Monsters have to be taken full on, with no quarter given. Air monsters can be popped with a pen, leaving hanging shreds to duck and weave through. Monsters shape shift to familiar terrors and with each attack become another and another and another until you think the way will never clear. Unseen smoke-monsters slide under the skull and cloud the brain - a personal Minataur. ...'the ghosts who haunt our lives/ are handy with mirrors and wire...'1
Are there maps? Maybe. Maybenot.
You can't trust word maps, they shift and change, sending you first one way and then another, depending upon where you are standing at the time - what position you are in.
Maps made by men are things of shifting lines and shadow drawn by those who would impose order nt chaos. Predicated on the axiom of the abstract world of Euclidean geometry - that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points (writers know differently) - maps forget or ingore that the world consists of curves.
Consider Mercator's Projection - 'a cartographical sleight of hand that overlooks the convergence of meridiens at the poles...As a result...Mercator's Projection causes oddities and distortions when used ovear larger areas.'2 Not much use, then, particularly in a labyrinth.
Maps are but a representation of a representation, lines on paper holding chaos in - or out, depending upon where you are standing. Waiting to be read by a lost someone. Maybe they'll find the way. Maybenot.
Borges writes -'I leave to the various futures...my garden of forking paths.'
And, in the 'Mirror of Enigmas' :
...a skylight through which he might submerge himself in the true abyss, which is the soul of man. The terrifying immensity of the firmaanent's abysses is an illusion, an external reflection of our own abysses, paerceived 'in a mirror'...If we see the Milky Way, it is because it actually exists in our souls.
By Glenda Guest
Return to Mad Med's Meditations
My fear made me brave. I mapped planned, encountered my dragons precisely where they lurked, crossed all bridges well in advance. But there is one bridge it's pointless to cross until at the last it rears its ugly head and points foolishly skywards. copyright S.N.
