Old entry writing: ‘Walking the labyrinth’

I’ll write more soon – I have to write more about the end, I have to get it all down – but I thought of something else, and went and found it. This is part of an unfinished entry I wrote in January of this year, when I wasn’t posting. In it I am writing about one thought sparked by the labyrinth, but, clearly, there was another, similar message to be taken from it, on a different scale.

Portland being Portland, in which hippie notions mingle with a comfortably mellow bourgeois domesticity in a pleasing oil-in-a-puddle pattern, there is a Peace Labyrinth installed next to one of the public schools in Northeast Portland, some distance east of where I live.

For clarity of what I’m going to describe, I should say something about what a labyrinth is. It is not quite a maze. A maze is a puzzle; it has branchings; you can go the wrong way or get lost. A labyrinth is a single continuous corridor to the end at its heart; it simply travels in a very circuitous way to get there.

(I know, you could get lost in the Minotaur’s Labyrinth, such that Theseus worried about it and so used a ball of thread to mark his path. Welcome to language. The Minotaur’s Labyrinth was a maze. A labyrinth is as I’ve said above.)

Labyrinths have been constructed on the floors of cathedrals, and have a curious relationship to monastic and contemplative pursuits, because something about walking a labyrinth does something to the head. I’m being vague because what it does to the head is variable. Just: You are in the situation. You are painstakingly/faithfully/stuck walking the course of the labyrinth.

So, Gwen and I have been in our break between the winter and spring terms of our classes (I got an A+ in the Grammar Lab section of my Copy-editing Certificate program, by the way). The break has lasted a month, and we are both presently unemployed otherwise, and we have exhausted the appeal of every petty diversion from the trivial to the dramatic to the profane, and, this last Sunday, we were both to the point of considering holding a race about who could completely chew a standard #2 pencil to mush first.

So, Gwen thought of going and walking this Peace Labyrinth that she knew of. (We had both, separately, walked another labyrinth downtown at Waterfront Park.)

And I thought of something else I have wanted to do with Gwen, since even before she moved here permanently. When riding east with Mom along Sandy Blvd, I have seen an old cemetery I have wanted to explore, because it is in the strangest, orphaned place. You know how sometimes, when there are two large roads that cross, with one passing over the other on a bridge, you go from one to the other by taking a short curving road that takes you around to it? Of course you do. Well, this creates a little island of land. And on this particular island, surrounded by nothing but the roads, there is a little hill with trees on the top and, among the trees, some headstones of the sort that people are too lazy or stonemasons are too few to put up much anymore. It has always struck me. You always wonder whether old cemeteries will continue in perpetuity, or what will happen to them or whether the graves will be moved and the land paved over and re-used, but this business of turning a fine and private resting place into what is essentially waste ground in an automotive-facilitation effort… And then there was the challenge, however microscopic. There’s no obvious place to park as there is normally. So I said, sure, I’d bestir myself to go and walk this labyrinth (I feign microreluctance for all manner of nefarious reasons) if we could also go and investigate this mysterious cemetery at the corner of Sandy and 122nd.

She said sure, and that actually the labyrinth and the cemetery were very close together, if that was the right intersection.

So we got in her car and drove east.

We went to the labyrinth first. I don’t think that the piece of flat land on which the labyrinth resides is meaningfully separated from the rest of the school grounds by any barrier, but the labyrinth nonetheless has its own gate in the fence that encloses the whole. It’s an impressive steel gate, with a sheet-metal cut-out diagram of the labyrinth layout affixed to it. On reflection I am not going to include a photograph of that diagram, although Gwen took a couple, because it will give the wrong impression – you will look at the diagram and think, ah, that’s what the labyrinth is like. But walking the labyrinth is not like that view from the top.

So it was your standard mossy winter mid-afternoon in Portland, not raining at least, and we parked across from the gate in front of a house whose owner came out and peered at us suspiciously, and went in. The labyrinth lay a little way out in the lawn. It is flat and open, I should say – no walls, just a narrow little trail of paving stones on the ground.

We walked it. I went first.

Gwen and I gradually separated. For me the feeling of absurdity came first – the what-am-I-doing-here this-is-what-I’m-doing-here. I smiled to myself. I took little dutiful funny plodding steps, and muttered “herp derp” to Gwen whenever we passed each other going opposite directions. And indeed this dimension of things did persist through the whole course of following the labyrinth.

But that was not the only dimension. It does get to you. Perhaps what happens is the other side of “absurdity” – you are not meditating, but you are doing nothing but “being here doing this”. You are here. Your attention is on the little path under your feet and in front of you. And of course the mind can have all sorts of thoughts, it is free to wander, but you are still being there doing that. No reason for being there and doing that intrudes. You do not have a reason. You are just doing it, for no reason, and, while you are doing it, no choices intrude either; you have no choices.

The curving paths continue, the switchbacks continue. You can see the round, empty space of the center, where the labyrinth ends, the entire time, if you look. And you are walking to get there – but little surprises intrude. This next turn takes you away from it, and you are going back the other way one row further away from the goal. You were not thinking that that would happen. And then you follow more switchbacks, things seem to be proceeding, and then you are turning away from the center again and you actually go a few rows outward.

I thought about history, and about political thinking, social thinking.

A person’s life is like a very short section of a labyrinth, a short stretch of one of these little straightaways on the labyrinth. A lifespan might encompass one turn; perhaps it might encompass even two. But the total shape of the labyrinth is not encompassed by a life and cannot be known by the course of one. The same with the end direction the entire labyrinth tends toward, the center. The course of the few steps we walk and follow with our eyes means nothing to it. The implication of that short, stubby lifespan course means nothing to the total track of the labyrinth, of the story, of history. We know and can see and can follow only our little patch. That little curving stretch, that little line or L or U, is all there is for us.

But, as we walk, we dream of the whole thing- of history, of the grand sense or moral sense of the story, of navigation. We think about what the center of the great labyrinth might be, and where, and try to look across at it, and in our minds and out loud we talk about turning the rudder to steer us in a clean sweeping curve toward the center. We do this constantly. It is what we do as we traverse our little stretch. It is what we should do. What else should we do?

Even when we ourselves do not have the conceit that we are steering, we imagine the course that the path is in fact taking, justly or not, not always but often conceived as justly, and that course too is a sensible trajectory, a comprehensible or drawable one. We do not imagine a labyrinth. Who would? Who could?

But when we look back at history, at recorded history, and at the people immersed in it in past ages – and if we resist the temptation to restrict our view to the just-so stories about progress and how it developed (the sweeping navigation-course projected backward), if we keep the complexity and we keep the utter difference and differences of history and outcomes from what the people back then comprehended or expected – then we do indeed see people trapped in the windings of a labyrinth, in little short blind sections of pathway that are their native lands in time and space and meaning.

All of this tangible, simply in the concrete reality of the path ahead of me. It is different to put it in words and type it out.

All my calculations and my fond imaginings – just like yours! … and my habitat is this stretch of history that is all that I can see, and I am utterly lost in time.

I reached the center. Gwen came to the circle of clear grass perhaps one minute later. I smiled at her.