A Way Out

The labyrinth has long stood as a powerful symbol for the tortuous duality of the human predicament. On the one hand, the labyrinth represents the delusion and entrapment that man is condemned to wander. Preeminent labyrinthologist Phillip Ambrose Walker, in his seminal work Finding the Center: The Legends and Legacies of Labyrinths, has described the structure as "embodying man's fundamental state of being lost." On the other hand, the labyrinth expresses man's ongoing pilgrimage towards meaning, discovery, and order. Contemporary labyrinth theorist Stephon Crete has described the labyrinth as "charged with a salvific magnetism on the order of man's most alluring archetypes of redemption."

In keeping with the rich, storied, and conflicting meanings of the labyrinth, we here at the Cincinnati Labyrinth Project believe that the labyrinth can serve as powerful symbol for our own more recent and more regional predicament: the delusion and entrapment we face in the Cincinnati Bengals.

Paul Brown Stadium cost Cincinnati taxpayers $455 million. What does the team have to show for this titanic sum? Chris Henry, Odell Thurman, a losing record, and ESPN's punchlines.

Cincinnati: bewildered, lost in the maze of humiliation and embarrassment.

That's why the Cincinnati Labyrinth Project is not content with leaving the labyrinth in the metaphorical ether. What better way to find our way out than by constructing a massive stone labyrinth in the very locus of our lostness?

My fellow Cincinnatians: meander the anfranctuous passages of shame no more! Meaning, discovery, and order we can yet find at the end of the tunnels.

Join our efforts to convert lost to found, entrapped to free, sinuous to straight.