Washing the wounds of time: Under the Sign of the Labyrinth by Christina Tudor-Sideri

Listen closely. If ever there was a book that reads as if the author is present, whispering over your shoulder, it is Under the Sign of the Labyrinth, recently released from the defiantly original independent publisher, Sublunary Editions. In this unclassifiable memoir/meditation Christina Tudor-Sideri carries her readers into an intimate, embodied anamnestic rumination on what it means to exist, exploring the myths and legends that form us, and the way our wounds shape who we become.

She begins with trauma, understood as something that “lives in the body of all things”—eternal, essential—and  proposes that to write trauma is to look deep into your inherited and personal histories, to examine your memories, to seek your self. A process that can, it seems, risk being traumatic itself:

Each word becomes a scream. Starving trains pass by my window with the heaviness of a dark eternity that cannot be erased once I travel back in search of what wounded me. Light becomes diseased. The genesis of poetry is expunged. Pain has a momentum of its own yet again, unceremoniously within the hollow and cold urn that entombs it.

A chill, a distinct darkness, and a slow pensive dawn colour this existential pilgrimage of a wounded poet philosopher as she allows her memories to guide her. It is a journey mapped in memory, literature, mythology—rendered visible in the blood coursing beneath the surface of her skin. Tudor-Sideri invites us back to the Romanian village where lived as a child, a formative world of forests, a river, and a place inhabited by the ghosts of wild mad men and women and the spirits of the children once housed in the local preventorium. She describes a childhood lived on the edge of ancient wisdom, magic and mystery. Drawing on traditions, images and lost historical practices she crafts an uncustomary quest in search of a way to understand and articulate the nature of being in the world.

The labyrinth, a symbol found widely in Eastern Europe and in Mediterranean cultures, is essential to this philosophical odyssey—imagined and reimagined as a physical embrace and as a metaphorical pathway toward the monsters that lie at the heart of memories, dreams, and lived experiences. Toward the self.

As I penetrate the labyrinth, touching the wall with my fingers, its outside becomes the silk fabric entombing my body—I become the pulsating core of the labyrinth inasmuch as it becomes the fabric shrouding me in my journey towards the center. I descend into the darkness of my being. I retreat from the world into the cavernous depths of memories that have blended with my viscera. In the dark, my mind dwells on the creature residing within—the monstrous I and the shadow it projects.

In following the lead of this powerful imagery, Tudor-Sideri calls on folklore, mythology and philosophy as she examines where self-reflection can take her—even if she does not wish to go—and explores the uncertain necessity of healing the wounds we bear.

Although Under the Sign of the Labyrinth contains some of the qualities of memoir and concerns itself with memory, it actually reveals little of the author’s life. Rather, she draws on her own sensory and emotional experience, because, after all, she can only speak to herself, but there is an intentional universality at heart. The “I” enwinds with “we.” The questions she is asking cannot be answered with what, but with how. Her fundamental inquiries—“What does it mean to write trauma/to write the self?”—are not directed at self-psychoanalysis. The bleeding out on the page is allegorical. This existential reflection, born of flesh and bone, extending beyond death and decay, is an extended dance between body and mind. For Tudor-Sideri:

Existence is always corporeal—we bleed, we ache, we become our wounds… The physical manifestations of our becomings and experiences leave traces on the world and on ourselves—the body marks the mind. We hold each other, and the mind marks the body.

In turn haunting, beautiful and gently macabre, the multiple threads of this essay are ultimately woven together as its poetic ramble reaches a thoughtful conclusion. Christina Tudor-Sideri’s work, according to her bio, examines “the absent body and its anonymous rhythms, myth, memory, narrative deferral, and the imprisonment of the mind within the time and space of its corporeal vessel.” There are many points at which these themes intersect with the kind of questions that trouble me, so I personally found this text to be filled with a wealth of ideas and inspiration. However, I have no doubt that anyone venturing into this intelligent, meditative prose poem will be richly rewarded.

Author: roughghosts

Literary blog of Joseph Schreiber. Writer. Reader. Editor. Photographer. View all posts by roughghosts