L’énigme du Labyrinthe, Chartres. Chapter 9 from The Works, 1993

After the series of the ox,the labyrinth appeared on my path.

During a visit to Chartres Cathedral, I was immediately drawn to it. Not as a historical object,but as a living form: an image that seemed to recognize something in me.

As a child, I had already been fascinated by mythology, by the story of Theseus and Ariadne’s thread leading out of the maze.

But in Chartres,this image shifted.

The labyrinth no longer revealed itself as a trap, but as a path.

A maze is designed to make us lose our way.

But the classical labyrinth has only one path.

Its purpose is not confusion, but orientation.

Not losing oneself, but moving toward the center.

There is no choice, no mistake.

Only a single line, moving in circles, drawing closer to the center and moving away from it again.

It is not a straight progression. Not a movement we can control or fully understand.

It asks for surrender to a movement that cannot be overseen.

After my earlier work on the ox, I recognized something essential here:

the path is not a search for something outside ourselves, but a gradual unfolding of what is already present.

As in the labyrinth you can only go where the path leads.

You cannot hurry. You cannot take shortcuts.

You can only follow.

And in that following, something begins to change.

What first appears as detour reveals itself as part of the way.

What seems confusing has its own order.

The center is always there but not immediately accessible.

It approaches and withdraws, until the distinction between inside and outside begins to dissolve.

The labyrinth became, for me, an image of the inner life: a path without overview,yet not without direction.

A movement in which you learn to trust what you cannot see, but what nonetheless guides you.

Not to escape the world but to experience it from another center.

And perhaps that is the deepest shift:

that you no longer search for the exit but become willing to walk the path itself.

“I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths,of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.”

Jorge Luis Borges

“A labyrinth is a house built to confuse men so that the confusion of the labyrinth may confuse the confusion of men.

Jorge Luis Borges