One Upon a Myth
in Montana

Creative nonfiction
by Karen M. Wilcox

How can I experience winter, my own private desolation, in the midst of all this green and budding life? I know three people getting married, and I experience my profound nothingness as a mythical hero/husband leaves me stranded on an island of my own making, as I weep, begging the man, enticing the man with shirts soaked in the very fluids of life—blood and semen, which only invoke death—and this marriage is flayed alive before my eyes, reduced to the ritual ashes of prayers burned on sixty-pound paper in the flame of a vanilla-scented candle. “Change sucks, Mom!” my four-year-old colt cries.

I guess I shouldn’t feel bad. Calypso didn’t fare any better than I, or Circe. Poor Medea still wanted Jason even if he never cleaned up his own dog’s poop, washed a dish, or stayed home with the child of his own seed, conceived in an unconscious moment of a Dionysian transit when the sun and Aphrodite were in bed.

How did it all begin? An Italian woman, a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter went on a blind date with an eccentric young man in the Air Force, who later had a mid-life crisis and thought the best thing he could give the world was ten good kids, and the second child, who should have been a boy, had a Leo rising at twenty-seven degrees in her astrology chart and a very loud voice.

My mom canned vegetables and applesauce and jams and jellies every fall. She made meatloaf every Wednesday night for dinner with the same lumpy mashed potatoes, and always gave my dad a foot massage at the end of a long day at work and read to him as he soaked in the tub at night. But that was early in their marriage. Now, quite often they live in separate parts of the house, and she complains of having to still fix him dinner thirty-five years later, as she, in her alcohol-induced stupor, smacks a frozen steak on the grill. The bloom is off the romance.

Adam, my lost love, said he had some reasons for deserting me: I am plump, but I like being plump; I don’t fish, but I don’t want to fish; I’m not a team player. But in the end, these things free me. That magazine advertisement proclaimed: “Things of quality have no fear of time,” but it spoke of a Maytag washing machine.

Ariadne laments, “I have grown used to loving the same man forever,” or at least that’s what Roberto Calasso says in his revealing book, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. Five years ago, before I met Adam, I had figured out that each man I dated was really the same man—only in different stages of development. Some were cruel; some were careless; some were depressed or oblivious; but I began to see the pattern of men as unreachable, as icons, as blank screens for my own mythic projections of men.

I am born again out of this hull, the corpse of a marriage; both Adam and I, as well as our mythic child have a chance to build a new Troy upon the ruins of the old, a chance to raise Atlantis out of the sea, to resurrect the true self from hiding, from storage, from slumber. Something must always die so that something else may have a space to live.

Mourning is a gift, a catharsis, an impetus to continue this process of metamorphosis rather than simply throwing in the towel. Dionysus, who, as Calasso says, “arrives unexpected, and possesses,” is the planet Neptune in the psychology of astrology, dissolving any and all boundaries, tempting with strong drink, with drugs, with dreams, with fantasy, reminding mortals that reality is not real, that it all rests in the perception of the beholder, enticing us into the beds of men who will ultimately betray us as women, who will seek out every vulnerability, exposing the soft, sweet underbelly to the cruel world for purposes of re-identification, for reconstruction.

Neptune is really Dionysus, the loosener, the reducer, the enlightener. In his presence, women forget their strength, and men melt, falling in love with pictures of women they never really knew—Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Lauren Bacall, Maureen O’Hara, Sophia Loren, Princess Diana—surrendering to an image of a woman who could hold them, envelope them, release them, nurture them, feed them, love them unconditionally.

We are, indeed, still affected by the Divine, as Calasso suggests, subject to the “gusting violence, an amorous persecution, a goad of obsession,” even when we no longer seek it out on our own. This translates into astrology, how the whims of the transiting gods, bearing gifts and glyphs of pain and growth, suffering and death, joy and mastery, affect us. And these planets circle daily from the watchful space of the sky.

So how did it all begin? It began with a saucy but lonely waitress who wasn’t supposed to work that day and a young man who was not going to go to the Bungalow Drug for a huckleberry sundae at five-thirty in the afternoon of June 8th, 1994, in Bozeman, Montana. This same young man, after paying the waitress, said, “What would a lady such as yourself say if a gentleman such as myself asked you out to dinner?” Her jaw dropped; she said, “Yes,” and so began the litany of the next five years.

When I met Adam, I had just promised myself to stop flirting with men, sleeping with men for no good reason. Of course, I had been working on a list. Beware of lists; beware of asking for what you think you want or need, because perhaps you don’t need it and won’t want it when you get it. But this list I had been working on for three years was full of meaningful necessities for some man who would somehow become a god. Only I got Dionysus, a man who has the potential to be spiritual, but who fritters it all away in the smoke, Dionysian tobacco, green buds, or sometimes purple, and always pungent like the smell of patchouli. But this was one of his rituals—to inhale this smoke, to be loosened so that everything happening in his surroundings would not grate on his fine nerves like fingernails down a chalkboard.

He is a lost myth, and I wanted to be his savior. I wanted to save him from himself. I became like Ariadne, loving the same man forever; like Medea, traded in for another woman by Jason, not because he loved the new wench any better, but because she would be glued to his hip and share his rituals of smoking illicit substances and fishing until the dark tide returned and the neon lights of the bars beckoned with sirens of beer and pool, until the hours have been squandered on pleasures of the flesh.

But when I met Adam, I didn’t know how to say “No.” I had no experience with that word, so when he asked me out to dinner, I said, “Yes.” And our son was conceived two weeks after we met because I could not say, “No.” I did not know that from the moment I met him, I was already a displaced myth.

As with the epic form, let me begin in the midst of things, so that I tell only one story. The Iliad did not begin with Leda and the Swan, nor even with Paris and the apple; so, then, in my epic with Adam, I would begin in the midst of trauma, all the while casting my eye back to the soil of our respective nativities. I would not begin where we met at the Bungalow Drug on that Wednesday, nor on the fateful day in August when we married with too many harsh aspects between the planets of love and those of obligation and strife, when he sobbed as if his world had ended, “This is the only wedding day I’ll ever have, and you’ve ruined it with your whiny nephew complaining about the cold in the shadow of the mountain. I couldn’t even hear the preacher at my own wedding, and I wanted to watch the sun rise over the mountain as we said our vows.”

In fact, my Adam, this man I shared my bed with, became, in the minds and eyes of the observers, the friends and relatives, the ghastly minotaur, the monstrous offspring of the ill-advised union of a Southern Baptist virgin and a sacrilegious tyrant. So, what, exactly, does one do when one realizes that one has married the Minotaur? Or, say, when one discovers herself as Psyche dripping the candle tallow upon the sleeping face of her lover to find he has been hideously transformed into a bear? Then you scream and run and ruin the structure of the mystery, because, as I said before, the mystery is necessary.

If I am going to turn into a serpent in the bath every night, as A.S. Byatt describes in her novel Possession, I will probably do it behind a locked door. But always with the injunctions Stay out! Don’t look! Don’t unlock the door of the locked room! It is the curiosity that eventually killed the proverbial cat and Bluebeard’s wife. Our desire to find out who, what, where, when, and why is often our undoing. The mystery should be one of never getting to see the god or goddess face to face, because if we do, we are burned alive.

Meanwhile, in Great Falls, Montana, some babies cry, some kids play, and some moms pull their hair out. I don’t know why I come home into this middle-class chaos, this strange place of suspended animation where none of us have really completed college; none of us, save one, have created successful marriages; none of us have held successful jobs. This never quite knowing what you want or where you want to go or who you are or what you could possibly do with your life is my family. Even the myth of my family feels displaced, misplaced, unidentified.

Can we change the dominant myths, the predominant rituals of our lives, like this coming home when things fall apart only to find that things are always worse at home? Or will we stay locked in this never-ending cycle of bearing children without fathers to love them or raise them? And so, every year, one or two sisters get pregnant, and one or two babies come into this small city with loving, shrieking mothers who are willful and stubborn, sad and stressed out, whose period of renewal never seems to come, or at least if it does come, the ritual and celebratory marriage of the king and queen is reduced to one night in a bed with wrinkled sheets before the man leaves to impregnate many more women until he learns to use a condom.

I generally engage in a ritual with my dad whenever I come to Great Falls. We go listen to music, country music, at the temple of Ra, the sun god of Egypt, but really it is the J-T Roadhouse, where the Dionysian beverages are served liberally and expensively, where each initiate wears a masque—showing only the side of them that is sexy, smart, funny, handsome, or beautiful, and, perhaps most important of all, available. This is a place in which the women become priestesses, offering their bodies in the dark corners of the altar as an oblation. The men accept somewhat gratefully and with great alacrity. This ritual is prevalent most everywhere in current society, only we have forgotten the myth behind it, behind this repetitive activity.

Will I be like Io and betray my past, my family, my class, to become my present or future? We clothe ourselves in the withered remains of dragons we have slain, of selves betrayed. Calasso proclaims that “as a civilizing gesture, women’s betrayal is no less effective than men’s monster slaying.” Ah-ha! Theophany—from grief to joy, from chaos to cosmos, and always caused by a woman. Gaia, you go girl! Calasso says, “The woman’s betrayal complements and concludes the hero’s work.”

My betrayal of Adam, making him look like a monster, even though I don’t necessarily think he is one, helps to complete the story. Take, for example, my bitter, gall-laden and acidic comments while Adam, Emily, myself, and our son, as well as the dogs—his and hers—went up to Hyalite Canyon for a bizarre episode of let-the-child-spend-time-with-both-his-parents-and-the-new-girlfriend: “Having a penis is like having a dog—it’s something that runs around and gets you in trouble over which you have no control.” Adam replied: “I can control it.” But I know he doesn’t particularly like the smell of sweat or women with hairy armpits, and now he dates a woman who doesn’t use deodorant or shave. How do these two things fit?

Adam, this man I don’t know anymore, called me on the phone the other day. “We both made this decision, right? I mean you were shriveling up in front of my very eyes, turning into dust. I had to leave you to save you from myself.” He confided later that he and Emily hadn’t immediately consummated their relationship due to stress and sadness—on his part, not hers.

I am drawn to light as cliched moths toward the flame, and to the desperate, blissful silence of beauty and space, wherein one’s inner thoughts, like haloes diffused, magnetize all good and necessary things, persons, events, life. I want so much to know who I am, what I am here to do, what beautiful and burdensome responsibility I balance across the breadth of my mythic back, as Atlas carried the world. Perhaps, though, there is danger in the knowing, inevitable sorrow in the knowing, but I hope I do not delude myself with hubris.

Last night, I lay in bed trying to fall asleep, trying to see in the dark corridors of my mind which way I ought to go, what mythic adventure I must embark on next. Do I go back to my roots, my family in Great Falls—for ultimately I have not betrayed as completely as Ariadne or even Medea those who share my DNA—to hold other women’s children, to mitigate between screaming mothers, who are sometimes calm and happy when their children infrequently sleep, to go out with my lonely, injured father, a blinded see-er sitting in his Lazy Boy recliner playing a continuous, unconscious game of solitaire in front of the TV?

How, exactly, did I become like Calypso—desperate to hear the heavy tread of masculine feet upon her island, desperate to keep Odysseus once he arrived, chained like some love slave she would not willingly release, wrapped in silken locks of hair? He could not escape although he tried each night, cried each night. In spite of himself, his body betrayed his heart, his true love—freedom and fishes and some Penelope with sun and Mercury conjunct his planets in Pisces who would understand him without words, without explanation. And yet each night his body would rise as the moon to the occasion, to the temptation at hand, until Hermes would come and free him, and Calypso would wail and curse her fate, would lament her aloneness again.

Why do all the myths read like soap operas, or why, rather, do all soap operas, trashy dime-store novels, and pop-culture movies read like myths? Indiscriminate love, sex, betrayal, reunion, communion, tragedy—again and again, around and around in the catacombs we go in search of the Holy Grail.

All my life, Libra girl that I am, I abandoned friends, family, and service in desperate Calypso-like attempts to snag a husband, a significant other who would fulfill all my needs, be everything I ever needed. Yet now with the fall of Troy—with the palpable loss of my Golden Age hero, in the absence of the mythical husband, who fell short and paddled away as Odysseus did—I find my comfort in the company of friends, in the sticky kisses of my child, in the pride of a project well-completed, paper well-written, a song well-sung, a meal well-cooked and consumed. And even in a bed slept in alone, dreams still arrive through the mists in Panavision, Technicolor, surround-sound, for which I’m grateful.

As Michael Sexton, my mythology professor in Bozeman, once said, all the stories of our lives come from entering into the world of myth, risk, and hazard. I took a risk when I dated Adam, when I had my son rather than having an abortion, when Adam and I married rather than going our separate ways. Without these risks, I would have had no stories to tell you. At this poignant juncture, the goddess of Consequence leaves . . . indifferent, letting drop outdated obligations as Zeus in the guise of a swan dropping Leda, engendering in the very loins of the end . . . a new beginning.

Copyright © 2008 by Karen M. Wilcox