musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

A Once for Now


Don’t you just love myth? Not myth as in magical legends, or purposeful deceptions, you understand, but myth as an explanation of origin, an explanation of values, and as a search for the why and how of cultural identity. Myth is the story of who we think we are, and of the place from whence we think we came. Myth is what is often explored in the metaphors of poetry.

It’s asking a lot from a myth I suppose, but like ink in a blotter, it manages to expand if you’re patient. On its surface it is an interesting pattern, but the Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach intuited that in its deeper levels, it might contain an otherwise hidden message for the observer.

Think, for example, of Homer’s Odyssey, the epic about the Greek hero Odysseus and his adventures during his wandering journey home from Troy to Greece after the end of the Trojan war. Odysseus, of course is famous for his supposed invention of the Trojan horse, but his lengthy subsequent journey can also be read as a metaphor of our own journey through life with its tragedies and triumphs, surprises and disappointments. Some things are only visible through examples, through parables which illustrate the point -but also indirectly, through metaphors.

I think I was first captured by the romance of myth by the American professor Joseph Campbell’s book the Hero with a Thousand Faces, and, of course, his much later famous interview with Bill Moyers on PBS which led to the publication of its transcript as The Power of Myth. Perhaps it was this that helped me to see many of the otherwise implausible ancient legends as myths; as ways of understanding why things are the way they are; as ways of linking a society to its historical development.

I am a partial colour-synesthete -for numbers primarily, although some letters are also tinted. I assume that is the reason some words are hued for me, albeit mostly with the feel of colours. The affected ones have a different texture, and they are usually the ones that fascinate me; myth is one such word: it has a pale green feel to it.

Another, and perhaps one of the most appealing words of this type, is labyrinth. I have always felt there was more to it than just a maze with a monster -the Minotaur- at its center. It felt different, sitting as it did in my head in a pale olive wreath.

There is something about the word ‘labyrinth’ that enchants me -something that its synonym ‘maze’ fails to do. I thought I’d look into it to see if I was on to something.

It was then that I stumbled across an essay by James McConnachie that seemed to possess some of the magic I felt: https://aeon.co/essays/how-walking-a-labyrinth-can-trace-a-route-to-self-knowledge

Both ‘labyrinth’ and ‘myth’ share a similar shade of colour for me -a coincidence, or something more profound, more mysterious? A bit of a stretch, perhaps, but I am attracted to serendipity (a cream-coloured word, however).

The author talks about walking the unicursal (one path, no choices) labyrinth near his home in the south of England on the day of his wedding. It was really just a winding path in a meadow, but he felt the need to walk it on that auspicious day. For him, it was a metaphor, requiring a myth to imbue it with meaning.

The original labyrinth -the one in Crete with the Minotaur- is rife with myth. Minos, the king of Crete, ‘demanded a tribute from the city of Athens in the form of seven young men and seven women. They would be imprisoned inside the multicursal Labyrinth created by Minos’ brilliant architect Daedalus, and there sacrificed to the Minotaur, a monstrous creature born of the unnatural union between Minos’ wife and a white bull.

‘Theseus gets himself chosen among the Athenians and, on arrival in Crete, seduces Minos’ daughter, Ariadne. She secretly arms him and slips him a ‘clew’ of thread’. Theseus kills the Minotaur, escapes the Labyrinth, runs off with Ariadne.’ Of course, myths hint at deeper truths about ourselves: Theseus abandons Ariadne and then, ‘upon homecoming, forgets to change the colour of the sails on his ship to alert his father that he had survived, and so the old man, thinking his son is dead, throws himself himself in the sea.’ A rather long and complicated story, I’m afraid -but so are the journeys through our own lives…

There seems to be a problem substantiating whether or not the labyrinth was actually a historical item. The word labrys in Greek apparently means ‘double-headed axe’- but despite the fact it has (perhaps) a similar etymology, the word labrys stirs no hint of colour in my head.

But the Cretan labyrinth was multicursal -hence the need for Ariadne’s ball of yarn given to Theseus to help him find the way out. It was an error-prone journey, otherwise -much like Life itself. With nothing to guide one on the right path, one risks getting lost -or worse, making it to the end (the center), only to find it is empty. No Minotaur, just Death.

Only the journey is important, and Ariadne’s thread is of limited use, save perhaps a way to recoup some mistakes and start again on another path. In a way then, the labyrinth may be a learning exercise; as the labyrinth scholar Hermann Kern once said, ‘In the labyrinth you don’t lose yourself. You find yourself.’

Maybe in real life, we become our own Ariadne, our own therapist. Or, as psychotherapist Carl Jung believed, a patient’s symptoms offered an ‘Ariadne thread’ that would guide the analyst.

But digging too deeply into the word ‘labyrinth’, destroys something; the colour of it fades in the stirring, like the reflections in a forest pond are disturbed by too much wind. Some words are better merely pondered over, like art in a gallery, like a glimpse of the setting sun seen briefly through parting clouds.

Some things are best left as mysteries, unsolved; some things, their colours left untouched…

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gozzter

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