The Labyrinth

                         by Aurel Antonie

On my left there is a wall which I keep touching with my hand. It is my only chance to find the way out of the labyrinth. I must keep my palm close to the left wall all the time, while moving forward. This is a guaranteed, found out by some mathematician or maze specialist, but not yet tested. Maybe they verified it by mathematical rules or calculations, or they checked  ………. labyrinth drawn on paper. But in point of practice, no one has ever walked blindly in a labyrinth, looking for a way out, with no other hope than the boundless trust in this principle. I actually do not confide in it but, unfortunately, I have no other chance. I am aware of  no other way to get out of an unknown maze.

I have not even a map with me. But how could I be supposed to have a map, since I have not entered here for a pleasure trip. Or at least to have a ball of thread like Theseus, in point of fact even that thread, no matter how useful, has still an undeniable disadvantage. That thread links you to the outside world and you run the risk that a practical joker or a malicious person might cut it and then you are entirely lost. You shall no longer find the way cut in a thousand years. Or the thread might just break being worn out by rubbing against those coarse  walls.

I think that the trick discovered by this mathematician is more useful. You keep your hand close to a wall and walk. And you don’t get away from that wall until you reach a way out. If there is a way out. But there certainly is! All mazes have way out. But what if I’ve never heard, that does not mean that there is no such a maze. Yet, I don’t think that the bad luck of running across such a labyrinth has befallen me. One may at least come out from the same spot where one has come in! A labyrinth without a way out would be a labyrinth without a way in, and such a labyrinth does not exist. You state again that it doesn’t exist! But Kelvin used to say… May Kelvin be thrice accursed! For he is the one who got me into trouble. With his morbid imagination, he talked me into coming to see the Gate of the Sun. That happened yesterday, if my watch is still going right.

We left together in the desert, yesterday morning. Out of the blue, Kelvin, who writes all sort of fantastic stories, began to speak about the labyrinth. This did not surprise me. It is customary with him. And moreover, there was a long way ahead of us and his stories made the time slip by. It is quite a blessing to have such a story-teller during a long journey. It is a blessing, if he confines to story-telling, but it is actually a curse if his weird fantasies materialize and you enter his tortuous world, hard to control.

I still cannot understand why have I accepted to join him in that absurd adventure. And yet, when he explained to me what was to be done, everything seemed so simple. We were supposed to cross the Red Desert in order to get to see the Gate of the Sun, which is bewitching. Where had he heard that? He had seen it many times in his imagination, or in a dream, or in a similar state of mind. It seems that such states are quite frequent with him. In his mind, the place where the gate was standing was so well established that he convinced me. And yet, I still don’t understand how I could agree to go to a place which exist only in the imagination of a guy like Kelvin. But this person exerts an unaccountable fascination on me.

“Don’t you feel that the labyrinth is emerging from the ground?” he asked me unexpectedly.

“I don’t feel anything,” I answered, staring at the boundless desert. Then I looked at him, but I didn’t like his expression at all. He seemed to have fallen into a trance.

“But it is emerging and surrounding us,” Kelvin persisted. “It often happens to me. I would sometimes wander for days in the maze, looking for a way out, but it seems that no way leads anywhere and I simply lose patience, though I try to keep my self-control. But one morning there rises that huge chronometer which replaces my sun and the labyrinth gets underground, it disappears, you see?”

“No, I don’t.”

“You know,” he resumed imperturbably. “I sometimes feel that I’ve been spending more time than was my due, that I’ve used a time that wasn’t mine. And this spell of time is taken away from my life. My life is shortened by that time abusively spent. This usually happens when I am creating. When time disappears and I think that the hands of my chronometer stand still. But this is not so. I use to create at night, because at night I get rid of the obsession of the chronometer and I feel that time expands and night may last for ever. But in the morning, when the chronometer rises and I may see its hands, I see that I have stolen days, sometimes whole months and I am frightened. I am afraid that I shall have to pay sometime for all that stolen time. My only chance would be immortality. But who would think that I am immortal? I do not fully believe it myself. If those around me would truly think that I am immortal, I could certainly be so. But people doubt it and their doubts rob me of life. If only they might believe in what I am writing. But they do not take it for true. Actually I think that they do not put faith in anything. They have lost their faith. They no longer believe in themselves, let alone in me or in my writings. Yet it seems that I need them, since when their indifference reaches a climax, the labyrinth which surrounds me rushes at me. And then I lose touch with people, because in that labyrinth there is no one. And I keep wandering in it for days on end, losing my confidence in everything that exist. I no longer trust my very life, as it is. And after long lasting searches and uncertainties, one morning there rise the chronometer which calmly announces me that it has robbed me of some other months from my life. The labyrinth, the art, people’s distrust, my own distrust, all these rob me, deprive me of life, so that I feel that my life has gone long ago and that I am in god’s debt for two or three lives. And then I start thinking again that I am immortal and the cycle resumes. Just now I am feeling that the labyrinth is emerging from the ground and separates me from you. The labyrinth had never surrounded me when I went to the Gate of the Sun. I think that you alone are to blame. I shouldn’t have taken you with me.”

I tired to tell him that I was seeing no maze and that it was not my fault that I was roaming that unfriendly desert. But while I was speaking to him, damn it all, he was moving away ever faster, so that I could no longer keep pace with him. And he got himself lost.

I walked all by myself up to the evening. I looked for Kelvin for a while, then I sought after the way back. I went to sleep at night in the desert and in the morning. I woke up inside the labyrinth. As easy as ABC! I think there is no easier way of getting into trouble… In actual fact, logically thinking, I don’t think that it was the labyrinth which came over me. It seems much more plausible that I should have entered it last night, after sunset, when I was wandering around giddily, without knowing too well which way I went. And I probably slept in the labyrinth, not in the desert. As a matter of fact, the distinction is not essential since, in the last analysis, the desert is the highest expression of the labyrinth, as you cannot get out of it by touching a wall with your left hand all the time. At any rate, it is better to be in a labyrinth. Especially when you are aware of the rule of getting out, as I am.

I know another rule as well, invented also by those students of labyrinths, but equally untested. You are supposed to draw a solid line on one of the walls. If you pass a second time through a gallery having such a line, you draw another line on the opposite wall. You should never pass through a corridor where there already are two lines. As simple as anything. This is quite useful when you wish to find at all costs any cul-de-sac or dead end, which might shelter a treasure or a hungry Minotaur. I think that this rule would have been quite useful for Theseus, but not for me, since I look for nothing, I just want to get out.

What a strange construction, this labyrinth is! Whoever could have devised it? Fancy that! It was Daedalus, that guy so full of useless ideas. I don’t know what possessed him! To make such a tortuous construction, just for confining an animal inside. Couldn’t he make a solid cage instead? Well, since he made no cage but a labyrinth, it means that things could not be done otherwise. As a matter of fact, what do I know about those times, and, in general, what do I know about labyrinth? And, even if I know, what would be the use? Could I get out faster from here? Possibly, it I might grasp the essence of the labyrinth and its purpose.

Any construction has a practical and immediate purpose. Only the labyrinth has such an absurd design, that I am induced to think that it was erected as a monument to the absurd, and yet, at the time when it was built, people could not afford to spend so much energy and money just for erecting a monument to the absurd, which we are not sure that they perceived as such.

Daedalus built the Labyrinth just in order to imprison an ox. I can’t get this out of my mind. What lie hidden behind that story? I should not forget that it was also Daedalus who devised those calamitous wings for Icarus. I think that the guy was a genius of evil and that he turned people’s heads with his strange ideas. And yet, the animal shut up in the labyrinth was a Minotaur. Minos’s illegitimate son. That’s the point ! The Minotaut represented the fault, the sin, which was to be concealed from the eyes of the other people and which had also to be prevented from rushing among them and from contaminating them. But in order to imprison a concept so overwhelmingly powerful as the fault or the sin, no wall is thick enough. And then Daedalus resorted to that awful snare. For it is an inconceivably refines snare.

In actual fact, the Minotaur was not imprisoned. It was not prevented to walk, to run, to look for a way out. It preserved the illusion of complete liberty. It was faced by miles and miles of galleries, which provided an almost endless number of options. And, since it had access to the corridors, the Minotaur felt no urge to break the side walls, which probably could not have resisted unusual strength. What a victory of intelligence over brutal force! That Daedalus sure was an extremely imaginative fellow! I ought to have taken his advice, before getting among those endless walls. Oh, no. I think that our talk would have been pointless, if he was like Kelvin. And they seem very much alike. The same unusual imagination. As if they were aliens.

Nevertheless, the labyrinth is still a great question. Whence does it come and what does it mean? It is a strange concept for human nature. In this concept there is something which exceeds the creative imagination of a man. Of a normal man, but not of someone like Kelvin or like Daedalus.

Kelvin should have roamed through this labyrinth, which is better suited to him mental structure. But what if he is bustling somewhere nearby and you might bump into him, at a turn of those tortuous corridors. Let Kelvin alone. He already has his mental mazes, from where he cannot get out. He has no need of this material labyrinth. O, but I want him to be with me, since he got me into this scrape and he is the one who should help me out of it. You’re wrong. No one will get you out of this place, if you don’t succeed in getting out by yourself. And you won’t succeed, until you find the essence of the labyrinth. Its meaning.

I ought to try to think like Daedalus’s contemporaries. It’s difficult. How am I to change my educated, logical thinking into their direct and instinctual way of reasoning? O, but I can. I don’t think I am structurally different from them. And this is the proof: I am not able to solve a problem posed by one of them.

The purpose of any labyrinth is to be solved. To pass through it and to find your way out. Or you may pass by it and ignore it and then the labyrinth ceases to exist. Especially if it is ignored by most people. To say nothing of the case when everybody ignores it. This makes me think that the Minotaur did not exist either. It was invented by Daedalus to make people solve the labyrinth. To draw their attention to it. To prevent their ignoring it. To give a human meaning to an inhuman construction or building. People had no wish to solve a problem without a practical and immediate end. Why should a man enter the labyrinth when he could simply ignore it and mind his own business? But, knowing that the building imprisons a force, a brutal force which may get out and destroy everything, people start being interested in the walls that protect them against that force. Would the problem of the labyrinth concern me, hadn’t I been inside, obliged to find its issue? I don’t think so.

I have learned about the Labyrinth from the legend of the Minotaur, then, quite accidentally, in a journal, I have come across a communication presented by a young scientist at an international congress of psychology. The young man made some mice enter a maze. The food was placed at the opposite end, so that the mice had to find the right way through the maze, in order to reach it. In the initial phase, out of 169 mice only one succeeded in finding the food and in surviving. The others were starved to death, straying through the paths of the maze. The offspring of those that could find the food were submitted to the same test and after chat tough selection, only those endowed with that special ability survived. After fourteen generations, the error decreased from 168 to two only. The young scientist who described his experiment drew a disturbing conclusion, concerning the social conduct controlled by transmitting to the offspring the newly acquired social habits. After that communication, another scientist repeated the experiment, which was a failure. He then publicly accused the young man of being an impostor and the young man committed suicide. The scientist who had blamed him carried cut the test again and this time he got the same findings as the young scientist. The story is quite strange and I might have forgotten it, hadn’t I been so impressed by the fate of the young scientist. It was in the same paper that I read about the method used to find the way out of an unknown labyrinth. 

As a matter of fact, that rule is a nonsense. I have been walking for ages keeping my hand close to that coarse wall and there is no glint of hope of finding the way out. The mathematician, with his rule of the labyrinth, was in the wrong. How could he be wrong? He cannot be wrong! He can’t leave me in the lurch just now, when I need his theory! What is the use of knowing how to go out of a labyrinth, if in practice I can’t do it? It goes without saying that a problem is of interest to you only when you are actually confronted by it. Otherwise you may think of it as an abstraction and you may solve it theoretically at most, like that scientist with the rule of the labyrinth.

But what if this labyrinth is endless? There are no endless labyrinths. You don’t say so! Just think of an endless wall, which you keep hugging but cannot reach its end. There are no endless walls. Not even the Chinese wall is endless, though it is the only construction visible from the Moon. Hence we are speaking of an endless labyrinth within a limited space. This is hard to achieve. Hard, but not impossible. An endless labyrinth actually is a labyrinth without solution, which has no way out. You can’t walk out of it, because it keeps changing the shape and place of its corridors, while you are inside. A modular labyrinth, whose modules are joined in an endless variety of ways. Or a labyrinth with doors, where every door opens one-way only, without allowing coming back on the same way. If you take the wrong way, you find yourself in a closed gallery and can no longer leave it. But that would be a labyrinth which kills. There is no need of such a labyrinth. You may wander through a labyrinth like that of Daedalus to the end of you life without finding any way out, if you don’t know the rule of keeping your hand close to the wall. But I do know it and I shall go out. Especially if I am to find out the essence of the labyrinth. I think that the only labyrinth which no issue is the labyrinth which you do not wish to leave.

If I come to think of it, I feel that essential element in defining the labyrinth is its very unique character. One man created one labyrinth only and mankind will go on speaking about it for ever. After that brilliant idea had struck Daedalus it is much easier to construct another labyrinth, than to grasp its essence. I wonder whether I would set myself to construct a labyrinth. I don‘t think so. Another labyrinth would merely copy the first one, which is unique and unattainable.

What would crown all is my meeting that animal, supposing it is still here. But this is not possible. According to legend, it was slain by Theseus, the man with the ball of thread. But are those legends to be trusted? I am not quite sure that the young man killed that ox. Maybe he did not even meet it. This is not out of the question, account being taken of the great complexity of the labyrinth. You may place one hundred individuals inside and there is a good chance that they will walk for weeks on end without meeting one another. In actual fact, no one ever saw the dead animal. They purely trusted that adventurer. How gullible people were! Not to check up! That was the first thing to do! But who was to do it? Who was bold enough to enter that lair-labyrinth? It was much more convenient to take it for granted. But, even it he had killed that beast, it is not certain that the monster had left no offspring or some other beings. Or, even more likely, people should have placed another animal inside and they are waiting to see how I am to find my way about it.

How annoying! Now I am going to be obsessed by the presence of an animal confined here. With me. Maybe for quite a long time. Bored and eager to find some diversion. And precisely I am the one to keep it company. What bad luck! It is my sincere opinion that Theseus stood somewhere near the entrance. He was certainly not mad enough to creep into rat holes, just to meet the monster. He then went out, told a lie and became a hero. What an artful guy! While I was simple-minded enough to set myself to roam through those caves and to keep touching the walls. Or perhaps people realized that Theseus had cheated them and that is why they placed me here to finish his job. But they could have informed me of it, a least. So that I could have taken with me a weapon or something. A weapon and a ball of thread. How strange!

It goes without saying that Theseus took Daedalus’s advice, before he ventured into this place. And Daedalus would have certainly described the structure of the labyrinth for hours on end. But when he saw the idiotic way in which Theseus stared at the plan of the construction, he sighed and gave him that thread which became famous. According to legend it was a woman who had given it to him. That legend was written by a woman. To be sure.

I think that same ball of thread was used somewhat later to make the Gordian Knot, after it got quite entangled by Theseus in the labyrinth. And then, as it stands to reason, a neurotic fellow came and cut it with his sword. Simply and efficiently. But things are somewhat harder, in the case of a labyrinth. One cannot seven it pure and simple, with a whistling sword. Nor can you take a pick axe, like a jobber, and start pulling down the walls, one after another. This is a Sysiphean labour and it is everlasting, since the problem of the labyrinth cannot be solved by digging a mole hole in it. The same as the question of the Gordian Knot was not solved either. To solve a labyrinth one needs calm. Calm and patience.

Nevertheless, they could have made a smaller labyrinth. What’s the use of so many hundreds of miles of winding paths and of so many thousands of crossings and forkings? But they couldn’t make a small labyrinth. The labyrinth poses or solves a fundamental question. A small labyrinth does not pose and does not solve any problem. Such a labyrinth could have been quite easily assimilated by people.

Logically speaking, a labyrinth is a construction which you enter and then try to leave as quickly as possible. This is again a contradiction, but it is true. Once you enter it, you are faced with several variants and you are free to choose one all by yourself. You alone! The Minotaur was also alone, the same as Theseus and I. And the winder the range of options, the more intricate it is, since only one choice provides the chance of finding the way out. The chance! This is the meaning of the labyrinth. Its essence. We are all in a labyrinth. Some are more proficient, others are less well equipped, but all are looking for a way out. The chance of finding it the same for all, but its very essence makes it available only for very few.

Now I am afraid that I shall never be able to find the way out and that I’ve lost my chance by applying that uncertain rule, of keeping the hand close to the wall. I think that every one is frightened and that the Minotaur did never exist. It symbolized only the natural fear of every man faced with a labyrinth he did not understand. That fear was materialized in that beast. Daedalus himself was afraid. He was the most frightened of all. And he materialized his fear in that impossible labyrinth. It is man’s natural reaction to the presence of a higher force, which he is afraid of and which may vanquish him. And since the only chance of the vanquished is not to accept the idea of defeat, he transposes the fight on a spiritual level and creates the labyrinth. Daedalus conceals his fear in this labyrinth which one cannot leave. Neither he, nor his fear. Then each one tries to find a way out, hoping to leave the other one inside. Everybody cherishes the hope of being lucky enough to be saved but my chance is the same as that of Kelvin or Theseus, the same as that of all those who wandered or will wander trough a labyrinth, without finding a way out. As a matter of fact, the chance is just an illusion, created to gather every one here within the walls of the labyrinth.

Yet, no matter how many thoughts I have, my condition is just the same. I am a man who has been walking for days or years on end, keeping his left hand close to the wall of the labyrinth and moving forward with the foolish hope that he will succeed in going out of it. Out, where the only thing waiting for me is the desert, which is a labyrinth essentialized to the absurd. And which you cannot leave, helped by any rule. Then why should I find a way out? Just for entering a labyrinth even more intricate than this one? A least here I have the possibility to choose between two or several galleries which are crossing or bifurcating. While outside, in the desert, pathways are numberless and endless. Here I have the opportunity to chose, since in any situation there are at least two options, and you may choose what is more convenient for you. The Chinese used to say that out of thirty-six possibilities, one should choose flight. How nice. To start running. Maybe it is convenient there, but here to run means to get away from the left wall and to lose your last chance of finding the way out.

And this absolute solitude where roaming through the corridors becomes an obsession. I think that I have secluded myself from the other people just because of that fixed idea of finding a way out of here. It secluded me from Kelvin giddy and dreamy as he was, but the only man I could speak with. In an endless labyrinth, you always need someone like Kelvin.

This is actually a huge and senseless game, whose rules I know but will no longer observe. I’ve covered enough miles. I’ve touched the coarse walls of the labyrinth quite enough. It’s over now. I want to be left alone with myself and regain myself.

The man took away his left hand from the wall and went off calmly. He walked engrossed in thought, his hands in his pockets, through the corridors that appeared and intersected in front of him. He met people. Some were drawing lines or various cabbalistic signs on the walls, others kept their left hand close to the wall, walking with a senseless hope in their eyes, others were running at random and all passed by the others without seeing one another. Nor did they see the man who passed them, indifferent to all, with his hands in his pockets and a bitter smile in the corner of his mouth.

                      Translated by Sorana Georgescu-Gorjan