The solution to a maze is always a straight line. This gives an air of fatedness to any successful traversal, and may make returning into it to look for alternative solutions counter-intuitive. Once one has arrived at any given point in a maze, the steps that one took there might strike one as having been necessary, inevitable, and somehow woven into the meaning, or at least specification and description, of this point. But, floating above our image, we can see there are countless paths to this point, and countless points along any of those paths. So, what causes the sedimentation of just one line of solution, such that alternatives seem unnecessary, impossible, remote, or just staggeringly difficult to find? In our image of the maze, the initial solution could have been produced by just a series of arbitrary choices when met with a fork in the road. Though there is something to this arbitrariness when we look at the accumulation and sedimentation of thought throughout history, that which underpins the form of the constellation within which we are currently captured, there is something unsatisfying to chalk up the historical contours of this constellation to being merely based upon a long sequence of arbitrary decisions, resulting in a line.
Instead it seems that thought has always pursued something, it is a pursuit, at the same time as it builds its foundations and lays its roads forward. Of course the something it pursues is myriad, and evolving, like a landscape or horizon one may set out towards. At any point in the pursuit one may look back, and again see a straight line, corresponding to the arrow of time. But one can always wonder if there are entirely different chronologies, different times, criss-crossing at invisible angles the point upon which one stands. A landscape is always a superposition of landscapes, just like how a self is always a multitude. Any point where we find ourselves has countless, incommensurable histories coiled up inside it, and a history is always composed of innumerable such points. And yet, when we try to have a second glance at these points, when we dig up what we believe to have been preserved in the layers of time, we find ourselves not in the company of eternal monuments, martyrs of necessity, but of withered statues with broken limbs and erased faces. The enigma of our current choices, whose deeper sense, blind as we are to their consequences, we are incapable of perceiving, remains an enigma even when we look back at our past forks in the road whose follow-up we have seen play out. The past does not conserve the foundations that thought has built along the way; the faces of the statues are erased so that we can project new ones from the present and give them a new life. Might it not be that process of planing and smoothing, that we mistake for an act of conservation, which allows us to turn events into points, homogeneous points that can be arranged into a straight line?
With this thought we now grow dizzy, the way forward is not chosen; it’s a function of where we find ourselves; even if choices appear before us they are so frustratingly weighted by all the corners we have bent before. But it’s the past now that spins like a magic compass, like it itself is a mere function of the determined choice before us. We understand our past, the road we have apparently carved, only through the significance of a forced choice placed before us, which is structured and delimited by… the past. There’s a lot to be said about the image of the daoist philosopher, pictured in serene recline. Who sits on the corner of the road, rather than navigates through it? The drunk, the lunatic, the child, the road-worker, and the philosopher.