F*cking Labyrinths

It wouldn't be a university if you could find your way around.

The spiral ascent as my right hand slid gently along the bannister of the University of Melbourne’s Baillieu Library felt as familiar as the route from my side of the bed to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I don’t know how much of my PhD was spent in the Reading Room I am just now waiting to open (there are two minutes until it officially opens and I can see the archivists in there, making me wait…I am sure they are doing something important. Or else taking precious time to share war stories about their teenage children or something). But the path to the Archives seems to be etched permanently into my body.

Image: Piece of stuatuary outside the Univ of Melbourne carpark. The figure’s hand are on his head, possibly pulling his hair out. Maybe, having gotten lost, perhaps he was turned to stone by the witch of Labyrinth. Photo by me.

I had an adventure on my way to the library. Charged with dropping off a professor’s annotations on someone’s draft PhD I dutifully climbed the stairs in the building as instructed to what the prof assured his daughter, with whom I’d just enjoyed vegemite on toast and peppermint tea in a famous Lygon Street cafe.¹

OK I’m now in the Reading Room. I thought I better update you, ‘cos you were sure to be anxious. That also means I better go read these files. But don’t worry, I’ll be back before you can get to the end of this senten…..

Seeking the Main Office described in my instructions, the named building had two towers: one East, one West. I didn’t read the text closely enough because following instructions is my second biggest weakness (the first is impatience). Which means I chose the tower on my right, not my left as instructed. I went to the second floor as the text described, walking in a circle observing nothing more than closed, empty academic offices. It was, after all, 9am on a Friday.

Fortunately the two towers were connected by a level-2 bridge. Gasping with pleasure at the decor that was exactly the same as my beloved Fisher Library at the University of Sydney, which was built and furnished c.1962, I walked jauntily through to the correct tower where the text assured me there was a Main Office.

Has anyone seen a Main Office on any campus in the world for the past couple of decades? Austerity dictates that the Main Office is now a tiny room with a rattley photocopier² and some seriously under-used pigeon holes for the rare piece of hard-copy mail, almost always a book that must be reviewed.

I find the poor substitute for a Main Office, which does not look well used. None of the pigeon holes were labelled with either the PhD student’s name (unlikely, to be sure) nor their other supervisor.

Fortunately, one of the office doors was open and an actual human was there trying to do their work. Apologising for interfering in that process, a lovely fella who I think was called Rowan pointed out that this building doesn’t even house History, but Media and Cultural Studies. Lovely Rowan helped me locate the historian we needed. They were in the ‘big glass shiny building’ (Rowan’s actual words) right next to the library. It was hardly out of my way.

Well, except the building was tricky. When you go in, warned Rowan, you’ll see some tables, probably with students sitting at them (what was he thinking? It was 9am on a Friday! there were no students). Whatever you do, he said, TAKE THE LIFT ON THE LEFT.

Not quite sure why THE LEFT was so important, duly warned, I entered the building. Hmm. Tables, I wondered? There were curved pathways. Stairs. A back door. Oh, back there, behind the curved pathway to nowhere - tables! In the meantime, I ran into a guy who was wandering around looking as lost as I, seeking a ‘flexible teaching space’ that he promised was on level 4.

Oh hey, I’m going to level 4! We went together. And sure enough, History was there. I found the next little room with the rattley photocopier and empty pigeon holes. But what if no one uses them?

A lone PhD student occupied the floor. Lovely Isabelle (I think. Names are third on my list of weaknesses) took me to the correct pigeonhole and assured me that the relevant academic actually does use it (I did say I am not at all sure I even checked mine for the last two years I worked at a university). She also promised to alert him to the thesis when she saw him. We chatted about her project, how she was finding #postgradlyf and parted, warmly.

My other friend still hovered by the lift, looking puzzled. I don’t think your flexible teaching space is here. Can she help me? He asked, gesturing to the PhD student down the corridor. Oh I don’t think so, I said, She just a PhD student, she mostly knows about early modern history. Yes I can! called Isabelle, hurrying towards us to help.

I left for the library archives, following that spiral stairway I knew so well. Yesterday I texted a friend about my plans, trying to organise the aforementioned breakfast. Her daughter was looking over her mum’s shoulder and read ‘library chives’, which will forever be my preferred term for archives now. She also a drew a picture. Behold, the library chive.

Why are universities like this? They all are. It doesn’t matter how new or old the buildings, why, why WHY they are always, always so fucking labyrinthine?

Shouldn’t the place that supposedly embodies the pursuit of science and rationality be. Well. Just a bit more orderly?

It is easy to see all the deficiencies of the university when you are stumbling through, desperately trying to find a room, or a person. Whatever happened to that very helpful Main Office? Those little rooms with unused pigeonholes and rattly photocopiers are just depressing, a symptom of endless, endless austerity. It seems that there is no one and nothing to make the place go any more, at least not in any orderly way.

But perhaps the universality of the fucking labyrinth form on campus after campus is actually important.

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors…To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one’s fecal necessities. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances…Light is provided by some spherical fruit which bear the name of lamps. There are two, transversally placed, in each hexagon. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant.

Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

The university is, after all, called thusly for its universality.

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure.

Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

But it is not quite that kind of universality is it?

There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything. As was natural, this inordinate hope was followed by an excessive depression.

Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

Well, quite. How we enter these beautiful institutions of knowledge, discovery and sociability filled with hope. It was ‘welcome week’ at UMelb and new students were clambering for endless red and beige bucket hats embossed with their field of study, matching t-shirts with a spot for their names and posters, and signing up to the desks of lefty students encouraging everyone to join one of multiple socialist groups.

To locate book A, consult first book B which indicates A’s position; to locate book B, consult first a book C, and so on to infinity ... In adventures such as these, I have squandered and wasted my years.

Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

Squandered and wasted. Oh so have I, Borges’ narrator, so have I. And so too, at least we hope, will all those students in matching bucket hats and t-shirts. The wasted time, the borderless library and the endless, endless labyrinth is part of the journey. And how extraordinary that despite the depressing rattly photocopiers, the abandoned pigeonholes and the lost Main Offices, there was always an unaccountably helpful person hidden between the shelves, wasting their precious years in glorious, labyrinthine discovery.

But this is the hidden secret of the university, isn’t it? That the labyrinth, regardless of the endless starchitects producing buildings too-often named after the last Vice-Chancellor, the labyrinth is still there. How would you even go about destroying it?

In describing this library, Borges travelled far, far into the future. He refers to our present managerial class with their metrics and KPIs as ancient heresy:

A blasphemous sect suggested that the searches should cease and that all men should juggle letters and symbols until they constructed, by an improbable gift of chance, these canonical books. The authorities were obliged to issue severe orders. The sect disappeared, but in my childhood I have seen old men who, for long periods of time, would hide in the latrines with some metal disks in a forbidden dice cup and feebly mimic the divine disorder.

Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

Things are extremely difficult in universities right now. Political repression exceeds even that which horrified us in histories of the Cold War. Austerity reduces the promise of the university to rattly photocopiers and empty dark corridors on one hand, and bucket hats and matching t-shirts on the other.

And yet, at every dead end there is a Rowan or an Isabelle ‘wasting’ their time on a labyrinthine journey and helping complete strangers find the way through theirs. May it never end.

1. Melbourne is known for its coffee and Lygon Street for its excellent Italian food, including breakfast pastries. By not even drinking the coffee I may be stopped and arrested at the airport for breaking Melbourne Law.

2. OK I don’t really know if the photocopier rattles. But I’m betting it does.