The Labyrinth

Reaching for Ariadne's thread

The Descent.

Palaeolithic

In the depths of time all were kin, and every human-self spilled out beyond the body, inhabiting rock, bear and firmament. Never knowing apartness, when those people walked, the world flowed through their bodies, and songs rose in their hearts, braiding all with all. Tools crafted from rock and wood, born of skilled hands. The hunters taking kangaroo or auroch with sorrow and gratitude. The world sustained by the world.

Too much thinking

A bearded Greek looked past the perfection of things to a perfect abstraction. What was one became two. Sundered. Broken apart. “No!” they said. “Your spirit soars. Your body stinks”. And the spirit soared, abandoning its clay shadow, and surrendered to jealous Gods and set up a new camp in a place called heaven: far, far, away. Three thousand years before zeros and ones drained the life from the world, a wedge slithered its narrow edge into the minds of people, and there began me and you; us and them; good and evil. Me and it. “Do not oppose me on this!” They cried. “The one God speaks through me, and I must slaughter any who do not submit”. “Go forth and multiply” They cried. “God is hungry for souls”. “You who are freed from this abhorrent world of mud and blood must destroy it in the glory of God”.

Enlightenment

“Ah”, said the humans. “We have no need of this God, He is but a maker of machines, (though yet he tells us on whom to wage war, and whom we should burn alive). The wedge is driven deeper, so that even God is cast aside, and only men make meaning. Cogito, ego sum. There is nothing I can trust beyond my own mind. A clockwork world filled with clockwork animals, unknowing of feeling, intention and life. A clockwork world full of animal humans: Welsh, Irish, African, Taíno, Eora, Woman. The men are drunk on the power they find in their hands. Nature screams on the rack. The ships set sail. There are many forests to be felled.

Terminal

God has taken up with Bad Company, and anyone who still speaks with the old spirits is a fool, a charlatan or just mad. Or brown and therefore cute. The world crystallised under the human gaze is the only world there is. Meticulously measured and doled out to the deserving. Death retreats, its long shadow cast upon a faltering world. A time of fever-dreams, when all that is alive must be fed into the maw of the machine to make more nothings for the empty souls that are fed into the other chute. The issue? Grey muck and hopelessness. A world un-made. Lives un-lived. Dreams of bunkers. “Ready the ships for Mars! All is lost here, for we can never forego our comforts”. The future will be better. The future will always be better. The machine will soon be planted in your brain. This is your destiny: to return triumphant to the world of matter. Dead. But also immortal.

Oh Dear, We’re Lost!

Lost, deep in a labyrinth. Stalking, or stalked by, a monster that will kill and eat us. That has half eaten us already. The genius scientist/engineer Daedalus built this labyrinth to imprison the monster, the Minotaur half-bull-half-human-child of the queen, Pasiphaë.  But Daedalus also built the machine, the wooden cow, that enabled Pasiphaë…ah, no. We must go back a ways…

King Minos and his Queen, Pasiphaë ruled over the island of Crete, and Minos, and, ever aware of his need to increase his standing amongst his rival Kings and would-be challengers, prayed to Poseidon (who else in that land rearing craggy from the wine-dark sea?), for a sign of his favour.

And Poseidon, sent Minos just such a sign: a great and beautiful bull, the like of which was never seen in all the world. Now, Minos knew what he had to do. He knew that he must slaughter this magnificent animal in sacrifice to Poseidon. This is the way of it.

But Minos could not bring himself to do it. Such a creature could not be wasted in sacrifice! So he kept the bull in the royal fields and admired him daily. This too is the way of it.

Poseidon might have been patient for a time, but it is not in the nature of a God to be patient for long. Angry, Poseidon bewitched the Queen, Pasiphaë into a desperate, sexual frenzy. She had to have that bull! She had to fuck that bull!

And so she beseeched, and then ordered on the genius scientist/engineer Daedalus to make her a machine. Yes, a wooden cow. Now we may be sure that Daedalus did his best to reason with the Queen – he was a wise man – but history shows that his words were in vain, for she was strapped in there amongst the carved wood, and her very human tenderness presented to the bull. He mounted that wooden cow. He fucked that poor bewitched woman, she oblivious to all eyes of all the Court, and the tongues of all the land.

[I wrote the story in a way to capture the imagined violence of the act. But who is deceiving who? And then I saw this painting, and I wondered if Poseidon’s ‘curse’, was love?]

And in due course, as is the way of things, Pasiphaë gave birth to a baby boy who was named Asterius. Asterius was a strong child, suckled vigorously and grew fast. He was perfect. Perfect except for the fact that he had the head and tail of a bull attached to his otherwise human form. Minos, we might guess, was not impressed, but we hear little of him. Pasiphaë kept the child in the palace and suckled him, as a good mother as any.

The child grew unnaturally fast, and soon outgrew his mother’s milk. And then it became clear that the child, being neither bull nor human, could eat neither grass nor bread. It was not long before the horror dawned on the Court and on Pasiphaë herself: this child was a monster that could now only live on the flesh of humans.

So it came to be, that the genius Daedalus was called upon a second time, to build a great labyrinth, so complex that none could escape it, below the city wherein this monstrous royal monster-child, now known to all as the Minotaur, could be imprisoned for the protection of all. And it also came to be, that, every year, several young men or women were sent below as feed for the monster.

As horrifying as this latter fact was, it did not trouble King Minos for long as he had the power and the need to punish the Athenians (for some crime we need not concern ourselves with here), and so he demanded tribute in the form of six or seven young folk every year…

And so it went for several years, until a Prince of Athens called Theseus declared that he could not live to be King of a land that would surrender its young to be sacrificed to a monster, and he resolved to kill the Minotaur or die in the attempt.

Things were done with a good degree of ceremony in those days, and so when an Athenian Prince arrived as one of the sacrifices, there was plenty of time for Theseus to meet Minos’s daughter Ariadne, and as is the way of things, they fell in love.

The day came for Theseus and his fellow sacrifices to enter the Labyrinth, and, at the gate, Ariadne surreptitiously handed Theseus a sword and a large ball of thread. I always think of it as being red thread. She kept hold of one end, and tied it to one of the bars that made up the gate.

Theseus and his companions descended to their fate.

How long they were down there in that foetid, dark catacomb, and what exactly transpired is not revealed to us. But when all was done, and carrying the Minotaur’s head in his arms, Theseus followed that red thread by twist and turn, by branch and fork, by gallery and pitfall, until at length, it led him back to the gate, and his love, the wise Ariadne (wiser at least than both of her parents).

There is more to this tale, matters of black sails and white sails, mistakes and the death of a King; a young woman abandoned by her lover on a deserted island[1], only to be claimed in marriage by Dionysis himself and her circlet flung into the heavens to become the Corona borealis…but these matters don’t concern us here. But we might note that the cleverness of Daedalus came to bite (even) him in time, when he crafted a set of wings made of feather and wax for his beloved son, Icarus…

Following Ariadne’s Thread

The red thread perhaps suggests we look at China.

In that land, though monotheism and a separation of body and spirit held sway for a time, the older visions of a unity of all things crept secretly, silently through dense undergrowth, slipped like mycorrhizae through the soil, drifted ethereal, like mist on a mountainside, like spores carried on a thunderstorm…ideas that could not be extinguished. And when the time came, those ideas burst forth into new life.

(That was a long time ago, and China is a different place now. But we might dare to hope that those spores lie yet upon moist earth, awaiting a sign).

In the ancient Chinese vision, there was the Tao, the Way, what David Hinton translates as the ‘Existence Tissue’. I cannot tell you what the Tao is. If I tried I would get it wrong. That much is written in the text. Tao is everything. Tao is everything changing. Tao is change, it is process.

Do I dare suggest that the Tao is comprised of two things? (not ‘comprised’ as in ‘reducible’, but ‘comprised’ as in a dynamic, inseparable unity). There is Qi. Qi is energy and matter. Energy and matter are, at root that same thing, interchangeable. Physics will tell you that. Qi does not float randomly about empty space. It follows a pattern set by the Li. The Li is the pattern. The pattern that causes this-or-that thing to manifest in the clothing of Qi - matter and energy.

In this we have a startling confluence of thought: from over a thousand years ago in China, and some radical thinking about Complex Systems that has rattled the cage of science in only the past few decades. The terms are different, and perhaps not completely interchangeable…qi for matter and energy, Li for “Strange Attractors”...

Perhaps a metaphor would help? Imagine a great river. Across the river there are swirls and eddies. Some are large, some small. Some last seemingly forever, holding their place in the water, whilst others are fleeting, gone in a heartbeat. Think of those eddies as things. Think of them as mountains or trees or people. Something, known in Complex Systems science as a “Strange Attractor” (and called by Jeremy Lent a “Natural Attractor”), causes that particular movement of energy and the matter (river water), to organise and swirl in a particular place and in a particular way. The ‘Strange” or “Natural” Attractor is the Li. For a time, the Li holds the movement of matter and energy (Qi) in a particular pattern, and in due course, it fades, and the thing (in this case, the eddy), fades.

Think of yourself. You know who you are. Other people recognise you, and know who you are. Yet there is virtually no atom in your body that was present in your body when you were a child. You are comprised of completely different material. And yet, you are you. Some energy…no…some patterning principle, has caused matter and energy to congregate in a (very) particular formation (you) since you were conceived. You have grown, and grown older. You have grown wrinkles. You have shed many times your body weight of matter, consumed many times your body’s calorific content, and yet you remain, indelibly, you. So you are neither matter nor energy, at least, not only. 

You might be tempted to think that you are in some way comprised or defined by your thoughts? This is the persistent idea of a separate ‘spirit centre’, carried in the famous statement of Descartes: “I think, therefore I am”.  The Cha’an Buddists know that you are not your thoughts, because you can sit quietly and watch your thoughts as they flit past. You can sit for longer and reach a state called ‘Empty Mind’, where you have no thoughts at all. And yet you exist.

What then, are ‘you’? Perhaps we could argue that the patterning influence that causes the bundle of processes and thoughts that is ‘you’ is your soul? But if this were the case, it is a very different ‘soul’ to that described by the Judeo-Christians, because within that tradition, the soul is the very opposite of the body, and destined (hopefully) to escape the body in favour of an eternal spirit world. This ‘soul’ that causes the eddy in a river that is you, is not separate. It is as fundamental to the Tao as is matter and energy.

Let us take it a bit further. Think of the River, and the little eddy that is you. You are there, swirling away for a time, glittering in the sunshine. And then you fade away, returning to the great flow of water, who knows whither? What then are you? Are you the water that comprises the eddy? Are you the pattern that causes the water to move in just that way? Or are you the River? Are you the River, along with the mountain and the trees and the red-browed finches and the earthworms and the planets and the distant galaxies?

If you are the River, then you are kin to all things. Not just kin…you are one and the same. You are a small part of existence, but you are a part of existence with eyes and ears and consciousness, and so you might reasonably suspect that you have a role in existence, just like every cell in your body has a role in your ongoing healthful existence. And something has to be said about teleology – the idea that existence has a purpose – an idea that has been expunged from Western consciousness these last few hundred years. Think of your body…your quotidian body…Does it have a purpose? Do you want to continue living, and experience beautiful things, and feel love? Probably you do. What about your Great Body? The River? Might it not also have a purpose and desires? A desire to continue living, to develop ever greater beauty and complexity, to admire itself through conscious eyes? To listen to and admire the song of birds and to exalt in the taste of warm, ripe figs?

Are you smelling fresh air yet?

But we are not out of the Labyrinth yet. 

We need to know these things. Not in our too-clever Daedalus brains, but in our hearts and our bodies. A knowing that is strong enough to survive the next fad and fashion. A knowing that is strong enough to offer any sacrifice that is required of us[2]. And there will be many.

We still need to know how to live. We still need to find an ethics that enables us to live as eddy-in-river, in respectful and generative relation to all the other eddies. We need to know what our work is, and how to love that work. We need to know how to take responsibility, not as genius scientist/engineers, but as King Minos should have been: in exultant gratitude for the beneficence of the World.

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[1] Here's the thing about Ariadne...she's something of a tragic figure...fell for the hero Theseus, who did his thing, then dumped her and went on his way to become King of Athens. She, abandoned on a deserted island, became consort/wife to no less than Dionysus. What did she do? Fell for a warrior and gave him a ball of string...just the ball of string we need right now. And her reward? A goat-footed God and her crown cast into the heavens for all time.

[2] Now here’s a thought: So Pasiphae was ‘bewitched’ by Poseidon, and thereby forced into a role of horror and infamy. She was the one who fucked the bull and bore the monster child. So we could see her as pure victim - an instrument of an angry God delivering punishment onto Minos. That’s a pretty standard reading (though it's hard to avoid the moral opprobrium - as though she retained some agency in the matter, which, if it were all the doing of the God, is quite misplaced). But if Pasiphae (with or without the intervention of Poseidon) felt genuine love, or even lust, for the bull, this could be a manifestation of a powerful generative force of nature (love and lust), in the correction (punishment) of a human hubris. Then we would see the re-assertion of nature’s power through Pasiphae’s desire. And the Minotaur? The Minotaur had an affliction: it could only live on human flesh (or blood, sometimes we are told). But the real evil of the Minotaur was only that which was instigated and manipulated by Minos in his revenge against the Athenians. The monster could not help being a monster, but this monster was imprisoned and used by a tyrant in the service of his ego. And the human sacrifices? Well, they were not meat. They were sacrifices, so the Minotaur was more than a monster. He was in some measure divine, a retribution: when you spurn a God, or destroy a planet, sacrifice will be necessary. That’s how it is.