never found in nature, and works of genius imitate nature, which in the simplest moment presents an unlimited mystery, just by looking ahead one cannot cut through to the other side, through every subtle suggestion of this tremulating leaf, on this trembling branch. He, therefore, made his labyrinth like the suggestion, at this time of a living being, at another time of a grand cavernous thing, and at this time again like a grove surrounded, invisibly, by hierophanies.

Daedalus also, of course, inserted life into the canvas, as any painter of landscapes must do, with a miniscule touch, because the impression of life cannot dominate the background, and because the insertion of life is the most difficult, most exhausting step of all; something equal to seriousness must be placed there, but full of joy. And the painter, exhausted already by the weight of his invention, capturing and magnifying the warp in the middle of a weft of skinny trees which conceals the sky behind a transparent lattice, he knows that to insert life would be impossible, and these trees must stand alone, captured in a perspective low down enough that our view forward is questioned. This painting, among others, adorns Daedalus’ labyrinth, which can be likened to a gallery.

The construction of the modern gallery, he thought, was excessively considerate, since more often than not there was nothing more complex than a loop, even in exhibitions that proclaimed themselves experimental. There might be endless adornments, but still rooms and corridors like cardboard boxes and tubes. For this reason, he felt able to abandon his pointless habit of counting his steps. Perhaps also he could avoid touching the left side, now the right side of the corridor, then the right side, then the left side, then that same sequence inverted. Yes, he was the life inserted into this labyrinth, and he was perfectly capable of prizing out its dull secrets, nothing more than immediate, arbitrary constructions in line with convention. One could navigate with ease, and the only difficulty was in choosing a sufficiently arbitrary, sufficiently pointless move, which provided just the same meaning as any other movement, one after another.

It was not long before he encountered the minotaur of this labyrinth, since each step is provably arbitrary, and may well lead to the same spot, only at a different point within the sequence. At any rate, he arrived at the minotaur sooner in sequence than those who turned only left, but in terms of time he spent many more days in this trance than anyone else ever had, since he so often stopped to commit his journey to memory via all manner of devices: string he tied in knots to code the sequence of movements, chocolate he cracked pieces off straight unto the ground, drawing stars linked by tentpoles on his star chart, which he had also begun to colour in with bright, thick pencils, adding ever more overlapping layers onto his reflection of the sky, each layer imprinting into memory an understanding of how these stars had changed. Now the snow leopard was eating the tattooed man, who before was hurling his spear at the boar. The scales had inclined and the horse now wore a horn, becoming a unicorn. It was while he was stood upright, etching over his star chart, that the minotaur came upon him.