Labyrinth of text

The medieval conception of a text is a unicursal labyrinth: it twists and turns, knotted in its convolutions, obscure a completely linear path. There is only one way to read such a linear text. Hypertexts, on the contrary, are topologically like multicursal labyrinths: there are many possible paths through, some being dead ends, and these paths fork at nodal points; they may even loop back upon themselves. While a multicursal labyrinth may only be traversed linearly — while the traces of its lines of flight are linear — its potential traversal paths, or its solution space, is both parallel, myriad, and potentially cyclic. A literary conception of chapel perilous must have these characteristics but further be undirected: chapel perilous is a labyrinth from which there may be no escape. The choice of paths here relates to conceptions of will. Chapel perilous is a place where traditional maze-solving algorithms do not work. You cannot stick to the left wall, for instance. You cannot get a clue. Therefore, it cannot be navigated without a ‘will’. The idea of will is problematic here: Gurdjieff’s idea of will seems stronger and stricter than Spare’s: we can create sigils without having a single crystallized self! And it seems incompatible with Crowley’s ‘true will’, a determinist formation that is guaranteed to be in agreement with the flow of the universe. Where Crowley’s true will is the Tao, obscured by the twists and turns and knots in the veil of maya, Gurdjeiff believes we can only develop a will through a promethean transcendence: to evolve is to declare war on God, Nature, and the Moon, and this revolt against GNON will be put down if it results in large-scale disruption. Crowley appears, despite his promethean and luciferian trappings, conservative in this sense. Gurdjeiff seems more in line then with Nietzsche, whose will to power ends with a superman who creates new sacred games for himself, or with Sartre, whose acts of radical freedom cannot be predicted. But this is not really true either! Gurdjieff’s will is a crystallized I, and is supposed to be at least internally coherent. Sartre’s revolts against the self are necessarily random, which Gurdjieff would consider the absence of a unified will. Yet Gurdjieff sees a unified will as nonmechanical — in fact, the only possible aspect of a human being that is nonmechanical. How is an internal consistency different from a mechanism? How is freedom of choice different from randomness? Here we may look to Dennett’s idea of the agentitive lens. We treat or model phenomena as agents — as making choices based on free will in a…