Anne Germanacos
Labyrinth
D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths
Unkept promises, misread instructions, sacrifices not made, or made incorrectly—any of these can spark a myth. If a myth can be said to have a beginning at all.
Perhaps it was the wrong book to bring home. She read to them from D’Aulaires until her eyes closed. Isabelle took the book from her mother’s hands and continued reading to her brothers until they too fell asleep.
The next morning, Raymond and Jerome each declared he was most like Theseus, that the other was the Minotaur, or King Minos, at best. Isabelle, the only girl, was free to claim Ariadne as her own.
Black and White
Their bickering was incessant: “Theseus didn’t kill his father outright. It’s just that he forgot to do something.”
“He forgot to change the sails. Dumbshit, it’s almost the same as killing him.”
Isabelle butted in: “If Theseus hadn’t abandoned Ariadne on the island of Naxos, she would’ve remembered to tell him to change the sails. She held the thread; the fool abandoned her.”
“You’re the fool!” With glee, the boys united.
Writing Letters
Outside, the late fall sun was setting in the surrounding maples. Dark birds flew between the crowns of the leafless trees.
Inside, Isabelle wrote a thank-you note to her grandparents for the dinner they would eat the next night. Raymond drew with a pencil, mostly erasing noisily. Jerome sat in the corner where two windows came together, reading the book.
Their mother sat nearby embroidering letters in black thread on woven fabric. The children could see that the letters made up the words: Fog bathing the trees.
Right then, there was no fog but simply the kind of very crisp air that leads people to believe they’re seeing everything exactly as it is.
In the Forest
Isabelle said: “Mom, you don't love me if you won’t come and see the thickest tree on the land.”
It was beginning to rain; the two of them set off.
In the forest, Isabelle pointed things out to her mother: blackberries, an old logging trail, rabbit scat, deer tracks.
“One tree?” Her mother kept asking. “How are you going to find it? There are tens of thousands of trees!”
“You'll see.” They stopped talking and fell into an old rhythm, sang a few wordless notes, mimicking each other, almost a love song.
The tree’s girth was enormous. Trying to capture it between their outstretched arms, Francis guessed its circumference was greater than the arms of three adults, open and linked.
Back through the canopied forest, they were a quiet parade. Not a single raindrop touched either one.
Secrets
Daedalus is the secret to the labyrinth. Theseus, strong and brave, is merely the hero.
“Who would you want to marry? Theseus or Daedalus?”
When Isabelle answered “the Minotaur!” the boys laughed, and she ran away screaming, hiding her face.
Icaria
Everyone knows that excitement or hubris, or perhaps simple ecstasy got the best of Daedalus’s son, Icarus. Flying too close to the sun, the last we see of him is melted wax and feathers floating toward the Mediterranean island we’ll end up calling Icaria.
An island Francis visited once, before any of them had been born or desired.
Melted Wax
Between bites of after-school cinnamon toast, Jerome asked: “Shouldn’t Icarus have known to fly lower when he felt the sun against him like that? Or was it already too late?”
Raymond said: “But it was Daedalus’ fault that Icarus died! If he hadn’t made the wings, there wouldn’t have been any flying.”
He was still for a moment, his blond curls like chiseled spirals against his pearly skin. Then he leaned across the table toward his mother and said, “But maybe he was happy, even as he was falling, because he got to go higher than any other human being had ever gone.”
For a handful of minutes, she had a favorite.
Gortyn
In Gortyn, on the eastern part of the island of Crete,it’s been rumored for more than two thousand years that Daedalus built a hollow wooden cow for Pasiphae, Minos’ queen. So in love was she with a white bull sent from the sea that she climbed inside the wooden structure and became a cow.
We know the rest of the story: from inside the wooden cow, Pasiphae, King Minos’ wife and queen, was mounted by the white bull sent by Poseidon. The result? The poor Minotaur.
Grandma’s House
They wound their way through empty back roads. Sunlight through the trees made shadows against the car and their faces. The children were quiet. The road was almost a maze, but Francis knew it well.
As they arrived, Francis’ father sprayed the car with water from a hose, an old trick, and they all went inside, wet and ready for dinner. True to Isabelle’s reckoning, the food was delicious, set out on the wooden porch where they could look across the valley to mountains, giving way to fainter, almost blue mountains in the distance.
Isabelle had forgotten to bring her thank-you note, and didn’t remember until she found it on the round table in the kitchen at home. Before going upstairs to bed, she tore it into tiny pieces.
The phone rang in the middle of the night; Isabelle fell back asleep thinking of monsters.
In the morning, she knew she’d dreamt of something unusual. Hands, penis, eyes were recognizably human. The rest of it was furred and sable-colored. She guessed what they’d been doing was sex. And couldn’t stop remembering for the rest of the day.
Labyrinth or MazeTheir mother was intent: “We’re going to cut down saplings to make a labyrinth.”
“Labyrinth,” Jerome asked, “or maze?”
“No difference.”
First Maze
Was the first maze a mistake? A reinterpretation of what was simply circumstantial? The brain, fired up, can see pattern almost anywhere.
We don’t know if the first maze had its genesis in terror or playfulness. Apt to think it was the former, we’d like to hope it was the latter.
The girl was running from her brother. She needed a hiding place and found it in the thickest knot of trees. No one could find her.
Peeking out to see whether he’d followed her tracks, terror and play came together. She didn’t speak, didn’t move but felt him looking for her, heard his weight breaking fallen twigs. He was taller than she. His breath, when he eventually found her, was warm on her skin.
Etymology
A labrys is a double-headed axe. Shaped like waxing and waning moons, back-to-back.
There are variations on the myth that aren’t mentioned in D’Aulaires: the real conflict was between Pasiphae and Aphrodite. Pasiphae failed to propitiate Aphrodite, so the goddess burdened her with a monstrous lust. Satisfying it, she gave birth to a monster.
The immortal gods hold up an accurate mirror, their cravings hardly more monstrous than our own.
Isabelle ran ahead of the boys, over the crest of the hill and toward the front porch.
“Mom! Mom! If you leave out the space, ‘a maze’ becomes ‘amaze!’”
Her blond pigtails had fallen from where she’d pinned them on her head that morning. Her green eyes were bright.
Cutting Hair
Beyond the stretch of their mother’s voice, Jerome took the scissors to Isabelle’s hair. “Cut it all, every bit of it. Off!” The late afternoon sun was in her eyes. She closed them on the world.
When the job was done, she gathered the hair from the ground and went back inside.
“Mom, it’s my hair.”
“Was.” Is all her mother said.
Isabelle/Ariadne
Sometimes she felt like a monster, stuck in a dark place where no one could find her.
The monster drooped his fat ugly head against his chest and cried. She tried to be nice, but was eager to banish him. It came to her in a flash: no hero existed without a monster.
Isabelle’s Labyrinth
Isabelle traced the letters in a book with the tips of her fingers: an A, a luscious R. She'd always loved Y, arms outstretched, ecstatic. E provided shade, protection. Her hands spread across the pages.
When she was young, her mother had twisted wool into yarn while the boys played with sticks or lit fires. Standing near her brothers, she’d felt the three of them were knotted, like a clump of her mother’s thick blue wool.
The boys had always launched invasions against her. She’d needed her mother, sought her in the hair that fell from her bun, the drawers in her desk, her hands as she made a cake. Like a cat, Isabelle had licked batter from between her mother’s fingers.
The Labyrinth
Francis’ labyrinth, made of woven walls of saplings, was simpler than anything described in Graves or Ovid.
Once it was built, no one could resist.
All the neighbors tried it: the women thought it was like a chapel. Jerome said he swam through.
Everyone faced demons, tamed them around the next corner.
Freedom
To conquer the labyrinth is to capitulate to its secrecy.
Spending sunny hours amongst the labyrinth’s shadows, you realize the object of your seeking is the pretty lanes themselves and nothing else. You’re desperate to wander in the puzzle of green walls, their greenness almost an air, their pattern a song. You may find that you adore your confinement, you’ve never felt freer.
A labyrinth can be torture or delight, depending on the mind of the participant: captive or willing partner?
Monsters in Closets
“We don’t put our monsters in closets anymore, or in labyrinths. At least that’s what we like to believe.”
“Nonsense,” Francis replied, turning away from the saplings to show Zack how vehemently she disagreed. He’d turned up for dinner, out of the blue.
When they’d put the children to bed, he said: “A labyrinth? Oh, that's easy. It's you, Frannie. I never know what's going on in your head.”
Then she said: “We live our labyrinths until we die.”
Heroes
Theseus died on the island of Skyros, thrown to the sea by King Lycomedes, a man jealous of his guest’s fame.
His remains dwell in the sacred enclosure of the Theseum in Athens.
We love a hero but abhor his mistakes. Or is it that we love to abhor a hero’s mistakes? Our own, beside his, so paltry.
Maze Talk
I’ll walk around and around, inside these little doorways and windows, until I find you. But will you still be there waiting for me?
No windows, no doors. (Every corner a toilet.)
I got lost and used my cellphone to find him. I know it’s cheating.
It makes a game of being lost.
We’re all lost anyway, so what’s the difference?
A labyrinth of being. How can you know another person? I mean, how can you even know yourself?
I just like walking in and feeling lost. It’s comforting to know you’re lost inside someplace.
I’ve never minded walls.
If you were a maze, where would you end?
Thread
Pasiphae countered Minos’s perpetual infidelities with a spell: instead of seed, he discharged serpents, scorpions and millipedes that entered the woman and ate up her vital organs.
No wonder she fell in love with a bull.
The Unrealized Angle of You
Why would anyone make a labyrinth when life is so complicated and convoluted already?
Who runs this palace, anyway?
Was that a tear coming down the minotaur’s face? Or just sweat?
Mom, it’s a metaphor. Don’t you know what a metaphor is?
I’m still trying to complete the unrealized angle of you.
Who Rules the Palace?
“So we’re in agreement about this? A maze offers choices, a labyrinth but one route. Right?”
“Yes,” she said, not looking up from the dishes.
“Okay, so in our story, who’s Theseus? Who’s the Minotaur? Who’s our Ariadne? And what’s our thread?”
They turned, and turned again: Francis was the minotaur, or Ariadne. Zack was Theseus, Minos, or the Minotaur. Who was more human? Who a lopsided human beast?
Who ruled the palace? Minos? Theseus? Or Ariadne, with her thread? Daedalus, who invented the labyrinth? Or was it the Minotaur, everyone’s nightmare, caged, sad?
“Zack,” she said, “I’ll always be trying to walk the labyrinth of you.”
Note
Some early mosaic labyrinths had paths too narrow to actually walk. Is the purpose of a labyrinth merely decorative? Commemorative? Contemplative?
In the ClosetIsabelle crouched at the back of the low closet, smelling shoes, clothes, the detergent her mother used and the sap of the knotty boards. In the darkness of the closet, humping stuffed Damien, she got confused and thought she was outside where, for seconds, she passed close to the stars.
She came back to herself, sweaty beneath hanging dresses. She pushed Damien away; the thing was over. Opening the closet door, the bed, pillow, shelves and the many things looked at her as if holding their breath.
Glaucus
How did Glaucus get lost in the palace? And what did queens do in those days to lose track of their children? Graves suggests that Glaucus was chasing a mouse.
Perhaps that’s when he drowned in a jar of honey, head first. Polyeidus brought him back to life and endowed him with magical powers. Later, about to sail home to Argos from Crete, Polyeidus directed Glaucus to spit in his mouth. When he did, everything, all the magic, went back to its rightful place, Glaucus’ knowledge of divination was gone.
Daedalus
Talos invented the metal saw, the potter’s wheel and the compass, but it wasn’t only professional jealousy that fueled the murder. Daedalus killed the boy Talos because he slept with his own mother.
After pushing his twelve-year-old apprentice off the roof of Athene’s temple on the Acropolis and being banished for murder, Daedalus took refuge in Minos’ Knossos. Eventually he had to flee Knossos too, and invented wings to escape with. That’s when he lost his son, a boy falling through the sky. We can imagine only too well the desperate shouts between the falling boy and his still-flying father.
* * * *
Maze, knot, riddle, joke, poem, quicksand, marsh, plain. One steps onto any path with the desire to be conquered.
I fix a labyrinth in your mind; I plow one in your memory.
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