minos

“How many paths can you take in a labyrinth?”

The Professor’s lecture rooms are always packed:

Pushing her glasses up once more, she surveys the bustling room,

scanning the jade-eyed tired, the idealistic all alike, the jumble of concentrated faces in front of her awaiting the day’s first words.

A breath, then she restarts.

“How many paths in a labyrinth?”

Silence.

“Only the one.”

“We take one path in life,” she continues,

her words slow and methodical,

reaching for a coherent point.

“Whether we stand for hours in front of every forking road,

considering each decision, retracing our steps, or race on ahead of the others,

we will only ever take one path.

If each choice is a crossroads,

the Labyrinth begins in the original Garden.

Would you rather walk in innocence or learn to live in uncertainty?”

How can I know if I’ve made the right choice?

She pauses,

considers for a moment.

“We get one chance,” she answers, eyes unfocused,

staring into the void,

“so choose wisely.”

“Because, this,” she continues, her voice raised,

“this, my students, is the game:

let’s say a boy is given a choice one day.

One choice, one path ahead of him, one path behind.

If he keeps going, how many paths does he know he’ll take?

If he goes back, how many paths could he have taken?

The possibility simultaneously dwarfs and is dwarfed by empirical reality.

Less is more.

Thus, we freeze, and take neither path:

Both paths die, and we survive, standing still at a crossroads.

Robert Frost ponders the road not taken, and wastes through his verse

the very real event of the walked path.

Is he right in doing so?

The unnamed woman in Genesis, instead of running to the future,

stands frozen, obsessed the past and what she cannot get back:

do you see yourself in her eyes?”

“Alright, I can see I’ve lost you.”

A few chuckles wade through the heavy air of the classroom.

It’s late in the afternoon, and the sun is beginning to set

behind the stained glass windows.

“Let’s say- let’s say we have a character, and our character has a name,”

she continues, “His name is Minos;

Now, you know from last trimester that

in Greek mythology, King Minos of Crete,

horrified

by the Minotaur’s appearance,

once asked the inventor Daedalus to build him a labyrinth in which to hide it.”

she pauses.

“It, the unspeakable.

Design a maze for your monsters, students.

Rifle through the dusty drawers in your head,

search for the plan you thought you’d found:

A finite room of endless corridors, twisting and turning,

each path forking a hundred ways,

in which it will never be bored of its decisions,

caught in a twisting cage of corridors.

If you are trapped, if you have no options,

you will end up making the same decisions time and time again,

lost in your own doorless labyrinth.

We get one chance, one path to trace:

where are you trapped?”

That’s the thing, she thinks later, sat in her office,

mulling over a lukewarm cup of coffee.

We turn the corridor;

we walk around the path, lost,

and find that we’re back where we started

because we never truly left.

Marlowe believed in predestination:

that you can’t change who you are,

that we are constantly tied by invisible strings,

pulled to the vortex of a singular fate:

that the Labyrinth has one exit.

Whichever path you take, you will exit through the same door.

Just ask Faustus.

You all know that Marlowe takes broken souls, tragedies, and writes his stories.

Yes, you.

I am talking to you: now listen.

Does the fact that there is only one path you take in a labyrinth

imply that this path is already set?

You turn the corner, sure, you walk in circles;

above, the writers watch and take notes, laughing at their subject:

do you know your fate as they do?

Could you tell if you were a story?

The boy in the labyrinth, he is no less real than you.

He is king of his own endless imagined Hell.

And in that twisting, turning garden,

he knows, and he rebels:

I am the Narrator! I am Me! We are the same person!

Climb, he'll climb.

Upwards, to see the labyrinth as it is, whole,

his life in its thousand string of stretched-out pathways,

under a stormy city sky.

We all seek knowledge, and who would not kill to see a map of their life?

Ask Faustus.

He finds the tallest tree he can and starts to climb.

His hands find branches that prick and scar his palms with their twisted brambles;

against the cold wind, he grits his teeth, bearing onwards.

Foot by foot, step by step, he scrambles upwards,

up the wall of the maze: I will find what I must, or fall.

I am Minos,

he says to himself, reaching out for another branch,

another foothold, higher up,

where the wind can’t hurt him.

My name is Minos,

I am real,

and I will not give you my story.

Yes, we see you, Minos.

Go on ahead, climb as much as you want:

the garden is endless and sees your ascent.

The sky grows darker with every step, and yet he keeps on going, blind:

bring it on.

He cannot see.

He cannot see.

And yet, he knows he will keep going, upwards into the blackening sky.

Will you guide him?

Does desperation make this surge of destruction our only rational solution?

He hurts; he climbs, still.

He falls, trips; a branch will catch him.

He maims the landscape, commands the storm to bend to his will.

If you write, you control.

So why are you still reading?

You are the compounding of every step you have ever taken;

every corridor that you have retraced,

every moment that you have hesitated,

and you do not get to choose this.

Your life is the sequence of steps,

of running and of uncertainty,

of dead ends and of twists and turns that you could never have predicted.

You look up; you climb, still, always upwards, don’t look back.

So you climb further, climb faster, so you dream

of where your frightened steps will lead you: someplace real.

One day, your father told you that you only get to be one person.

Your name is Minos, and you are the architect of your own neurosis.

That’s always when it happens, when you’ve nearly reached the top.

Crack.

Cadere: To fall!

to fall from grace, to fall to Earth.

To fall so fast, so far, you feel your fear sink quietly

back to where you thought you’d forgotten you existed,

to see your life flash in fragments before you: this is the labyrinth.

O Fearless, take flight!

Fragments:

To fall as a child in your mother’s backyard, knees scraped and yet still laughing,

your brother watching from the porch.

To fall into the river, screaming, little, your swim trunks the colour of the

bright yellow sun.

To hear your friend laughing, and know you love him.

To fall from grace.

How could you say this wasn’t real?

I have shown you the Garden, now do not blame me because you tried to control it.