Into The Labyrinth (with Philip K Dick, The Monkey King, and Dante)
Into The Labyrinth (with Philip K Dick, The Monkey King, and Dante)
FICTION | FEBRUARY FEATURE I
Fifty years, most of it trapped in this dank labyrinth, sometimes awake, most of it asleep. Either way, time passes.
There was a time before the labyrinth. My body was a soft, sunlit ball, then a pliable, thoughtless sprite, and eventually a fleshy automobile, blooming in motion. This flesh vehicle feeds on the sacrifices of countless plants and animals. Before I could voice any objection it hurtled into the labyrinth and I was trapped, taken along for the ride.
I wandered for so long I lost sense of how much time had passed. On rare occasions, I would discover messages written by others who had been lost before me, scrawled on the walls in blood.
The poet Dante was lost in a forest. He descended into hell and found a mountain he could climb up to heaven. That’s what it took to get out of that forest!
Sun Wukong, the Monkey King was banished from heaven for the sin of arrogance. The Buddha put a mountain on top of him for 500 years until he agreed to go on a dangerous pilgrimage to bring the Buddhist scriptures from India to China. 500 years before he said sorry! That’s human stubbornness for you.
Philip K. Dick was trapped behind the walls of a black iron prison that transcended time and space. His message is inspired but written in fragments throughout the labyrinth so I don’t know if he ever escaped.
A forest, a mountain, a prison. I knew they were talking about the labyrinth. I was eight years old when I watched a TV show about an evil wizard who trapped children in a magical labyrinth. I knew at once that I was trapped in there with them, and have been ever since.
With one exception: 20 years ago, I was wandering around, determined to escape, when I happened upon a pair of wings. They were just like the kind made by Daedalus for his son Icarus (when you are trapped in the labyrinth you hear about all the different means of escape). I flew free! But not for long.
I learned first-hand that Icarus was not proud; he didn’t want to see how high he could fly. Listen, here’s how you get into trouble flying free from a labyrinth: looking down from those divine heights, you see that the pattern of the maze is the pattern of your entire life. Every event, good and bad laid out so that it makes perfect, harmonious sense. Like a peacock’s shimmering tail. So beautiful. It’s only then that you realize you’ve flown too close to the sun. Wings catch on fire and down you go in a blazing heap.
How terrifying to return to darkness and confusion. For a long time I wished I had never known freedom at all, but time passed and the taste of it faded. Poor Icarus fell into the vast depths of the Unconscious Sea and was never seen again. I was fortunate to be able to pick up my broken pieces and start rebuilding my vehicle.
The flames that consume my sacrificial fuel have lost some of their potency. I find myself in a strange space between consumption and being consumed myself (by time). My steps are slower now. Slowing down reveals details that I missed before.
These walls I’m passing, they're a perfect example. I’ve walked past them before, I'm certain of it, but something's different. What’s this? There are small cracks in the wall, through which the sun is shining.
The cracks of light leap. They begin to move, to dance. Sparks of light pull themselves up from the surface of the wall and jump at me. They pass right through my skull, into the fleshy flower that is my brain.
Up and down the spinal column stem, faster and faster until the light becomes heat, heat becomes fire that flits around on the winds of my thoughts.
I cannot keep the fire locked inside. I must let it out. Pichu, pichu! I spit it out. One flame after another.
When I’m done and the water clears from my eyes there’s a very strange sight to behold.
Before me, on the floor of the labyrinth, is a flickering trail of fire.
Finally, I no longer have to stomp about in the dim maze. My feet regain the springy bounce of their youth; my heart fills with heat. I write this message on the wall with the blood of my left index finger, marking the beginning of a new path:
Groping in the dark,
fifty year labyrinth, then
a trail of bright thoughts.
Walking Through The Words: Behind the Scenes of Today's Haibun Short Fiction.
Haibun
Basho, the Zen poet, invented the term "haiku" for the famous 5-7-5 syllable poem and also the lesser known haibun.
Haibun (俳文, literally, haikai writings) is a literary form combining poetry and prose. The range of haibun is broad and frequently includes autobiography, diary, essay, prose poem, short story and travel journal.
The most famous haibun is Basho's Narrow Road To A Far Province.
Basho's Narrow Road To A Far Province
Oku no Hosomichi (奥の細道, originally おくのほそ道), translated as The Narrow Road to the Deep North and The Narrow Road to the Interior, is a major work of haibun by the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō, considered one of the major texts of Japanese literature of the Edo period. The text is written in the form of a prose and verse travel diary and was penned as Bashō made an epic and dangerous journey on foot through the Edo Japan of the late 17th century…In one of its most memorable passages, Bashō suggests that "every day is a journey, and the journey itself home". Of Oku no Hosomichi, Kenji Miyazawa once suggested, "It was as if the very soul of Japan had itself written it."[5]
Here is the first haibun in the sequence of The Narrow Road to the Interior, which inspired my labyrinth-themed piece.
The passing days and months are eternal travellers in time. The years that come and go are travellers too. Life itself is a journey; and as for those who spend their days upon the waters in ships and those who grow old leading horses, their very home is the open road. And some poets of old there were who died while travelling.
There came a day when the clouds drifting along with the wind aroused a wanderlust in me, and I set off on a journey to roam along the seashores. I returned to my hut on the riverbank last autumn, and by the time I had swept away the cobwebs, the year was over.
But when spring came with its misty skies, the god of temptation possessed me with a longing to pass the Barrier of Shirakawa, and road gods beckoned, and I could not set my mind to anything. So I mended my breeches, put new cords on my hat, and as I burned moxa on my knees to make them strong, I was already dreaming of the moon over Matsushima.
I sold my home and moved into Sampû’s guest house, but before I left my cottage I composed a verse and inscribed it on a poem strip which I hung upon a pillar:
This rude hermit cell
Will be different now, knowing Dolls’
Festival as well.
Translated by Dorothy Britton
(A Haiku Journey: Bashô’s Narrow Road to a Far Province, 1980)
Read more about Basho and his haiku poetry here on my first Enlightenment Prompt: Divine Suicide For A Happy 2024 (with Basho's Frog).
Dante's Divine Comedy
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more;
From The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Sun Wukong, The Monkey King
The Monkey King or Sun Wukong is a fictional character best known as one of the main players in the 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West, and many later stories and adaptations. In the novel, Sun Wukong is a monkey born from a stone who acquires supernatural powers through Taoist practices.
As a child in Australia we were exposed to a mix of American and Japanese television. Monkey Magic (Saiyūki, 西遊記, lit. 'Account of the Journey to the West'), was on TV every night after school and served a my first encounter with Buddhist philosophy (my friend, the Tibetan monk Lama Lobsang Tendar once told me that he also watched the Tibetan version of the show as a boy). It transfixed me immediately and, from what I understand, was very popular with most Australian schoolboys. To hear someone say out loud that the world was an illusion, that we were trapped within our own thoughts, that there was a path to liberation from the suffering of the world confirmed what I intuitively felt from a young age.
Philip K Dick
At the time of his death, Dick's work was generally known to only science fiction readers, and many of his novels and short stories were out of print. To date, a total of 44 novels have been published and translations have appeared in 25 languages. Six volumes of selected correspondence, written by Dick from 1938 through 1982, were published between 1991 and 2009.
The Library of America has issued three collections of Dick's novels. At least nine films have been adapted from Dick's work, the first being Blade Runner in 1982.
Recurring themes in Dick's work
Five recurring philosophical themes in Dick's work have been classified by Philip K. Dick scholar Erik Davis:
• False realities
• Human vs. machine
• Entropy
• The nature of God
• Social control
Similarly, in Understanding Philip K. Dick, Eric Carl Link discussed eight themes or 'ideas and motifs':
• Epistemology and the Nature of Reality
• Know Thyself
• The Android and the Human
• Entropy and Pot Healing
• The Theodicy Problem
• Warfare and Power Politics
• The Evolved Human
• 'Technology, Media, Drugs and Madness'
"The Black Iron Prison" is a concept of an all-pervasive system of social control postulated in the Tractates Cryptica Scriptura, a summary of an unpublished Gnostic exegesis included in his novel VALIS. Dick wrote:
Once, in a cheap science fiction novel, Fat had come across a perfect description of the Black Iron Prison, but set in the far future. So if you superimposed the past (ancient Rome) over the present (California in the twentieth century) and superimposed the far future world of The Android Cried Me a River over that, you got the Empire, as the supra- or trans-temporal constant. Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all inside it and none of them knew it.
Into The Labyrinth is a British children's television series. It was produced for the ITV network between 1980 and 1982. Three series were produced and directed by Peter Graham Scott. The series was created by Scott along with Bob Baker, who had previously written several stories for Doctor Who.
The series was based around a struggle between two timeless, feuding sorcerers - the noble Rothgo and the evil Belor. Each aimed to obtain possession of the Nidus, a magical object of limitless power…The first series followed a group of modern-day children (Phil, Helen and Terry) who find Rothgo, almost lifeless, in a labyrinthine cave. Rothgo sends the children through different periods of time to search for the Nidus, which is disguised as a different object in each time period and can only be seen in reflection. The children arrive at various points of history (the French Revolution, Ancient Greece, English Civil War, etc.), in which they find an earlier version of Rothgo himself, playing a character from each period. Together they search for the Nidus, but their attempts are constantly thwarted by Belor who also appears in each time period disguised as a character herself.
The Story of Icarus
Icarus's father Daedalus, a very talented Athenian craftsman, built a labyrinth for King Minos of Crete near his palace at Knossos to imprison the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster born of his wife and the Cretan bull. Minos imprisoned Daedalus himself in the labyrinth because he believed Daedalus gave Minos's daughter, Ariadne, a clew (or ball of string) in order to help Theseus escape the labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur.
The Lament for Icarus (1898) by H. J. Draper
Daedalus fashioned two pairs of wings for himself and his son, made of metal feather held to a leather frame by beeswax. Before trying to escape the island, he warned his son not to follow his path of flight and not fly too close to the sun or too close to the sea, but, overcome by giddiness while flying, Icarus disobeyed his father and soared higher into the sky. The heat from the sun melted the beeswax, causing the wings to fall apart as he flew. Icarus attempted to stay aloft, but ultimately fell into the sea and drowned. Daedalus wept for his son and called the nearest land Icaria (an island southwest of Samos) in memory of him. Today, the supposed site of his burial on the island bears his name, and the sea near Icaria in which he drowned is called the Icarian Sea. With much grief, Daedalus went to the temple of Apollo in Sicily, and hung up his own wings as an offering to never attempt to fly again. According to scholia on Euripides, Icarus fashioned himself greater than Helios, the Sun himself, and the god punished him by directing his powerful rays at him, melting the beeswax. Afterwards, it was Helios who named the Icarian Sea after Icarus.