The Minotaur's eyes

In the story of Borges “The House of Asterion”, the Minotaur does not remain a prisoner in the Labyrinth of Crete. From time to time, he makes his forays into the world to observe men, being surprised by their faces - as flat as the palm of a hand -, curious with their fears, giving free rein to their vanity - feeling observed climbing on the platform of the spectacle of the world - and contemplating the cries and prayers of the people, provoked by him, by the way. I wanted to make a simile between the labyrinth of the Minotaur and the Bentham panoptic, however, the eyes, or rather, the position of the eyes seems to me dissimilar. In the panoptic, a building designed to monitor many men in a prison, the eye remains in the centre of the building, as if it were the core of a solar system. And around it revolve the rocky and gaseous planets, with their satellites, and several other minor bodies such as asteroids and comets, including Pluto. Everything revolves around the Panoptic, in various orbits, each in its supposed freedom of action, describing its mane in the wind, flushed like Mars or carrying its storms as Jupiter does. Instead, the eyes of the maze belong to the Minotaur, who is the one who looks and describes and surprises storms, shame and tears. This building fulfils the function of the digestive system of the Minoan empire: every nine years it devours seven maidens and seven maids, Athenians, as a ritual tribute. According to Borges's story, there are nine men sacrificed and not fourteen, every nine years. Others say the sacrifice must be made every year. Numerical confusion, no less than the rooms in the labyrinth. In the enclosures, designed by Daedalus, the architect, there are no eyes. Nor were there eyes when he designed the cow costume in wood, so that the queen of Knossos, Pasiphae, joined in zeal with the Cretan Bull. That is the origin of the Minotaur: in the absence of eyes. Will Borges have understood this by going blind? I imagine the labyrinth enclosures alien to the light, because in its stomach was not the source of the shadows of Plato's cave. Hunger was hidden, as Fear did in Kipling's tale: a naked and monstrous being, who entertained himself by bleeding and circling like an asteroid with a ram's vocation. But that centre was the vortex that swallowed everything and according to Borges he expected liberation. More than the centre of a planetary system, the centre of an entire galaxy, that is, a black hole. Is it another form of the Panoptic, a kind of reverse jail, where the executioner hides in the stomach of the world? And who looks to contemplate those hands that just look, which are the faces of men? Is it not that the eyes of the Empire of Minos, that monstrosity that shames the king, a kind of guilt for power, a primitive and atavistic savagery that channels the force, must remain in darkness, perhaps in silence, so that men replicate the interstices of the labyrinth without fear? Or perhaps with him, a type of underlying fear, in the second layer, like an auxiliary breath? What frightens man the most, the monstrous centre of the labyrinth or his math? Does the structure that gives it the appearance of firmness and stability or the rebel force that turns around and skips the walls of its own scaffolding?

With respect to the palms of my hands, I always have cold hands at this time. We are in the middle of autumn and winter is feeling little by little. What did Asterion mean when he said that men's faces were like the palms of their hands? To his coldness? We also inhabit labyrinths. And the eye that watches over us is well cooked inside us and we call it consciousness. When does she give her inner somersaults, imitating the rams and bleeding? When we feel guilty? Or rather when we trample it inside and stick our Athenian sword in its heart? Our enclosures also obey a math, an enumeration like the labyrinth. It does not matter to be sitting in the living room, in the bedroom or in the bathroom. Each of them contains its space, its surface, its square meters. I am now sitting on a vertex of the polyhedron that contains my office. Like the labyrinth of the Minotaur, I keep its door open all the time and turn my back. Do I expect the sword of my boss or some client, who suddenly surprises me writing this essay? No, it would not be liberating to be surprised like this, because I write to give life to my hands that are now cold. And why did the face of men seem so cold to Asterion? Did the labyrinth square them the emotion and corner the corners of culture and good manners, until the roughness of behaviour was eliminated, flattening the primitive savagery of prehistoric life, subtracting them vitality? And what if we suddenly woke up with beast heads, in the same way that happened to Ulysses navigators, under the spell of the witch Circe? What would be the head that would replace my face? Simply a pig? A sheep, a cat, a dog? A wolf? How many costumes could we wear! However, the palms of the hands sometimes want to be stars. As they are born from the same limb, they are not allowed to open so much or to tear themselves apart or take their freedom, nor to fly. They obey the living and unconscious centre that also governs me, the Minotaur that bleeds and pranks inside me. My hands are tied to the body and cannot get away from this labyrinth of circulatory systems, nerves, muscles and breathing. Muscles tie them to their enclosure and write, cold. And so they are when the Minotaur surprises them. They approach each other. They merge like wanting to get confused into one. A single cold hand. A single face of a flat man. And little by little they are gaining heat, to rewrite.

In writing, then, I must deal with these two monstrosities: structure and strength, that is, the labyrinth and the Minotaur. Is the Minotaur madness taken to confinement, just as Derrida mentions commenting on Foucault? That is, Minos the king of Crete, seeing the fruits of his wife's zoophilia, encloses the bull-headed monster in the structure of the maze with the desire to silence madness and trigger history. The story speaks once the ships travel from Athens to satisfy the voracity of the monster. And why the sword of Theseus? Perhaps to untie this Gordian knot that mean bloody sacrifices? In a dialectical key we could say that the death of the Minotaur is the synthesis that resolves the contradiction between the ritual sacrifice of 14 young Apollonians delivered to the silence of the madness of the minotaur who does not speak the story, and that on the other hand mobilizes the facts, that is the history, the naval trips by the Aegean Sea (that still was not called thus), and the cycle of death of the same young people. A contradiction between the history of the Minoan-Athenian exchanges and the confinement of the history of the Minotaur, life interrupted, reduced to prancing and bleeding jocularly. And the last sacrifice, that of the Minotaur, interrupts the death cycle of the young Athenians. For that the sword of Theseus. But was the establishment of the annual ritual of sacrifice of maidens and maidens necessary? As Derrida rightly says, "from the first breath, speech, subjected to this temporary rhythm of crisis and awakening, can only open its space of speech as soon as it encloses madness." Well, the myth emphasizes the Minotaur, as well as Theseus, but what about Minos? Is not the voice of the king of Crete heard when building the labyrinth and enclosing the madness of Pasiphae, that is, the Minotaur, which is the fruit of it? And that is then the first breath born from the labyrinth's grids: the wind that drags the black sails of ships from Athens to Crete and vice versa. And the rhythm, either annual or every nine years (the great ritual year, which is the same), is set as a tyrannical breath of crisis and awakening. Athens every year had to wake up from its lethargy to immolate the best of its children to the bloody crossing of the dark ships. Until the king's son, Theseus, a kind of Christ willing to descend to hell, voluntarily offers to cut with tradition. To blind the Minotaur’s eyes, to put an end to his panoptic. What a curious resemblance to the myth of Ulysses and Polyphemus! But this time it is Nobody who goes with the task of twisting history and blinding the Cyclops, but the Son, a Temudjin, will they be the same? Being and non-being are born together says the Tao, the path of the Logos and the Non-Logos, the labyrinth, according to Parmenides. And to kill the bull, Theseus becomes entangled with Ariadne. The other-King's daughter, the voice of the story, Minos. Is this why later Minos will be appointed judge of the underworld?

But why did Borges break the silence of the Minotaur’s madness? Did talking to him cause his redemption? Speaking of mazes, I just faced mine checking my Excel spreadsheet. Their appearance is also due to the aesthetics of the grids, however, their paths are diverse. The sum: that's the important thing. It's already the end of the month and the labyrinth doesn't add up. For a moment, I am also the Minotaur waiting for redemption and would like to entertain myself in somersaults and bleed until I get to laugh out loud. And every cell of the Excel spreadsheet, with all its inventions, which are supposed to be mine, suddenly enlarges like mouths of a fish, like the mouth of Sheol. It is always possible to cheat my game. But the game catches me and leaves me facing my disfigured face, bull, ox maybe. Of ox for loading the game of the monster that devours itself. When I built my maze, my game, I was the king, Minos, almost God. Suddenly I became a Minotaur, wanting to peek over the walls of his labyrinth. And who observes who? Minos to the Minotaur or the Minotaur to Minos? I am the man turned on himself, the contradiction resolved. The dialectic has twisted in my individuality, dissociating it. A man of this century faced with his own exploitation. Tormented by his own ghosts and why break the silence? To free the tornado that underlies our digestive system? Is it possible to create without consuming a little? Whoever speaks cannot be crazy, Derrida concluded. The Minotaur unleashing his soliloquy, in boasting to frighten men, left his madness behind. Who did he turn his eyes to then? Towards himself, and his navel, like when he was entertaining turning around ram? Or to the men who had a flat face, like my cold hands? Breaking the silence is unleashing history. The madness - or circling like a ram, which is almost the same - is forgetting words and history. It is to hold on instantly and laugh at the tear, the bleeding of the possible, and the euphoria. It is the unleashed animality that forgets the grammar, the tyranny of the days and the cells of the Excel spreadsheet. It is an open laugh that unfolds on a hyperbolic horizon with infinite curvature. It is breaking God and every possibility of walls, tables of the Law and norms. When the Minotaur speaks, he observes himself and forgets the pranks, jumps the wall and finds the men, those who are afraid. And pray for your own release, you want to pay the price of insanity, as I wish I could pay my debts at once. Draw a plan, solving the maze. However, when he went out to meet the men he already left the labyrinth, but he doesn't know it. The Minotaur relies only on violence, on a kind of shout, a flash of voice for his release. It is no longer hunger or desire to consume what the Minotaur wants, but to die. And what does this mean that the Minotaur dies when he has already decided to speak? The replacement of one story for another? The man when he writes dies, Derrida would say. In the story of Borges the Minotaur did not resist Theseus. This is what the Athenian hero tells Ariadne in the last line of the text. But there is another line beyond the sea and the betrayal of the daughter of Minos: on the island of Naxos, naked and sleeping, Ariadne was forgotten by the hero. The god of ecstasy, Dionysus, came to the rescue, but that is another story. A story that has nothing to do with Theseus's sword or Ariadne's thread. A story that forgot the other story, not changing black candles for white. And the king's last sacrifice was in the name of that son who forgets and heals himself of everything: Aegeus, the father of Theseus, threw himself on a cliff into the sea, which since then bears his name, seeing the black sails. They had left that, if they defeated the maze monster, they would change them. Thus the murderer of the Minotaur was crowned as king of Athens. That tells the other story. Now it is appropriate that we put the king in brackets (and the new god) and take away a sacred moment. Well, as Derrida said, "history and discourse is like the wrath of God that comes from itself." Ariadne's threads became entangled with a king and another god. But as I said above, those are other stories, other paths unleashed by the will of a God. I will rescue the last silence of the Minotaur, when he forgot the words at once. I will rescue that last gesture because why run away from it? Where were the Minotaur’s eyes at that moment? Meeting with Theseus's eyes? On the sword? In the thread of his sister Ariadne? Is it better to shut up and go crazy, if you don't want to unleash the story?

The eye may wish, but it is neutral. Light does not consume things, as does fire. Even so, it is a first violence, since it would be the loneliness of a mute look, of a face without a word, an abstraction. It is the outline of ethics that Derrida paraphrases talking about Levinas. Between vision and hearing, he keeps his ear. According to him, it captures the vibration of the bodies without altering them. It is very well consistent with what the uncertainty principle mentions: the observer modifies the observed. But since the eyes of the labyrinth belonged to the Minotaur - for it was he who looked and described the storms, the shame and the cries - he filled the corners of the labyrinth with light with his violence of light without consuming them. And he also filled the silhouette of Theseus, his savior, because the Minotaur did not carry the real violence (the sacred violence, I would add). His gaze toward his redeemer, toward the future king, unleashed all his anger from God. That is why he did not resist his sword. It was a non-flat face, the monstrous face of a bull, silent, mute, re-concentrated in his madness, in his abandonment, who defeated Theseus. That is why he forgot all things and became king.