Labyrinth

 

A labyrinth has only one path. So you cannot get lost in it unlike in a maze that gives you choices and dead ends. Yet walking a labyrinth feels like being lost.

I first met the labyrinth in a child’s magazine decades ago, in the story of Theseus. A monster at the centre, a hero with a sword, a girl with a ball of thread. It was a simple story of courage rewarded. It took me years to notice what the story quietly assumes: that the labyrinth is a problem to be solved, an obstacle on the way to somewhere.

Daedalus, who built it, knew better. When he had to leave Crete, he did not re-enter his own creation to walk out of it. He went over it, on the wings of wax and feathers. The builder did not trust the path he had built himself.

The labyrinth is quite strange compared with a maze. It winds, doubles back, takes you near the centre and then away from it soon, but there are no junctions, no choices, no dead ends – unlike the maze. You cannot get lost in a labyrinth. And yet, walking it, you feel lost almost every minute.

Do we feel lost because the paths fork or because the path is longer than our patience?

In the medieval cathedrals, the labyrinth was paved into the floor. Chartres still has one, a great circle of stone at the feet of worshippers. Pilgrims who could not make the journey to Jerusalem walked it instead, on their knees, the whole winding length of it. They called it their Jerusalem in miniature. The point was not to arrive. Anybody could arrive; the path guaranteed it. The point was to keep walking even when every bend insisted that you had gone wrong.

Jorge Luis Borges spent a lifetime dreaming of labyrinths. In one of his many stories, a writer leaves behind a novel so tangled that it contains all possible versions of a man’s life: every choice made and unmade. Borges called it the garden of forking paths.

Have we built that fiction around us now? The algorithm at every turn offers us forks: this job or that, this opinion or its opposite, this feed curated for someone like me… We have never had more paths, and we have never felt more lost. Perhaps, we were created for the labyrinth – to walk on and on. Hence we go crazy in a maze where we have to pause and choose.

I imagine a pilgrim at Chartres of old days. She keeps moving on her knees. Her knees ache, her attention wanders, and she brings it back, and brings it back again. That is what religion is about, perhaps: acquiring the discipline to walk the path which does not show you the destination behind the countless curves but equips you with the trust that the path will take you there definitely.

Unlike in the Minotaur story, here there is no monster waiting to be killed with the sword we’re carrying. Maybe, the monster is me myself. Maybe, the religious labyrinth is meant to redeem me from myself.

Chartres - image from Flickr

Nearly two decades back, Maggie and I visited a Jesuit house in Kalady to meet an old friend of mine who is a priest. I was quite surprised to find a replica of the Chartres labyrinth there.  

PS. The photo right on top is a place called Between Rocks near Ramapuram, City of Rama, in central Kerala. There are four ancient Hindu temples in the place, one each for Rama and his brothers Lakshmana, Bharatha, and Sathrughna. There is also an imposing Catholic church nearby. It is believed that Rama reached this place in search of Sita during his exile. The brothers too followed in search of both of them.