45. Ambiguity
Ambiguity
makes metaphor and imagery potent. It makes
us wonder and grope for connections … It draws us in.
An ancient Moorish tradition tells that Solomon, King
of Israel, imprisoned three million flies in a bottle of black glass,
which he kept safely out of sight in a well near Babylon. It is thought
they were spirit familiars, rather like the cats supposedly kept by
witches.
Of course, Solomon was an enemy of the Moors. His religion was different;
this was enough to believe him evil.
Many years later in 1528 – in the same tradition of intolerance and fear, but under a different religious heading – the Grand Inquisitor in Toledo outlawed the keeping of flies in bottles.
These odd facts all appeared on the daily-changing
pages of the Labyrinth website, along with –
by coincidence – a quotation from Ludwig Wittgenstein:
Was ist dein Ziel in der Philosophie? Der Fliege den Ausweg aus dem Fliegenglas zeigen. (What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly how to escape the fly bottle.)
More extraordinary still, around that same time, I visited southwest
France to look at some caves – I thought they might be a good
location for a scene in Labyrinth. I drove up into
the Pyrenees from Carcassonne,
listening to the radio, I heard the announcement for the cycle of summer
baccalaureate exams – the first would be Philosophy. But that's
not it.
The caves are about 2000 metres up on narrow winding roads. The journey took about two and a half hours. I spent the whole time thinking about flies … Flies and philosophy, flies and witchcraft, flies and freedom …
When I got there, I found the entrance to the underground passage lit
by a shaft of sunlight in which a swarm of tiny black
flies hovered.
Ambiguity ...
