David's Inferno

by David Blistein

  In subsequent years, I walked my share of labyrinths. Although I respected the spiritual intentions of them, I was usually only going along for the ride. Either I was at some kind of meditation retreat where everybody was walking a labyrinth, so I walked it; or Wendy had heard about one that someone had constructed nearby and wanted to walk it, so I joined her.

  By the way, labyrinths are different from mazes. This is important symbolically as well as practically. You can get lost in a maze—theoretically forever—without ever finding your way out. You can’t get lost in a labyrinth. If you walk in one direction, you end up in the center. If you walk in the other direction, you find yourself back at the beginning.

  The terms, unfortunately, are often used interchangeably. This is partly due to the famous legend about a brave Athenian prince named Theseus who decided to take on a ravenous monster named a Minotaur who had an unfortunate taste for young Athenian children and allegedly lived in the center of a labyrinth. But that was no labyrinth … that was a maze. We know this because Theseus tied a ball of string to the entry door and unrolled it behind him as he went in so he could always find his way out. If it had really been a labyrinth, he wouldn’t have needed the ball of string. He could have just turned around and run like the bejeezus in the other direction.

  Labyrinths have been built for thousands of years. From Rome to Scandinavia. Here in America, a major building boom began when the coming of the “Age of Aquarius” segued into the “New Age.” Now you can find them in all sorts of public places—from corporate retreat centers to hospitals.

  They range from simple seven-circuit labyrinths, maybe 20 to 30 feet wide to eleven-circuit labyrinths of 100 feet wide or more. The one at Chartres is only about 40 feet, which makes it almost impossible for two people to pass each other while staying between the lines. Perhaps, it was designed specifically for solitary walking. So the only person you pass coming and going is yourself.

  Walking a labyrinth guides you unerringly along a series of gentle switchbacks, sometimes drawing you towards the center and sometimes swinging you to the outer circle where you feel like the trailing end of a comet looping out and in around the earth. After a while you find yourself at the center—which, for some reason, always seems to come up on you suddenly. Then you walk back out. Most people go at a leisurely pace. It usually takes anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes. Although, depending on the size of the labyrinth, a serious Buddhist doing kinhin (Zen walking meditation) could easily stretch it out to 45 minutes. As far as I know, the unofficial world speed record is held by an 11-year-old boy who ran in and out of an eleven-circuit, 100+-foot-wide labyrinth in 2 minutes and 42 seconds.

  There are all kinds of books about the occult wisdom buried in labyrinth design and the healing effect walking one can have on your body, mind, and spirit. While it’s technically considered a meditative activity, the experts insist that there’s no “right” way to do it. Walk fast. Walk slow. Still your mind. Let your mind chatter away. Doesn’t matter. Just walk the labyrinth … all the way into the center and then all the way out. Let the labyrinth do the work. Bored? Not to worry, you won’t go to Hell if you decide just to step over the lines and walk out. (Try not to bump into anybody.)

  To me, the way it works is kind of like the car I once had that came with a digital compass near the visor. To calibrate it correctly, you had to go to an empty parking lot and drive around in several complete tight circles. I think that’s one of the things walking a labyrinth does. It sort of recalibrates you. I’ve emerged feeling calmer. I’ve emerged feeling exactly the same. I’ve emerged with my mind more still. I’ve emerged bursting with new ideas.

  Regardless, I’ve always walked out a different person than I walked in.

  Every year, I cut a cord or so of wood to heat my cabin. Although not much wood, it still leaves behind a lot of slash which, like any guy with a chainsaw, I throw into halfhearted piles, hoping it will have the decency to decompose as quickly as possible.

  In early 2005, however, a weird thing started happening: The brush began intertwining itself into orderly circles around trees. Soon—as if the elves or aliens were getting increasingly bold—the branches started wending their way around several trees and even around curves in the paths.

  Wending is right. As quickly as I was creating chaos out of order, Wendy was doing the opposite. Until then, I’d always considered the idea of building a labyrinth in the woods behind our house to be one of her artistic visions that might be inspired, but would never see the light of day.

  The intertwining branches thing changed that. Not only could I finally see what had been in her mind’s eye all along, but I realized that clearing the area, collecting branches, and laying out the circles would require a combination of light mental focus with a reasonable amount of physical activity—which was, at the time, definitely my kind of job.

  More important, I superstitiously hoped that building one might reconfigure me in some way or, at the very least, buy me enough spiritual credits to make a persuasive argument to Dympha (the patron saint of the mentally ill) that she should perform a miracle on my behalf.

  In late 2005, shortly after my breakdown, we began building our labyrinth. As soon as we decided to build one, I knew the perfect place. While most of our land is a mixture of maple, beech, oak, aspen, and hemlock ranging from adolescence to old age (100+), there was a small plateau covered with baby beech saplings crying out to have a labyrinth built on it. (I hear these things.)

  My first job was to cut enough of those saplings for us to layout the circles without continually having our eyes gouged out by twig-size branches. Remarkably—considering I usually went out equipped with nothing but a chainsaw and an abundance of nervous energy—I showed remarkable restraint. So much so, that even now I occasionally remove a few more saplings to make the paths a little easier to walk without losing the forest feel.

  Most projects that Wendy and I work on together begin with a uniquely creative glimmer in Wendy’s mind’s eye. I translate this glimmer into a blast of activity that, while corresponding vaguely with her vision, does more to tell her what she doesn’t have in mind than what she does.

  Whenever a decision has to be made, I focus on how to make it as quickly as possible so I can get back to work as quickly as possible … figuring I can always double back to fix things later. Wendy’s focus is to keep looking, waiting for the right solution to appear. Because, from her perspective, once you’ve committed to a specific course of action you may never be able to repair any unforeseen damage, thereby falling further from perfection with every step.

  Still, contrary to all laws of our respective human natures, we’ve worked together successfully on many “projects,” our marriage being far and away the most impressive.

  Back in the late fall of 2005, as both the days and I became progressively darker, we did the preliminary work. This involved a lot of stakes, strings, branches, and pauses, as we (she) evaluated the aesthetics of different path widths and overall dimensions.

  By the time I got back from my road trip out west the following spring, Wendy had realized there was no reason the outer paths couldn’t veer off a little, a few feet down a bank. So, over the next month I worked in fits and starts to shift the preliminary circles outward, extending the width eventually to more than 125 feet, about three times larger than the one at Chartres. We weren’t trying to show off. In fact, we’ve almost never shown the labyrinth to anyone. And, with a few years of neglect, it will dissolve back into the earth, a whisper of its former self. Rather, even the most irreverent voices within me will admit that the labyrinth was already there … we just had to see where it was so we could lay branches on top of it.

  On Mother’s Day weekend 2006, the rains came. And came. Ending that perfect spring and culminating in epic floods in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

  We didn’t have any floods in Vermont that time, but the rains kept coming. We had only four sunny days between Mother’s and Father’s Day in
2006—not the best weather for a depressive and the death knell for most lilac blooms, apple blossoms, as well as my work on the labyrinth. Walking around in damp woods, slowly picking up and laying down sticks just wasn’t my idea of fun—especially since that year’s crop of black flies, mosquitoes, and deer flies all developed an uncommon fondness for the skin I was trying not to jump out of.

  That November, however, after laying the stone pathway, building the bridge, uprooting the Rosa multiflora and, most importantly, having the septic tank pumped, I returned to the labyrinth.

  Intuitively, you’d think you build a labyrinth by laying down paths. Actually, you make the circles and then figure out where the “cuts” are. Then, to make the turns, you just round the branches from one border onto the adjacent one. Trust me, it makes sense.

  And so I dragged and collected branches, cut a tree here and there, and made circles of branches, with bigger logs on the outside; Wendy joined me occasionally, or more often, worked separately, adjusting my work.

  One day in late December 2006, diagram and compass in hand, I hammered stakes at the north, south, east, and west nodes and began making the cuts and curves. When Wendy came out to look, she felt something was off. It took a little while for her to realize the problem: I was working based on magnetic north as opposed to true north.

  And so, at high noon on one of the shortest days of the year, I marched with uncommon confidence out to the labyrinth with an old Boy Scout handbook, an old-fashioned watch with hands, and a 12d finish nail. (The Boy Scouts use a toothpick, but that’s ’cause, unlike me, they usually aren’t prepared with a 12d nail.) After I moved the stakes, Wendy came out to see if I’d earned my Merit Badge. She still looked at the north node rather suspiciously, but I held up my Boy Scout handbook and she yielded to superior wisdom.

  We only had a few inches of snow in January, so we kept working, building up the circles so they would still show in gentle circular ridges when the heavy snows came—as long as I got out early enough to pack down the path.

  The heavy snows finally came shortly after midnight on Valentine’s Day 2007. By the time it was light enough for me to see out the window, there were already a few inches on the ground. I quickly put on a random assortment of sweatshirts, ski pants, and woolen hats, strapped on some snowshoes, went out to the labyrinth, and stomped it down.

  We went out several times during the day, the blizzard winds sweeping paths away within a few hours of our making them. Once, I inadvertently crossed a border that had been flattened by the wind, and got totally turned around. So I had to carefully retrace my snow prints to the beginning and rush back into the house to get our diagram.

  You got the image? A 50+-year-old guy, late in the afternoon of a blizzard, sweating inside multiple sweatshirts, baby icicles hanging from his woolen hat, intently peering through whipping snow at a diagram of a labyrinth, frantically trying to reconnect the dots before losing the true path for the rest of the winter.

  It took me a while. But I did it, even using my glove to sweep away the error as best I could so it wouldn’t show up as a glaring blemish on the perfection of the universe. I walked in and out once more to make sure. By then it was almost dark, so I went back in the house, lit a fire, and had a drink with Wendy.

  I felt pretty good.

  The snow stopped overnight—almost two feet for us, three feet in other parts of Vermont. The next day, I went out early to make sure the labyrinth was still visible. It was.

  Relieved, I stood at the beginning and walked in. I had to be careful in a few places—certain parts on the southwest quadrant aren’t as protected by trees and still tend to get buried more easily.

  But I made it.

  People have different rituals at the center of labyrinths. Usually of the prayerful variety. Even I tend to turn in each direction (true, not magnetic), close my eyes, take a deep breath, and then open them. That’s what I did this time. Turning finally back towards the opening on the north side of the inner circle and closing my eyes.

  When people talk about being heartbroken, it’s usually because they’ve lost something outside themselves. The death of a parent. The end of a relationship. A lost opportunity that may never come again. My heart was broken. But the only thing I’d lost was inside. And he, that guy, was never coming back. He might look the same. He might even act the same. Hopefully, he’d be as funny as he used to be. But he wouldn’t be the same.

  I opened my eyes, kind of smiled, and shook my head. A slow smile. Kind of wry, kind of relieved. A small shake. First a little to the left and right. Then up, down, and straight. I was a little weepy as usual. My body felt fragile and exposed. But I was smiling.

  I had finally made it to the center of the labyrinth. Now all I had to do was find a way to walk out.

  AT THE BEGINNING OF PARADISE, DANTE DOES SOMETHING few other authors have ever done: he urges anyone who’s managed to follow him this far to stop reading. Because he’s going places no one’s ever gone before, and if they can’t keep up, they’ll probably end up lost in a bewildering maze. (Maze, not labyrinth.)

  Certainly, there are practical reasons for him to do this. Copies of Inferno and Purgatory are starting to circulate, and he’s wary of criticism. (You don’t like it? That’s ’cause you don’t get it.) It’s also a shot across the bow at all those powerful people who won’t be exactly pleased when they find out where he’s placed them. Well, they better think twice before seeking revenge, because Dante’s about to experience Divine Grace, and he’s taking no prisoners.

  But his warning is also a colossal act of arrogance that’s perfectly in keeping with his own custom blend of wisdom, pride, and stubbornness. He wants this to be a book unlike any written before. And it is. He wants it to be one that the multitudes will acclaim. And it will be.

  Unfortunately, in the centuries that follow, fewer people will read Paradise than Dante’s other two books. And fewer, still, will understand it. His goal is nothing less than rapturous consummation with All That Is, but he makes it perfectly clear that he is the only living human who’ll get to do so. Everyone else will have to get the word secondhand. From him. After years of railing against his exile, he essentially exiles himself.

  Paradise is, indeed, where Dante pulls out all the stops—mentally, creatively, and spiritually. He can’t worry anymore about whether anybody else can connect the dots. He’ll have enough trouble connecting them himself. So, having warned his readers of the dangers that lie ahead, he blasts off into and beyond Ptolemy’s nine spheres of heaven. Along the way, he’s questioned and lectured on the four theological and three cardinal virtues by a pantheon of historical all-stars—pagan and Christian alike: Saints Thomas, Peter, Francis, Bonaventure, and Augustine; King Solomon; Emperors Trajan, Justinian and Henry VIII (whom he hoped would take over Italy); several nuns, his own great-grandfather, Adam, Eve, the Virgin Mary, and God Himself, who appears in a flash of LOVE and LIGHT.

  The result is a conglomeration of Medieval, Greco-Roman, and Egyptian cosmology, philosophy, and morality, grounded, with some poetic license, in traditional Christian theology. A vision of the righteous hierarchy of all things that has the trappings of a full-blown episode of mania. Sometimes the book reads like a doctoral dissertation, albeit one written on peyote: The thesis is magnificent, the insights are truly radical, and the language is so transcendent that, when necessary, it can easily overwhelm mere logic or common sense.

  I see why he warned us to turn back. I’m exhausted just writing about it.

  The problem is that, although many serious literary critics—and Dante himself—consider Paradise his greatest achievement, far more people still think his trilogy is called “Dante’s Inferno.” (A convention I followed in naming this one.) In other words, most of us do turn back. But not because the seas are so treacherous—from my perspective, it’s way harder to read about what happens to people in hell—no, we turn back because the story is over.

  Until now, behind the often-didactic mor
ality tale, lies an epic myth: Man has mid-life crisis. Man reluctantly begins quest for meaning. Man meets old wise man who says he has been sent by man’s one true love to show him a way out of this vale of tears. Driven by a combination of desperation, chivalry, and desire, man follows old wise man through realms of confusion, sorrow, and toil … literally hellfire and damnation. Finally, man reaches the Garden of Eden and sees girl of his dreams. In this case, her name is Beatrice … a woman he’s been obsessed with ever since he met her at a neighborhood party one evening in 1274. Back then, he was only nine. She, eight. But, for him, that one glance triggered a lifelong yearning for beauty, light, transcendence, and, undoubtedly, some far-more-carnal desires.

  If The Divine Comedy were a traditional novel, this would be the climax. After 40+ years of dreaming of this woman—not to mention the ultimate two-day walkabout on the wild side—Dante is surely more than willing to call it a day … or preferably, a night. Who can blame him? If he followed a classic storyline, he and Beatrice could now “live happily ever after”—unless, unfortunately, he arrives only to learn she’s already married somebody else, or he shows up breathlessly as she breathes her last. The moral would be: “it’s worth sacrificing everything for what you love,” or “timing is everything,” or “you better hope love is immortal because, otherwise, you missed your big chance.”

  Instead, the story is only two-thirds over. Beatrice remains very much “alive,” but still divinely out of reach.

  This is where Dante is really sailing on waters that have never been sailed on before. Having completed a remarkable picaresque novel, he starts writing a textbook. About a place where everyone’s happy all the time and nothing really happens. Oh, there’s some celestial singing, of course, and a lot of convoluted discoursing on transcendental matters, but the souls in Paradise really don’t do anything. They’re all perfectly content with being totally aligned for all eternity with God’s will and living in exactly the place that He intended. Nobody is the least bit upwardly mobile. To be so would, well, defeat the whole purpose. Although, if it makes them feel any better, according to Beatrice, they are closer to Him, they just appear not to be to Dante. Huh? Don’t ask … it gets worse.