Mazes - Ursula K. Le Guin

I just read the short story, and it made me want to write about how interesting its connection feels to everything that’s been happening lately.

The story is told in the voice of a creature, (we don’t know what kind of creature, so in a way that narrator is also an 'alien' for us the reader). 

We learn that the creature has been captured by a larger creature  “the alien” . This alien subjects the smaller creature to a series of tests or punishments. The trapped creature believes the alien is intelligent, and that since they are both builders of mazes, they should be able to communicate through them.

So the narrator begins to perform these intricate, almost ritual-like patterns, like a language, like a dance. But instead of understanding, the alien either remains indifferent or responds in a way that feels almost humiliating, placing the creature back into simpler, more primitive mazes.

Eventually, the creature starts to believe that the alien is not trying to communicate at all and that is just a solitary being, that inflicts suffering without reason or meaning. No clear intention, no real purpose… just acting, almost mechanically, doing what it does.

Genius! Love that she is so ambiguous about it,  because allows for so many interpretations. 

1- The first thing that came to mind is JC waking up in the  maze, trapped by a giant creature 'the hospital'. The hospital as one giant intelligent organism, alien to JC.  Yesterday, during the delirium, he tried to reason with the nurses and staff, telling them why he needs to leave the hospital. He was feeling trapped, and frustrated because all his attempts to communicate with the bigger organism were in vain. 

2- The story also reminded me of the bee I saw today trapped in a spider web.  The spider and the bee, are also both maze creators, and alien creatures to each other. I imagined the bee as a conscious being, trying to communicate with the spider, by performing the same rituals and patterns learned at the bee's colony, but the spider is simply doing what it does by nature. 

3—Artists as maze creators, trying to communicate with a larger “alien”: the system, the symbolic order. The system itself is an organism made of mazes, tightening a rope around our necks, trapping us like slaves. The artist tries to break through, to liberate something through intuitive, artistic rituals and expressions and yet the system remains indifferent. But if we zoom out, out even further, reducing the artist to the size of the bee...the artist trapped in another creature's maze and that other creature is behaving as natural and as automatic as the spider. 

The question is, if any way to communicate with the bigger alien is pointless...should we still try anyways?