This is the storm sewer under Tucson, another labyrinth.
There's a whole labyrinthine system.
Most cities have a lot larger storm sewer systems than we do.
But we only have--
because we don't really get that many storms,
there's only probably, I don't know, maybe six or seven
networks of storm sewers in Tucson,
whereas if you go to say, Toronto, or are New York,
there's a lot more to be found.
So, you know the labyrinth.
You might know this labyrinth, which is
in Chartres Cathedral, France.
This is the labyrinth, which is the site
of the original labyrinth.
If you go to Crete and you spend--
and you go to the sort of Minoan palace there, Knossos.
This is a reconstructed--
a reconstructed-- there's actually
no real labyrinth there anymore.
They've kind of made a whole new building
and sort of tried to extrapolate and figure out
what this might have been like, which is actually a really
disappointing experience if you go to looking
for a real labyrinth and you find
with this, which is kind of Disney World of labyrinths.
But you might know the labyrinth there, too.
Or you know this labyrinth.
This is from a sort of early video game called Rogue
that I loved to play.
So you're the little at symbol in the upper right hand corner.
You sort of tool through these darkened passages.
The fact that it's an at symbol is super cool.
And this is still a really amazing game to play.
It's as deep as playing most role-playing games
that you might ever play.
As I said, there would be a couple of geeky asides.
It's a very fun-- the Kestrel--
the Kestrel did kill me right after this moment.
Then you know the labyrinth.
And you know the labyrinth.
And there's hundreds and hundreds
of labyrinths to look at.
There's a lot of meditation labyrinths in Tucson.
People just go spend their time working through the labyrinth
as a way of dealing with whatever is in their life
or lives.
There's probably, I'd say there's
got to be 10 within 30 miles from here.
Many of them are sort of rock.
Some of them are painted concrete.
Or this is an old Dungeons and Dragons
dungeon that a friend of mine drew, which I have.
I spent a lot of times growing up
playing Dungeons and Dragons.
Thinking again, these are sort of formative experiences
that you have as--
really as writers.
I mean, D&D is a kind of shared story space in which you really
can have it and kind of make things up as you go along.
It's really pretty fantastic even
though it took me a while to be able to speak
about it publicly.
Because I understand it's like not
it's not as cool as I once thought it was.
But these are totally cool.
Look at that.
That's pretty cool.
Here's another shot of the storm sewer
here in Tucson, which I spent a lot of time exploring.
I've got a video with some images
of the storm sewer in Tucson.
It's a lot of labyrinths.
I give you a lot of labyrinths to indicate, I think,
also that the labyrinth is, I think, very-- it's important.
It's important to me.
But it's important to us as readers and as writers.
In a way, that's what we're doing when we read poems, when
we read stories, when we read essays,
we're just going through one line at a time.
I mean, it's actually right to left, right-- or left
to right, left to right, left to right.
Like we're stuck in the groove kind
of moving forward in the thing.
There's really only one way unless we're reading things
like choose your own adventures or things that are
sort of like more explicitly forked narratives, which
usually aren't really very fun as an adult.
Although there is a pretty good choose your own adventure that
just came out which is worthwhile talking about.
Maybe we can talk about that.
But we can't not be in the labyrinth.
That's why-- I think that's why it's
such an appealing sort of metaphor for the way
that we live.
We have-- we're always going forward in one way or another.
We're certainly working in it.
So the thing about it, and the thing about the sentence,
the thing about the poetic line, is that it's mostly linear.
I mean we experience it in linear ways, even if we--
even if it branches off and is going in different directions.
Part of what I think is most interesting,
though, about the labyrinth is the pleasure of being in it,
whether it's even sort of being the protagonist in our own web
surfing adventure, which I admit is not a very
interesting adventure, maybe--
some days it is, some days it's not--
or a reading adventure, is that we are first person.
We are the one who is doing the navigating.
We're the one who is collecting links, who is putting things
on our Flickr, who is tweeting things,
who's liking stuff on Facebook.
We are, as writers, we're all-- we're writing.
We're collecting.
We're sort of accumulating things
as we move through things reading.
But we are a kind of adventurer, I think,
automatically when we actually have to collect.
When we're adventuring, we're reading, too.
Science tells us that we experience the things.
We actually physically, biologically experience things
that we read about, which we all know
if we've read since forever.
Because we do.
But it's pretty fantastic that's actually
been now proven to be true.
So there's a pleasure in playing these things,
I think, in finding them and connecting them and trying
to participate a little more actively in our art.
I wrote this essay last year in response
to the question is the knowledge dead?
This question that everyone always wants to talk about--
is the book dead?
Are we just going to be clicking with our iPads into the future
and never really looking at the printed page again?
Which is a really annoying question for me
just because, of course, it's not dead.
I mean, it's been going for 1,000 years.
The codex is a powerful thing.
It'll be fine.
But I started thinking about the ways in which we increasingly
now want to participate in our media.
If you look on YouTube, for instance,
you can find no less than 25 different cover versions,
home made cover versions, of a commercial for a website called
finallyfast.com, which is this terrible commercial that you
watched-- they used to watch on late night TV
about two or three years ago.
And it's this really lame commercial.
But there is, for some reason, there's
25 cover versions on YouTube.
For some reason, we really like to participate in the things,
even if we're bad--
for some reason, fan fiction.
We want to play with things.
And maybe it's a generational thing.
The kids or whoever, they want to be-- they
want to play with things.
But I think we've always-- we've always
wanted to play with things, like playing Dungeons and Dragons.
And that's not super different.