If the Minotaur Was Free
In a Forest Somewhere
A beetle walks along a log covered with many seasons of leaves. His stride is stiff but purposefully on the crinkled cushion. The low sun glints its shield-like wings. In much the same way I sipped a glass of vodka with a spoon in my hand as I ate my only meal of the day: finishing off a jar of peanut butter in a windowless kitchen. I was 18-years-old. A half peeled banana lay on the table and music played from my headphones and I danced like something was frozen in my extremities. My three other roommates slept in their own rooms.
It had been days since I had carried a conversation with anyone but the children I babysat. Somewhere inside myself I was throwing crumbs at a famished beast, its anger wide enough to cover my life. The bit of freedom illustrated in the carnage of the kitchen in a world of control was enough to hold me right at one place. Like the hard elytra of bug wings, I let nothing in and nothing out, ready for battle at any moment and steadily I kept walking over a frozen ground in the giant expanse of a forest. The truth is that I was looking for something, someone who recognized me, someone to see beneath my well-layered defenses.
The first Airbnb: How to ditch a writing conference on the first day
Twelve years later the world teetered at the brink of a global pandemic. Right there, before the chaos and myriad vague predictions of the future, a couple of my comrades and I were funded by our writing program to go to a conference in San Miguel de Allende in the Guanajuato region of Mexico. We were drawn to the conference initially because the writer, Valeria Luiselli, was slated to speak. The prospect of an oasis from February in New York City, a place to learn about new plants and hills and air, writing - and Valeria seemed almost too good to be true.
On account of last minute scheduling, we booked two places to stay in four nights. The first Airbnb was a pink cockeye house that appeared thin as a needle as we approached, only to expand out like a magenta balloon at the Y turn. The last night we slept there I dreamt of a woman rising out of rivers of blood and limbs in the street.
San Miguel de Allende was granted as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its preserved Spanish Colonial architecture. Narrow cobblestone streets grid the hill marked by colorful adobe buildings. Water fountains with peculiar faces and fish adorn each block. The center blooms with a sand and pink church casting sunset colors over a snake of arcades and perfect button trees. When we began our walk on the first morning of the conference from the southern edge of the city, vestigial colonialism was up and swinging.
Nearing the center, an outpouring of - if I could guess - white west coast hippies, accumulated in the street. It was as if a bunch of Pacific Northwest settlers had fallen asleep in a cold mountain cavity and woken up in their heaven: Mexico, where it was warm and beautiful, cheap, and rustic. In a way that’s exactly what happened, only they woke up here in the 70’s during the Vietnam War and never returned. Arid years drew water from their pores and they became dry, relieved and happy faces wrinkled into tired endless smiles, and the new commerce shriveled into millions of tourist dimples in their wake. The feel was that of a neverland. The joy was tired, as those lost boys who have held onto childhood too long. Along the cobblestone streets are pastel windmills of wrought iron reaching from the shop doors. Thousands of prints of Frida Kahlo portraits explode against walls. Antique stores feature elaborately designed unhinged doors or Michaels over dragons carved on sandy wood. San Miguel, the one who exiled the devil dragon from heaven. All these disassembled pieces, these elusive replicas are nothing but tchotchkes to fill a void.
Of course, colonization started long before the influx of U.S. boomers. With a particularly lasting violence, the conquistadors would forever change and disrupt the fluctuations which already existed. They hammered a dream into the landscape. M. Nourbese Philip, at a reading I attended virtually, evoked the Mexican poet and diplomat, Octavio Paz. He described the dream machine of the utopian vision of the “new world” that European empires imagined. He said that all who live in the Americas are grappling with who they are in relation to the land: the European being projectiles into a future, ripped from their past, the African, taken captive, meant to be fixed in the constant present. And, now I speculate, the native peoples only ghosts and dreams: disappeared from time, and weeds in the garden of empire.
San Miguel de Allende was established as a haven for artists in 1938 when the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros opened an Escuela des Artes. In 1951 the Instituto Allende opened in partnership with an American PR person Stirling Dickinson, former Guanajuato governor Enrique Fernández Martínez, and Nell Harris, Fernandez’ wife. The institute then became legitimate in the eyes of American fine arts universities and the US connection cemented. Now Sotheby’s owns most of the buildings in the city. Now the colonizers want to write their memoirs.
Like so many foreigners before us, my classmates and I were initially surprised at the ease with which the landscape appeared, the weather warm and welcoming, the prices low and people appeared kind and open. Like so many before us, we were living the colonizing myth with the same optimism: What magic to find a conference where the weather was warm and a writer we so admired was going to speak? How many Europeans - and then North Americans, repeatedly scoured the land for treasure in the same way, with the impression that fortune would just appear for them shimmering at their very feet.
As we approached the conference’s hotel, buildings became gutted to make stark modern coffee shops. The small streets loping up the hill looked like a leisure magazine as hyper fancy boutique stores blazed napkins of the same sacred heart flame, formulaic floral arrangements with the beaks of dahlias and sunflowers pecked the windows. There are places in this world that are facades. If you have traveled, chances are you have seen them. To invoke Susan Sontag, to be a tourist and take photographs is a way of refusing the experience of being there. Some place are upheld for the sake of the photograph they will make, so when you walk through them it is as if you are walking through an emptiness. Through the disorienting relationship of being abroad the photographer and that which they find “other” is worthy of taking in the colonizer’s imagination. Places are not sets for a smiling head to bob in the middle of. Even if you have been doing it for twenty years on the same street corner.
The hotel descended into a lobby cooing with the women conference organizers. Soon we would deem the conference a “cruise ship” on account of these white women, and the small ostentation of male poets in bolo ties. Many of them also lived in San Miguel. In the flurry of brightly colored scalloped flags we found ourselves easily the youngest people in attendance besides a Mexican-American woman. She was in my workshop about supernatural writing. Here, we, the living, invoked the dead and contemplated how they manifest in every day life. Are they in the crunch of my teeth at night? No, they are somewhere outside of ourselves. They can’t use our bodies as vehicles, can they? She described how close the dead are in Mexican culture, while the white Americans described profound grief and fear tied up lonely in their hearts about the beloved dead. Some in the workshop were older and looking to write about dear people in their life who passed. Of all the workshops, this felt the safest, it felt closest to the act of writing, which so often feels like the act of connecting impossible things.
One older man who looked exactly like Colonel Sanders led a workshop called “The Sentence '' where he talked only about his own books that no one in the class had read. We were asked to read his sentences over and over again, tweaking them, but their voice remained the same like a long teeth masticating the letters, mashing them in every structural formation, yet not once changing their dull idea. There are only so many ways to say one thing before the concept loses its meaning altogether. He didn’t seem to understand that the sentence was not about him. Can the woman next to me write her sentence, please? By the end of the class I was fuming at having spent money for that narcissism - even if it was the program’s money in the end.
Over the cucumber-lime-lemon spa water cooler we were informed that Luiselli would not be speaking at the conference after all. There was a last minute change in plans. Not only was she not coming, we had not bought the right tickets to see her talk even if she was.
There was no more need for the conference at that point, the day after we arrived. We left that afternoon and every afternoon going forward after free lunch was served, only to return to the hotel for the pool. The afternoon we decided to ditch, we found solace in the library in the city center. The library was a sprawling one story building with an outdoor courtyard, a house of sunlight. It was attached to a church of which I only remember the sky of yellow wall extending up with no interruption into the thin air.
The Library: Encounter and The Minotaur
The landscape began to make itself known in the library. Altitude headaches would soon become familiar to me. With time away from the workshop nonsense, I contemplated the novella whose structure I could make neither heads nor tails of. In fact, I did imagine the character as a strange body moving through space - no, through liquid. The appendages of it made themselves clear to me and promptly morphed when I attempted to note them. But it was also undoubtedly a part of myself. Settled into a corner of that library illuminated by a skylight, I found a book of women surrealist artists, a group of individuals who were giving me permission to expose my creature, to not be afraid of its maw, whether dead or alive.
The act of seeing felt important to me in writing this novella. Because describing the complexity of what it is to be a human, proved to be not human at all, and when all else failed I at least wanted to know what her hands looked like. As I wrote, I kept getting too close or too far away from the body. Perspective skewed and relied too heavily upon environment and interaction, dream and daydream and technology, advertisement, opinion infiltrated the self to the point the reflection became an uncanny meeting, the image of a person too simplistic to hold our infinite epiphanies. So connections between ideas decayed.
Books have memories. Their spines and pages develop grooves, so they get used to opening to familiar spreads others have found before. So this book of surrealist artist told me where different hands had gone. The process of writing can attract synchronicities as if voices speak directly from the abyss. This page opened to me as if all the teachers had opened this page too. They said, “look.”
Encounter is a portrait by Remedios Varo. It depicts a woman with an angular face in a dress made of stormy water. She sits on a pin legged stool at a humble table with a wooden box. A shelf of boxes spans the wall behind her. But the figure has opened the box on the table. Her eyes, however, look away, out toward the left of the painting. She appears to be lost in a thought, disembodied to the moment.
Within the box there is another face, a twin face. Only the eyes rise above the lid. It appears healthier than her own. It is somehow rounder, peachy, and it's cheeks fuller. While her own is wan and near transparent, the eyes in the box look up at the figure expectantly, but the woman does not return the gaze. The viewer too, is isolated in observation of the scene. The face in the box is riding on a current of water that flows from the opening and into the figure’s dress. It’s hard to tell if the water coming out of the face in the box has dressed the woman, or transformed her dress, or, in fact, is merging with her dress. The fabric looks like a wave crashing against a rock.
The water dress was also depicted in Varo’s painting The Minotaur painted the same year, in 1959, on whose canvas depicts the dress wide open. Where the dress in Encounter seems binding, as it winds around the figure’s legs down to her ankles.
Varo was born in Spain and lived in Paris and then Mexico City, where she painted Enounter. Varo is a masterful architect of imagery as narrative. Each of her paintings appears to rely on a meticulous attention to angle and space to tell their stories. Her mother was a devout Catholic, and her father an hydraulic engineer. These themes emerge as if anticipated on the tip of the brush as they weave architectures of connection and boundaries that make a dream world appear real, or a real world wear the garb of a dream.
Varo imagined a minotaur: a Spanish emblem of masculinity and violence as a feminine form. She has small breasts rounded against aquatic fabric.The minotaur was brought to the center of an inescapable labyrinth by King Midas. Too dangerous for the outside world, he wandered its illogical halls, bellowing and shaking the earth above. The minotaur is unable to live in society lest it create chaos, which has no boundaries or limits. Even the self squirreled into the corners of our consciousness’ will be stamped from the rage of the monster. The minotaur becomes a being that is not god nor human nor animal, and in this liminal identity becomes sacred.
If the minotaur were to be free it would mean so much more to be human. Because a human can’t be reflected in that which does not include the inhuman. The minotaur as a spectre of death is in fact exactly what it is to be alive. To be alive is to hold the minotaur within oneself, that deep underground, where it is both nourished and seen. The angry feminine, like the Greek Furies who were rejected and banished below the ground longs to make contact.
Contrary to the strong neck, depicted on the form of The Minotaur, the woman in Encounter is buglike. Her form is obscured by the layers of exoskeleton, while the minotaur is bright, standing, her head framed in an ecstatic halo. She holds a key and boldly looks into the viewer’s eyes.
It is difficult not to connect Pandora’s box to Encounter, as the subject sits, somewhat morosely before an open box. Not only was Pandora “given” to humans as punishment for Prometheus, she let loose all the evil of the world by opening the box that was gifted to her on her wedding day. The Greek myth becomes a story which shames the woman, who has no chance for redemption nor a soul to search with. She becomes the scapegoat for the sin of fire. In Encounter, we see no swarm of sin clouding the air around her, rather water flows out of the box in delicate waves surrounding this woman, dressing her, defining her, drowning her, loving her, allowing her to change.
Boxes line the wall behind this woman, each one holds a mask. To open that which is given at her wedding, a dowry, that which is of her ancestry - she must forget who she was before her marriage, and indeed, who she will become. By opening the box before her, the woman makes an action to define herself by satisfying a curiosity. Housed within this simple action of unlocking she goes from being the object to the subject; on a journey of her own as she recognizes that which is inside of herself, gifted at birth and useful. The caterpillar becomes mush before it becomes a butterfly. There is a transformation occurring in the surrender to the twin face in the box. With all the loss and heartbreak and vulnerability that comes with transformation she struggles to accept the story the mask tells. Sometimes in the face of change we hold onto our sadness like this woman grips the right edge of the painting with her gaze, like she avoids eye contact with her twin in the box, fearing, ‘what will become of me?’
To write about oneself is to write outside of the body. To see oneself as object and subject. To see the body like a glove and know that this self is a changing thing and passes like wind along the grasses. We, you and me, are the meeting place of time and space. And when we know ourselves we see ourselves in multiple perspectives, for a moment we rise out of the sea of change - the sea of blood, which our bodies become and look into the eyes of the great beings of transformation that live within the very walls, of even the simplest basement.
The face in the box is bodiless, its mouth is even covered, yet it has an ease of power. The boxes in the background of the painting call to question: who gave them to her; or did she extract them from herself? Pain of repression has the potential to sink everything into a box. I see a character, whose depression threatens her own ability to understand the magic of her circumstance. It can be difficult to look at the staggering beauty within each of us. That we might hold these lids open despite despair, hoping that others will see, but not willing to see for ourselves, when we might be the only person in the room who would recognize them. The truth is that we wear these gifts, whether we know it or not.
The second Airbnb and a trip down the river
Our second dwelling was up the hill and closer to the basilica and the roiling city square. The woman whose apartment we stayed in was Mexican. She drove us to a taco stand outside of town where I roughly pierced together, through my (dismal) Spanish, the fact of tacos that are made of a mushroom of a mushroom: Huitlacoche. We drove along the Laja River to Atotonilco and the monastery there, where men sleep on the floor, pray, and flagellate. The walled monastery implied layers of interior structures, into which we were not welcome. The door to the chapel was stucco and white. However, contrary to its rough and stark exterior, the chapel bloomed into a sanctuary designed in deep baroque. Generous light flowed from the windows and illuminated crowds of color, and yet the stories on the wall were full of pain and sadness. A woman who was with a few others, presumably her family let a muffled cry out as she wept, and the place .
Along the walls of the chapel was the familiar story of Christ. Shockingly realistic statues filled the third dimension on pedestals. Christ himself bore the cross on a pedestal as I made my way down the aisle. Round beads covered the statues’ bodies and faces as countless tears and blood of Christ, St. Sebastian, of Mary and Mary Magdalene rolled down their bodies. The wounds were bright and open on the men as the sacred blood of sacrifice rolled down their resin skin, rounded tears shimmering like crystals down still faces. I have not spent much time with Catholicism, much less the Latin forms of the religion.
surely translated through indigenous spirituality woven into the rituals and representations , so I am not the one to speak on the meaning of the images particularly. But the overt physicality of the pain struck me.
Mesquite and acacia line the small Laja riverbed. Deep mineral pools interrupt the otherwise dry expanse. The church was built specifically for this portion of Christ’s journey on sacred land for the Chichimec and Otomi people. The hot springs in the region were ancestrally medicinal places. The salt and minerals from the depths continue to crumble the paintings and the walls of the sanctuary today.
Underlined in the bloody imagery were the constant reminders of the priests’ flagellation. Outside tents sold miniature whips on keychains.
The punishment for the body is a type of self regard, one that, I think morbidly articulates a human desire to name oneself and witness an externalization of commitment. These lashings produce edges that might help to define oneself, in case one was to forget or reject the fact of the body through shame or trauma. I know what it was like to be able to see the shape of my own bones. It was a feeling of horror and satisfaction wrapped in one. Commitment to an externalization of emotion is compulsive. I have been afraid of all of my feelings because to feel greatly is to become a minotaur - out of control. Even when we are looking away, tears rolling down our cheeks, our bodies writhe and respond to life - even if against our will with the lesson, that the body is not a fortress.
I think of the painting again, Encounter: “Contre” comes from the French root, to battle. The oppositional quality to these beings raises the stakes in the intention of the meeting. Battles, fights are the realm of the body or the land (the two of which I encourage you to merge in your mind) and so they are political engagements.
The face we recognize is not in fact our face but our history. The figure in Encounter does not have to look at herself to know that something is fundamentally changing within her. The feeling is already there.
To recognize oneself as an “other” could be jarring. But to recognize oneself extending beyond the body is an act of surrender which ruptures what it means to be a self in the capitalist, colonialist sense. An encounter is a political experience. It exists, as Jos Charles states, with the harmonic activities of a poem. And within the moment of this apparition of empathy lies the ingredient in the alchemy of love.
When I was seventeen I started an intermittent fast that would continue until I was about twenty-two. Each day introduced new rungs of self control I set for myself to climb. My existence project to live on the brink of starvation was a stubborn belief that there was a better way to live. And I didn’t know how else to say it but through the rejection of my own body and all of the food that surrounded it, the system of infinite destruction that is eating. My body became the home of anger. I felt as if I was performing an act of resistance when I refused to eat. Had I discovered the language to begin a conversation with another form of thought, something that could train me how to see and understand these emotional beasts, I might have been able to begin with a different strategy, been offered another way to react. My anger was not the problem. I felt I had no one, and that I should be alone in that time of change. But here is where representation, the act of seeing is not important. In the same way the water dress surrounds the figure, she does not need eye contact to know she is changing. In the act of trying words, language provides an architecture for thought.
The city is as much a stage as a room of boxes stacked on each other. Encounter is a parable. The figures in the painting sit cheating the audience as if on a stage. The story layed out carefully with fractured parts to piece together, but in a logic I understand. In the same theatrical sense, the audience is not allowed into the gaze, and so includes the viewer to be voyeur in its contemplation of self. How do you feel in the intimate moments when you realize something is not right?
The question opens up more than it reveals. I understand the desire to live in controlled suffering, but suffering is not a thing of control in the end. It is a fact as true as life and death that to control would only writhe in one’s head with an unpredictable logic and so creating that perceived monster. In North America I have learned that suffering is not a part of life, but something that must be overcome. At the very least chaos appears to exist. I can’t believe there is a direct transaction between good and evil as if they lie in camps of their own, fighting battles that will never be won.
There are about 43 muscles in the face, whose tiny dances provide tools to hide, or open doors. But it is not for oneself alone. It is a book itself, falling open in places where the spine has been worn. Like sunlight, we can only see the reflections of these expressions. In this way we suspect we may be alone, and so build the social structure of Encounter.
The Mountains: Leaving
It was the last night of our stay. We each squeezed lime into our beers and let fruit juice make paths down our arms. My sleeves stuck to the unwashed sugar as the hill became illuminated with tents, under which appeared several long tables, overflowing with jewels and precious metals. These markets were common around San Miguel de Allende. Earlier a man had brought me out from under a tent to see the “sunstone”. I marveled and then refused to buy. But in a lucid haze of last night's blitz I became immersed in the sales, the way the silver wound around my fingers, and the numbers calculated, rising me up on rock cliffs in my mind. In New York this would be. So. Expensive. I was breathless with opportunity and walking around with my hands choking on jewels.
Was it the conquistadors who ripped through the mountains with armor and canons and picks, tearing through the stone to find what they could never have been worthy of at home? It was already gone from their souls. The gold and silver extracted would only be returned to various coffers far from sight. San Miguel is the archangel who fights against evil for good. He is depicted stamping on the head devil who is sometimes seen as a man with batlike wings, and sometimes a reptilian monster from the book of Revelations.
Remedios Varo escaped Europe and too from the surrealists who had welcomed her. She was one of the first European artists to find refuge in Mexico to escape World War II. Mexico had become a place where important political and philosophical discussions emerged, represented in communist murals by Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozoco, and the very same David Alfaro Siqueros. Before founding the school in San Miguel de Allende, Siqueros was involved in an attempt to assassinate the influential Leninist communist leader, Leon Trotsky, who was exiled in Mexico City at the time. Monsters, beasts, the chaos rolls all over the world. We are carrying the fear of it. But we don’t have wings. Fear should not be pressed into the ground where we only watch it tremble below the depths. When if we looked at it we might only see a beetle walking determinedly across a log, with the reflection of our eyes on its wings.
We got a cab at 3am to the Queretaro airport. The car was static with sleep. It was the last time I would travel for a year and a half. I didn’t know it then, hugging my arms as I looked into the shadow hills. As we drove on black velvet roads I could see the southern cross, clear in the sky. I wondered if it was in fact the swan who has a similar formation: the swan of the north. I scanned for even the dimmest light of the new day sun to orient me, but there was no hint of its warming the horizon. The shape is clear: four brilliant stars in concert. What brilliant sky we could see now that the light of the city where we had stayed was gone. I wondered what other stories this constellation has been a part of. And the story becomes a divination in which time unravels in the face of this ancient light. With certainty, someone will look at this collection of stars and not think of the sacrifice of Christ.
The jewels are made of the same stuff as these stars are planets spinning above us. There is more abundance than we could imagine. We don’t need to tear the mountains to look at the precious gems of which we are already made.
The massive mountain bodies rose ribbed and snakelike to a speckled sky. This land long cared for and honored by the Hñähñu, Otomi and the Chichimec who continue to live on this land, who honor San Miguel as well, but as a totem of abundance. Evil is only so much when it has a barrier. The devil’s head holds strong medicine. You don’t shoot the thunder cloud. We don’t bomb climate change. If there is an opposite to evil it is surely abundance.
I wish I could have faced my anger, but it was a comfort I didn’t want to let go of. To know myself would be to release her into the wind. Recognition is a finishing and I wasn’t ready to let go of that resentment. There was no point of reckoning or moving on. But at a certain point I was able to look at that one part of myself and see her, let her speak, let her cover me with language.
I am comforted to think we can see, if we look, to the faces that love us and be held by them. There needs to be a place where we are allowed to feel the extent of our pain, rather than letting it eke out for decades or let it make us monsters. To know that there will be different kinds of stories is enough to hold us as humans, that will not mutilate or tear us from this very land and water. That a human might look at this sky and have a story wound and different about what this constellation is, with a glimmer of recognition in their eye, it’s a glimmer I share with them.
It was the four of us, pressing ahead in this vehicle over the sand. The dead are dragons in the sky, moving in mysterious and knowable ways.
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