The Western World’s dominant mythologies teach that made things turn on their maker, causing misery. In the Genesis story, for example, the seemingly excusable curiosity of Eve leads to sin and death and alienation from the creator, but Genesis is merely the best known example – similar morals can be drawn from the Pandora story and Islamic versions of the Adam and Eve tale, and can be seen in Native American creation mythologies. Even Hindu cosmology tells tales of fallen humans who just won’t obey, who insist on rebellion and betrayal.

socially maladaptive troglodytes

As humans, we play a uniquely benighted role in this sad drama, for not only are we made things rebelling and causing our own misery, but as makers we are surrounded by made things rebelling against us, and this motif also rises to the level of myth. Frankenstein’s monster is a good example, as are golems, zombies, and other created humanoids. In science fiction, we find troublesome computers like HAL 9000, the multitude of robots and androids, such as Battlestar Galactica’s Cylons, who organize to wipe out their pathetic biological makers, the legion of man made viruses that exterminate us in vividly imagined end time plagues, and the current apocalyptic favorite, nanotechnology that disrupts matter itself.

But the more troubling setting for these myth enactments is real life. In retrospect, the millennium bug flap seems like a preemptive Doomsday scenario that didn’t come to pass, but there are plenty of examples that seem to put us in less vaporous peril. Air conditioning that thins the ozone layer and gives us cancer, internal combustion engines that emit greenhouse gases and cook us alive, video games and social networking sites that turn our young people into violent, socially maladaptive troglodytes, the convenient plastic packaging that pollutes our land and emits carcinogens and mutagens, the toxic wastes that cause testicular atrophy, the nuclear power plants that create mutated giant flying turtles that level our cities with laser vision… but you get the idea, and no doubt you have your own favorite example of technology turning on humanity.

Could it all be a myth? Not myth in the sense of not being true, but myth in the sense of an overarching tale that we all unconsciously subscribe to and use to order existence and make sense of the world. And as devotees of this myth, are we making our lives much harder than they actually need to be? That is, what if we somehow replaced our creation stories with tales of things going right, with created things that are helpful and useful to their creators? Might our technology turn out benign, even beneficial?

We’ll never know until we consciously adjust our creation stories until, as a species, we come up with better archetypes for technological success. In other words, maybe it’s time to come up with better myths.

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A couple of weeks ago, the Diva and I found, and walked, the labyrinth pictured below. It’s at Land’s End, and has a great view of the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s one of at least four in San Francisco—there are two at Grace Cathedral, and one at the California Pacific Medical Center; as it happens, I’ve walked them all. The Land’s End labyrinth is easily the most vulnerable of the four, made simply of rocks and gravel found nearby and raked and set into the labyrinth outlines—in fact, it’s been destroyed by cretins, and remade, at least once. It’s beautifully sited on a promontory, with a spectacular view of the Golden Gate Bridge and the bay. Though it must have taken substantial effort to make, and appears timeless, in fact it was laid out in 2004 by one man, Eduardo Aguilera.

The Land’s End labyrinth depends for its survival on the kindness of strangers, and as the Diva and I negotiated its twisty inevitability we both, without discussion or premeditation, found ourselves tidying and rectifying the pattern by nudging stray rocks back into place. It felt like instinct.

I was reminded of the medicine wheels that appear in (presumably) sacred sites across vast swathes of North America. They are referred to as ‘Indian’ or ‘Native American’ but in fact they are far older than any extant culture and archaeologists tell us that they have existed for several millennia, serving—and being served by—several of the cultures that washed across their range like oceans receding and swelling. Think about that. Medicine wheels—which, like the Land’s End labyrinth are simple patterns of rock laid on the ground—have proven more durable than several civilizations, while also depending on civilizations for their creation, maintenance, and renewal; is it not flabbergasting? Our own civilization protects them carefully, with fences and guards, preserving them for… what?

placing our feet with Jain-like care

Of course, much the same can be said of cities, languages, religions, and other human constructs that outlive humans, and nations, and yet depend on humans for continued existence. It’s as if we are parasitized by patterns of varying complexity who make use of our bodies and minds as a means of life. Think of a medicine wheel filmed from above, its 1,000s of years of existence compressed into a movie of, say, an hour’s duration; it alone would persist while forests shimmered in its margins, while humans, like flickering brown worms, swarmed about and kept it repaired, occasionally adding or deleting pieces of the pattern according to some unguessable logic. I think it would look much like a cell under a microscope, or like a city seen from a satellite. It would be a living, lordly thing, and we its vassals.

The Diva and I walked the labyrinth with something like trepidation, eyes cast down, placing our feet with Jain-like care. I can’t tell you the unknowable vastness of her thoughts, but I know that I was contemplating the labyrinth as a metaphor. Because they are twisty and surprising and yet, in retrospect, inevitable, labyrinths are unavoidable metaphors for relationships, careers, and life itself. And so the walking of a labyrinth should be conducted reverentially, for our passage through it is like our passage through this life. Missteps are likely to find some expression in our circumstances.

I know whereof I speak. For once I walked another labyrinth, with another girl, and though we arrived at its center without mishap she made a fetish of being unrestrained by convention and walked straight out, across the lines, without a backward glance. I felt it like a blow to my heart, and followed her with dread. And in fact that was our last good day together—everything went bad after that, and we both crossed lines that I, at least, came to regret.

These patterns we walk, and live within, and build and maintain and renew; we make them and then they shape us. So much of what we do is set in stone, long before our individual selves exist. So much of what we do is inevitable, but only in retrospect—in the moment of walking, the best we can do is note the lines as best we can and walk with care. And should we choose to flout a line, as sometimes we must, we should do so consciously and face the consequences with open eyes.

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The Battle of Agincourt, a famous English victory over the French, was fought on October 25th, 1415. On that rainy, muddy day, King Henry’s archers and infantrymen defeated French cavalry, though they were outnumbered 4 to 1.

Or were they? In her recent book, Agincourt, A New History, historian Anne Curry uses original army enrollment records to prove conclusively that in fact the odds were about 3 to 2.

Or were they? Historian Juliet Barker, in her even more recent book, Agincourt: The King, the Campaign, the Battle, uses French heraldic sources to prove conclusively that the French outnumbered the English by 6 to 1.

the French won decisively, using armored zeppelins

Other aspects of the battle are also disputed. Some reconstructions suggest that the English longbow was not as effective as commonly thought, that Henry was a lousy general, and that English archers did more damage as infantry than they did as archers. I will not be surprised if some new history proves conclusively that in fact the French won decisively, using armored zeppelins.

Nor is Agincourt the only battle with disputed history: the history of all battles is endlessly debated as is every historical event. The plain cold truth is, humans have no way of knowing definitely what happened yesterday, let alone 600 years ago. Our only access to the past is second hand, via eyewitness accounts or physical records such as photographs. But we know from modern studies that eyewitnesses are hopelessly subjective and physical evidence is subject to endless interpretation—consider the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination; what it proves seems to depend on who you are.

Underlying human efforts to write history is the assumption that there is a truth to be discovered—that is, we act as if there is one true story that can be reassembled by painstaking research. But is there? Since the past is non-existent in the most profound way possible, isn’t it really the case that all we can do in the present is argue about interpretations of the past?

And of course this applies to more than history—religions also fiercely debate the past and the most successful religions are the ones that most successfully push their interpretation of what really happened hundreds or thousands of years ago. For example, at least in our culture, it is usually taken for granted that the man Jesus at least existed but in fact, historically speaking, there is not a shred of admissible evidence that proves it—no physical evidence, no direct eyewitness accounts, no documentary evidence, no mention by contemporary historians such as Josephus or Tacitus… no evidence at all, really, just the hearsay evidence of biased authors writing 70 years or more after the supposed man’s supposed death. Am I saying that Jesus never existed? Not at all! I’m just pointing out that humans today have no way of really knowing whether or not he existed and that everyone who says otherwise is sort of, um, lying. And the same can be said for quite a few ‘historical’ figures.

So the past turns out to be as fluid and subject to human influence as the future and only the present really exists—which is something the Buddha said thousands of years ago… or did he?

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