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 III

Navigation, Day 31: The Vestibule (1/28/2009)

I am surprised that Groverson and Afaaq are still sleeping when I wake in the dark. In the relative darkness, that is. Here, the moon and stars wash the coastline in a silver film. Their luminous spindles stick to the sand, the sand clings to the spindles.

Maybe I am anxious. Maybe I am dreaming. Above, the unbounded sky. The envy and contempt, the hope and reason of bounded earth, of the earth-bound. I am not sure where I am until I begin to hear motion, shapes.

Afaaq and Groverson are busy about a morning fire, behind them a violet swath of sunrise. "We'll be paying for this late start, won't we?" I ask, walking towards them.

"It's only a few kilometers from here," Afaaq responds. 

"And this no place to be alone," Groverson adds. "We go with you until you are suited." I can't tell whether he looks at me with respect, admiration, or whether he betrays admonition, bewilderment. 

We pack and set off with hushed, methodical deliberation. For the first time I admit I am uneasy.

* * *

You can see them a kilometer off. Rusted hulls, rusted rigs, rotted sails. Scuttled shells, desiccated bodies. Giant gravestones stuck into the sand, burial plots staked out of desperation, not design. We approach, haunted, reverent, reminded. Visible from satellite, Groverson tells us. To no one in particular, really, but something one should say in the presence of those decaying colossi. On the rocky sea shelves, a fort stands sentinel. Abandoned, but it casts a long strip of shadow onto the shoreline. We stand in its shade for protection from the sun, from the ships. 

Bret reviews the equipment. I have rehearsed all procedures, but there is something comforting in the routine one last time, something comforting in the final company. "There's no more delaying," I say. I do not remember if I said this out loud or to myself, but I do remember thinking it didn't matter either way. I  take out some bills. Both refuse, hands up and out, shaking my offer away. "Really, that's not necessary," Groverson says. Afaaq smiles graciously, but his gaze is out at sea, studying the position of the ships.

Groverson turns to go, Afaaq some moments after. I look up after securing my gear and zipping my wetsuit. Gone, soundlessly, their tracks already erased.

Solo navigation. The most authentic mode, perhaps. The authentic mode, and thus the most unsettling. This, too, I may have said aloud. Labyrinths are not the mere sites for cogitation, they are thought physically manifest. The boundaries of the known and unknown, of the knowable and unknowable.

* * *

I wade into the water, and I am in the labyrinth. The Ribbon Reef wastes no time, however. 

In many labyrinths, the vestibule is contiguous with the port of ingress. In others, the vestibule adjoins it. Not so here. Some claim it is no coincidence that the vessels ran aground where they did, especially given the notoriously unpredictable (and treacherous) currents there. Whatever the case, theory, too, runs aground as soon as the navigator crosses the threshold.

Suffice it to say the location of the vestibule changes in the Reef. And suffice it to say that many navigators have not advanced beyond this point.

Fact is, I am paying for the late start this morning. Behind me, past the deserted fort, the sun, vermilion, recedes. I have swam through and climbed up the eviscerated bellies of too many ships, finding nothing. Even tracking the ships has become difficult. The first stars are glowing through, the water releasing its heat.

I think of Afaaq. I think of scribes. And I remember the swirling constellations that night. I have nothing to lose, I think, as a spiral of shipwreck emerges before me. Do I see this, or do I create it? Neither matters, I conclude, coursing the whorl to reach the center vessel.

* * *

I discover the vestibule after sundown in the hold of the center vessel. Luck. Or maybe not. There is neither pure accident nor rigid causality in the logic of the labyrinth. A controlling, uncontrollable logic.

Still, the waters block my entrance. I peer into the passageway, seeing no further than its upper coral ring. Dark, cold, breathing, moving. This labyrinth is alive. Its coral corridors alive, themselves harboring life.

I do utter this aloud. I remember the dead surfaces of the reefership stealing my sound, my breath, my motion, as soon as they could reach the corroded walls of the hold. I have arrived at the boundary of a foreign physics.

The perishable cargo in the hold of the reefership had decomposed long ago. Subsumed by the sea that crawled up from the hole that rotted through the keel in one of the refrigeration chambers. The sea, voracious, inexorable. The sea, substantial, thick, viscous. The sea, an entity. All-moving, unmovable. I discard all  I thought I knew about the sea. Expectations, presumptions are dead weight in any labyrinth.

I search for the vessel's name, no longer legible on its half-bleached, half-rusted shell. Something to give the boat a hold over the water, to give me a hold over the boat. But I cannot waste my light. I find a dry refrigeration chamber adjacent to the vestibule and turn off my headlamp. The labyrinth moving, groaning below me. 

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.  

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

Prenavigation, Day 29: Arrival in Nouakchott (1/26/2009)

Boundaries. Nouakchott is a land of boundaries.

The Sahara and Atlantic hem in Mauritania's capital city. Mosques rise above the streets, whose names bear their French colonial past. Neither rise above the dust. Urbanites squint in the haze, nomads slip past. Both unnoticed. Taxis clamor over the calls for prayer, the donkeys, the merchants. None the loudest, none unheard. All heeded, all the same under the sun.

I stand between the tide and the shadow of the dunes, no longer sure where water begins and earth ends, no longer sure there is any difference. 

My guide to the labyrinth is young, his face already wizened from sand and sun. He goes by Afaaq. He tells me it means the place where earth and sky meet. Himself a boundary. A Moor. Mauri. In antiquity, the land of the Moors. Greek for black. Now we cringe at this appellation, but we have forgotten the simplicity of it, the immediate perception. Places, people have colors. Named for colors. Subject tethered to object, object to subject. We have imposed our disjunctions on the past, have severed the tethers. 

His camel is laden with my supplies: jugs of fresh water, dried figs, jerky. In order of amount and importance, though not of weight. He rolls a cigarette. His English is as tight as his roll, even if his accent is heavier than the heat. We pitch our tents near the flooded sebkha north of the capital, where we wait for Groverson. Bret Groverson, British expatriate and self-styled international trader and explorer. He has procured my tanks. 

Heat, sun. Cold, moon. Boundaries.

* * *

Before the fire, Afaaq asks me if I am a scribe. My silence is ignorance. He repeats, "Scribe. Katib." I remind him of the Ribbon Reef  Labyrinth. He sighs, not impatiently. Maybe out of memory. "My ancestors were holy men. A sect of holy men. They were scribes, kuttab, a revered Islamic duty, fit only for the purest observers and preservers of Allah's word as recited by Mohammed. But they were condemned as heretics. They believed that Allah's truest name was written in the earth, in the sky, in the waters, in the sands, in the trees, in the stars. Allah's name uncorrupted by man's corruption, unspoken and unspeakable by man's broken tongues. They didn't speak themselves, though. Code, credo. For the clerics, that was only a minor objection, however. The sect wrote, but in no ordinary sense. It was shape, it was motion they were interested in. Motion. Pronouncing motion. The labyrinth, not a built environment, they believed, but Allah's name embedded, emerging from the earth. If one followed the right path in the labyrinth--"

Groverson arrives, late, interrupts Afaaq in Hassaniya Arabic. Afaaq rolls cigarettes for each of us.

The camels grunt, the fire hisses and snaps. Afaaq stares into the fire, as if deciphering. Groverson and I greet, review the morning's plans. But this, too, is of the silence that surrounds us. Our exhaustion reverent, grateful. We retire, the stars forming spiraling corridors above. 

Season's Greetings from CLP

Happy Holidays from all of us at the Cincinnati Labyrinth Project!

I thought some readers might enjoy this festive, rather poetic excerpt from Douglas Myerston's 1978 Nipigon Labyrinth navigation journal.

25/12/1978

The sun rose early, rousing us from our slumber in the Great Room. It was Christmas Day. As I surveyed the corridor around me, there was no doubt in my mind that this was truly one of Mezin Kobrin's finest labyrinthectural designs. For weeks on end now, the convoluted halls had driven several of our men very nearly to the brink - one man, Howells, bore deep bruising on his palms and knuckles, the product of the previous day's heedless search for third doors. The domed rock above us, a radiant combination of heliodor and blue basalt, was illumined as though afire by the myriad moss agate and malachite deposits which adorned the canopy. On all sides of us, geometrically arranged recesses and slits in the boundary walls allowed light, both natural and tourmaline filtered, to fill the room. Our own frozen breath appeared to us as the stuff of ephemeral, drifting vespers. We rose slowly one by one. Michaelson, the adolescent in my charge, was last to rise, him unaware of our proximity at last to the center. The light shifted around the room in kaleidscopic forms, all floating blocks of color and dazzling pulses of refraction. Looking reverently amongst ourselves, we walked forward towards the center - silent, and filled with that wonderful electricity that comes only in the final throes of ethical navigation.


Beautiful, inspiring stuff indeed. I urge all readers to search out Myerston's late 70's navjournals. They're presently out of print, but may be ascertained via certain rare book dealers for relatively modest sums.


We'll be taking the next few days off to spend time with family and friends. Look for more activity at the end of the week, plenty of exciting labyrinthological happenings to discuss.