So we spend our days, as you probably do-- as I do,
at least-- if you spend any time online, click, click, click,
click, click, click.
Click one thing-- and this is a Michael Ayrton image, too,
which maybe I'll come back to.
You can see in the center-- there's
sort of two centers of the-- it's a labyrinth.
Technically, it's a maze.
A labyrinth in the sort of original terminology
meant a unicursal thing, and this is not unicursal.
There's a couple of ways you can take--
you can actually get off-path in a maze.
But sort of in the way that I think of the labyrinth,
it's essentially about the same.
So we spend our days clicking on one thing that
leads us to another thing.
This is the Minotaur which is at the center--
one of the two centers of this labyrinth.
This is not life-sized, this is a mock-up of a labyrinth.
One thing that he did is when his book The Maze Maker
came out, Armand Erpf who was a millionaire--
sort of reclusive millionaire, maybe billionaire,
I don't really know--
he really loved this book, and he
hired Michael Ayrton to actually build him
a real-life labyrinth.
He's like, can you make me one of these?
And Michael says yeah, of course.
Of course I can.
So he makes this 6-foot deep labyrinth of stone.
It's the largest stone labyrinth certainly still alive
at this point--
or still around.
And it's just on this guy's sort of strange, reclusive--
he's got this large farm and property in the Catskills.
You can't go in there because someone died.
People would get drunk and try to get in the labyrinth
and so and so.
And so this is the mock-up.
And this is one of the two Minotaurs.
This one is, I think, in a park somewhere in Detroit.
But this-- he did a lot of work with bronze,
so this is one of them.
And there's one of the center of the labyrinth.
So we're clicking on all these things.
The reason why I'm talking about the labyrinth
is not just because I think the labyrinth is cool,
though I do think the labyrinth is cool.
I think it's pretty much the way that we live now
if we spend any time online.
We click through one thing, we click to another thing,
then we start something on Wikipedia
and then click this link a ways down Wikipedia,
and then that brings us some place.
Then oh, here's a poem, OK, that's interesting.
And then we kind of click to something else.
We end up very deep in our own browser histories.
This is an image--
also a labyrinth.
It's called Man in the Maze, which
is from the Tohono O'odham.
And this is an image that's actually
from a statue that's up in Udall Park here in Tucson.
Once you start thinking about labyrinths,
you start seeing them everywhere.
So it leads you to another, and you
click on another thing that leads you to another,
and you click on another thing and it leads you someplace else
until you have to close the browser window or just
reboot the computer.
Or you can try to backtrack if you want to,
or you can just take pleasure in the sort of random path
you seem to have taken-- almost an essayistic, tangential
meander through things as we sort of move toward whatever
endpoint we're getting to.
So if we do these things and we spend any time clicking online,
then we believe in a labyrinth.
This is the real life Michael Ayrton labyrinth.
I think that's his daughter maybe--
he's got a couple of stepdaughters.
One of them wrote a biography of him which is pretty good.