Prefacial Premonition

So maybe you’re thinking, Of course. Who else but a poet would write a book on labyrinths? Who else but a poet—an exile in industrialized, computerized society; a lover of embers and leftover spiritual ash; a quixotic pilgrim walking in circles of descriptions of a bandaged, bitternail, but beautiful world—would write a book on labyrinths?

But all warm-up and welcome aside, I labor in what follows to rub the smug of over-personality out of these musings on labyrinths, labyrinths that helped me do just that. Escape myself—my usual way of walking (in lines, toward goals), my usual way of being present to the world (as an observer, always only on the way to being a participant), my usual assumptions about other pedestrians (in the way, but polite enough, often enough), my usual thoughts about scripted rituals (atavistic time-sucks), and my usual need to solve—or at least argue with, or at least document—each part of the world as a piece of the puzzle.

In the labyrinths I walked in churches and garden grounds across these North American states, I found to my surprise a most precious of intangible renewables: surprise. The relief, the release, and the simple joy of surprise. Wound in their tangled knots of nested space and time one puts in them, the labyrinths I walked were intricate and clever in their surprises. But just as surprising were the personalities who came to walk them, for reasons equally tangled. The labyrinths were us—wishing to simplify the byzantine buzz of our minds; wishing to ramify any love and truth we could detect, or invent, or remember, in our former and current selves. Wishing to simplify; wishing to ramify, in some aspirational alchemy I was in the end gratefully unable to canonize into a science.