I had the impression, midway through the hours I spent wandering, that time itself had become visible, that every moment of my life as I was passing through orange gates always had been and always would be passing through magnificent gates that only in this one place are visible. Their uneven spacing seemed to underscore this perception; sometimes time grows dense and seems to both slow down and speed up—when you fall in love, when you are in the thick of an emergency or a discovery; other times it flows by limpid as a stream across a meadow, each day calm and like the one before, not much to remember; or time runs dry and you’re stuck, hoping for change that finally arrives in a trickle or a rush. All these metaphors of flow can be traded in for solid ground: time is a stroll through orange gates. Blue mountains are constantly walking, said Dōgen Zenji, the monk who brought Sōtō Zen to Japan, and we are also constantly walking, through these particular Shinto pathways of orange gates. Or so it seemed to me on that day of exhaustion and epiphany.
What does it mean to arrive? The fruits of our labor, we say, the reward. The harvest, the home, the achievement, the completion, the satisfaction, the joy, the recognition, the consummation. Arrival is the reward, it’s the time you aspire to on the journey, it’s the end, but on the mountain south of Kyoto on a day just barely spring, on long paths whose only English guidance was a few plaques about not feeding the monkeys I never saw anyway, arrival seemed to be constant. Maybe it is.
I wandered far over the mountain that day, until I was outside the realm of the pretty little reproduction of an antique map I had purchased, and gone beyond the realm of the gates. I was getting tired after four hours or so of steady walking. The paths continued, the trees continued, the ferns and mosses under them continued, and I continued but there were no more Torii gates. I came out in a manicured suburb with few people on the streets, and walked out to the valley floor and then back into the next valley over and up again through the shops to the entrance to the shrine all over again. But I could not arrive again, though I walked through a few more gates and went to see the tunnel of orange again. It was like trying to go back to before the earthquake, to before knowledge. An epiphany can be as indelible a transformation as a trauma. Once I was through those gates and through that day, I would never enter them for the first time and understand what they taught me for the first time.
All you really need to know is that there is a hillside in Japan in which time is measured in irregular intervals and every moment is an orange gate, and foxes watch over it, and people wander it, and the whole is maintained by priests and by donors, so that gates crumble and gates are erected, time passes and does not, as elsewhere nuclear products decay and cultures change and people come and go, and that the place might be one at which you will arrive someday, to go through the flickering tunnels of orange, up the mountainside, into this elegant machine not for controlling or replicating time but maybe for realizing it, or blessing it. Or maybe you have your own means of being present, your own for seeing that at this very minute you are passing through an orange gate.
2014
JOURNEY TO THE CENTER
(on Elín Hansdóttir’s Labyrinth Path)
A vast artillery of techniques, from divination in the entrails of animals and in the dark sky of stars to the polls and studies of our own age, has been deployed as though they could be a torch, a flashlight in that dark journey, but the future always surprises, and no quantity of predictions makes it predictable. Darkness is a pejorative in English, the darkness that is supposed to be bad times and moral failure, and the term has often carried emotional, moral and religious overtones, as has its opposite: the children of light, snowy angels, fair maidens, and all those knights in shining armor and cowboys in white hats. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that,” said the dark-skinned Martin Luther King Jr., but sometimes love is darkness; sometimes the glare of light is what needs to be extinguished. Turn off the lights and come to bed.
This was the text for an artist’s book about the labyrinth; the original formatting is preserved but flows differently here.
Darkness has its uses, its virtues, and its spirit, the spirit of embracing—of embracing the unknown I was going to write, and then thought that might be too narrow, and embracing might be a way to describe this nocturnal atmosphere in which things are not so separate. In the deepest dark, in the velvet of blackness, what is there can only be distinguished by touch. John Berger wrote, “In war the dark is on nobody’s side, in love the dark confirms that we are together.”
Darkness is amorous, the darkness of passion, of your own unknowns rising to the surface, the darkness of interiors, and perhaps part of what makes pornography so pornographic is the glaring light in which it transpires, that and the lack of actual touch, the substitution of eyes for skin, of seeing for touching that is the difference between distance and closeness, warmth and coldness.
In the dark there is no distance, and perhaps that’s what some fear in it.
In darkness things merge, which might be how passion becomes love and how making love begets progeny of all natures and forms.
Merging is dangerous.
Darkness is generative, and generation, biological and artistic both, requires this amorous engagement with the unknown, this entry into the realm where you do not quite know what you are doing and what will happen next.
To embrace the future, the dark, you make. Making is a letting go of your own stuff into the world, of the ideas and offspring that the breeze of time takes away as though you were a dry dandelion, a thistle, a milkweed, a poplar whose seeds travel on the winds of time, in this way that wind makes love to flowers and seeds, in this way that time tears them apart and carries them onward.
The white ghosts of those seeds travel forward in time and land when the wind ceases to bear them up and then only maybe to take root and start the story over again, or another story.
When you spend time in the desert, you come to love shadow, shade, and darkness, the respite they give to the menacing glare of day that burns you out and dries you up. The light is beautiful but too powerful, and at midday it flattens everything into a bland harshness, but early and late in the day the light is more golden and the shadows are longer. So long that every bump has a long shade streaming from it across the land. Bushes have the shadows of trees, and boulders, the shadows of giants; every crevice and fold and protrusion of the landscape is thrown into the high relief of light and shadow, and your own shadow is twice, seven, ten times your height, licking like a cool tongue of darkness across the landscape. At those times day and night are intermingled.
Too much whiteness and you go snow-blind.
You can see in the dark, but brightness blinds you to the subtleties of the night world, so that if you make a fire in that desert or walk by flashlight your eyes adjust, and everything outside the illuminated area sinks into indistinguishable blackness. Turn away from the fire, turn off the light, and the darkness ceases to be solid black and turns into visible terrain, even on starry nights without the moon’s blue shadows and cool watery light.
So it is in the labyrinth called Path, where you enter, the door shuts behind you, and you pause while your eyes adjust and what at first seemed like pure blackness begins to sort itself out into angles and facets. One of the uncanny aspects of Elín’s Path is that the traveler—viewer we usually say about works of art, but this art is more and other than visual, and the person who visits it is first of all a traveler—is that the travelers who enter it one by one bump up against their own ideas about light and darkness. It’s the most natural thing in the world to interpret the darknesses within Path as solids and the subtly luminous planes and zones, illuminated with a faint lavender light from narrow cracks in the structure, as openings, but often it’s the opposite: pale are the hard walls, inviting is the endless darkness.
Path has been erected in four places now, but I saw it or rather traveled it in its second incarn
ation—entered it seven times in the late spring and midsummer in Iceland a few years ago. When I first entered it early that May, darkness was already growing rare and late in Iceland, disorienting for a person from near the Horse Latitudes, and by mid-June there was no real darkness, no night, no respite from the rational light of day and wakefulness, it seemed, anywhere on that island, except for Elin’s Path. The labyrinth seemed like a burrow, a refuge, an island of night in that country of day. The piece was as welcoming and uncanny as sleep in that bright relentless summer when I was thirsty for darkness.
You dove into the structure’s darkness—dove, because like a diver, you had people standing by to pull you out if you got too lost or too frightened, as people become even in illuminated labyrinths. And when you went as far as you could go the walls began to press together and there was no way forward; you turned back and wandered through the luminous and darker darknesses to the light and were done with the exploring, at least bodily, for the mind lingered.
The piece stripped you of certainties, of confidence, disoriented you and rendered your sight unreliable, put you in a cloud of unknowing and set you on a path whose twists and turns and distance were unknown. This is perhaps closer to our real condition in many ways than the assuredness with which we meet the world even when it turns out we don’t know what we’re doing or what to expect, even when the world surprises us and expectations don’t map possibilities. Which is to say it did what darkness and labyrinths do, both get us lost literally and let us know who we really are, metaphysically.
Labyrinth in Luce Irigaray’s feminist etymology has to do with labia, the lips, but the more commonly accepted interpretation is that the word somehow has to do with the labrys, the two-headed axe of ancient Greece that nevertheless became a lesbian icon some decades ago, perhaps because it has to do with fierce goddesses and matriarchs—a labrys hacked open the route for Athena’s birth out of Zeus’s head. What is an axe doing in a labyrinth? They cut through things, straighten the way. English axes is the plural both of the tool or weapon and of the straight line of a trajectory, the axis of a boulevard through a city, of the Champs Élysées or of Broadway or Laugavegur in Reykjavík, the long boulevards that are also sight lines through cities, incisions in them, since a street is only the void defined by the volumes of buildings. But in a labyrinth the axes are broken, or rather coiled—lines wound like the spool of thread Ariadne gave Theseus so that he might find his way out of the labyrinth in Crete, the labyrinth made to hide the monster. In some of the ancient drawings of Ariadne, the spool of thread she holds looks like a spiral labyrinth itself. The thread Theseus unwinds is a reminder that the labyrinth is also a line, an axis, wound up so that vast distance fits into small space.
“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 throu
gh 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.
The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness Page 24