Spirals and labyrinths

A mysterious manuscript by an unknown author, a found object, is duly published by one Peter Cornell who claims authorship and gives it the title Ways of Paradise (2024, translated by Saskia Vogel). It is a work of Casaubonian ambition, but with more success and humility, gaining cult status when it was first published in Swedish in 1987. The author brings together, like pieces of collage, references to spirals and labyrinths, both naturally formed and human-made, across great swaths of time(lessness) and place(lessness), whose design it is to unite humankind with the eternal. There are diagrams and photographs that helpfully illustrate what these spirals and labyrinths look like and where they are. Likely a byproduct of an even more ambitious research project, the notebook was filled over the course of thirty years, by the nameless scribbler who spent each day in the National Library of Stockholm. Its contents read more like endnotes of a book, though the book itself is absent and likely to have never existed, with references to the mythical labyrinth where the cursed minotaur is imprisoned then killed, the natural shape of the medieval medina radiating outwards like layers of protective shell, the same shell that gives the astonishing nautilus its defining shape, and the eternal beauty of the golden ratio [image above]. When the labyrinthine city is replaced with the straight lines of the modern metropolis, the flaneur recreates them in their minds, letting their feet trace ancient paths, guided by the paradise in their mind. Perhaps because spirals and labyrinths are embedded in the subconscious by divine intent. Ways of Paradise has referential echoes of Walter Benjamin’s ‘One-Way Street’, an essayistic voyage of leaps, disjuncture, misleads, and occasional dead-ends. Both form of fragments of extreme brevity, cryptic ellipses and satisfying length. One can start reading back to front, from the middle then either way, it doesn’t matter. Perhaps this is what the shadow of a book looks like, its surrealist half.