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Rudolf Hausner, The Labyrinth, 1987-1991
It was not at all clear why I was so disturbed by the August 2002
conversation with Danny Panagakos. As he had pointed out, this was all so
much ancient history, and the details about the move to Belize aside, it
was not as if I had learned much of anything new, not as if I had seen
some fact from an unexpected angle. To find that someone has become
still more of what he had been should not shake one's faith in the
coherence of the world. The conversation nonetheless disturbed me. It
disturbed me enough that, while washing dishes the next morning, I
seemed to be in a fog, and I allowed a large pool of water to accumulate at
my feet. It spread over half the kitchen floor, which I did not notice until
my wife let out a yelp. My slippers were wet.
I had avoided meeting with Danny for the past ten years or so. For the
most part, I had avoided even thinking about him, at least at any length.
True, once in a while I might be tempted to remember some guffaw
-producing mutual outburst of black humor, a shared Eureka moment of
insight into contemporary art, or a key crisis that one or the other of us
had talked the other through. But then I would stop and say to myself,
"No, there is no point to this at all. He is only a Minotaur. He is not fully
human. No good can come from getting sentimental."
The problem could be stated simply as: What is wrong with my own
psychology that I should pick such an apparently soulless creature as a
friend?
I was once a Boy Scout, and the Boy Scout Oath reads, "A scout is
Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient,
Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent." I was generally a good
judge of character, and with the exception of Reverence and Obedience, I
still expected my friends to put some reasonable percentage of these
virtues into practice. Perhaps, though, there were several other "Brians,"
at least one of whom I did not really know, and whom I did not want to
confront. To secure his supply of bioenergetic fuel, I thought, the
narcissist may be able to employ a kind of radar, which allows him to spot
the germ of his own pathology in others.
Thus, Danny had been able to probe into my wounds, to definitively
confirm that they were not due to any actions on my part. For example:
my relative obscurity as an artist and a writer was due not, as might
appear to be the case, to the fact that I did not bother to send manuscripts
to publishers or to exhibit unless invited; no, it was due to the ignorance
of the rest of the human race, which had, almost certainly, been getting
more pronounced.
It was possible, I thought, that the Minotaur served as a kind of missing
link, as the psychopomp to an otherwise lost world. He was a conduit for
the spirits of the dead, the eater of all public sins, the debt collector, to
whom blood was due. He was the living key to an alternate version of
reality, where my own dreams of omnipotence ran wild across the flood
-plain, as dark as the U.S. invasion of Iraq, as free as the drift of
geophosphates on the wind.
So, ten years had passed since my last encounter with the Minotaur, and I
had gone out of my way not to think too much about him. Then, one
phone call had led to another and this had prompted me to glance behind
my shoulder. Which flaws and self-deceptions had I managed to
transmute? Which flaws and self-deceptions still actively pursued me? My
method was to try to make use of every scrap of my experience. If I
looked with empathy on what the Minotaur held in contempt, I thought,
then I might just make out the features of my own hermetically sealed
face. It was only necessary to view each detail in reverse.
See, over there are the factories of Worcester, as they were in the 1970s,
when smoke still puffed from the gigantic stacks. This was no place for an
artist and writer to grow up! You, Brian, had no desire to stand for eight
hours at an assembly line, day after day, 49 weeks out of the year, and you
had some degree of contempt for those who did. Like a twinge from a
missing limb, you can even now sense the alienation that you felt. Quite
oddly, however, you do not regard yourself as more intelligent than they.
You mourn for the city in which you came of age, on whose wrought-iron
bridges you climbed, down whose hills you rode your Flexible Flier in the
winter. You have come to appreciate its freight yards and its loading
docks, and you love those with whom you had shared a now vanished way
of life, however inadvertently. Those days that you took too lightly are not
scheduled to return. Those factories have become a part of the
archeological record. The assembly lines have stopped, and pigeons fly in
and out through the jagged glass of the windows.
How evolved you are, Brian, to have not disowned your roots. How
sensible you are to not wage war on the dead. How generous you are to
think well of those who had made your younger self feel claustrophobic.
How freely you have offered your hard-won vision to the masses. With
your change of attitude and a paycheck, they could pay a third of their
bills. It is not your fault if they have chosen to disregard your insights. For
the past ten years, you have done your best to expand the boundaries of
the self, to be open where you had earlier been closed, and yet…Like the
Earth, the labyrinth turns. Its corridors lead to dimensions beyond those
of time and space. To celebrate your escape may be to step into a trap.
***
Adolph Gottlieb, Recurrent Apparition, 1946
In the labyrinth built by Daedalus there are mirrors by the thousands,
which make its 28 U-turns seem more complex than they are. Truly, there
would seem to be no way to extract yourself from its spell, no way through
or out of it, no direction to go other than the one in which you came. It is
clear—if only in retrospect—that this labyrinth is a work of genius, that
Daedalus has designed it to take full advantage of your habits. At its dead
heart, he has placed the Minotaur, a product of recombinant engineering,
who, due to several haywire genes, is said to only be able to survive on a
diet of human flesh. There seems no way to escape from the Minotaur's
surveillance. His gaze is cold. His remote eyes zero in on anything with a
pulse.
Beast-men march like clockwork from every imaginable angle, chanting,
their hands shaping balls of primordial energy that they are able to turn
into weapons. Your heart is beating from your chest. Could you really be
so amateurish as to lack the skill to control it? Such a heart is ridiculous.
Can you really call it yours? The sound can be heard in distant quadrants
of the galaxy, its thumping growing ever louder, and then louder, and
then louder. Your own mind turns against you. It betrays you with
practiced ease, like a democratic leader, as if it did not know to whom its
loyalty was due.
So yes, be afraid; be very afraid. With your head bowed, let the Minotaur's
agents see the deference in your stance, the lack of intuitive certainty in
your movements. There are few whom you can trust. Even they tend to
assume that they know where the Minotaur is. By closing their eyes, they
believe they have removed the barcodes from their foreheads. They do
not know that they serve him.
"In the scheme of things," you think, "it seems possible that the labyrinth
is no bigger than a seed, that my body is much too big to fit inside. Did not
my mother, Maia, once provide me with the tools to deconstruct
projections, to shatter all but the most primary of metaphysical structures
? There must be some way to return to the 'adamantine' stars—the stars
that are alive and that have a human form— and not to the quaint ones
painted on the upper part of the labyrinth." At each u-turn, you can feel
the cold breath of the Minotaur on your neck.
For the sake of argument, let us say that the Minotaur does not actually
exist; he is only the reflection of a reflection of a species dreamed by
Daedalus. It is even possible that he might have no power without you,
that your life-force is the only thing that gives substance to his image. It is
you, Hermes, who have conjured the whole story from thin air. "Surely,"
you think, "those mirrors will not be difficult to break!" Yet somehow, in
the end, this is not at all reassuring. Who is to say that you cannot die
horribly in a dream? Who is to say that, upon waking, you will not see
your breathless body stretched below?
***
Pablo Picasso, Minotaur is Wounded, 1937
Danny had been very sick as a child—or so the story went—with any
number of arcane conditions. In his memories, he would see himself frail
and naked on an operating table, under harsh lights, surrounded by a ring
of giants wearing 19th Century diving helmets. The eye-slits of these
helmets were unblinking. Strange instruments moved in synchronization,
as if directed by a single brain. Even under the anesthesia, Danny found
that the lights were too bright for his eyes, which hurt, and for some
reason were impossible to close. At the same time, the brightness
produced a very curious effect: he could see through the walls of the
operating theatre, which had become almost transparent. Out beyond
them, he could see a network of curved passageways, wall after wall,
around which his vision moved, before returning to the doll-like body on
the table, with its out-of-scale Taurean head. In and out of hospitals for
the first 12 years of his life, he had been overprotected by his mother,
Pasiphae.
According to my mother, Maia, who had worked with Danny's mother at
an underwater laboratory, in her younger days Pasiphae had acquired a
big "reputation" as a party girl. They had worked at a place called the
"Center for the Research and Development of Ancient Biomechanical
Species." There, they took dictation from the gods. They checked flow
-charts for the projection of the five Platonic solids, and they assisted in
the preparation of test subjects for their insertion into three-d forms.
Pasiphae was bright, but her mind was seldom on the task at hand. This
did not seem to have put her at any sort of disadvantage. She had later
married well, to a slumlord with a PHD in Civil War Geometry and ties to
the Greek Mafia.
Pasiphae's newfound affluence had allowed her to attach a more
luminous mask. This image was, after all, in keeping with the root
-syllables of her name. Pasiphae, from "pas," "for all" and "phaos," "light."
There were certain of the Hoi Polloi who had confused her with the Moon
. As if! What an insult! Was her light not destined to be more wide-shining
than that? Why did others not give her the credit she deserved? Who
would want to be compared to that haunted ship of souls? The mask was
new. It shone. It would cause the world to bend in correspondence with
its features. There were needs that could not be met. There were hungers
that could not be satisfied, as she had proved by her desire to have sex
with the bull. And then, nine months in which her body was not hers, the
pain of the delivery of an oversized head, the bellowing that put the
agents of the IMF on notice. Soon, you deadbeat Hierophants, a child will
turn your knees to water! By some process of psychic alchemy, the small
son would fulfill the mother's fantasies of perfection.
As the child grew, many academic honors were hung around his neck. His
bellowing, while still fearsome and unsettling, became much more covert.
Twenty years of twice-weekly visits to the analyst had only served to make
the Minotaur an expert on his neuroses. He could expound upon them at
encyclopedic length. Twitching fingers in the air, he had learned to put
quotation marks around the scene of the primordial crime, with its stench
of fear, with its tongueless choral singers, with its shelf upon shelf of
disassembled gods, with its Oedipal violation of an all-too-eager mother,
with its drawing and quartering of the Servants of the Pole.
First, they had flattened the Hypersphere, until it was just a small circle
on the floor. Then they cut the One into Three, the Three into Six, and the
Six into Ten. They leached the warmth from the Minotaur's blood, so that
he could not register the violence of the act, so that he could not hear
space scream. A dead sun was then implanted in his chest. "For your food
," they said, "select only the fittest and most beautiful." As a group, in
their 19th century diving helmets, the ring of giants nodded. The eyes
behind the eye-slits of their helmets did not blink. Who could make sense
of the barbarous nonsense that they chanted? One could only presume
that it worked. Ontogeny was thus made to recapitulate phylogeny, albeit
not quite the phylogeny of our race.
If "the personal is the political," as was said in the 1960s, then how would
we set limits to this type of correspondence, and where would it ever stop
? Let us take the mask from the Minotaur, with its terrible gold-tipped
horns. It is possible that, behind it, we will see the face of a frightened
child. The face is tiny and soft, a bit scrunched up, and as vulnerable as
that of an oyster. It is no wonder that he finds it necessary to project a
giant shadow. But just as soon as I begin to assume the best, I think: It is
possible that the face of the child is yet another mask. It is a ruse once
designed by Daedalus, a technological wonder that puts victims at their
ease, through which stares a presence that was old before the Deluge.
***
Pablo Picasso, The Remains of Minotaur
in a Harlequin Costume, 1938
Exempt from politics, uninterested in wealth, devoted only to the care
and feeding of my art, it may be true that I am self-absorbed. I seldom
give any change to derelicts. I care more for my peace of mind than for
the for the fires that will erase whole towns in California. I do not live
there, I live on the East Coast, and who among you has the standing to
accuse me? I have never owned a car. I prefer to walk. My carbon
footprint is much tinier than the average. Even now, I care too much. In
spite of all my yogic preparations, I think more about the fifth great die
-off than I should.
Call me focused, if you will, or anxious, or even self-contained; do not call
me narcissistic. True, there is a barcode on my forehead, but it is only just
barely visible. If I am not pure, I am as pure as most of the 8 ½ billion
now being prepped for sacrifice. They are pure enough. They will serve,
as will you, dear reader/listener, who have volunteered to bare your
throat by the fact of your existence. My role? It is only to inform you of
your role. The entrance to and the exit from the labyrinth are the same.
There, the choice is yours.
It is certainly not my fault if the Minotaur was a friend. It is not fair to
describe me as a vector of disease, and if I were, would this really be so
bad? How else could I speak of the Minotaur, of your no more than six
-degrees of separation from his cult.
In its "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," the A.P.A.
lists narcissism as a disease, but why, when so many narcissists are
successful, even famous? Some diseases are common, like life. A true
disease originates on the other side of death. It is a broken mirror, a sign
pointing at itself. To its host, the true disease is of inestimable value.
"Success does not come cheap," as the maxim goes, but the price will be
paid by someone other than the Minotaur. The 12-year-old girl who works
at the Dow plant in Bhopal, for example, has volunteered to assist in the
clearing of this debt, and she is said to be grateful that she has a job at all.
In this age of the triumph of the Top One Percent, of sociopathic chic, to
say that someone is "successful" does not imply any personal virtue on his
part, or that he has not, very simply, stolen what he wants.
For now the shadows have come out to play. The light shifts, and they
have suddenly become much more tangible than they were, as they dare
us to speak up. We are free to say "Please" and "Thank You." We have
somehow incurred a debt by the fact of our existence. "Will that be cash or
blood, sir?" It is possible that the 1000 percent interest is too high. Once,
Daedalus had set up a receptacle for virgins, which has now been fully
automated.
We are free to speak up, if we choose. We are free to interact with the
forces that, from the time before the Deluge was a tear, have been hidden
at the dead center of the labyrinth.
Zdzisław Beksinski, Untitled, 1982
It can be difficult to tell someone who has not been hypnotized by the
narcissist about the devastation that the false self can create, about the
wake of doubt it can leave. So subtle is the contagion that its target may
not choose to detect the signs of its advance, not until the damage is done.
Have you set yourself apart? Yes. Have you looked down on the common?
Yes. Have you laughed at the less intelligent? Yes. Have you nursed your
sense of grandiosity? Yes. You are free to review the progression of your
symptoms, to re-diagnose the disease of which you would be cured.
That you have done this so often before may not imply that you are
serious. With eyes wide, you are led to collaborate with the Minotaur, to
play each part in the ritual he assigns, before you pause to take note of the
gold ring in his nose, of the Freon he snorts, and of the supernatural
horns that stretch above the mask, which is made of leather and devoid of
all expression. The shared world that once appeared to be so solid is then
shown to be a stage set. You can poke a hole through its cardboard with
your finger. Wind picks it up and carries it off, to reveal, behind the stage
-set, an abyss.
There is a feeling of having asked to be taken in and manipulated, of
having volunteered to be the victim in a con game, of having been used
and then thrown, casually, away. But do you even know in what age you
were born, or that Worcester, Massachusetts, is the place where you grew
up? The egg of the world broke, i.e., there were those who broke it. You
got sleepy, very sleepy, and you did not really try that hard to put it back
together. Of what crimes are you guilty? Some were no doubt by
commission, still others by omission. How many of your teachers lied?
How much has the Minotaur kept from you?
Yes, "mistakes" were made. You are certainly free to call them that, for
such is the nature of freedom: You can tell yourself you are free. It seems
your boyhood friend has cultivated a secret life as a serial killer—though
of a sort both highly specialized and archaic—and that, with eyes wide,
you have inadvertently assisted in his project. At your feet, the bones of a
small, man-headed bird, as well as those of a large, bird-headed man,
some pottery shards, and a few radioactive spills. Here are giant skulls
that do not have cranial sutures; there are the burnt but oddly
luminescent bones of several 300-foot snakes.
Now, the night grows quiet. It is even possible that the Minotaur is dead.
You have killed him, perhaps, and have somehow misplaced the past
2800 years. For the whole time you have been wrestling with a hologram.
Your life-force is the secret of his strength. Right turns to left in the
labyrinth. The "I" leads to the "You." "We" opens onto "They." The smoke
lifts, and there is only an astringent smell, a bit like that of bleach. There
is no space between the city and the macrocosm. It is clear that some
world-subverting ritual has occurred. As if they were gloves, you have
given a strange species access to your hands.
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