Thinking About Not Thinking About Things

The living will always be dogged by the questions of life; that is an ineluctable fact of life itself. After all these questions concern the living, and questions can only be answered by the living. Yet is it in their interests to answer these questions? How should they answer?

One way of answering these questions is to think through them. Thought may be based on many things: experience, knowledge, beliefs, feelings, intuitions. If you are lucky, they are a swarm of fireflies leading you out of the night. If not, they each separate and wander in different directions, until the light is so diminished you are left stranded.

And sometimes you find that they can build walls faster than Svaðilfari and his master; the walls force you to turn, run into culs-de-sac, retrace your steps...soon you realise you are in a labyrinth. You are Theseus, without his Ariadne, and the Minotaur resides within. You may slay the Minotaur and eventually blunder your way out, but you will have lost something forever (Purpose? Innocence? Or your youth, if you take too long). You may come out so changed that people can't recognise you, or worse, think you the monster from within. You may wander the labyrinth until you turn demented. Drink his blood in some Mithraic rite, proud matador. Don the hide of your slain foe like a shaman. Become the master of the labyrinth, and keep out intruders like the kid in Home Alone. But beware – take his place, and he will have defeated you.

Or you two may be equally matched, and end up locked in an eternal duel. Or else befriend your Enkidu, and spend your days playing chess in the middle of the labyrinth. In the course of your palaver, you may learn that the tales told of the Horned One by your kind were fallacious, that he is the last of a proud race hunted to extinction by man; ashamed, you commit seppuku.

You may even lead him out of the labyrinth, where he can never be an equal member of society. But none will dare challenge you with the Minotaur by your side, nor him with Theseus by his. You will have given life to something more than Frankenstein's monster, a fraternity of man and bull. But you will wonder if he will ever turn against you, if perhaps all you have done is merely extend the boundaries of your labyrinth to the outside world...

One of Borges' stories comes to mind, a story that's unavoidable when there's a labyrinth in the case. A treacherous vizier absconds with treasure, takes on the king's identity and builds a labyrinth, luring the king in for regicide, and emerges as the king, though with the treasure spent by the construction. To build a labyrinth is to invite a foe. And with the world already a labyrinth, what need is there for another in your head?

At the end of all this, there are no clear results. Schrödinger's Cow remains half-dead and half-alive. Mental states are quantum and fragile; the merest act of thinking may alter its position and momentum irretrievably. Especially given the evolutionarily honed, inbuilt mechanisms of self-deception, introspection may not be an advisable course of action at all.