David Willis McCullough: Brick Maze

The Unending Mystery

Excerpts from The Unending Mystery:

Introduction

Photos:

The Arkville Maze

The Unending Mystery: The Brick Maze...
by David Willis McCullough

[Click here to see more pictures of the Arkville Maze]

From the outside, approached by a dirt road that follows along a mountain stream through a pasture and into a woods, the maze resembles a large, grass-covered burial mound. It fills a forest clearing, and only on entering does the walker see that the mound is roofless and that the interior, with its befuddling choice of red-paved pathways, is made almost entirely of brick. As built, the walls actually rise from eight feet tall at the outside to ten feet at the center, and the maze contains a subtle clue to guide the attentive walker. The almost claustrophobically narrow path between the walls descends slightly as it moves closer to the center, as if saying, "Getting warmer, getting warmer," and uphill, again almost imperceptibly, as it moves away. ("Getting colder, getting colder.")

Ayrton was obsessed by Daedalus, although some might argue that his real obsession was the Minotaur. He retraced many of Daedalus's steps through the ancient world, duplicated some of

his feats (such as casting a honeycomb in pure gold) and decorated a London restaurant, the Minotaur, entirely with his paintings and drawings of the monster. He also wrote an impressive novel, The Maze Maker, in which he dramatizes some of his conjectures about King Minos's maze and its meaning. He gives it a dual center ("two chambers separated by a maze within a maze") and adds that "these rooms were conceived as symbols of the juxtaposition of the sun and the moon. The maze between them took exactly as long to penetrate as the time when the sun and moon may be seen in the sky together on the day at the center of the year." As for the maze's coiling shape, it was inspired by ancient memories of primitive man's wonder at the entrails that spilled from slaughtered men and animals.

Soon after The Maze Maker was published in the United

States in 1967, Ayrton received a request from Armand Erpf, a financier and magazine publisher, asking if he could re-create the maze on his estate in rural Arkville, New York. It seems to have been a challenge the sculptor had been preparing for all his life. It was completed in 1969, and when Michael Ayrton died in 1975, the Arkville maze design was reproduced on his gravestone in Hadstock, a village not far from the great turf labyrinth at Saffron Walden. Although the maze itself is rarely open to the public, a casting of the Minotaur in the moon chamber at its center can be seen near St. Paul's Cathedral in London, dominating tiny Postman's Park, a former churchyard where mailmen used to rest.

A shady path made of black and white pebbles leads away from the Arkville maze and farther into the woods. Along the way are overgrown plinths topped by giant urns that would be equally at home in either the formal gardens at Versailles or a picture book by Edward Gorey. The path ends at the opening of a small (twenty-six-foot) black-and-white stone version of the octagonal labyrinth at St.-Quentin in France. Here, perhaps intended to serve as a calming antidote to the terrors of the Minotaur's den, it is called simply the Jerusalem Maze.

It was made at the request-perhaps even the insistence of Armand Erpf in 1970. Ayrton was not much interested in cathedral-floor labyrinths, what he called the "Christian unicursal maze." Indeed, he probably found them a bit dull. In a speech given at the Detroit Institute of the Arts, Ayrton described the kind of maze he made, with its many opportunities for taking the wrong turn, as having "the more ruthless view of chance and necessity which was general before the birth of Christ." The Christian labyrinth, while it may lead relentlessly to "redemption ," is, he said, "without risk of error" and "leaves nothing to chance. " He never used the word unadventurous, but in context he didn't have to. Eventually, his patron got the labyrinth he paid for, but handsome and elegant as it is, it lies almost literally in the shadow of its more dramatic neighbor.