BEWILDERMENT

A labyrinth, definitively, is a bewildering argument. In mythology, we know that Daedelus built the original labyrinth as a prison for the Minotaur, but historically the labyrinth was the royal Minoan palace at Knossos on Crete, a sprawling complex of passages and halls built into the island.

If you stare at a waterfall and then look at the wallpaper, you will see its pattern crawling up to the ceiling. The “waterfall effect” is your brain forcing your eyes to perceive of continued motion. It is a bewildering.

If you explore the labyrinth for too long, your reemergence into the common grid will be characterized by monuments and turns you do not remember. A sprawling complex becomes a wilderness of illogical topography. If you explore the labyrinth for two weeks, your neighborhood will lack cartographic certainty for a month. Your prior experience of the city was mediated by the trail of memories you left behind you as you went along, but as breadcrumbs in the forest they will be eaten, bewildered. 

It is reductive to conflate your various perceptions. Although they are physically interrelated, they do not conform to the same laws. Laws are arbitrarily determined, and perception is quantifiable. Each awareness – how to make macaroons, your memory of the lake house, your conception of the planet from Solaris, symbology – is a material island; there are more than seven continents in your mind.

In death, the ocean is not squandered. It remains, dotted by the many-natured islands you (discerned/enabled/constructed/watched grow) in life. However, it is said that the islands become wilder.