Waiting For Theseus

Day identifies itself from night with a soft grey radiance filtered through a bruised canopy of sky. Of the sun I know nothing other than what he has told me. It is beyond my imagining and seems incomprehensible that each day can be oppressed by its hovering intensity whilst one is unable to look upon it directly for fear of blindness. I am sure that I could not keep my eyes away.

Before he came, those sunless years passed through me fluid and unnoticed. I had long since ceased the counting of days, my tongue having grown stiff, my mind quiet. If once I knew language I had forgotten it, and thought too had passed, taken perhaps by a similar forgetfulness. The marshland then made no distinction between it and myself.

In my mind now there is an image, it is a memory. On the morning of my birth I wandered the denser marsh in search of fresh patches of the red reed. Climbing over a green and sodden knoll my eyes fell upon him, floating face towards the sky in a small pool. The pool’s surface, slicked with oils of turquoise-green and blue and strewn with feathers of white and deep red, framed him young and beautiful, his body naked and still as if sleeping. I know I stood and looked at him for some time. I do not know how long. The image is clear. I have no memories of thoughts passing through my mind as I looked.

Submerging myself that morning in the pool’s tepid water, I swam towards him. The motion of his chest told me he was alive and as I touched him he winced as if in pain. Pulling him from the water I lay him face down on the knoll. The feathers that floated in the pool had come from his back and arms and some still adhered to the black pasty wax that covered his skin. Blisters and burns stretched up his legs and torso and his hair too was singed. I lifted him gently, he was not heavy, and carried him in my arms, his head upon my shoulder.

As I walked, I felt the warmth of his breath upon my cheek and my feet faltered momentarily. The roar of soundless reflection suddenly invaded the quiet and empty spaces between my eyes. Thoughts began to form, questions, all in words confused and distorted. They sounded within me like uninvited gods and the fallen bird-man in my arms grew heavier.


With his arrival the counting of days began. Three days filled with waiting passed before he stirred to consciousness. During this time he drifted feverish then lucid, on the periphery of wakefulness. I sat by him, transfixed by the mumbled fragments of language that escaped his lips and met my ears as spells. When his fever finally eased and he regained his senses, he pulled himself up into a ball and shook in terror. It was some time before I realized that it was the sight of me that so frightened him. I withdrew to watch him from a distance as my own thoughts writhed and I rapidly stirred.

The nature of my state of being during my solitude is now inconceivable to me. In my wakened state, I have an awareness of myself. No, this seems imprecise. I have an awareness of things which are not myself and know myself only through this distinction. Once I was of these marshlands but now find myself within them.


Gradually the fallen man grows comfortable with me. He follows me as I lead him through the marshes and talks constantly, perhaps as much for his benefit as for mine. I, of course, do not speak, not remembering how. Slowly I begin to mouth words to myself, fascinated by the mechanics of lip and tongue, inhaling and breathing words in.

As we walk I turn my head to him and mouth some word or sequence of words. This acts to direct his thought and thus his language and so, as he becomes familiar with the marshlands, I explore the forgotten realm of words and thoughts and am progressively dragged by an unreasoned will into further sensibility.

I wonder if death is like my life in the marshlands before he came. Perhaps I drifted off into death and my body lived on, breathing and feeding itself. He asks me questions about his gods and about being. I ask him back why he is fascinated with existence. What else does he know? Surely non-existence cannot be known, but I smile to myself. He and I share a primordial memory of nonbeing and I have been there whilst alive.


Memories, landscapes in themselves, are both obscured and embellished by the present. His memories, however, are clear as if the events in his past had been scarred crisp and unmistakable upon his mind. Many of the things that he describes to me take on such a solid form within my mind that I am tempted to believe he merely triggers my own memory of such things. It is the sun that challenges this. I cannot conceive of its celestial torment.


During this time my new companion talks much of his father who had built a prince’s palace renowned for its intricacies. With its innumerable passages this labyrinth is a prison to its one inhabitant who is consigned to its depths. I wonder if this prince knows that he is a prisoner. There are no locked doors to restrict him.


As my language returns it becomes clear that thought has passed through my mind before. Words come that my fallen companion has not taught me and, indeed, does not know. Gradually I come to recognize great differences between us. Within him there is a certainty, an assuredness that I do not share. Now, as I explore the marshlands with him, his talk of escape excites me but instinctively I know it to be futile. Does he not notice that each path taken leads ultimately to its source? Space within the marshlands is simply a series of circles intertwined and overlayed.

What has brought him finally to this realisation is the discovery that he cannot become lost. He leaves my small hut and walks directionless for days, changing course without thought. Always he returns, fed back to me through the circles.

After this he began to fashion wings out of bamboo, feathers and woven reeds, intending to fly out of the marshlands, but these wings will not lift his weight; that he thinks they will seems absurd to me. He assures me that his father constructed wings for him in a similar way and it was these that brought him to my marshes. I suggested that just as the marshlands are not to be found on his father’s maps and charts and as such are not contained within the geography of his former life, so too may the natural laws be altered within these swamps. He can conceive of no such possibility and continues to work.

He began subtly altering his wing design, trapping different birds with lighter feathers, thinking the marshland’s moist air the fault. Now in desperation he has began experimenting with all manner of radical design. My hut is besieged on all sides by an array of exotic man-wings but still the marshlands will not relinquish its hold on him.

As he works I talk with him, feeling compelled to know more about the imprisoned prince called Minotaur.


The space within the minotaur’s palace is deceptive. His labyrinth, like the mind, is seemingly without circumference, its lacework of corridors providing the illusion of an infinite realm. But corridors re-emerge, as do thoughts, and as he roams, unhindered and solitary, he notices a familiar bend or archway and so turns and retraces his course. Ultimately he discovers he is always brought back to his starting point. To test this theory he wanders aimlessly, like my fallen companion in the marshes, and, when lost, sets out once more from this new point. In such a way he discovers the nature of his new home and in a similar fashion I have uncovered the truth of my inner landscape. Thoughts recur and all my understanding is circular.


My companion does not recognize the significance of the things that he tells me. He cannot see that the labyrinth is the marshlands and that the marshlands are my mind. He is obsessed with his wings, his mind fixed on escape. His arrival has awoken in me some pain. I am aware of myself unceasingly and my perception is a festering wound. Is this what it is like to live in the company of others? It is little wonder that I chose these marshes.


It is the other that torments us, Minotaur and I, that reminds us of our solitude and containment. Left alone within his palace the minotaur lapses into forgetfulness; indeed, it is the nature of the labyrinth to induce this state. This phenomenon is not unknown to his captors, who require of their prisoner a degree of suffering not facilitated by a union with his surroundings. And so each year they release into his palace fourteen young virgins, seven boys and seven girls. The sudden arrival of others wakes him from his dream, reminds him of himself and the world beyond the walls of his labyrinth, reminds him of his imprisonment. Thus his forgetfulness is countered and the cruelty of those that imprison him sated.

At first the minotaur bears no malice towards his guests. He welcomes them to his home and leads them down its corridors, indulging in the return of memory. But gradually, as his awareness grows, he comes to understand their purpose. They fill his head with ideas of escape and instil within him a great dissatisfaction, for he knows escape impossible. This is the beginning of his suffering and he yearns for the forgetfulness of his solitude.

For the fourteen with him there is no escape. They too are now prisoners and for them there will not be the relief of forgetfulness. There is no solitude in his palace now, no corridor that will not eventually bring them back together.

On reaching this understanding the minotaur transforms. To the eyes of his fourteen guests he becomes the crazed bull-headed monster they had imagined would tear their flesh from their bones as soon as they entered his palace. At first he begins to howl, a sound so full of rage and anguish that many become frozen with terror. These are the first to die. Others run, scattering into the labyrinth, but none know its intricacies better than he. He makes quick work of it, not wanting his victims to suffer.


The bird-man too has not suffered and innocently did not realize that contained within his language was the imperative of his end. He floats with blue eyes turned from me, vacantly fixed upon the green pool’s floor and his back is to the sun. I am again waiting, slipping through recollection to its end and falling just beyond to those few nebulous moments immediately prior to my birth. I find here an unexpected resonance, a disquiet I thought impossible. It is as though I detect in the memory an undercurrent of emotion.

It is early morning. I have come to search for fresh patches of the red reed that sustains me. Seeking a vantage point from which to survey the surrounding marshes I climb to higher ground. The bird-man that I see here in memory, wounded and floating, is that same that now floats dead before me. The pool, however, seen in memory, and the one I hold now in sight are not the same.


- M. Plumber