Navigation, Day 32: Inverted World (1/29/2009)
Itself, time is neither foil nor foe to the navigator. No, the navigator battles with keeping his sense of time. Or, more accurately, battles against losing it.
Yes, the empiricists have amply analyzed the strange behavior of time in the labyrinth. And, of course, the idealists have vehemently countered their claims. But these are words. Tired, emptied, displaced words. Detached from the corridors they codify in vain. Authentic navigation should neither pursue nature to her hiding-places nor should pursue divinity to its holy grail.
The navigator's task is to know where he is, which is to say his task is to remember his own lostness, to strain to stay ahead of his own lostness. And it is his sense of time, not his location, that aids him most in this project.
This fundamental paradox looms over me like a cloud of urgency when I wake up. But this is precisely the will of the labyrinth. I have to restore my equanimity. Dawn-light crisscrosses in fine bands through the brittle starboard walls. I enter the vestibule. The cerulean seawater laps the rust-brown keel. The portal stares at me like a great, glaucous, cataracted eye. Brooding, foreboding.
* * *
I dive in, feet-first, the passageway just wide enough to permit me. The corridor drops several yards straight down before it bends and opens into a coral grotto: the first chamber.
Anemones in bloom, bursting in bright orange and yellow fingers that feel and grope the waters, lying in wait to snatch motes of prey with their poison digits. Sponges, some like neural clumps, others like swollen funnels, breathe the water. The floor bristles with seagrass and urchins who register the changing directions of the water-wind. Iridescent fish, scrambling the light from the small ring of surface water above, flash in and out of invisible crevices. Eels, rays, sharks drift, menacing shadows made for ambush.
And the coral, the great living, feeding, breathing, multiplying city of coral. Multifarious, multitudinous. Form and function. Part and whole. Strange biologies.
A prodigious colony of star coral forms the main structure of the chamber. Colors, shapes, names. A million white and golden polyps clustered on the dull grey exoskeleton, each a stellate mouth clambering up and out from the convolute frame that surrounds me on all sides. At the base clump boulder-sized brain corals, their surfaces unfolding in impossible labyrinths. At the top blood-red fan corals branch out like an exposed network of nerves. And in brilliant rings burn the flaming tendrils of the sun corals throughout.
The coral immures me. Psychoanalysts have called navigation a masochistic pursuit, the self-willed imposition of incarceration for the thrill of escape. Egotistical at heart, fundamentally narcissistic. At this juncture, it seems more like exile. Theory is useful after all, upon reflection. Not a crutch, not a compass, but rationalization. A means to slow the breath, really, to ward off panic and the waste of oxygen.
I notice the spiny leg of a crustacean jut from a ring of sun coral. I inspect it. It offers passage. Blind, narrow, no sight of the other end. I swim into the darkness, into the dark throat of the labyrinth.
The first decision is as much a choice as a rejection. A new set of pathways, a lost set of pathways. Either way, the multiplication of the unknown.
* * *
The tunnel leads me into new chambers with new tunnels, which lead me into new chambers with new tunnels. Swaths of color, objects and occlusions. Movement has become pure sensation, primal need, sedimented and historical. Choice exposed as illusion, an elaborate grid-work of cortical synapses useful but constructed for an identity intact, for the place known, the time embodied, for the mind aware of itself as other.
But even the electric impulse must jump through the spaceless space. Mind elusive, fragmented, nascent, recursive, groping for the organizing principle, running from
bees in the honeysuckle bush
throwing stones into the creek
father's aftershave, news on the radio through a closed door
mother's hairdryer, light through the crack of a closed door
hand bleeding, breaking the neighbor's glassware
dogs barking, banging up against the chain-link
tripping into the medicine cabinet
cleaning the evidence, hiding the evidence
there is blood in the water
blood in the light
descending into light
cloaked, shrouded, surrounded
by shadows of predators faceless
* * *
Breath is distant. Ears are ringing. Hand clutching my thigh. The cold salt smarts the wound, exposed, unprotected. A dark cloud of blood. There is no separation from the labyrinth, no membrane between the labyrinth and--I, I am lost. I have lost.
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