THE LABYRINTH
What we all have in common is that we come from nowhere, we are now here, we arrive by the same route and we are headed in the same direction. What differentiates us is who we are and our journeys while we’re here.
From the moment we arrive we are venturing into the unknown, and albeit that we may cling to the known and familiar, we will always be encountering the unknown. We live at the edge between the known and the unknown.
Myths often offer us patterns for entering the unknown. One such myth from Greek mythology is that of the labyrinth, which I have used as an image for this site. The myth is that of Theseus and Ariadne. It runs as follows:
At the time, Athens paid to Crete a tribute of seven maidens and seven youths who were then led into a labyrinth where they either got lost and died of starvation or were killed by the minotaur that lived at it’s centre. Theseus volunteered to go as one of the youths with the aim of killing the minotaur, though without a plan as to how; in other words, he was putting his trust in his instincts to see him through. When he arrives in Crete, Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos and half-sister to the minotaur, fell in love with him and, on condition that he would take her back with him as his wife to Athens, gave him a ball of golden thread. This thread had been given to her by Daedalus, the architect of the labyrinth and generally a mythic figure of the artist and she was told that if the end of the thread was tied to the lintel of the entrance door the ball would unfurl and lead by many devious twist and turns to the innermost recess where the minotaur was lodged. (Curiously the name for this thread is a ‘clew’ from which our word clue is derived). She gave this to Theseus and said that by simply rolling up the ball again, he would be able to find his way out. Interestingly, it is not clear exactly how Theseus killed the minotaur – this apparently was left to him. There is much that could be written about this myth, but for my purpose here, the important element is that in determining how to set about his task of confronting what was threatening him, he was shown that the way in was quite literally the way out. It is still down to him to confront and deal with the threat, but I take it to mean that, psychologically, the golden thread that leads him in and out is an almost literally imaging of the word in-tuition. The golden thread of intuition is provided by the architect of the labyrinth. This would suggest that when we have access to the creator of the situation that we are in, we no longer feel so much a victim of it. We have a clue, as to how to proceed – an inner compass. It is rather like having a navigation bar on a website that leads us from one tab to another!
ACTIVITY ZERO
The name for this site is actually taken from Mirror-land, a poem I wrote from my collaged newspaper book Stellations ( See Poems tab under What do I do?).
I know next to nothing about physics, but I later discovered that in quantum physics there is a term called Zero point energy, also known as the Force of almost nothing. Briefly, an experiment has shown that there is no such thing as a total vacuum – that when two mirror plates are placed in parallel in a vaccuum box there is a minute force that attracts them together. This ‘vacuum’ state in physics finds its counterpart in that state of sentient stillness that lies at the heart of both meditation and creativity. The mystic Sufi poet Rumi in one of his poems recommends this state:
The Absolute works with nothing.
The workshop, the materials
Are what does not exist.
Try and be a blank sheet of paper with nothing on it.
Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing,
Where something might be planted,
A seed possibly, from the Absolute.
The idea being that from this state all things develop naturally and that you don’t actually need to know where you are going.
Contact details:
David Clark
Email: david@activityzero.com
Mobile: 07711 939 469