*** In The Labyrinth ***
a jeremiad for nine voices

*** for jack ***


(V.O.)
In the labyrinth (repeats)

Buddy
In the shadows

The Chemist
Under the eye

Ariel
We follow closed timelike curves

Emily
Cooking breakfast

Aelita
Never having answers

Billy
We ride the Bull of Heaven

Roland
We watch Beauty and the Beast waiting to cross Fifth Avenue

The Professor
We radiate quantum gravity

Tight Five
We'll take that to go

Aelita
We are walking with the goddess

Emily
We ask the right questions

Ariel
Our parents were coherent

The Professor
We follow left hand walls

Emily
We hunt and gather

Ariel
Forever confused

The Professor
Seeking tokens

Buddy
Buying time

Tight Five
Squeezing by

Buddy
Down among the dead men

Roland
Holding short of the active

Ariel
Seeing the flash before the boom

The Chemist
Character armor weighs you down

Emily
A time for dressup and makeup and play

Roland
The end of ends, the ricorso á ouroboros; please pardon this brief rupture in the fabric of the consensual hallucination that is our notionally shared reality

Buddy
Bye and bye slides by in the rear view mind's eye's soft misted streetlights of a Donegal evening strolling over the River Eske

The Professor
Nostradamus lost his way

The Chemist
We finally got the message of beta decay

Ariel
No one's found a place to hide

Aelita
People rent their lives, just to get by

Billy
We pretend to be walking with the king

Buddy
We are having deep conversations about ultimate questions

Roland
We are alone

Ariel
Grinding through desperate years

Roland
Certain only in the knowledge of death

Aelita
The smell of that cocoa, faint notes of marshmallow and melting snow, turning to look out the window and seeing only one set of boot prints

Emily
You hang, inverted

Buddy
Rilke's caustic light

Roland
Hurry up please, it's time

Billy
Does this bus go to Brighton Beach

Ariel
Last Summer in Marienbad

Roland
In hoc signo vinces

The Professor
We fritter away so much, adrift in the empire of signs

Billy
2+2=5

The Professor
Humans evolved without speech

Ariel
The breeze holds a breath of Fall

Roland
Formal cause obtains

The Chemist
Truth and illusion and George and Martha

Buddy
Hung over on Golgotha

The Professor
Snakes live to tempt you

Emily
You must bring home the bacon

Roland
By the hand of Apollo, flung from the sky

The Professor
The vision of an order behind the visible that the gods supply is the chef's kiss of a self-sealing system

Ariel
No one asks followup questions

The Professor
Words vanish as they appear

Buddy
We live forever in the smell of oil: bunker fuel, diesel, regular unleaded, kero, Jet-A; it marks the nature of our passage

Tight Five
We spin illusions

Roland
Time means nothing

Emily
Tea and sympathy

Billy
This is not our first rodeo, Titania

Ariel
No one knows your name

Emily
We are all late September bees

Billy
Crashing in from orbit, retros firing, all superhero spandex and chrome

Emily
The fruit hangs heavy, still, from subtler trees

Ariel
Jane Jarvis plays the Thomas organ

The Chemist
The darkness closes in

Aelita
There exist temporary autonomous zones

Buddy
Your parents got the turkey in the oven while you watched March Of The Wooden Soldiers

Aelita
You feel the tug of those strong, early memories, the ones you never admit to anyone

Roland
It's alright ma (i'm only bleeding)

The Professor
The medium is the message

The Chemist
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law

Ariel
The sky was preternaturally blue that day

Buddy
Never Count Chocula, always Frute Brute

Roland
Heat death, big rip, vacuum decay

Aelita
Morning imperceptibly transitions from birds to crickets

Billy
Render unto caesar if and when he sees ya

Tight Five
The second mouse gets the cheese but it's usually the third or fourth jackal that gets the brain

Aelita
We are all free

Ariel
No one has to hide their face

Aelita
Heaven's just a concrete fist

Roland
Everything is fine

Billy
The weather suits the stones

Ariel
Caught nameless by the tide

Aelita
Walking sideways down the sand

Ariel
With sea and sky the only way

Emily
We throw ourselves, ourselves...our selves, away

Aelita
Like leaves, like tears, like wind-blown silk

Emily
But gravity is the eldest god

Buddy
And the priest said to Solon, “Oh, what a blow that phantom gave me”

The Chemist
See it in the hard scattery mesonlight and the soft silvery muonlight

Tight Five
Give me your keys

Roland
It's never too late until it is, but trust me, you'll know when that time comes

The Chemist
Catena hac nocte

Aelita
We earn our daily bread

Ariel
I lost my place

Roland
We search for arête

Aelita
We eat the bosses

Billy
No one sees it coming

Ariel
We are learning in the turning

Roland
We pause, suspended, in the heartbreaking paroxysm of final parting

The Professor
A thread exists

Buddy
Unconstrained, the real tripods have terraformed location 978 into the planet of gold and lead

The Professor
Frame by desperate frame we sink into the tar

The Chemist
Drizzle, drazzle, druzzle, drome

Roland
The light finally reaches us

Aelita
Every old sock finds an old shoe

Ariel
We can connect the dots looking forward

Tight Five
We stumble upon a giant untouched cream-filled snack cake

Buddy
The everyday conundrum: that these things which surround you will outlive you; that is the true mono no aware, Margaret

Roland
The implosion happens faster than we can perceive it

The Chemist
In some frames of reference, you have been dead for eleven million years

Billy
We all face the sun and squint a bit

Ariel
We are not even a pixel on the pale blue dot

Tight Five
We need more cowbell

Ariel
If you don't mind me asking

Roland
We secretly long for a believable priesthood

The Professor
Many of the things we say are lies

Emily
We languish under its sulfurous gaze, its sightless obsidian gaze

The Professor
The doctors all blur together

Emily
Maxwell, Maslow, machinima, Mishima

Billy
We all have our party tricks

Roland
We always break out the good whiskey

Aelita
We live in a brutal, angry land that needs some goddamned heroes

The Professor
No one else is on your side

Ariel
Freedom cost your child an eye

Roland
Everyone deletes their cookies

The Chemist
Elvis shakes with Richard Nixon

Roland
On to Chicago and let's win there

Buddy
Ein jeder engel ist schrecklich

The Professor
There is no traffic on the eights

Roland
Entropy overtakes the thief

The Professor
The sun is always overhead at noon

Billy
What you want is in their limo; opening the door signifies acceptance of the terms and conditions and irrevocable grant of license in perpetuity to your brainwaves, proteome, and corpsicle for any legal purpose, in any form of media now existing or ever dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio

Ariel
The end of all vanities is stealth camping next to the dumpster out back of that strip mall on 24

Buddy
Sequins sparkle

Billy
Dogs howl

Roland
Primordial strings shall tremble their web

The Professor
Yer jest 800 grams 'a phosphorus up th' flue

Tight Five
Your head will reel and your bones will roll

Ariel
You are perpetually rattling around inside the cacophony of your time

Aelita
You walk in the presence of the past, considered as a cumulative, serried, intersectional web of truths and oppressions, and whose weight can occasionally be felt when one's foot comes down

Roland
We pretend we are immortal

The Professor
Until of course one day we are not

Billy
It does make the sandwiches taste better, thanks, Warren

Emily
Once you have known flight, you will walk forever with your eyes turned skyward

Ariel
All religions are necessarily wrong

Emily
The opposite of any great truth is also a great truth

Tight Five
Your dinner is dying in the window

Roland
It's the season right after the ball

The Professor
Under abyssal rain, slewing like slow sleet

Tight Five
The chamber slowly fills with risotto

The Chemist
Every death we experience is threaded, popcorn on the darkest of holiday strings, back to our first bereavement. we remember that every time.

Tight Five
You can choose a sandwich or a schmear, essen or glace

Aelita
Everything closes early on Sunday

Billy
We wait, hushed, behind the great wall, for the king’s arrival at the sacrificial table

The Professor
Each word meticulously carved into the black basalt obelisk

Ariel
Feral cats yowl

Roland
Repetition, and repetition, and repetition at all times through all channels, aiming to provoke fear and anger

The Professor
We shuffle always among devices and screens

Roland
We approach the past at 9.8m/s2

The Chemist
You are shocked back into normal rhythm

Tight Five
We feed the losers to the volcano

Ariel
We’ve got all doors open

The Professor
We watch The Sorrow And The Pity on a loop

Tight Five
Nothing but olives

Aelita
We tweeze splinters of the True Resolute Desk from beneath our fingernails

Ariel
Please don’t eat the daisies

The Chemist
You might spare a thought for the control arm

Billy
Words will be minced

Roland
The code smell is resistant to refactoring

Aelita
The owners call in the Pinkertons

The Chemist
Our universe, like the atom -- like our lives -- is mostly empty space

Buddy
The grit in the oyster is you

Roland
Some things just won’t tile

Billy
Checkout time is high noon on main street

Tight Five
Hit the button for the elevator

Roland
We shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us

Ariel
House to half and hold

Emily
Set pagers to stun

Buddy
Check out the concession stand

Roland
Non Von, non Euclidean, non Aristotelian, non e vero e bene trovato

Billy
Grab your crotch and call for Jesus

Buddy
Stand right, walk left

Aelita
Things are what they remind you of

Ariel
Who you are is where you were when

Emily
It's always five o'clock somewhere

The Chemist
You can sometimes see the skeleton winking at you through the skin if you look at it right

Tight Five
A melon for ecstasy

Ariel
Please and thank you

Roland
Stick of gum makes you hum

Tight Five
We're gonna cath you, sheriff, and we're gonna cath you slow

Roland
You can occasionally see about fifty yards ahead

The Professor
You never know what's on the consent agenda

Tight Five
Haters gonna hate

Buddy
You always ask yourself, what did i do or not do

Billy
There is a vague taste of blood in your mouth

Aelita
The hiss of sanctimony is never far away

Ariel
Don't you worry your pretty little head, we're going to shoot this with lots of coverage

The Chemist
Things are beautiful and warm then the water drains from the sky and your generation ship is decanted, blows against the empire style, and you are eating tuna salad on a roll over your trash can in a whitewashed 1930s retrofit office on Madison Avenue with only the vaguest notion of how your day-to-day work aligns with the organization's strategic priorities, but you do have a dim sense there could have been more than this, once

Roland
You don't want to be in a split screen

Billy
Records were made to be broken

Emily
You are on the fastest route

The Professor
Dubito ergo sum

Roland
We are all, god help us, Santa's elves

Ariel
Wipe slates, see late lates

The Professor
I would like to go, Z-12

Billy
That same old tune on the hydrogen earbuds

Roland
Mene mene tekel upharsin

Ariel
We all do what we are told

The Professor
Sand is worth its weight in gold

Buddy
She loved the spy who came in from the cold

Billy
There's a dog in every manger

Roland
Jusqu'à ce que nous soyons finalement détruits par cet obscur objet de désir

The Professor
Dogs bark but the caravan moves on

Tight Five
The first taste is always free

The Chemist
The sacrifice of Isaac every hour on the hour; the reset is laborious

Buddy
Down from room two-thirty-seven to the fish and goose soiree

Aelita
We slowly push in to yet another patriarchal tail-eating spurious creation monomyth

Ariel
You are rewired: beep. bop. boop.

Emily
The president is absolutely not one hundred feet tall

Roland
That smell...you know that Anthropocene smell...

Emily
What's past is prologue

The Chemist
The kid was probably dead by then. All the cops saw when they got there was the two polar bears fighting over a leg

Emily
We dig our own graves

Billy
The mojo wire throbs for us all

Ariel
The clouds have rocks in them

Tight Five
Fifty million toasters can't be wrong

The Professor
Don't move your head so fast you'll get whiplash

Ariel
Summer sublets are available

Aelita
We lounge in the buttery light of the Hudson River School

Roland
We spot movement back of the tree line

Ariel
We speak in tongues

Billy
We make our own gravy

Aelita
We chalk it up to experience

Buddy
The crickets and dogs in the opening soundscape of Amused to Death, transcluded herein by reference

Ariel
We're looking for the eleven o'clock number

Tight Five
Fantastic opportunity! Limited time offer!

The Chemist
We don't know how preliterates experienced the attentional metacognition that we call consciousness; it's something we consider a normal inhabited state because of the affordances we've built up around it

Aelita
We say it like a fortune cookie postscript

Tight Five
We're only two paychecks from lucrative oral presentation opportunities in the hospitality sector as upstart attackers in the brick-and-mortar b2b marketspace with service offerings targeting logistics endpoints

Tight Five
Blowjobs. that's blowjobs in truckstop bathrooms if you don't speak résumése

The Chemist
If codeine isn't working try fluoxetine, then ketamine

Aelita
Am i free to leave?

Buddy
Hoc est corpus

Aelita
The regret of the unsaid

Ariel
We climb toward the distant light

The Professor
We adjust the titer

Emily
Sweet sixteen evaporates to final four

The Chemist
There is nothing to be afraid of

Roland
Forward looking statements are asterisked

Aelita
It’s critical to stay hydrated

Tight Five
Your mileage may vary

Billy
No pain, no gain

Roland
You will most likely never know why there is something rather than nothing

Tight Five
Check, please

Emily
The eagle never lost so much as when it stooped to learn of the crow

The Professor
Only connect

Aelita
He counted on the inscrutable alien subtlety of his facial gestures; she could read that midwestern style like a book

The Professor
You need to understand that change is an incremental, multi-year process, and we have to think in the long term, maintain a big tent, and not get too far out over our skis

Billy
Stuck in traffic with lou, backed up to 39th street

Roland
Folx are grinding metal, working 18-hour-days couchlocked into the Apollonian dream, ordering local burritos that are better than they have any right to be from that Mexican slow food place just off Seventh Ave, man, this thing is the size of a baby's head. Dude. Baby head burrito. You wrap opsidontally, and put a dollop of sour cream on the fontanelle.

Ariel
It's the kind of dive bar where you intend to have a couple with friends and you find yourself in the middle of a cornfield at three in the morning holding a foam Minecraft sword

The Chemist
Casaba

Tight Five
Fingers in your ears, class, it's time to test the nuclear siren

Billy
Johnny got his gun

Ariel
And still, everyone went to school today

Aelita
As falls Seneca, so falls Seneca Falls

Billy
It's been a ride, you think, looking back. nod. smile. Then you realize. It's five years later. and somewhere in there, you lost them. You remember thinking you had to do something, a nagging reminder that they were still out there. In the snow. Somewhere. And now, forever, they are not.

Buddy
And you -- you catch glimpses of yourself, in glasswaxed windows, blood smeared handkerchiefs and veils

Aelita
Time moves fast; time moves slow

Ariel
After Bathing At Baxter's

Roland
After the first refusal

The Chemist
Hairlines recede, arteries narrow

The Professor
We are always managing the fugitive noetic universe

Buddy
We wander through the first floor of A&S in 1984, and she is working at the perfume counter

Ariel
Photos of the past lure us, like sirens, to the Symplegades

Buddy
And so, we precess through the cryoablation of the fungiform papillae, in fourteen stations, as we celebrate the Sorrowful Mysteries

Aelita
We are here, and then we're not

The Chemist
And those in a Geertzian thin slice of culture grasp frantically to capture bits of the scene, tears in rain, how it felt to be. In the village, on a Fall evening, in 1984. Closing Eddies with the media ecology crew, passing a joint by the arch in Washington Square, listening to a thousand boom boxes bloom, steeping in the magic chemical biogenesis of a warm summer city. Bliss it was in those nights to be alive. but to be young was very heaven.

Ariel
You are in a maze of twisty passages

Tight Five
It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten.

Billy
Here, at the center, you find him. The oddly regal monster. He is surprised to see you. he does not expect visitors.

Emily
You have heard all the stories. He is a mutant. A horror. Killer of children; father of lies.

Aelita
But then, such stories come from Minos and his paid courtiers. Minos the duplicitous, Minos who, to assuage their night terrors, engaged you to design a most elaborate prison without walls whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere

Buddy
The center holds not just the minotaur, but the final mirror

Roland
The center, says Joseph Campbell, is the heart of the quest

Emily
The center, says the Tao Te Ching, is the emptiness that renders the rest meaningful.

Aelita
The virgin, the mother, and the crone walk into a bar and they say the center is that of which you cannot speak, and we know a thing or two about that, so shut your pie hole

The Professor
And time stood still

Roland
And you could, for just an instant, see everything, as if in a crystal, ever unfolding, ever ramifying, like the Borges aleph, and there you were, floating silently above -- and, for the first time -- seeing the shape of the labyrinth. Finally understanding that shape as a shape you had known all along, latent in the sky, deeply embedded in the fundamental nature of your being, all shifting and locking and electrochemical, and you hover, watching. And you begin to count backwards, slowly, from ten, and as you hover, you will begin to feel more relaxed, more weightless, more aware of the vibrations of everything around you. Ten. You are floating freely in space. Nine. So relaxed, Gently rocking in a warm ocean at sunset. Eight. Everything you see is peaceful and relaxed. So calm. So smooth. Seven. You begin to sense beyond you the mind that made the labyrinth. there is nothing negative here, only beauty. Six. So relaxed. Everything is beautiful. Five. The labyrinth is the necessary shape of the cosmos. It is as it is. Four. You relax into an even deeper level of radical acceptance. Things are as they are. There are many colors of guitar. Three. You are another level deeper, sinking into smooth clouds that support you like melted marshmallow. Oooey. Gooey. Marshmallow. It's delicious. You are delicious. The smell is all childhood, and fun fairs, and good times. Two. You are so deep now. Just you, floating peacefully in the huge blue bowl of sky. One. You. Are. One. You. Are. One.


THE MINOTAUR'S SONG

You were young and you were strong
When we were old and wrong
You've been with us all along
By our side
You are fire you are ice
You're the thing we sacrifice
You're the spirit that has never died
Bring us war, bring us peace
Bring control, bring us release
Bring the thunderbolts that chase away the night
With the water break the stone
Cuz we're children all along
And we cannot face the forces that we fight

CHORUS
It's been a long time
Waiting on the dark side of the moon
A long lonely night
In the corner of my room
Until you come
Oh, until you come

You were promised from the first
But we know what promises are worth
They're not worth the world they're spoken through
You were latent in the sky
At the back of every eye
Everything that I have ever been was you
From the corona of the sun
To the sea where life's begun
Now feel the boundless web of nature stretch through space
Hidden behind
Every thought form in my mind
Has always been
The outline of your face.

CHORUS

OUTTRO
Hmmmmm....
(spoken, over)
Like panthers in a cage in Rilke's zoo

Tight Five
And suddenly, it becomes clear what you have to do, and you move smoothly and efficiently to an escalator that appears deep in your subconscious, a marvelous helical escalator that you are now riding up and up and up inside this gorgeous cenote in Belize, all dapply water and sparkling blueness as you rise in a slow glass bubble corkscrew turning, turning, turning, toward the bright surface, rising inexorably toward that moment of chaotic transition at the interface and then, (sound effect) ahhh, here you are. Please watch your step leaving the vehicles. some contents may have shifted. baggage claim is to the left. Oh, good, someone sent a limo. Wait, what?

Aelita
Fuck them and their limo. Develop some goddamned class consciousness and partner with the minotaur. I'll bet you could ride the fucking minotaur out, eh? Betcha nobody's tried that move. Together, slay the king for hubris, and then burn down all the fucking palaces of all the ones who just couldn't bring themselves to walk away. It may be too late for Daedalus, but at least some of the real monsters will taste justice.

Ariel
Watch the closing doors please. next stop for the theater of your imagination is childhood wonder. How does it feel to re-inhabit that child mind? You now have the plasticity required to grok that the force of gravity, the speed of light, the cosmological term, the lifecycle of the proton, yea, the great globe itself and all which it inherit, once thought to be absolutes, in reality are epiphenomena, values that fall out because of the current way of being of this thing, this flux, this happening, this hyle we all poke at from within, which we don't know what the fucking fuck it is

The Professor
The hubris of a point surveying a line

Ariel
Where would you like your last ambulance ride to be?

Tight Five
Always ask for a rain check

The Chemist
The present moment in your spacetime comprises the only thing that actually exists

Aelita
Freedom is what it is

Roland
The grandkids skip by and gently place a few pebbles before being distracted by the Mister Softee theme calling from out on Woodhaven Boulevard

Billy
We count our losses

Roland
Sonnet 73, included herein by reference

The Professor
We recite it like ancient performative ritual to appease, to exhort, to attract, to warn and repel, older than masks, the firelight cave faces of comedy and tragedy

The Chemist
Quaerendo invenietis

Emily
Your nearest exit may be behind you