The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (33 page)

“I know of one labyrinth which is a single straight line,” says one of Borges’s characters. “Along that line so many philosophers have lost themselves that a mere detective might well do so, too.” Borges was labyrinthine; he loved innumerable quantity, visions of the infinite and uncountable, tangles, riddles, complexities, and within them an Argentine sense of inexorable fate. Borges is now the name of a tree-lined boulevard in Buenos Aires, so that you can now walk the straight route of his commemoration, if not the circuitous routes of his imagination; but I digress, I wander, though my subject is wandering itself.

In a labyrinth that is not the straight line of Borges, the only way forward is digressive, a constant turning and twisting that is both a means of disorientation and of compressing considerable distance.

A labyrinth winds the axis of a journey into a small space, embodies as a metaphor the journey into the unknown or makes the metaphor concrete so that you bodily enter the metaphor and, for once, the metaphysical journey of your life and your actual movements are one and the same. “Their paths are linear,” writes Penelope Reed Doob, but “their pattern may be circular, cyclical; they describe both the linearity and architecture of space and time.” And describe the way time is space, space is time, when you travel—a metaphor for life itself, with the proviso that
metaphor
itself is a Greek word that means “to carry over,” and in Athens, the transit system is still called the Metaphor. A metaphor carries the abstract into the concrete, the tangible into the conceptual, and vice versa.

A labyrinth is a metaphor in both senses, carrying you on a brief journey that reminds you that you are always on a journey. You are always in the labyrinth, always a little lost and always feeling your way forward, there is always an unexpected turn ahead, in fact you were born into the labyrinth out of the darkness of the womb and you will only exit in that other darkness of tombs.

The two paths, literal and metaphorical, become one path on which you know at last that you are a traveler in darkness. But in the labyrinth, you arrive before that finale, and one of the great spiritual uses of a labyrinth is to compress the journey of pilgrimage into a local space, so that you
may wander, may know that in order to get to your destination, you must turn away from it, become lost, spin about, and then only after the way has become overwhelming and absorbing, arrive, without having gone far.

In this way it is the opposite of a maze, which has not one convoluted way but many ways and often no center, so that wandering has no cease or at least not a definitive conclusion. In a labyrinth you’re lost; you arrive nevertheless; and then you reverse your journey. Maybe the journey outward is what all the writers on labyrinths have neglected: what happens after you arrive is always a complicated question and an overlooked challenge. It is like time going backward, like rewinding thread or film, but you never quite return to where you began because the person who had truly arrived at the center is by that time subtly someone else.

The end of the journey through the labyrinth is not at the center but at the threshold where it began. Or maybe home is where one returns from the pilgrimage, the adventure; maybe it’s the unpraised edges and margins that also matter. It’s not immersion but emergence.

In this folding up of great distance into small space, the labyrinth is like two other manmade things, like the spool of thread and like the words and lines and pages of a book.

It turns a road into a spool of thread and a story.

Imagine all the sentences in this small book as lengths of a single thread that we have wound up into pages; imagine that they could be unwound; that you could walk the line they make; and try to imagine how long that line might be.

Reading is also traveling, with the eyes along the length of an idea, which can be folded up into the compressed space of a book and unfolded within your imagination and your understanding. Knowing that, you also know that we read the landscape as we go and that we travel in stories and by stories, that our life is a story being written by feet and imagination, a story that we ourselves are, in part, the author of, even though we have little idea how it will turn out, what the next winding of the labyrinth is. E. L. Doctorow once said that writing was like driving home in the dark; you can only see as far ahead as the headlights’ beam, but it gets you there. So is everything else. Journeys, labyrinths, threads are the powerful metaphors that contain and carry everything forward.

When you enter the literal labyrinth, its maker has assumed the high power and responsibility of narrating your journey for a little while. In her labyrinth you are the story, but she is the storyteller. This can be a respite, a passage of life with a guide, like Dante led along by Virgil, and it can also be frightening, a reminder that you are not in control. The one thread of your own life tangled up with countless other threads in the usual tapestry of heartbreaks, doubts, joys, epiphanies, and routines. You are not entirely the storyteller but neither is the artist; in her labyrinth, what transpires as your journey unwinds is, in part, of your making, whether darkness and the unknown bring fear or wonder into being, whatever longer thread you spin this passage into. Path maker and path walker are collaborators of a sort, in that dark.

And the same goes for reading, but, reader, remember that the thread you unspool here will not get you through the labyrinth. To read or think about it is no substitute for that plunge into the dark. You must go. Or if you read this far away from
Path
or long after, you have to ask about the other labyrinths upon which you might be embarking or avoiding, about your own darknesses and interiors.

Whether or not you enter labyrinths through the labia, there is another labyrinth in the human body: in the windings of the inner ear, whose channels provide both hearing and balance. Anatomists long ago termed this passage the labyrinth, which suggests that if
the labyrinth is the channel through which sound enters the mind, then we ourselves bodily enter this dark labyrinth like sounds on the way to being heard by some great unknown presence. To walk this path is to be heard, and to be heard is a great desire of the majority of us, but to be heard by whom, by what, and how? To be a sound traveling toward the mind—is that another way to imagine this path, this journey, the unwinding of this thread? Who hears?

Christians walking church labyrinths imagine they are traveling a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and Muslims face Mecca and make the hajj once in their life to that black stone, the Kaaba, in the white glare of desert, and they both might say that the sound is being heard by God. A thread, a story, a sound, a song along a path, and the journey is always inward. But maybe here God is only another name for the unknown, for that embracing darkness that is space and silence and the unwinding openings of possibility.

In some versions, the Virgin Mary conceived through the ear, so that the labyrinth within was the path that the divine spark took into her being, so that she conceived by hearing and brought forth a man who was in some sense the Word and still is a story and words.

“Just as from the small womb of Eve’s ear

Death entered in and was poured out,

So through a new ear, that was Mary’s,

Life entered and was poured out.

Or so said St. Ephraim.”

Which is to say that there is an eros of hearing, as well as a labyrinth in the ear, and you enter the labyrinth named
Path
as a sound heard by darkness. The labyrinth that might be the lips that speak is also the ear that hears.

In Greece there were gods, not God, and in the center of the labyrinth was the Minotaur, that beast born of the queen of Crete who conceived a passion for the great snow-white bull who is to that story what the white whale might be to
Moby-Dick
; he sets calamity in motion; the Minotaur is calamity itself, and Daedalus built the labyrinth to hide
it from the world. The queen’s name means “shining,” and she was a daughter of the sun. But who and what the bull was is all confused, for in some other myths Zeus himself assumes the form of a bull; and in Crete the real name of the Minotaur (which translates as “bull of Minos”) was Asterion, ruler of the stars. Which is the name Borges used in his story “House of Asterion.” And the bullheaded man wrapped in tatters of divinity was betrayed by his half-sister, Ariadne, who gave the spool of thread to Theseus so that he might find his way back out of the labyrinth after he slayed the hybrid creature with a labrys, the two-headed axe that shows up in his hands in many Roman mosaic labyrinths on floors. In Ovid’s Latin version of this old Greek tale, Ariadne fled with Theseus, but he abandoned her on Naxos, and like her brother, the ruler of the stars, she suffered and then went up into the sky as Corona, the constellation of the northern crown. The stars, a labyrinth in darkness; the constellations, threads we stretch between them.

But I meander, for all I meant to say about the labyrinth of the inner ear was that in
Path

there is a soundtrack by the artist’s brother Úlfur—

whose name means Wolf, not bull—

that is an almost subliminal throbbing,

rather like the heartbeat a baby must hear in utero.

Or maybe when you are a word heard by the god

who is the god of the lost, of unknowns and unknowables,

you in turn hear his heartbeat.

Moving inward like sound, moving outward like thought.

2012

LETTER TO A DEAD MAN ON THE OCCUPATION OF HOPE

Dear young man who died on the fourth day of this turbulent 2011, dear Mohammed Bouazizi,

I want to write to you about an astonishing year—with three months yet to run. I want to tell you about the power of despair and the margins of hope and the bonds of civil society. I wish you could see the way that your small life and large death became a catalyst for the fall of so many dictators in what is known as the Arab Spring.

We are now in some sort of an American Fall. Civil society here has suddenly hit the ground running, and we are all headed toward a future no one imagined when you—a young Tunisian vegetable seller capable of giving so much, who instead had so much taken from you—burned yourself to death to protest your impoverished and humiliated state.

You lit yourself on fire on December 17, 2010, exactly nine months before Occupy Wall Street began. Your death two weeks later would be the beginning of so much. You lit yourself on fire because you were voiceless, powerless, and evidently without hope. And yet you must have had one small hope left: that your death would have an impact, that you, who had so few powers—even the power to make a decent living or protect your modest possessions or be treated fairly and decently by the police—had the power to protest. As it turned out, you had that power beyond your wildest dreams, and you had it because your hope, however diminished, was the dream of the many, the dream of what we now have started calling the 99%.

And so Tunisia erupted and overthrew its government, and Egypt caught fire, as did Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, and Libya. Where the nonviolent protests elsewhere turned into a civil war, the rebels have almost
won after several bloody months. Who could have imagined a Middle East without Ben Ali of Tunisia, without Mubarak, without Gaddafi? And yet here we are, in the unimaginable world. Again. And almost everywhere.

Japan was literally shaken loose from its plans and arrangements by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, and that country has undergone profound soul-searching about values and priorities. China is turbulent, and no one knows how much longer the discontent of the repressed middle class and the hungry poor there will remain containable. India: who knows? The Saudi government is so frightened it even gave women a few new rights. Syrians wouldn’t go home even when their army began to shoot them down. Crowds of up to a million Italians have been protesting austerity measures in recent months. The Greeks, well, if you’ve been following events, you know about the Greeks. Have I forgotten Israel? Huge demonstrations against the economic status quo there lasted all summer and into this fall.

As you knew at the outset, it’s all about economics. This wild year, Greece boiled over again into crisis with colossal protests, demonstrations, blockades, and outright street warfare. Icelanders continued their fight against bailing out the banks that sank their country’s economy in 2008 and continue pelting politicians with eggs. Their former prime minister may become the first head of state to face legal charges in connection with the global financial collapse. Spanish youth began to rise up on May 15.

Distinctively, in so many of these uprisings, the participants were not advocating not for one party or a simple position, but for a better world, for dignity, for respect, for real democracy, for belonging, for hope and possibility—and their economic underpinnings. The Spanish young whose future had been sold out to benefit corporations and their 1% were nicknamed the
Indignados
, and they lived in the plazas of Spain this summer. Occupied Madrid, like Occupied Tahrir Square, preceded Occupy Wall Street.

In Chile, students outraged by the cost of an education and the profound inequities of their society have been demonstrating since May—with everything from kiss-ins to school occupations to marches of 150,000
or more. Forty thousand students marched against “education reform” in Colombia last week. And in August in Britain the young went on a rampage that tore up London, Birmingham, and dozens of other communities, an event that began when the police shot Mark Duggan, a dark-skinned twenty-nine-year-old Londoner. Young Britons had risen up more peaceably over tuition hikes the winter before. There, too, things are bleak and volatile—something I know you would understand. In Mexico, a beautiful movement involving mass demonstrations against the drug war has arisen, triggered by the death of another young man and by the grief and vision of his father, left-wing poet Javier Sicilia.