MAZE General Comments

For saying something.

This and that.

 - Image copyright 1985 by Christopher Manson

892 thoughts on “MAZE General Comments

  1. Is most of the inscribed symbolism throughout the MAZE related to the Tuareg/Berber language? B

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  2. Isn’t it obvious, that the silent film director, namely Cecil B. Demille, is instructing the audience to read the signs, while listening to the chronophone?

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  3. Was looking to see if Vewatkin, would be ardent in ogling over a question that I have briefly surmised hitherto. On the Cover, the mouthed entrance depicts a pi symbol (“π”) . Could Manson have been implying (through the image of the red herring), that the recidivistic prisoner should be referring to the “pie rule” and not so much, the pi symbol?

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    • No, but it also seems unlikely that the door is an intentional pi symbol. The uppercase pi symbol is shaped like a doorway, which means that a lot of doorways look like uppercase pi symbols, both in Maze and in real life.

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    • Seems unlikely that the door is an intentional pi symbol?! You have got to be kidding. Sure, lots of doors have lintels that protrude beyond the uprights. But show me another door with raised borders that specifically outline a pi shape like the prologue door has!

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    • I don’t what you mean by “specifically outlines a pi shape.” The uppercase pi is stylized in a lot of different ways, all of which are variations on what looks like an upright, rectangular doorway.

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    • The raised outline. Look at it! It encloses a pi shape. If it were just a lintel on top of uprights, as I said, fine, not meant to be a pi. But it’s a lintel on top of uprights with a painstakingly rendered design element that deemphasizes the break between lintel and uprights and emphasizes the overall pi shape. Again, show me another door with an outline like this.

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    • To say it another way, if you want your already-pi-shaped doorway to look like you meant it to be a pi, adding that outline seems to me a reasonable way to do it.

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    • I don’t understand either why you want to see another door like this or why the outline is significant to you. If you want an upright, rectangular door or doorframe (or any other object, I suppose, since its appearance here isn’t apparently meaningful) you can find them in this book, online, or anywhere finer books are sold. If you want another door exactly like this one I suppose you have to do some more image-searching on google, though I don’t know why you want to (or want someone else to).

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    • Now you’re just being deliberately obtuse, but whatever. My point is that you can’t find a picture of a stone door with a design just like that on it. It is very unusual. So to me, that means it has a purpose, and IN MY OPINION, its purpose is to outline and emphasize the pi shape.

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    • I guess I better understand what you’re saying, but it seems a bit farfetched, at least without more support for drawing these conclusions. Again, the vast majority of doorways are shaped like upright rectangles. You find this door to be peculiarly designed (which I’m not sure about, but might be true), and you take that as an indication that we ought to be especially concerned with its shape–which is the element it has in common with otherwise unremarkable doors. To me this is like if there were a bicycle with unusual tires pictured in the book–while it’s certainly possible that a bicycle would be present in order to suggest two Os, nearly all bicycles have O-shaped wheels, so it not only wouldn’t seem self-evident that that is the meaning of the bicycle, it also wouldn’t be obvious how the uniqueness of the bike’s ornamentation would inherently strengthen this interpretation. What WOULD make either the Os or the pi more plausible is if there were any surrounding details that lent sense to that interpretation–but here, we have only dream logic of the kind used everywhere else by this community to implausibly force meaning onto every page of the book.

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    • That’s too harsh, that is a pretty reasonable pi r there, just not a good explanation of why it’s there.

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  4. by Christo(p)her Manson = Coin My Brother’s Han(d)s / the letter (p) becomes a (d) when it’s inverted and then reversed.

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    • Hand My Coins To My Brother’s Family ( To my family C.M. )

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    • That’s just what his name is, though, and the phrase has no relevance to the book.

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  5. I have a theory as to why some doors go somewhere but there are no doors in the new room allowing you to return to the first. my theory is that the maze is the labyrinth were the Minotaur is trapped, and the labyrinth supposedly moved by itself so once you go somewhere the maze moves and closes those paths.

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  6. I have always wondered what happens if you push the bell in room 11, I always pictured it electrocuting the person who pushed it, because it is in the trap, any ideas? (Dang I sound like Reddit)

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    • Since the room is designed to look like a cage, I pictured the button summoning some kind of giant rodent. Maybe a rat?

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  7. @vewatkin I solely appreciate your figuratively kind attunements in regards to our persnickety tête-à-tête’s at hand and as of late. I’ve just a few questions at the moment. 1.) Is there any sign if I can see from the numbers within THE(2)NEXT(6)PAGE after the PROLOGUE? 2.) Does the door jamb that the umbrella is resting upon have any significance? 3.) Can the building in the shape of a book be a phylactery? 4.) Is the anchorite that has been immured behind the wall in room 39, have any similar dissolutions which are related to the MAZE?

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  8. Thought it would be interesting to ask whether or not the red herring could also be the key ingredient in humble pie? And if so, could it be more of a boon that is bestowed upon the man bull (minotaur) ? Reminded me of something a bard had once written: “Happy is he who is sentenced to this place in exile!” Took the pi number 3.14 to a mirror. Through the light it read. “PI.3″ as in PI.E (pie).

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    • Are you referring to the publisher’s logo with the owl stuff? It wasn’t a design choice by Manson; that’s just an image Henry Holt had chosen to represent their business, long before Maze was written.

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    • No wikipedia necessary! She was referring to urban legends of hidden bull images in this very book.

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  9. @vewatkin Thank you for your clarification. You know, these conversations we’ve been exchanging in response to one another, seem to be overlapping in a sense, that the answers (as well as the questions) bare more resemblance to a vicious cycle than it does a discernible journey. A catch-22, so to speak. That being said, I’m guessing that the owls which are holding the open books represent learning, and I can also see the owl’s head beneath the All Seeing Eye inside of the letter ” A ” from MAZE. Have you ever seen the (0,0) on the $1 bill?

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  10. I think that on the whole, this book is meant to be smaller than the red herring it bereavingly represents. It does help to discern between what is secret and what is hidden, but I have contently deduced a highly questionable conclusion. What if this is really supposed to be a tool, in and of itself? As in a recruitment screening, of sorts. The idea struck me when I noticed the 3 owls on the front, side, and back cover. They were all holding an open book, but 2 of the owls were facing left and 1 owl was facing rite. I also ran across, what I have assumed to be the best passage: –
    XVI
    Beneath Her clear
    discerning Eye
    The visionary Shadows fly
    Of Folly’s painted Show
    She sees thro’ ev’ry fair
    Disguise,
    That All but Virtue’s solid
    Joys,
    Are Vanity and Woe.

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    • It wasn’t, but it was the basis of contest in 1985. Solving various puzzles in the book would earn the winner $10,000, but the only part anyone solved was finding the shortest path. Some incomplete solutions to two other parts were enough to award several contestants a share of the prize money, but only after two rounds of hints were distributed by the publisher.

      The puzzles of Maze were likely less intuitive than Manson intended, rendering it almost entirely incomprehensible despite it being constructed of mostly concrete puzzles that could be rationalized in hindsight.

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  11. @vewatkin The gang-stalking tactics within this decrepit street theater scenario is what keeps me coming back for more! ror

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    • Julian Assange likes to leak other people’s business…but where are HIS email leaks????

      HYPOCRITE

      (gee I wonder why—-Russia much?)

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  12. Could a building in the shape of a book, be construed as Heaven being visualized from the bible’s interpretation? P.S. I wouldn’t want to accept recognition from a extrinsic perspective, even though the (former) reward of $10,000 may have been tempting by some. Furthermore, I will always remember the MAZE as being knowledgeable from the aspect of its most crucial and vicarious steps in my ascertainment of mental acuity, which are not only based on acquiring new skills (mind you), but on procuring intrepid qualities of what I have already known. Thank you for your time and for your effort. William Brandon McLaughlin

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    • Well done, the book is definitely a metaphor for heaven, as confirmed by Manson in correspondence.

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    • Nothing you have ever said, thought, or experienced has any bearing on MAZE.

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  13. “consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased”

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  14. “There are pleasures in the act of accumulation: the thrill of the hunt, the joy of the find. But true collecting is more. It’s listening for the hum of history in things, finding connections among art and objects of different times and cultures, and gathering images so that, as in poetry, they reveal new meaning.”

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