Hunger's Brides (106 page)

For more than two years she'd laboured to draw nearer her quarry, to feel what she felt, know what she knew, to think her thoughts. Two years of struggling over an incline so slight as to render any upward progress imperceptible, then, just ahead a sudden vista
like a door opening onto the sea
. In the work of Octavio Paz, Beulah detects an echo, a reflection of a formulation that carries her forward through her own research like a mantra:
swallow the world…
.

The following would be, incredibly enough, high ground for Beulah, from which she could look back over her struggles, her furies and frustrations, her sacrifices.

From time to time I find myself rereading passages such as these. One must after all try to imagine Beulah happy. But as on previous occasions, the happy moment was brief, a sense of triumph even at the turning point of defeat. The ground was never solid beneath her, struggling as she did to each sand dune's crest only to stare out over countless others, over endless ranks of barren breakers, stacked monuments to the wind.

I cannot help seeing Beulah hunched over her notebook, scabbed knuckles whitening around a pencil stub, blinds drawn against the day, the room's strew and scatter of books, junk food wrappers and encrusted plates more squalid in the gloom….

If youth is not wasted on the young, surely ambition is.
⁶
She had been determined to run every lead to ground, every allusion, every reference, every myth along the way. Yet even if from the outset she'd recognized the objective for what it was—the virtual sum of human knowledge—still this might have been insufficient to discourage her. At any rate, Beulah finds her method of approach bringing her time and again to the brink of an abyss of complexity beyond her human grasp.

In a chapter devoted to
First Dream
Octavio Paz initiates Beulah in the vast literature on the ‘voyage of the soul' and medieval dream theory … Paz on Sor Juana's greatest work:

Enchanted by the image of souls in transit while we sleep, for the first time in months Beulah finds herself not just cannibalizing texts for quotes and selective truths, but actually reading again. Inspired, she plunges headlong into the literature Paz cites: Athanasius Kircher's
Iter exstaticum
, Artemidorus'
Onirocriticon
, Cicero's
The Dream of Scipio
, Macrobius'
Commentary on the Dream of Scipio …

But after a two-week binge of consuming texts she lifts her head, synapses crackling, fluorescing with points of light—and feels no closer than before. A sharp swing in mood, a return to a familiar pattern. Her notes here revert to near incoherence and to her sedentary fetishes—‘the rank red-gummed rotting smile / the stink of failure clinging to my clothes like fear—animals and children smell it on me….'

What moves her at this precise point to copy the following quotation?—an exercise of sympathetic magic, a conjuring. Or maybe it is just to write down something coherent.

Hardly, it seems, has Beulah taken Paz as spirit guide than he teaches that Sor Juana, unlike all the dream voyagers who had ever gone before her, travelled without a guide. Maybe this is why Beulah is now so quick to discard Paz, her esteemed guide and teacher—again, the familiar pattern: blame the teacher, not the method. Hoping to limit the avenues of approach by following him, she has instead discovered them hugely multiplied. She has badly underestimated the breadth of Paz's erudition but, more, she has once again failed to grasp the fundamental lesson: the labyrinth that is one mind. And so, repenting her ill-invested hopes she finds herself alone again. Perhaps it is in that solitude that she came closest to joining her Sor Juana.

At any rate, it seems strange that she should think herself at another dead end just as she is led from medieval dream theory to the sprawling corpus of labyrinth scholarship; and that in the very midst of a tangled bower, our maze-runner stumbles at wits' end into a vast library devoted to … labyrinths. Despite her own childhood intimations, Beulah was not at all prepared for the reach of the maze phenomena across the ages and around the globe, from Neolithic Scandinavia to Tierra del Fuego to the hedge mazes of twentieth-century Nova Scotia.

This business of labyrinths must seem to the modern reader quaint and antic, his most recent acquaintance stemming perhaps from childhood trips through the fun-house mazes of seedy carnivals. And hedge mazes—
really
. Even those of us craving the exotic, the mildly dangerous, would find ourselves hard-pressed to conjure anything more threatening here than some geriatric Priapus hobbling through a set of well-trimmed alleys with a silver tea service in one hand and a set of bloodied pruning shears in the other.

If the reader's patience had not already been sufficiently taxed, one might sample the catalogue Beulah was about to acquaint herself with: mazes
in malo
and
in bono;
mazes with centres and without; mazes concealing grail or monstrosity; mazes in two, three or four dimensions; the maze as pleasure dome, bower of lust; mazes of the mind and mazes of the body—palaces of the intestines
†
—inner pathways of ear, brain, bowels….

Yet all of this would amount to no more than an arrangement of markers charting the maze as
idea
.

In 1967, at Montréal's World Exposition, more than one and a half million people lined up for hours on end at the
Labyrinthes
Pavilion for one thing: an authentic
experience
of the maze. For this is precisely what is lacking today, not the view from above but the view from within. Not the thin, tepid wash—the littered flood of meaningless information, but the avatar it displaced: the deep, blue dive into an infinite complexity. What most eludes our grasp today is not the maze as idea, but as experience. Or so my own research has suggested. What the fair-goers in Montréal are on the verge of discovering is that each maze-runner is the architect of his own labyrinth, each forking in the path is marked by his doubts, each passageway excavated by his questions, each blind alley walled in by his ignorance and errors and pretensions. From metaphors to myths and on to dreams, thence to voyages of the soul and labyrinths, what we lack today is the experience of blundering through a maddening series of detours into the tangled heart of a mystery that conceals what we most fear—that there a monster waits, and that it wears our face.

T
EOCUALO
        

T
HE FOLLOWING ODDITY
seems addressed to me, though Beulah never sent it. Maybe it was intended to echo a certain strain in the Baroque, recalling the salty side of Donne or the Coy Mistress of Marvell or any number of romps by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester—“The Disabled Debauchee,” to name one. I do not know how it was to be taken. I offer it here not as one of Beulah's amusements but as an exhibit in my defence.

Some background on the text. According to her notes, in pre-Hispanic Mexico there was a rite, since compared to that of the Christian Eucharist, that involved moulding an effigy of God out of amaranth or cornmeal moistened with blood, then proceeding to eat it with the cry:
Teocualo! God is eaten
. What I still cannot decide for myself is when she wrote this—it was lying among other papers traceable to early 1994, which is to say, before she left Calgary. I can't even begin to imagine the strangeness she would have felt to have written this, only to experience the actual rite first-hand a few months later on a mountainside in Mexico.