Wednesday, December 1, 2021

A(MAZED)


Adrian Fisher has created over 700 mazes in 42 countries. He founded a company, Minotaur Designs with a “labyrinthologist” named Randoll Coate. BTW quite a job description. Imagine advertising for such a specialty. It sounds like something right out of the NB column of the TLS which specializes in eccentric avocations and the words that describe them. Was a “topiaryologist” employed in the making of Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining? All of this and more is the subject of a New Yorker article whose title itself “The Garden of Forking Paths” references the famous Borges story from Ficciones. One point the article addresses is “the traditional Christian pavement labyrinth…found in the nave of Chartres Cathedral." Nicola Twilley, the author of the piece goes on to point out “Medieval labyrinths of this kind aren’t puzzles; there is only a single path, arranged in a snaking pattern of concentric folds, and to process along it to the center is to participate in a physical allegory of the soul’s progress through life and toward salvation." How suggestive! The article also provides instructions on how to negotiate a maze, which is to return to the outside before going back in—a piece of advice which itself has spiritual ramifications that the Minotaur, Daedalus, and Icarus would all have profited from—even if they didn’t have access to one of the ur-texts in the field, W.H. Matthews’ Mazes and Labyrinths: A General Account of Their History and Development, dating from l922.

Read "Transcendentalwasm" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Maybe I'm Amazed" by Paul McCartney

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.