Labyrinth Poem

Entry for 4 November 2018:

Note: To mark the 30^th anniversary of the construction of the Murray Creek Labyrinth, I’m reprinting this poem. I wrote this originally for a humanistic psychology class at UC Santa Cruz in 1970 when I was 19 years old.  In 2000 I revised it for a self-published collection of my poems.  The poem mixes familiar scenes around the UCSC campus with Greek mythology and Joseph Campbell’s archetypal “Hero of a Thousand Faces.” Psychologically, this was an attempt to capture the moment in which I began to gather the courage to turn back to face my mortality, and in so doing began to become an adult, a process I am still working on almost 50 years later.

             1. Prologue

When I am dead, remember me,

as one who walked, often quickly,

in deep shadow under tall redwoods,

on too-bright March mornings.

Please remember this, at least:

That I knew that I was lost and afraid,

but refused to give up, and would not take

the escape of doing things the easy way,

I would not follow a childlike faith,

at simple altars in sun-bright places.

Remember me, thus, as a person

who said what he thought was true and necessary,

and did not regard the difficulty or the pain.

And thus he walked awhile in shadow,

and found some small good, and was gone.

            2. Beginnings

Who now knows the hour or the way

by which we came into this maze, our life?

Others have recalled for me my birth:

Into this cave of night I came;

and grew where fires threw their glare,

throbbing, at the roof of my small world.

These first confusions of shape, color, and words,

describe the orders of my first and present worlds.

But they are hardly the first:

Before my birth was,

I slept a shoreless fetal sleep,

wandering in an inner sea.

Who knows how that sleep began?

            3. The Labyrinth of Daily Perception

Waking, I rise and creep to the window.

Like a cautious priest I part the curtains;

a thousand images leap through the glass:

Dawn is fighting to free herself

from the tangled, clutching

branches of distant trees;

her blood has run across the sky,

and stands in pools now.

A shivering oak:

Unsteady silhouette of leaves

cuts sharp and deep into the sill.

I go outside and find:

Behind a sea of green-feathered spear tips,

an ocean swells.

And the morning moon, past full

is now waning, dying,

as the sun rises to overtake it.

Cloud-shrouded, westering,

it is caught by a swell of redwoods

like billowing nets on the tide.

The air is chill,

an asthmatic motorcycle passes,

gasps up the hill.

This place of towers and trees bemuses.

Climbing up the hill,

I am confused by faces, found in the crowd,

then lost behind.

Superreal, warning off intrusion,

uncompleted buildings deflect my glance.

Men leave their noise, pause from their work,

constructing this maze or that mountain,

to glare me by.

I stop at last beneath great cumuli,

whose movement seems to shove the sky itself.

I cannot stay, and go below to read;

but there instead I wander underground,

with furtive looks, through rows of crying books.

Cold walls oppress, drive me to the surface,

to find the world is walled

by clouds and trees,

by dark wet roads

and white stucco towers,

by sights and sounds that lose me in their maze.

At last, I am exhausted,

from these thousand leaping images

My chosen path is now an aimless wandering,

and walking seems

a way of standing still

amid the passing show of place and face.

At dusk a friend comes by my room to talk,

but in the middle of his speech,

the words go strange:

He speaks to me as if he were King Minos,

come to greet the fourteen youths

Athens’ black-sailed ship has brought to Crete. 

Then he leads me into the Labyrinth

and leaves me in the dark.

In silence, sitting in my empty room,

I feel the images fleeing, demons,

drawn through the window to the night outside;

and in their place, opening, a great space;

the minotaur eyes of the staring void.

            4. Dreaming of Escape

This is how it seemed to me,

that King Minos rules the Labyrinth

but the Minotaur holds the void.

In the silence of the center I knew he sat, and waited

for me to come to him.

There is, I had heard, some secret way,

a path that leads to true birth from the womb-maze.

And I had listened to those who claimed:

“The Labyrinth?  A nautilus shell

describes its form, and all who know

can tell the way the exit lies,

for the passage grows ever wider.”

False hope, I judged.

For who knows where shell enclosure ends

and if free sky, when reached,

is not more shell,

bright, extended into heaven?

So I continued to seek my own way out,

but many were the blank walls and circular reasonings

that trapped my speculations and attempts.

First my physics, then my metaphysics

did not set me free, and, in fleeing from the center,

all I found was more confusion.

And I failed even to elude the void.

From the center, it reached out at me;

when it passed, its cold touch brushed me,

it stopped me from building, quickly crumbling

all my contributions and solutions

reducing them to twistings of the Labyrinth.

For at the center of this life, my death

sits, waiting, for me to come;

he will have me anyway,

whether I will it, or not.

And at my dying, the rats will carry

my bones to him, and he will have

my marrow.

            5. Epilogue

Into this cave of night I came;

and grew where fires threw their glare,

throbbing, at the roof of my small world.

I tire of the fears and fantasies of youth,

that have kept me at the edge of life!

And so I take as my archetype,

Theseus, who took another’s place

to penetrate the maze.

                                               

And I will seek the center of the world,

whether it be made of emptiness or connection,

terror, resignation or love,

and I, too, will try to be a hero.

-Robert Elliott (February-March 1970/December 2000)

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