Reply To: To the The Female God of the Labyrinth,” with Joanna Gardner, Ph.D.”
Dear Joanna: I just read your powerful story about your husband’s ordeal, which you by his side, did to. The weave you create is miraculous. You ARE Ariadne weaving the two universes into a gripping wholeness. What I like most about your story is how you underscore that myths are present all the time if we have the eyes and ears to sense their engulfing presence. Some years ago, when I was very ill from a bacteria infection that required more than one surgery, then a complete redo of an earlier hip replacement, I realized in healing that I had to write about it from a mythological perspective, which I did. No question that it helped me in my return to the ordinary, which I cherish now more than ever.
One final point–In Reading The Craft of Zeus: Myths of Weaving and Fabric, by John Scheid and Jesper Svenbro, that ancients traced the origin of story to the spider’s webbing and built narratives off of this structure–plots not being linear but more in the form of a webbing. So Ariadne may well be, along with Athena, the grand weaver, the figure that returns us to the origin of stories themselves.
Just to share that. Thank you for a beautiful story and I pray that your husband continues to enjoy good heath, and you with him
Dennis Patrick Slattery