Asterion and Ariadne

There is a room that is all hallway, all door. Asterion and Ariadne are forever lost, forever finding their way.

Be Not Humbled In Your Pride

You are not one thing entire, but a whole vast continent at once. Daughter of the sun, bride of the sea, know yourself immortal and unending, a mere sojourner in this world of flesh and of desires.

They will break you. That is what it is to be in the world: to break a little more each day, to crumble slowly toward that dark soil that is flesh’s true inheritor. Be afraid, be brave: they will tell truths about you, monstrous truths. Know yourself untouchable, forever saved, forever clean and unforgivable. You are above everything, still riding proudly behind the horses of the sun, even bent beneath the ocean’s back; you shall be cursed with double-vision.

Desire, they will call it; animal lust. You who were born to be a god they will rope and ride like any other cattle. What do they know of fertility, of the colossal acts of love that churns mud into men and trees into women? Whose rich seed overflows its banks and returns the fields to life? Your children will be monsters and fratricides, as they must, as they are needed.

Pasiphae: daughter, queen, bride, mother, judge. You were born to suffer, as were we all, but created to endure.

Double-Headed Ax

Decades denied entrance she wears hard into the gate.

They trickle past in their sixes and sevens, white haired, black eyed, hopeful, weeping, greedy, desperate. She plays knucklebones to pass the time. Beyond all quotas. Ripe with waiting, full to bursting, charged with secret learning. They have no tongue in common.

Walls of gold and heavy fruit. She spits seeds in the black, black earth, pulls shoots up by the roots when they dare go unveiled before her. Seeds among stones, among shallow ground, in a well-drained field. The beams are sound but the pipes are shot.

She circumnutates. Arianrhod. She echoes to the sound of youth and long-distant tides. Waveless, stony beeches.

The gate opens and he is there, her radiant bride, teeth and hooves bloody, bloody, who puzzled his way out to this meeting. She ends her waiting and folds the maze up in her sails.

We Shall See Face to Face

From everywhere his face, his malapportioned body. Unloved, he lacks language but not mother-wit; he understands that this worm of infinity, this endless mirrored coil, is meant to chastise him, meant to rebuke him for the unconscionable sin of bearing so flagrantly his father’s name.

They have gifted him a garden at the center, and there mercifully cloaked his reflection with rhododendrons, cashew trees, pepper plants, poison to one who lacks his mother’s placid digestion. There is a spot, just inside his filigreed gates — gates which have never closed, were never built to close — where he can spy the sunstruck hillside that holds his prison, dimly but faithfully reflected through the labyrinth’s undeceptive length.

Each year he waits for company.

They can none of them meet his gaze.

One by one, from the oldest to the youngest, they drop their eyes. Poor creatures, they cannot bear the weight of the god’s touch. He would go to meet them, if he could — there is but one path, after all — but one step nearer and they dissolve, and it is his own shape he sees and cannot bear. He flees, weeping, wrathful, to await their yearly coming.

Within the Plains of Memory

After something like twenty miles, the usual measures fade away. Distance and direction, past and future, all grown shifting and uncertain. She stands in a bazaar two hundred years after her own death, listening to conversations in a language she recognizes but cannot understand. She floats massless in space, watching the crisp line of the terminator sweeping across unfamiliar continents. She is a name half-said in a windowless room choked with decoration, a sharp crack of gunfire echoing across Kansas prairies.

At the center, in what might be the spiral castle of Arianrhod, she finds it, old and blind, rapt in contemplation of the infinite unfolding of the Aleph.

“Well met, o my brother,” she tells it.

“What’s that? Who’s there? Come closer that I might know you.” She gives it her hands, hairy with goat’s hide. “Do I know you? I do not think I know you.”

“Once we were closer than blood, closer than skin. Once we were two sides of the same door.”

“I don’t—” it begins, and she stabs it, new key in an old lock.

The Minotaur

Think of Blake’s illustration of the Commedia. Think of Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beasts. In short, think of the minotaur as inversion: man above, bull below, human head on taurine body. The poor, near-sighted creature! Think of other questions: such a large babe ne’er grew in woman’s womb. Question Poseidon’s gift: a bull? or cow? If cow, whither the father? Minos, then? or love-struck numinous creator? Whose seed germed in that forbidden garden?

But, so. Let us consider clothing. Or, rather, the lack therof — for if there is one thing constant about poor Asterion it is the lack of cover his several parents have provided for to cover up his shame. (Saving the labyrinth; a cold stone cloak throne upon an impudent figling.) How he swells in his maleness! See now the sad ghosts of past crimes rubbing down to nothing on a convenient cornice! These little deaths whicker in his ears.

What can he do when they have broken under his thwarted love? What other food is there? Outcast, untutored, unfed; without family, without language, without all the needed gentle ties of his human head, what is there for him? What, but turn cannibal? Poor omophage, he turns corner after corner, wears stone to earth with heavy hoofs, but never finds the door his key would fit.