"Dancing With Mnemosyne"

    The night held no moon as she ran blindly through the forest.  She didn’t see the thing that followed but between the beats of her heart she heard his footsteps fall on the moss covered ground, thud, thud.  The branches cut into her bare arms and the blood flowed.  Silence surrounded her and fear drove her onward into the thick trees, solid and black in the night.  Her feet were bare except for the mud that caked between her toes, and her hair, wet with sweat flowing freely, whipped her face and back with each step.  She did not know where to go but continued on into the darkness.  Her pursuer was a threat, but not in a physical way; it was something more, something that made her soul curl up within her.  She had to hide, had to find a shelter.  The base of a cliff before her came quickly and she searched for a way up, a way to flee the pursuit.  She found a hand hold and began climbing.  Her naked body pressed into the cold, hard rock, and she bled as the crags cut into her hands and feet.  She couldn’t see him for it was the dark night, but she kept climbing, knowing he would come.  Reaching a plane that was level, she crawled up on the ledge exhausted and tried to find the wall to lean against.  There was none.  She entered the cave and began climbing, endless climbing yet she was going down, down into the depths of the earth.

         Abby awoke with a start, she was breathless and drenched in sweat.  The pillows from the couch were on the floor and so were her clothes.  She was disoriented but recognized this place as home.  She looked out the window and saw the sun leaving in the West.  The pink glow lit the room as she rubbed her eyes.  Leaning forward she reached for the cigarettes on the coffee table, feeling her body ache as if she had run a marathon. It was the second time this week.

“Well, what do you think?”

“I think you should do something with it.”

“It’s just a dream.”

“I think it means something.”

“Yeah, I think it means you are driving me nuts,” Abby said to herself as she stood and stretched her arms to the ceiling, falling forward palms to the floor to pull the tightness out of her hamstrings.  She walked to the shower and washed off the remnants of the dream with a long, hot one.

—

         The studio was dark except for Abby’s corner.  The heat from the standing lamps caused beads of sweat to form on her brow and arms.  The shadows caressed her as she tried to form in the clay the beauty and horror of her vision.  There was only silence within Abby’s mind - all other space was filled with the angry drums and cymbals of Rush. The floor vibrated through her bare feet and moved her heart with the rhythm of the night.

         “Mnemosyne” had been sucking the life force from Abby for two months solid, an irrational fascination born from an introduction during a graduate seminar on Mythological Symbols. Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, had copulated with Zeus, god of gods, for nine nights and given birth to nine daughters, the Muses of Inspiration.  It was a fascinating idea to Abby, that Power and Memory create Art.  She wanted more information, but the texts revealed very little except one little blurb about the mystery rites of Mnemosyne.

         Abby’s interest in all things created was born in youth when she found the safety of other worlds in reading.  She had been a quiet, pensive child with an awkwardness in verbalization that set up a lifetime of solitude as people would give up trying to involve her in their groups. Although as a child she could not put a name to it, her estranged social state was born also from the gaping hole in her self image of non-being. She had been adopted into a loving family, but even there she did not feel like a piece that fully fit anywhere.

         In the early years, her parents had sent her to shrinks in an attempt to stifle what they saw as a blooming darkness in their daughter.  She tried to be what everyone expected her to be, but there were things inside that did not jive with their idea of a normal, healthy little girl. After a fairly long and deep stint in religion which had sustained her life through high school, Abby had come to college terrified and enthused by the freedom to find herself.  She dove into her studies and tried to continue keeping the darkness at bay, but inevitably, the more she opened her mind to the world of letters, history and mythology, the more she questioned the very rationality of the rope she tethered herself with to the cross of religion.

         The duality within began to choke her as the world of ideas frayed her concept of life and meaning. She hired her own counselor for her sanity and their work outside of religious concepts had born much fruit.  Abby had been able to put a focus on what she wanted to do with her life - something with art.  A Major had been chosen.  But the deeper issues of secret self had been very slow to come to the table.  She kept those statements to herself, verbalized only in a silent inner dialogue.

         At 22, Abby had completed her first degree and remained at the school to continue her graduate studies.  She had few relationships. Outside of acquaintances with other students in study groups, the only person she really spoke to was Dr. Demeter, her counselor.  She had given up all friendships from her past due to philosophical differences.  She could not abide relations that perpetually lived with the delusion of god on the table.  At first, she was too torn by leaving that world behind and could not bear daily reminders of where she had been. The irrationality of it all, but what if she was wrong in not believing?  What if she really was being selfish and stupid in denying the existence of the invisible?  After a few years of rational thinking, the day to day questioning of right or wrong belief subsided, and she secured her faith on her own will to success in this life rather than some hope for a blissful eternity. Still, however much she denied or refused to address it, the doubts remained, remnants of the chains tethering her to the identity they said was hers to claim.  But that skin was too awkward, like shoes too big to fill, clumping around life trying to be quiet.

         Something in Mnemosyne’s description as a powerful, somewhat androgynous being, captured Abby’s imagination, sparking a connection in her own heart and giving her the image for this statue which would become her final graduate project.  Abby could not sleep, could not eat, for Mnemosyne was always calling for her hands, “Finish me, mold me, find me within this mass.  I long for you...hold me so that I can hold you.”  It was a sick kind of intriguing fear that allowed Abby to continue for nights on end in the studio alone, and yet not alone, for there were spirits laughing sometimes, a frightful kind of laugh that rang through the concrete room over the roar of Abby’s music.

         At first, Abby denied these noises with rationality.  It was just another imaginative episode. There was no other world. This is reality and these voices are simply obsession driven to madness.  Her attempts to deny all spiritual aspects of life closed the doorway to creation.  The image of Mnemosyne remained, but she was stifled from drawing her out of the clay, barren to the point of seeking direction from outside herself.  Dr. Demeter had said to play with it. Listen and play. “Don’t be so rigid Abby - maybe if you just let go, you’ll find a way to get what you see and feel.”

         In a fit of frustration with her physical exhaustion, Abby sat down on the stool before Mnemosyne.  The coldness of the room did not touch her as she sweltered under the lamps.  Her long, black hair flowed halfway down her back and a few tresses fell forward over her shoulder, bare except for the strap of her overalls.  The shadow she made to the right resembled that of the thinking man and to the left her figure merged with the shadow of Mnemosyne, still just a black form laying across the cold floor.

         Abby stared at this figure growing out of the huge base.  It was going to be horribly beautiful, mostly woman, but with strength in its form, like a man - a hardness and yet something quite feminine as well.  Abby wondered from where this vision had come.  The two months of restless naps between work and the hours spent in the birthing room prevented her from thinking very clearly.  All she knew was she had to create this image; she had to mold this form, every inch intimately with her own hands.

The love between and artist and her creation was something that Abby knew well. It was, perhaps, the only true passion she had ever known, but she had never been so incredibly obsessed with a piece before now. There was something imminent in this one, something special about creating Mnemosyne, and she longed to find out what it was.

         The smoke from her cigarette lingered in the air, creating a haze in her corner of the room.  Over the left shoulder of the emerging form, Abby thought she saw something move quickly into the shadows and then heard the laughter she had become accustomed to ignoring.  The CD player clicked off and in the silence Abby screamed, “Who are you?”  Into the non-existent face of Mnemosyne she yelled,” Who are you to bring such force into my world? Why do you haunt me so intensely?”

         Echoing across the vast studio, the enforced concrete walls rang her voice into the silence, into the void of her own identity. In that stillness she heard them giggling, she felt them laughing at her ignorance of the power she was forming with her own two hands.  Abby gave in and entertained Dr. Demeter’s advice.  She changed the CD; perhaps she could pacify these spirits with music of another kind.  She chose Enigma knowing their sound to calm her own unease in the empty moments of life.  She returned to the stool and took up another smoke.  Her hands were strong, the ligaments and muscles long and protruding over the frame of her bones.  Her fingers and arms were lean, but they were filled with strength from years of pulling and molding life into the lifeless.

         Her now 26 year old body was slender and worn with loss of sleep and nutrition.  Her face was hard with chewed lips and rigged jaw line, neither male nor female.  The  only distinguished characteristic she saw were intensely blue eyes.  In the light of the darkness they were like crystal wells sunk deep within the black circles that held them in her head.  Abby drew a long breath on her Camel as she leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees.  The music was taking its effect and her need for sleep drew her into the unconscious state of mind.

    Climbing, endless climbing, yet she was going down, down into the depths of the earth.  The moist soil oozed between her fingers as she moved forward into the darkness.  The jagged rocks allowing footholds as her body was drawn deeper into the core.  The heat of the center was cooled by the surrounding insulation of the earth, of the soil, but it was a suffocating journey.  The tunnel of her decent twisted and turned so only her soul could guide the way.  She knew the way, but not where she was going.  Her instinct drew her on in spite of the anxiety racking her body with tremors and retching.  The air was stagnant and stifling, restraining her movement, but she had to go on.  Another corner turned and she saw two eyes glowing gold in the darkness, but there was no form.

         She was suddenly surrounded by light and awoke to find herself lying at the base of her sculpture. The morning students had arrived for class and the studio was bustling with activity.  Abby moved away from Mnemosyne and stared at the form.  She noticed she was still trembling from the journey she had taken in the darkness as she reached for another smoke and tried to light it.  She had to leave, not only to get to work, but to get out of that state of mind.  Draping the form in a wet cloak, Abby prepared to go.  She put her tools in her cabinet, turned off the lamps, and went home.

---

         Abby supported herself with a job in the University library. It was menial work in an atmosphere she absolutely loved; rows upon rows and floors upon floors of words wrapped up and stacked up, centuries of ideas and worlds created.  She enjoyed the challenge of directing students to just the right text to enhance their learning or to support their argument.  She enjoyed the hours of being paid to walk the stacks, handling the texts and wishing she herself could read more and more.  It wasn’t much of an income, so she supplemented with editing and research for other students.

         Two afternoons a week she walked across the campus and into town for her appointment with Dr. Demeter.  Her office was an old colonial house and their meeting room was in the library with its dark wood paneling and well worn leather chairs.  Dr. D. was more like a paid friend, and though Abby knew she leaned too heavily on this relationship, she couldn’t bring herself to give it up after these past five years.  Dr. D. was a slim woman whose intellect challenged Abby, but never too much.  She would ask the leading questions, but Abby wouldn’t always be led and the therapy aspect of their relationship would stagnate until Abby gave up the facade of strength and gave into the leading.

---

         Three years before, Dr. D. had finally gotten Abby to address the mother issue in an effort to get her to pin down an identity for herself.  After all the years of religious psychologists telling her these desires and this image were caused by a malformed relationship with her mother, Abby refused to address the issue in any way and thus remained without the pleasures of love or emotional contact with the world around her.  She stopped speaking about her secret desires as they were only wrong ideas.  She chose not to be anything - neither male nor female, neither hetero nor homo.  She chose asexual androgyny and closed herself to gender issues and any emotion involved in that realm.  But it was a lonely road and Dr. D. kept pointing that reality out.

         “I have my art and books,” she coped.

         “Well, if that’s all you need...” Dr. D. would say leaving it open for Abby to decide if that road were enough for life fulfillment.

         Abby knew deep down something was missing and it was standing in the way of her total happiness in life.  She could keep telling herself an artist’s life is a lonely one or she could be brave and address the possibilities of something else. She finally stopped fighting about talking about it.  Dr. Demeter had helped her admit that her mother was just a human being passing along what she knew as truth, living the life she was taught to live.  Abby would be doing the same thing if that were close enough to her own truth to claim.  But it was not.

         Many hours, many stops and starts, many break downs and breakthroughs later,  Abby finally spoke her secret truth to Dr. D. “I don’t know what I am.  I have a girl’s body, sort of, but I feel like I should be a man - I’m hard and rational like that, no emotion and yet when I allow myself to go there, to feel that identity in emotion I want the warmth of a woman, but to feel that identity in a sexual way, it is with another man I find pleasure. And when I entertain any thoughts or desires in my head, I hear nothing but the religious and social world bearing down on me and I can’t go there. So I don’t know what I am, who I am. I just don’t think about it as much as I can.”

         It was difficult for Abby to make that statement, to speak those words.  In so many ways she felt like she was relinquishing control of the reins of a wild horse.  After all of those years repressing gender concepts and holding this dialog only in her head, the issue was now on the table and Abby had no idea whether to eat her words or starve in the silence of never speaking them again.  Dr. D. suggested the unthinkable as a starting place for addressing the feast, “Have you ever considered looking for your biological mother?”

         Two years passed before Abby was ready to take such a step.  There had been much to consider; too many people to be hurt by taking that step- her parents, the woman who gave her life and herself if a rejection was found at the end of that journey.  She studied harder to flee the guilt rising in her heart and pondered deeper to find the courage to step out into that unknown darkness.  The process had been set in motion, and Abby now waited for a word from the agency about this missing woman in her life.  She did not think this would be the end all, be all healing of her identity, but thought it might be a genesis.

---

         One afternoon about a year ago Abby left work and headed to Dr. D’s with nerves all a flutter. She had been dry heaving in the bathroom from the stress of reading the acceptance letter.  Her biological mother was willing to meet her; this should be a good thing and yet she was terrified.

         A million doubts came pouring out that day. “What have I done?” “What if she doesn’t like me?” “What if she is religious and I can’t be me?”
Spiraling anxiety left her a child weeping in fear on Dr. D’s couch of comfort.  She hated this weakness but could not control it.

         “Listen to yourself, Abby. These are the issues in your psyche we have been trying to deal with and so many of them resolve here in this brave action of meeting her.  You can do this.”

---

         Their initial meeting was an overwhelming experience; anxiety and a cotton mouth checked by the embrace of a deeply known stranger, hours of talking, bottles of wine sipping as individual histories unfolded and fused at the breakfast room table. Weeks and months followed with letters upon letters shared, revealing a love and openness growing between them.

         They were so similar and yet so different, as if their individual lives revealed the two most extreme roads possibly taken by children raised in the very same household, by the same non-demonstrative mother.  Abby had taken the ruled road, but her mom was a free spirit on a path through the woods; yet the vacancy in both their hearts remained.

---

         After a long work day with mind occupied by these memories and that dream, Abby walked her way to Dr. D’s office for one last visit before going to see her mom again.

         “I had that dream again - you know the one where I’m in the tunnel being chased by him,” she said as she flopped down in the chair and threw her legs over the arm. “I keep telling myself it’s just a dream, but that inner dialog keeps saying it’s something else.”

         “What does your other self think it is?” Dr. D. asked in her prodding way.

         “I think it’s becoming something I want to tell her.  I think I feel like I can trust her with this part of me.  I mean, we’ve kind of touched on it anyway and she may already know it.  I see so much of me in her; she’s strong and hard like that, but she’s beautiful too. But in the dream I’m still running from that part of me so I don’t know.”

         “I bet she can take it Abby.”

         “But we don’t DO emotions. I mean, I can feel it.  There is the underlying current in all of our letters ands it’s like fire when we are together, like flying so high.  We don’t ever TALK about it, but I think I’m falling in love with her.”

         “Maybe it’s time you tell her, maybe speaking the truth will put him right within you, so you won’t confuse desire with love.”

         “I’m scared,” Abby admitted. “What if she freaks out? What if I totally lose control?”

         “You won’t know until you try it.  What have you got to lose?”

         “Her.”

---

         
         Abby made the drive to her mom’s house; they had a wonderful weekend of being together.  They went to the zoo and shared their love of animals.  On her final night there, they stayed up late, drinking wine and talking about everything under the sun.  The conversation turned serious and they approached the breaking point in their inebriation.  Defenses down, emotions high, they discussed their need for one another.  They sat in her bed with only the moon lighting the room.

         The need rising in her heart, overtook her mind.  “Can I hold onto you?” Abby asked embarrassed even in drunkenness by the desperate longing in the words that just came out of her mouth.

         With only the release of the breath she had been holding since they met, her mom moved closer and Abby grabbed her in a hug so fierce it would choke the life out of a bear. “O, the tears are coming,” she thought as she held her breath to keep them at bay and buried her face into her mother’s breast.

         She wrapped her arms around Abby with the same hunger and as her breathing became evident sobs she held her even closer, and the two became one again in the moonlit night.  Two lifetimes of longing merging in the darkness, two million tears of need falling and wetting the clothes and sheets, two souls grasping each other, healing the past separation and so grateful for the present moment of fusion.

         The hours of the night passed by as they clung to each other, finally embracing the most peaceful sleep of mother and daughter side by side, their tears subsiding and their breathing slowing into one calming rhythm, their hearts slowing to the same pace once again.

—

         Climbing, endless climbing, yet she was going down, down into the depths of the earth.  The tunnel turned once more into a tight little cave, but it was warm and comfortable here.  The earth around her was breathing, swelling and shrinking in synch with her own rasping breath.  She began to feel safe from her pursuer and her breath calmed, and the cave calmed with her.  She saw two eyes glowing gold in the darkness and a form emerged into the cave, but she had no where to run or reason to go.  It was him, the him of herself and he just wanted to lie in this warm darkness with her.  She reached out and took his trembling hand and they laid down together in the warm, breathing cave. They slept, and as the night went on, they merged into one body, one form.

—

         Abby awoke with a start.  Her head was fuzzy and she was being held down by a leg and an arm over her back.  She realized it was just the dream again and she was still here in her mother’s arms.  She snuggled closer, reveling in the reality that they had broken through the barrier of silent fear.

         Neither of them spoke about the night before that following morning.  Neither of them could verbalize their emotions in sobriety.  Neither wanted to part ways again, but the reality of their individual lives called and they had to answer. As Abby drove home she tried to recall and relive every detail, every touch and the freedom that every tear had brought.  She never wanted to forget that feeling, the feeling of being that loved.  Her mind slipped as the miles passed and in her vision she saw the face of Mnemosyne. She drove straight to the studio.

—

         She turned on the lights of her standing lamps and turned up the stereo to Sarah McLaughlin’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. She pulled back the wet cloak of the massive form.  Her drive was on now to complete this obsessive work.  Her vision was clear, her heart was free, and she began pulling away the layers of clay, dancing around the form in her bare feet.

         She thought about the night before and the dreams that had driven her sleep through this process of creation. She imagined the unknown of Mnemosyne’s Mystery Rites and she knew that had something to do with the process of becoming.  She realized her wholeness with the him in her and accepted it as the way things should be.  She felt her mother’s arms around her as she formed the body of Mnemosyne and she sighed with relief.  She evoked that special place of breathing earth and found such comfort there.

         All night Abby played with her vision and in the morning when the sun came across the room from the high studio windows, she saw the completion of her creation.  Amazed at what had become of her creation, she walked around the base of the form and wrapped her arms around her body as she finally stood face to face with herself.