[Transcript: As John T. Irwin eloquently summarizes, a labyrinth resembles a maze because it is “always open from the outside but appears to be unopenable from within.” End transcript]
ok i’m reading about labyrinths for personal reasons and. obsessed with thinking about narrative as something that is ‘open from the outside but unopenable from within’… can’t stop picturing someone just. stumbling into a story and getting locked in from the inside because all of a sudden the part is cast, their fate is set, and they have a role to play and lines to read… everything is up for grabs until the moment the story starts and then the ending is fixed and you’ve been buried alive inside a structure that gives the illusion of agency while leading you all the while down the only existing path toward the very center of itself, where what awaits you is death..
[Transcript: to tell a story is to align an already known set of events along an arc. End transcript]
[Transcript: They were last seen by European whalers in Baffin Bay awaiting good conditions to enter the Arctic labyrinth. End transcript.]
Francis Beaufort: “Let due honours and rewards be showered on the heads of those who have nobly toiled in deciphering the puzzling Arctic labyrinth, and who have each contributed to their hard-earned quota.” (Kenneth McGoogan, Lady Franklin’s Revenge (2006) pg. 385)
[Transcript: The past tense is a very sturdy thing. End transcript.]
Lady Franklin: “Dear Love, / Haven’t I always told you / there is / what happens, / and then / there is how / we choose to tell it?” (Corinna McClanahan Schroeder, “Letters to the Dead” (2020) pg. 64)
