Riddles & Mazes: Transcending the Mundane
"Riddle me this."
"What is the sound of one hand clapping?"
"Why did the chicken cross the road?"
At the close of Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf, Harry, the novel's protagonist, after torturous attempts to learn how he must live his life, is given a simple instruction: "Laugh." At the end of a film on meditation, spiritualist writer and speaker Alan Watts ends his lecture with the same gesture, a prolonged, inexplicable burst of laughter. In Hopi culture, shamans take on the roles of clowns, working their way through spiritual behavior in a series of antic, Marx Brothers like physical humor. And in western culture, the fool often persists in asking the most maddeningly disconcerting questions.
Thr riddle is the intellectual counterpart to the physical contest, a means by which the true hero demonstrates his worth. But while the warrior demonstrates his achievement on a clearly materialist plane, the journeyman who solves the riddle demonstrates a transcendent knowledge, an intuition about the true meaning of existence that the warrior cannot. After following the greatest of Trojan and Greek heroes in The Iliad, Homer focused on Odysseus in his sequel, the warrior who also conceived the Trojan horse, who outwitted Polyphemus the cyclops by declaring his name was "Nohbdy," who donned the costume of a hermit and tricked his way past his wife's suitors before bathing the palace in their blood. Achilles could never have done all that.
The trick of the riddle is not to answer it logically. Those who do, fail, demonstrating their inability to think beyond the rational and into the non-rational sphere of another dimension. In effect, one must think irrationally--a paradoxical act--to not trap oneself in the maze of logical thinking. The logician believes his science addresses all the questions of the universe, but the true hero knows it reflects only the truth of the material plane, that a wider, differing wisdom cannot be defined by the tools of the secular world. As an eastern proverb states, "That part of the All which can be defined is not the All," suggesting that anything that can be pinned down in the logic of language must have lost its essence in the translation.
The sciences have demonstrated this truth in a number of ways, from burgeoning mathematical systems (Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry) to disciplines that seem to contradict each other. Newtonian physics explained a great deal about our universe until Albert Einstein posited the Theory of Relativity, which suggested that Newton's laws of the universe in fact described only the earth. It wasn't that Newton was wrong; he was just incomplete. By contrast, Einstein's belief in a space bent by gravity, a cosmos that tied time to the perceiver (so that time was not independent of him), appeared more like eastern poetry than rational science. Which is the point. To understand the laws of physics that made space travel possible, Einstein had to abandon the rationalism of Newton.
Riddles, then, invite the initiate to contemplate a vision of the universe that eludes rational thought. To attempt to logically answer a Zen koan (as in "what is the sound of one hand clapping?") is to have failed before emitting an answer. Koans are not intended to elicit answers; their irrationality is an attempt to dislodge the mind from its preconceived thinking patterns so that it might conceive of a thought it had never considered. Neurologists might describe this as the shift from left brain to right brain thinking (as in Gabrielle Rico's clustering techniques for writing; teachers often employ methodologies to force students to stop thinking conventionally so they can write in a truer voice).
American writers of the nineteenth century exhibited such a philosophy as they attempted to jolt their culture out of its Euro-centered thinking. When Ralph Waldo Emerson called "consistency the hobgoblin of little minds," he assailed the traditional, custom-based rationality of American thought, a stance echoed in his pupil Henry David Thoreau's pithy book of abstract aphorisms, Walden. Walt Whitman boldly declared in one line from Leaves of Grass, "Do I contradict
myself? Then I contradict myself." And Emily Dickinson wrote that "Success in circuit lies" in describing how to pin down the truth: avoid facing it straight on.
Mazes and labyrinths are the concrete forms of the riddle, physical constructions meant to disorient our senses. Popular in the late Renaissance and Victorian times as gardens or hedge mazes (where they were earned the name of "follies"), they entertained aristocratic partygoers who delighted in the sensation of temporarily losing contact with the society around them. But they could also be scenes of nightmarish dislocation, as in more recent works like Stephen King's The Shining, the 1980s film Labyrinth, or the ominous opening of the 1970s film Sleuth.
Icarus and Daedalus avoided the riddle of the labyrinth by winging their way out, but their temporary prison on the island of Crete once housed the minotaur, the beast that awaited Theseus and Ariadne. Ariadne attempted to thwart the punishment of her father, King Minos, by leaving a thread as she and her lover wound their way deeper into the maze, a device also employed by Hansel and Gretel, who dropped bread crumbs on their second trip into the forest. But birds ate the crumbs, leaving the children to face the dangers of the woods with nothing but their wits. Similarly, forests operate like labyrinths in European folk tales, wherein heroes must use brain, not brawn, to find their way out, often solving riddles and puzzles before they can do so.
Riddles abound in the Bible (as when the voice Moses hears in the burning bush declares of itself "I am that I am"), and are the pretext for the meeting between Oedipus and the Sphinx, when the latter asks the traveler, "What is it that crawls on four legs in the morning,
two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?" Failure to answer correctly results in death (and there are a few bones about as Oedipus notices), but the soon-to-be-tragic hero supplies the right answer: man, who crawls in the morning of his life, walks upright in the noon of his life, and uses a cane as he ages. Unfortunately for Oedipus, he is less able at solving the riddles posed by the oracle at Delphi, who has prophesied that he will marry his mother and slay his father. The oracle underscores a prominent theme in the story of Oedipus Rex. As shown in an artistic conception (left), the oracle (always female) was believed to sit in a cave upon a tripod, from which she recited riddling answers to questions put to her by attending priests. Mythologists have speculated that the oracle sat over a small fissure in the cave from which emanated gases that sent her into a trance state. Be that as it may, the oracle symbolized that medium who communicated with the gods on a different plane, bringing back to a corrupted language words that could not communicate a logical meaning, only an implied one that a deserving hearer could decipher. The Delphic Oracle was echoed in Roman culture by the figure of the Sybil, who Aeneas encounters in his journeys, directing him to enter the underworld before he can continue his travels.
In updating the Saturday afternoon movie serials of his childhood, Stephen Spielberg created Indiana Jones, a professor as wise as he is strong, and pitted him against a range of mental conundrums. At the climax of his search for the Holy Grail, Indy must solve the answer to a series of riddles before he can gain access to the sacred chalice. The story is an update of an even older tale, that of the knight Parsifal, who initially fails to find the grail when he first meets the Fisher King. Young and inexperienced, Parsifal thinks like a knight, but not a wise one, and he cannot understand what he must do to please the King. Only after years of travel and suffering does he understand, and given a second chance to meet the Fisher King, notices his wound and asks, "Uncle, what is it that ails you?"
Suggesting that sometimes the best answer to a riddle is a question. A paradox.
