TUNNEL, AXE, QUARRY, HARE:
A LABYRINTH FOR CHIARA FUMAI
Talking about the dead is generally inadvisable. It is easy to treat them offensively, referring to them as if they were absent from the conversation. But such a faux pas can have dangerous consequences—because the dead, just like the living, don’t take kindly to offense. To punish those who disrespect them, the dead don’t hesitate to confuse the ideas of the living, appearing to them in the form of a lie.
If we shouldn’t talk about the dead, then we should also be careful not to ignore them. Because the dead are as present as the living—and, like the living, they are social beings, thirsty for dialogue. To those about whom we cannot speak, we can address our words directly in the form of a dialogue.
For this reason, this text is dedicated to Chiara Fumai; not as a homage to an illustrious absentee, but as a letter addressed to a presence. This text is, of course, only one side of the correspondence, the completion of which remains in the inaudible ocean where the dead pour their words. Ironically, it would take another Chiara Fumai to catch her response.
I cannot say if the recipient of this text is present here, in the flat where I’m writing, or if the act of writing to her brings this text already to the place where she now resides. In either case, both of us are guests and hosts of this conversation and, as courtesy demands, I would like to begin the dialogue by summoning a topic that is of interest to us both.
In one of the latest presentations of your art, in the Italian pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, curator Milovan Farronato inserted your opere (I cannot bring myself to call art by the term “work”) into the context of a large and sprawling labyrinth. It was a happy decision, in my opinion, or at least one that might spark your interest—once again, a form of courteous conversation. It is also a happy coincidence that the labyrinth has recently emerged as a metaphorical landscape for your art, since that will be the topic of this letter of sorts—a long and wandering letter, of the type that used to be exchanged at the time of Christine de Pizan.
The labyrinth embodies within its symbolic form a certain understanding of reality, which I have often seen shining through your performances: the idea of reality as a continuous, rather than discontinuous, realm.
If we were to trace the history of thought since antiquity, it would be possible to identify a constant movement between these two understandings. On the one hand, there is the view that reality is a discontinuous field: things are essentially separable and the existent can be infinitely subdivided into discreet particles. According to this view, the act of separating reality—as the effect of applied rationality—is itself the only element of truth in the world. Only when we have found the absolute “atom,” the thing that cannot be further divided, will we have encountered the Truth. Until then, however, the process of cutting and dividing is the closest approximation to it that we have. Needless to say, the infinity of division is implied in its very process, and an atom as such will never be found in this way…
On the other hand, there have always been people who consider reality as essentially continuous: a realm where interruptions are accidents rather than signs of the triumph of rationality. According to this vision, the truth within reality is not obtained by separating but by unifying. I had the impression, while watching your performances and looking at how your thought shines through your art, that you might also share this particular understanding of reality. I hope you’ll be interested to follow me in a closer examination of the metaphysical aspects implicit in it—and of the way in which they inevitably lead its adopters towards the symbol of the labyrinth.
Differently from their “discontinuous” counterparts, believers in the continuity of reality can count on a final point of resolution for their investigation. The process of unification is not infinite and thus it cannot be mistaken for the truth itself: its natural conclusion is in the completion of the Whole. Only the Totality is the Truth—a Totality which is coincidentia oppositorum, inclusive of infinity and finitude, eternity and time, one and many—and the Totality of the existent is a piece of evidence that is as obscenely blatant as the divisions that seem to separate distinct entities. Perhaps the reason for the invisibility of the Whole, to some, lies precisely in the intensity of its evidence.
When reality is seen as a Whole, whose truth and existence come prior to their individual manifestations, its composition acquires a peculiar form: the labyrinth. The weirdness of its unfolding has often led to fear-ridden interpretations, as if its spires were in fact a trap, set to devour those who entered. But this isn’t necessarily the case. Built originally as a prison—according to the myth—the labyrinth soon revealed its nature as a path of initiation: it can be argued that the labyrinth wasn’t really built for the Minotaur, but for Theseus.
In this sense, we can interpret one of the possible etymologies of the word “labyrinth”: from the Greek labirion, “underground tunnel.” As the embodied form of continuous reality, the tunnel is the empty space, it is the stage where the performance of life can take place. If the course of life is ever to have a location, this can only be, as in the case of the mythical hero’s journey, within the room offered by the labyrinth. If reality is continuous, and its completion lies in the Whole, then nothing will ever be able to exist anywhere but in its spires. All the events, all the images, objects, adventures that have ever been, or that ever will be, are always-already taking place within the labyrinth. Filtered by the structure of the tunnel, with its turns and blind spots, the cacophony of their simultaneous existence is defused into a subtle murmur—almost a music for those who can hear it.
Indeed, the labyrinth, which is itself emptiness, is never devoid of presences. Not only is the hero there, but everything else also traverses its spires at every instant. To the sensibility of the hero, the labyrinth feels haunted by something, of which the Minotaur poignantly offers a monstrous symbol. To avoid using the figure of the Minotaur—who deserves some rest, after millennia of metaphorical summoning—it is possible to borrow another image to represent the presence haunting the labyrinth. Rather than taking it from archaic mythology, we could look for it in that modern mythology which goes by the name of philosophy: the conceptual notion of “sense.”
If the Truth is the Whole, where all things are always and already included, then sense too has to be found within its bounds. But sense, like happiness, is not within the catalog of objects: sense is not a thing, since, unlike things, it’s not bound to any specific location. Sense can emerge about anything, at any time, and it results from a particular epistemological relationship that a certain point of awareness—a subject—has with their surroundings.
To trace the emergence of sense, it is necessary to consider that, within an understanding of reality as continuous Whole, rationality ceases to be the process of cutting up the existent, becoming instead a form of “counting” the eternal populations of the labyrinth. Once the subject feels satisfied with the number of individual existents that they’ve counted, they might decide to perform a further epistemological jump: the passage from multiplicity to unity. This is the Pythagorean discovery of the number “one,” as ontologically unique among all numbers. This counting-to-one includes all the different presences that can be witnessed by the subject, the totality of all the other beings, compressed into the unity of “one” encompassing super-entity. There, and only there, in their whole, lies the truth about them: their “sense.” In each of them, the sense of their totality can manifest the “sense” of the thing—which is, after all, the same sense of all things.
“Sense” is the result of counting all observable beings as one totality of “sense.” But this totality shouldn’t be confused with the Totality that encompasses everything—all the others, as well as the subject. “Sense” is given by the totality of everything except the subject—it is the result of a gaze that looks outwards, including everything in its horizon, except itself. Hence the monstrosity of the Minotaur, which effectively represents all the others, everything “other,” condensed into one body.
Such sense-making separation between oneself and the rest—mistaken as it may be in a vision that sees reality as a continuous Whole—is already implicit in the very form of the labyrinth. A second possible etymology of the term can help to reveal it more clearly: the Greek labrys, “double bit axe.” A royal and priestly effigy in Minoan Crete, the double bit axe symbolizes this seeming paradox, by which the labyrinth contains in itself its own negation. Separation is possible within a continuous notion of reality and to a certain extent it is even necessary: its negative relationship with the continuous Whole is precisely what allows for the movement of the entities that populate it. As happens in folk fables, loss and mistakes are the sparks that ignite the commencement of the quest. The separation induced by the quest for “sense” diffuses
a weird, ominous atmosphere into the landscape where the adventure takes place. As the hero looks for “sense” within the labyrinth, the
borders of its corridors close shut, turning into an impenetrable wall
of trunks and foliage blocking the path through the forest.
This is, perhaps, the most dangerous moment in the course of an existential adventure: surrounded by impenetrable jumbles of branches and brambles, the explorer might be tempted to pick up the double bit axe and again start cutting their way through the forest. Just as they draw closer to their final approach, they might finally fall for the lure of discontinuity and for the promises of a clear-cut, non-contradictory rationality. Many adventurers get lost at this point, and in a matter of seconds they are catapulted back to the beginning of their journey. Only those who have never abandoned their belief in the continuity of reality, and have deposed their axe, are allowed to proceed further into the contradiction at the heart of continuous reality. I cannot know for certain if you were among them, while you were alive—but a certain obstinate quality to your art, always launched across worlds and times and identities, makes me believe that you might have been in their number. And perhaps you’re still among them now.
For those who resist the temptation to use the axe of reason to cut their way through the forest, the labyrinth has a new surprise in store. Once again, it is a plot twist that is already included in the word—precisely in its third possible etymology: the Greek root -laf (from which lapis, in Latin), meaning “stone quarry.” To the adventurer who has resisted the lure of the labrys, the labyrinth offers the spectacle of a miraculous transformation. Suddenly, the impenetrable jumble of trees freezes into a petrified forest. No longer threatening and disquieting, the “others” that constituted the substance of “sense” reveal themselves as the place where the adventurer can source the material to build, for the first time, a home for themselves. The others, all the others, those living “hells” mentioned by Sartre, become in the end the stuff of a subject’s existential landscape. In its being a stone quarry, the labyrinth of continuous reality is a treasure trove of limitless potential for life—not just any life, but a “good” life, a life that looks around itself and finds itself at home. Or, even better, a life that looks around its own home and recognizes it as the ultimate “foreign land.” Something not too dissimilar from the way in which, in your art, you have inhabited the lives and spirits of “others,” imaginary and material, living and dead, as if walking through the rooms of your own home.
And among the countless corridors of this labyrinth-turned-home, I think that you too have encountered two uncanny spaces, like twin rooms divided only by a curtain. In the mirror of the face of the others is manifested that mysterious link which connects every “other” to an observing subject. The blushing of life and the pallor of death that we see in the others is the same that colors and discolors our own cheeks. At last, something appears in the vast realm of “sense,” which is not only of the “other,” but is intimate also to ourselves. A twin entity that seems to escape the grip of “sense.” Life and death, conjoined, become a growing presence within the curves of the labyrinth of reality. Catching them seems impossible for longer than a glimpse, like a memory that returns to visit us but briefly. The lives of others, and the deaths of others, start to pervade the hero’s final journey with the same stubborn evanescence of an atmosphere. What a strange tinge they give to the rooms of the labyrinth… From the place where I find myself at present, I imagine that they might look different from what they seem to you now. Or perhaps we look at them simultaneously, but from two sides—and who of us sees their front and who sees their back it is impossible to say. If only I could receive your reply, to tell me how they look to you now.
I wonder how you observed their strange, double presence, while you were still in this part of the labyrinth that we call “the world of the living.” If I look at them now, I see what is perhaps the most majestic presence that I’ve encountered so far, but also one that is difficult to pin down. All that I can say of them is that they are conjoined, albeit each remaining different, and that their essence seems to be nothing more than a movement. Precisely, their essence is a movement of memory: life and death, as our companions along this journey through the labyrinth, emerge as the opposite movements of memory away from, and toward, oblivion. Like the Orphic mystagogues used to repeat, it is life that takes on the movement toward oblivion—in the same way that the bodies proceed through their becoming as entities hurled toward their own dissolution. Conversely, the vital force of memory, its fierce escape from the swamps of oblivion, is embodied by death—a death that is not stasis, but the expression of an unquenchable desire for memory. Death as nostalgia, tou nostou algos, the pain and sadness of one who wishes to return back home—back to the feeling of the labyrinth not as a forest, but as a home. Thus, life forgets itself until it vanishes into death, while death remembers to the point of building itself again as life—again, as a “good life” of homely foreignness within reality. This is perhaps what is truly contained in Heraclitus’s 62nd fragment: “Mortal immortals, immortal mortals, living their death and dying their life.”
As the traveler across the labyrinth of continuous reality tries to grapple with the double movements of life and death, and as they look into the familiarity with both movements in their own life, they inevitably start turning away from the total sum of the “others” and toward the missing piece of the “self.” If they themselves are as living and as dying as the rest, what kind of entity are they, within the great catalog of the existent? They too must have a face of their own—the traveling hero thinks to themself—but which is it? Are they a rock, or a cloud? Are they Chuang-tsu’s butterfly, or the butterfly’s Chuang-tsu?
In this passage beyond “sense” and toward the Whole, the labyrinth bestows on its explorer one final gift. It bestows it now, but it had been there all along—as it was already in the word itself, as its fourth, possible etymology: the proto-Greek leberhis (from which the Latin lepus), meaning “hare.”
Perhaps, in this long and winding letter, this might be a passage where you feel particular resonance. The hare, a favorite animal for medieval witches to incarnate as, represents in its agile body some of the traits of the magicians of all ages. Even before the age when magic became an autonomous field—or rather, when magic was forced by rationality to seek refuge in its lonely tower—already at the time of ancient Egypt, the hare was the symbol and the victim around which the entire labyrinth was built. In the Egyptian religion, the hare was the material form taken by the female divinity Unut. The hare-goddess, together with her male counterpart Ununu, was a variation on the great divinity Osiris—Osiris the psychopomp, who could accompany souls into the afterlife because he himself had already died once. After being killed by his brother Seth (ancient Egyptian gods could die), Osiris returned to life thanks to his sister-wife Isis’s healing. He returned to life—he remembered himself to life, we could say—but the experience of death didn’t leave him unscathed. The body of Osiris-the-hare was crossed by the scars left by Seth’s knife and by Isis’s sewing. His mind too changed: after his resurrection, Osiris was known as “the tired god.” What a strange appellative for a divinity, which places it closer to Grünewald’s suffering Jesus than to the triumphant depictions of a pantokrator God. Like a hare, the tired god is ultimately the invisible thread that connects all the tunnels of the labyrinth—indeed, it is to the hare that we owe the existence of the labyrinth, and its network of dens scattered along her meanderings.
There, in the hare and in its sacrificial body, at times dismembered like that of Osiris, or of Artaud, at times recomposed by a magical healing, there at last is encountered the totality of the Whole. The totality of reality, the Whole, takes shape in the labyrinthine entrails of the hare and from there is projected outward, in the shape of that landscape which we call “reality” or “world.” As the Whole herself, the hare looks around, and around herself she sees only her own reflection—as this, as that, as each one of the presences and “senses” that populate the labyrinth. Suddenly, her adventure changes pace, turning into the excited inactivity of self-reflection. She no longer knows if she’s looking out or inward, because everywhere she sees reflected the Totality—the place, the labyrinth, where all things become and always remain possible. Everything glares in the body of everything, as a constellation of stars (Latin sidera) whose company each thing eternally shares (cum siderare, “looking at the stars while in their company”). The hare considers herself in every place, and every place considers itself in the hare.
This is, at least, what can happen over a lifetime to someone who shares a vision of reality as a continuous Whole—a possible story of their journey on this side of the threshold of death. I don’t know how this journey proceeds afterwards. Whatever your adventure at present, I only ask myself if a nostalgia might have caught you for being once more among the constellation of the hare. If perhaps the memory of when you used to consider the stars of this world has turned into a desire (de siderare, “extreme stargazing” to the point of “making the stars invisible”) to again merge yourself with them in the way of the living. And if this desire, perhaps, will translate one day into a return.
Whether your present story is one of consideration, or of desire, or of activities that remain unknown to me, I take the exit from the labyrinthine as an opportune moment to take my leave from this part of our conversation. I hope that my funny etymologies and my attempts to explain something unexplainable have risen your interest a little, or that you’ve found their awkwardness endearing. I don’t know whether
to await a response, since I am still new to these types of correspondences. I remain on this side of the text, for now, curious to see a little more of what you’ve seen, and of what you’re seeing.