Heather Momyer
In Paris, two former lovers drank their coffee and discussed the arrival of the German troops. The landscape of France was changing and the young men who had mingled in Alsace a few years prior were now in one uniform or another. At the café table, there might have been something said of the plight of the French girl at the hands of the arriving army, but what Simone was really trying to say was, “I’m having an affair with one of my students. She is only eighteen.” Jean-Paul retorted quite possibly on the agency of man, only to infer, “Of course. I’ve already fucked her younger sister.” Then, both agreed that young French girls were not for soldiers.
In a Parisian café sat two monsters: mythic and alluring, seductive, beautiful, and treacherous. The Minotaur ate up virgins and called out to the garçon, and the tongues of Medusa’s snakes hissed around her head.
* * *
Over the summer and fall of 2009, I read some of the short fiction of Amanda Marbais. These stories pivot around themes of communication, miscommunication, and blocked communication, sometimes due to the fate of the universe and technological problems, other times due to the characters’ refusal to hear each other and themselves clearly. Characters struggle to say what they mean as their partners listen and attempt to interpret through inactive internet links or language that simply does not add up to enough. And when their emotions get the best of them, when the only thing left is to flail out in rage, these characters turn into animals. In the story “Twining,” Geoffrey and Jeanine grow long legs and necks as they are transformed into giraffes; Gerald, from “Colossal,” is a colossal squid; and Marcia and Sue become a miniature deer and goat, respectively in “Horns.”
Communication problems continue, but the key seems to be this: Only when emotions are tamed and only when the characters have learned the art of tenderness and compassion and of giving and accepting love can they truly be able to speak to each other.
* * *
Jean-Paul argued that deep connection with another human being is impossible.
* * *
In the meantime, Amanda and I read each other’s tarot cards and looked for signs in life, directions to lead us on our paths, suggestions for the best routes to go. “I think there are signs,” I said. I believe fully in the tarot. “Only, we’re probably illiterate,” I added. But still, I wanted to trust her vision in those evening hours, sitting across from each other at the dining-room table, or in the sun-room while the late summer sky was softly darkening. We drank green tea and coffee from ceramic mugs and chose one of the five decks of cards, though often, we settled on the deck that belonged to me, a set with bright fairy-tale-like illustrations. I shuffled the cards.
How should I go about getting a better job? Should I stay in Chicago? How can I establish a stronger creative community? Will I meet someone new soon? I kept talking and kept shuffling, but what I was really trying to ask was, “When will I get to feel loved?”
I cut the deck and handed the cards to Amanda who set them down in the Celtic Cross spread and spoke of a dark-haired man who would come in time. “It will be slow,” she said, inferring, “Nothing is certain.”
* * *
“We author our own lives,” said Jean-Paul. “The signs are what we have written—Our interpretation is indeed our authorship.”
“Unless we are women,” argued Simone. “Both women’s lives and dreams are shaped by men.”
* * *
In the labyrinth that is Paris, the Minotaur welcomed the youth and maidens who were kindly sent to him. Existentialism might be an argument for action and responsibility, but in terms of his sexual affairs, the Minotaur waited passively.
* * *
“Of course, there’s no need to do anything,” Jean-Paul claimed. “But, if you want life to be different, change it.”
Simone stared at him but refused to will him into stone.
“The war is here, and if you don’t like it, you can always kill yourself. There are always options.”
Simone knew this was the philosophy of a privileged man.
* * *
Medusa was lost among the hedges and the paths forked and turned. “We have choices,” said the Minotaur, “and each one made is at the expense of the others.”
Which way is the correct way?
Choose from the following:
A.) There are many ways to get out of the maze, but there is one way that is certain—kill the Minotaur.
I’d like to offer these characters a chance to redeem themselves. I’d like to find them putting down their sticks like Amanda’s giraffes in “Twining.” Geoffrey wrote “cunt” with his twigs, but when faced with Jeanine’s absolute rejection, he found that no mooing or sputtering or coughing meant anything. He twined his neck around hers and swallowed his pride. He wrapped the connection between his head and heart around hers and held on.
* * *
Medusa was divine in the temple of Athena and raped by Poseidon. In the moment of her fear, in the moment of her paralysis, Athena transformed her into the Gorgon. She bestowed upon her the gifts of asps that slithered and hissed like fire around her face and a world of feminine rage and fury. Pregnant with magical wings, Medusa could stop an archer in his tracks, send him back like a flint arrow to his place in the rock from which he was born.
When she came upon the Minotaur, Medusa had found they had both aged from many years lost among the greenery. In times like these, there is no time for awkward stumblings of affection, despite their shared moments on paths that often intersected through the decades—those evenings of wine and cigarettes, or of talks through the nights, or those letters that crossed cities, continents, or oceans.
“What I had meant to say,” the Minotaur said, “was our love is essential.”
“What I had meant to say,” Medusa said, “was go fuck yourself.”
Medusa’s snakes twined and wrapped in order to constrict and press breath from bodies. There was no room for tenderness among their skins when the Minotaur was blabbering about the option of suicide. Medusa’s refusal to kill herself off was not a symbol of her compliance. Nor would she be caressed into calmness.
After 50 years, her love turned to stone while she made deep engravings on his tomb. “His death separates us, my death will not reunite us,” she scratched.
B.) Everyone turns to stone.
In Amanda’s short story “Horns,” Sue turns into a goat and her relationships suffer. She misses her boyfriend, who will not visit, and does not maintain a relationship with her friend Marcia, who is now a deer. There is little to suggest that she is happy with her parents’ attempts to help her adjust to her new life, and when the goats from the neighboring farm bleat outside her window, offering themselves as a new community, Sue rejects them as well. Instead, Sue simply quiets herself, left with beating heart, and stays silent.
* * *
The Minotaur and Medusa were both lost in the labyrinths of love affairs and among the thousands of words that make up their lives. They sat at their desks in Paris, and with typewriters and pens, inked out the texts filling pages and pages of lines meant to lead them to where they were going. Their words mapped their routes and determined their directions.
“Writing is a gift,” the Minotaur said, “but it is a gift that transforms the giver.”
One must know when to put down the pen. When the writers are ready to be still with themselves and with the world, there are no words left to say. They are left with the silence of the rocks in the ground.
Medusa closed her eyes, and the Minotaur’s vision was dim. There was no need to see as they wept out their furies into the pages of their books, and as they wrote, their bodies morphed into something else. Flesh and blood seeped into those words, as they both turned themselves into objects that were to be immortal. If there was anything meaningless in those lives they were living, they no longer had to see it as such. Instead, they accepted it all as their hearts slowed and calmed. In those Parisian apartments, the Minotaur and Medusa transcribed themselves into the world of the eternal. They wrote themselves into stone tablets, left still and quiet once the pen and typewriter keys no longer moved, making gifts of themselves that echoed in rhythm of hearts, forever and ever.
C.) The hedges are burned down because there are times when even the Minotaur and Medusa might learn to accept the gifts that come to them with graciousness.
Gerald is a colossal squid, an animal that some scientists speculate can communicate loudly and simply from deep, deep waters. Though his natural form and habitat might resemble the embryo in the womb, Gerald will not call his mother. Instead, it is his lover, Joan, who acts as the surrogate in this story and ends by murmuring a lullaby, gifting Gerald with song.
* * *
Medusa might have helped contrive the scene as she brought young lovers into the maze to be tossed around between herself and the Minotaur, but it was the young Jewish girl who came bearing gifts, hoping to feel loved by both creatures in return. She entered the hotel as a virgin with the Minotaur and trekked though the mountains with Medusa. She remained loyal until the end, but when the Germans came and her family was dying, the Jewish girl ran out of the labyrinth, setting the walls on fire as she fled. If the Minotaur and Medusa would have run out with her, if they would have said, “Yes, yes, we really do love you, too,” perhaps they would have escaped. Perhaps they would have discovered those moments that are dropped in their laps as treasures and gems, flickering and reflecting, in those instances, the love that they felt should have been delivered unto them by God the Father and by all Mothers who send out offspring through the waves of birth. There are moments of grace. There are moments when other people give us what we always thought we deserved, even if they are as rare as those times when something ancient and miraculous is suddenly washed in with the tide. Some things are placed right at our feet.
Instead, the Minotaur and Medusa did not acknowledge the girl as she escaped. They did not rush after her and hold her safely as all good parents and lovers should. Instead, they decided to stay while it rained down fire as if God Himself had willed it. There were embers in the streets, but the two of them kept on with their same old story and were left with their decision to just burn up with the world around them.
D.) The Minotaur and Medusa make the labyrinth their home.
I once said that writing is like being God; reading is like building a cabin out of the trees that God made. The building of the cabin is a collaborative process. Readers read according to their desires and construct a narrative out of the materials present. What kind of home would they like to have?
In the dining room, Amanda and I continued reading tarot cards. As a gift, I gave her a deck with illustrations of shape-shifters. I was thinking of her stories and noticed that animals were not given much space in the illustrations of the decks we already had lying around, and I knew little about those kinds of archetypes.
In the Shape-shifter deck, there are several cards that are not a part of the more traditional tarot decks. It includes a card for the shape-shifter archetype, a symbol of harmonizing with other living beings. It represents moments when people merge together as one, building energy together. According to D.J. Conway and Sirona Knight, whose book accompanies the deck, the shape-shifter card asks the reader to “Remember that you are a boundless being.”
I think of Amanda’s giraffes, other transforming peoples, and Conway’s and Knight’s book that suggests that transformations reflect the merging and melding of bodies, the synthesis between mind, body, and spirit, the ability to participate in the Oneness of the universe.
While reading tarot cards, the five of cups appeared often. This card depicts a man looking at three cups that have been knocked over and spilled. Possibly someone other than the man is responsible for spilling the contents. The world is full of things that just happen. But the card is a card of perception. All the man needs to do is turn around to see the two shiny cups that are right there, just as close. “Choose what you see,” the card says.
When Amanda read my cards, she often closed her eyes, and I understood that vision is more important than sight. The witch who sometimes comes into our lives may appear ugly, but she is always magical. Sometimes Medusa thought she was punished. Other times, she was enraged and magnificently powerful.
As a writer, Amanda’s vision is even clearer. The shape of the body does not matter, nor does adequate communication through language. If words will always fail, as they always will, there are other ways to be found, as the animals without language already know, because what does matter is the ability to love and feel loved.
* * *
The Minotaur repeated, “We author our own lives,” but Daedalus planted the hedges.
The hedges were high and both the Minotaur and Medusa found themselves stepping over the fallen twigs and shuffling their feet through the leaves that littered the paths. Sometimes they walked together, and sometimes, they turned in opposing directions, only to find themselves in the same room again many months later. But, neither could remember how they came to be lost in the maze in the first place. They had been there as long as they could remember.
The myths went something like this: Simone was transformed into the Medusa as a punishment. Perhaps it was Athena who cast the spell. Perhaps it was the patriarchy. The stories vary depending upon the teller. The Minotaur was born from a mother who lusted after a bull who came in from the sea and was quickly killed. Both events involve the God of the Sea whose house holds those waters where squid bloop in pre-lingual states and many other creatures are born forth, rising from depths. Poseidon is the father who sires through the ocean womb. Transformations through birth or rebirth are always sacred.
In the maze, Medusa found herself slithering as the gorgon with a desire to stop men with arrows aimed at both her heart and head, and the Minotaur was a Minotaur because he was not fathered in the same way as the other French men, or so he had said. But when they crossed paths for the first time, the Minotaur said, “Our love is essential.”
Medusa said, “Yes,” but they both knew they still had to go their own ways. So, they traveled on, taking several steps together, until they found the fork in the path and Medusa took the right-side fork and the Minotaur took the path that diverged to the left. But, as they traversed through the labyrinth, each began to prune the hedges just a bit more. The Minotaur cut fresh flowers and put them in vases on the tables. Medusa framed pictures and hung them from the twigs. Each bought desks and typewriters and moved them around to various rooms where they sometimes stayed. Young loves came in and out of the maze and shared beds with each of them. And when Medusa and the Minotaur would meet again, one would open a bottle of wine as the other would light a cigarette and they would share the evening with each other, or they would sit together and drink coffee and discuss manuscripts and politics. And in this way, the hedges that once felt as an entrapment were decorated and shared and became the home for their lives. And sometimes, they even pruned the hedges together.
“Our relationship was the greatest achievement of my life,” Medusa said, but what she really meant to say was, “We shared a space with each other, and together, we have learned to build something.”
In the labyrinth that held the mementos of their lives, including the letters they clutched over the decades and the books they had written between cigarettes and travels and wine and lovers, the Minotaur found that his dim vision no longer mattered, and Medusa could sometimes close her eyes to sleep. Over time, she had learned how to shape her own dreams. When their eyes were shut tightly and the patterns of their lives made no sense, they could feel the hedges prickle their skin and know the direction of the wind. They could walk down hallways in the dark and feel the way to go.
Bibliography
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De Beauvoir, Simone. “From The Second Sex: From Part III. Myths: From Chapter I. ‘Dreams, Fears, Idols.’” Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007: 300-323.
Marbais, Amanda. “Colossal.” Fictionville. April 2009. Web.
_______. “Horns.” Kill Author. Issue 3. Web.
_______. “Twining.” Monkeybicycle. 2009. Web.
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_______. The Words. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. Greenwich: Fawcett Publications, 1964.