A Labyrinth Is An Ancient Device That Compresses A Journey Into A Small Space, Winds Up A Path Like Thread

“A labyrinth is an ancient device that compresses a journey into a small space, winds up a path like thread on a spool. It contains beginning, confusion, perseverance, arrival, and return. There at last the metaphysical journey of your life and actual moments are one and the same. You may wander, may learn that in order to get to your destination you must turn away from it, become lost, spin about, and then only after the way has become overwhelming and absorbing, arrive, having gone the great journey without having gone far on the ground. In this it is the opposite of a maze, which has not one convoluted way but many ways and often no centre, so that wandering has no cease or at least no definitive conclusion. A maze is a conversation; a labyrinth an incantation or perhaps a prayer. In a labyrinth you’re lost in that you don’t know the twists and turns, but if you follow them you get there; and then you reverse your course. The end of the journey through the labyrinth is not at the centre, as is commonly supposed, but back at the threshold again: the beginning is also the real end. That is the home to which you return from the pilgrimage, the adventure. The unpraised edges and margins matter too, because it’s not ultimately a journey of immersion but emergence.”

— Rebecca Solnit in The Faraway Nearby

John Zorn, Sheloshim

Masada Chamber Ensembles

Caravaggio’s angels

In evening’s dome each bird is a point of memory. It’s amazing sometimes how the years’ fervor returns, returns without a body, returns for no reason at all, how beauty, so brief in its violent love, saves us an echo as night falls.

And so, what can you do but stand there slack-armed, your heart overloaded and that taste of dust that was a rose or a road— Flight outflies the wing. Without humility you know this remnant was wrung from the dark by the work of silence, that the branch in your hand, the dark tear are your inheritance, the man with his story, the lamp shining its light.

— Julio Cortázar, “Resumen en otoño” (tr. Stephen Kessler)

En la bóveda de la tarde cada pájaro es un punto del recuerdo. Asombra a veces que el fervor del tiempo vuelva, sin cuerpo vuelva, ya sin motivo vuelva; que la belleza, tan breve en su violento amor nos guarde un eco en el descenso de la noche.

Y así, qué más que estarse con los brazos caídos, el corazón amontonado y ese sabor de polvo que fue rosa o camino— El vuelo excede el ala. Sin humildad, saber que esto que resta fue ganado a la sombra por obra de silencio; que la rama en la mano, que la lágrima oscura son heredad, el hombre con su historia, la lámpara que alumbra.

“What is it like to be a prophet? Everywhere Cassandra ran she found she was already there.”

— Anne Carson, “Cassandra Float Can” (via roofbeams)

In Arabic the word for logos (logic, nous, psyche) is aeql, which literally means “to bond”, forming connections between things.