A World Below Ours

My Dear Friends,

Fitting indeed that Criterion’s Hulu channel has recently made Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, which documents the notorious production of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, available to stream, as I have just returned from the very same climes that Herzog himself negotiated while creating his infamous opus, returned finally from what has certainly been the most difficult and perilous navigation of my life. Indeed, it was a navigation which I can say without hyperbole almost cost me my life. As I mentioned here, one of the most fascinating labyrinthological findings in the last few years has undoubtedly been the discovery of what was thought to be famous labyrinthect Mezrin Kobrin’s final, unfinished labyrinth located in the Amazon Basin. As noted in the above-mentioned post, CORRIDORmotionDESIGN was tapped to finish Kobrin’s lost labyrinth, a move which excited us here at CLP quite a bit, they being one of the more progressive neo-recursivist firms operating in our present epoch. With my dear collegue John navigating the complexities of the Ribbon Reef Labyrinth (detailed in his navjournals below), I was thrilled to accept an invitation from Yves Cruemer, head labyrinthect at CORRIDOR, to be among the very first walkers of Kobrin’s final (and, now, ostensibly “complete”) masterpiece. When I arrived in Manuas to meet Yves, he had yet to arrive. I asked a tour guide if he knew anything about the construction of the labyrinth, and some 4 hours later I arrived by skif at what I assumed was my destination. For the sake of concision, I will simply say that what I arrived at was indeed a Mezin Kobrin labyrinth, but not the Kobrin labyrinth that CORRIDOR had been hard at work completing – rather, I found myself navigating an as-yet-undiscovered Kobrin labyrinth – a cave labyrinth the construction of which proved so ponderous, so deadly and bizarre that by the time I arrived at the first juncture of the maze I knew in my heart that I would never leave its subterranean perimeter.

Crossing the Rio Negro by skif

As I’ve only been out of the infirmary for two days, my capacity for both narrative writing and typing as such is at this point less than satisfactory. Rather than describe retrospectively my experience in what I’ve termed the Manaus Cave Labyrinth, I shall let my navjournals do the speaking. I plan to begin transcribing them tonight from my room here in Pongo de Mainique, and I shall, of course, post them here in the coming days. I will let my previous navigating self do the telling. He shall speak of my experience as a walker in the final labyrinth built by a titan at the brink of sanity.