J. Kelly's Ribbon Reef Navjournal: Selected Entry IV

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.

J. Kelly's Ribbon Reef Navjournal: Selected Entry II

Prenavigation, Day 30: Reaching Nouadhibou (1/27/2009)

Groverson rouses me before dawn, thrusting a small tin plate of karra, coffee, and a cigarette. I take them in reverse order, stilling lingering at the boundary of sleep.

"Where's Afaaq?" I ask him.

"He left in the middle of the night," Groverson answers. "He is already en route to Nouadhibou. He prefers to travel solo. Says he stops frequently to inspect the ground, the coastline, whatever is on the trail. A naturalist, he says. I don't ask questions. We'll see him when we get there." He pauses to look at the sky. "Pack up. It's about time to head off."

We decamp to the Mauritanian coast, traveling on camelback in the precious cool before sunup. Groverson is a quiet man. I suppose he reserves his speech for business. Or maybe his work is really in the line of listening. But I have little to say myself. 

He breaks the silence at last. I am grateful. The desert, the sun seem to feed off of silence. "It's been some time since I've seen anyone going into the Reef. Not since that boat shipwrecked a few years back. It killed all aboard." He turns toward me, looking at my tanks strapped to my camel. "It's hell to get those tanks, by the way. And there's not much customs is strict about in these parts. No one gives tanks for any kind of diving in the area. Contraband. Some did before the shipwreck, I should say, but not after the laws changed. Steep consequences. The zone ends at the tip of the Parc National Banc d'Arguin. And even there permits are scarce. But I don't ask questions." He didn't sound irked, though; stiffly matter-of-fact, maybe even a bit surprised. 

I didn't ask any questions either, although I had my share. It's easier to ignore the implications. Prenavigation is the fast before the fast, the gaze over the edge of the building before the jump. Negative capability.

* * *

The sun is almost halfway to its crest when the sand turns to water, where a rigged dhow awaits us. Money exchanges hands (the one universal gesture, I am certain), and in the rusty whir of the motor we sail north into the Gulf of Arguin.

We keep near the coastline. Countless fleet shorebirds fleck the sky. Black terns, grey plovers, white pelicans, scarlet flamingoes. Colors. Names. Innumerable fish mottle the surface of the sea. Grey, white, yellow mullets. Sawfish, guitarfish, hammerheads, leatherbacks, loggerheads. Shapes. Names. Sharp, unambiguous.

Our boat chops across the waters, up the notches of the spine of the world. Sun. Salt. Sleep. No one seems to mind me dozing off. But I remember noting how no one ever seems to sleep over here. Not even Groverson. 

* * *

Before nightfall we land in Nouadhibou. Money exchanges hands. The dhow whirs south. Afaaq has been expecting us. He sits before the fire, inking graceful arcs across canvas.

"Arabic?" I chance.

"The flights of birds," he corrects, not looking up.

Heating up karra over the fire, Groverson says, "We leave before dawn again. We'll guide you to the ship graveyard, where we part."

We eat, smoke, and retire. Not even the coiling constellations can take it off my mind.  

New from the Mauritanian Front

Labyrinthians abroad, 

A freak storm in the otherwise placid late winter Atlantic has forced me to take longer-than-desired refuge in the Ribbon Reef's exquisite Great Room. While Stephon Crete's technomania oft chagrins me, his solar-celled blackberry has saved me in my current condition. Last week, I exhausted my supplies. At last recourse, I had to phone my emergency contact back on the coast; he shipped out some direly needed rations before the storm struck, allowing me another day in the aqua-lab. (This reminds me to discuss the ethics of the telephone in navigation, over which much ink has been spilled.) Unfortunately, my memory is low on the phone, so I cannot post any images just yet. But wait patiently. In my extended navigation I have encountered no other walkers, which, on top of the dangers I have already surmounted, has greatly amplified the challenge of this labyrinth. 

Upon my return, which will be soon (I cross my fingers), I will post my navijournal. Given my solitude, and given my delays, I think you have much to anticipate. Au revoir.

[Message sent via Blackberry.//3:07 am] 

An Alarming Appropriation

Dear Readers,

Please forgive the typography of this post. I am writing to you via Blackberry on my way to the Ribbon Reef Labyrinth in the atoll lagoons off the Western coast of Mauritania. And wish me luck: aquatic labyrinths are among the most challenging and perilous. I will share with you my navijournal when I return.

We labyrinthians at the CLP hold ourselves to the highest journalistic standards, and thus we always strive to eschew any editorialization in our threads. However, we must also uphold the integrity of the labyrinth, and therefore we believe it is our sacred duty to report any disquieting and undignified labyrinthine phenomena.

As many of you know, the best of this nation's college football squads have squared off in the various matches of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS).  Advertisers and corporate sponsors lacked no creativity this year in their commercial promotions of the BCS. Yet, one advertisement employed an outrageous conceit: linemen, in caricatured lust for victory, careering the corridors of labyrinths to tackle their ways to the center.  

Watch the video, if you can stomach this egregious appropriation:

We at the CLP avoid prescriptivism, but this promotion displays two sinister misrepresentations which we cannot condone. First, navigation is not a competitive activity. Certainly, navigation has its athletic demands, but congression is not a gladiatorial sport in which one "wins" or "defeats" an opponent. Second, centers do not present the navigator with any kind of trophy. Arrival is its own reward, and there is no prize or treasure awaiting the navigator.

Labyrinths can indeed serve as rich metaphors, but, fellow labyrinthians, we cannot tolerate such co-option.