The Labyrinth

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The Labyrinth is writing about writing, fiction and autobiography and non-fiction, structured in the shape of a labyrinth, meant to be read in a meditative way, just as one would walk a labyrinth, over and over, in order to release thought and embrace serenity. The subject is writing and going in circles and a lyrical song of self. The overall project is less concerned with story, or meaning, and more interested in movement, and sound.

In Greek mythology, the Labyrinth was an elaborate, confusing, underground structure designed and built by the legendary architect Daedalus for King Minos of Crete at Knossos. Its original function was to hold the Minotaur, who was the son of Minos’s wife Klytemnestra conceived with Poseidon’s bull. This conception was the last hoorah of the preOlympian prepatriarchal mother-goddess age. The so-called monster had the head of a bill and the body of a man and superhuman strength. Pasiphae saw him as a member of the royal family and wanted him to have freedom to move so Daedalus built him his private guarded impenetrable quarters in such a way that he couldn’t get out and he couldn’t be caught. Daedalus had so cunningly made the Labyrinth that he could barely escape it after he built it. The Minotaur lived there a long time and was reportedly fed boys and girls sent by cities under Minos’ control in homage, a humiliation devised by Minos, not the Minotaur. Eventually he was killed by the hero Theseus who seduced princess Ariadne, the Minotaur’s half sister, daughter of Minos and Pasiphae, who lived in the vast palace and knew from her mother how to find her way through the labyrinth of antiquity. Theseus butchered the Minotaur, dumped Ariadne on the way back to Athens on a barren island, forgot to change the color of his sails from black to white which led his anxious father King Aegeus to jump into the sea (now Aegean) out of despair, imagining his son dead, and inherited the throne of Athens. Theseus later married Ariadne’s sister, Phaedra, to consolidate power over Minoan Crete. The Labyrinth conjures three modern female characters from greek mythology who represent the three parts of the human: the rational, spirited and appetitive parts, or, put differently, the intellectual, soulful and biological parts. They are lost in metaphoric labyrinths of social making. Will they find their way out? How can they disentangle themselves when they are so lost? Will they access the Lost Genius of Being Human? Do they meet? - Download free e-book to find out!