Memory, Muses, Memoir

I am continually humbled at the gift of not one but two daughters, and have come to think of my writing as not only content I want to pass on to them, but also as a model of leading an examined life. I was just beginning to recover from being what Maureen Murdock has labeled being a “daughter of the father,” with my focus on doing and achieving, being the best at my vocation, gaining respect from my peers. I was only just becoming aware of how deeply I had devalued the feminine in my life and what it had cost me. I was just beginning to understand the gift of being part of a sisterhood that has existed from time out of mind, part of the community of the Feminine. I was forty-one years old at the time, and just beginning to understand what it meant to be a woman. I realized that writing my life story didn’t need to be about going out to conquer the world as much as it needed to tell about getting to know myself. In time, I found the images from a previously puzzling dream offering a new vision, a new myth for my mid-life; that of memoirist and storyteller. In Christine Downing’s words, “The discovery of a mythical pattern that in some way one feels is connected to one’s own life deepens one’s self understanding. At the same time, the discovery of the personal significance of a mythic pattern enhances our understanding of the myth and its variations. Appreciation of the connection between a myth and my life seems simultaneously to make me more attuned to the myth’s unity and to help me understand how moments in my life which might seem accidental or fragmentary belong to the whole.” I became more and more curious about myths and what these old stories might have to teach me, and then decided to return to the path of a student and enrolled in a graduate program in Mythological Studies. From the very beginning, the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, made herself known. While in my previous field of work I had assessed and treated memory as part of the necessary skill set for learning, retaining, and retrieving content, this new path required more metaphorical understanding. In time I would come to learn how the Greeks dealt with psychological phenomena via the figures of their pantheon. Mnemosyne was imagined as one of the Titans, one of the original children of Sky and Earth. She would couple with Zeus and birth the Nine Muses, the feminine guardians of creativity and learning. In her story I began to find reverberations for the writing of memoir, my passion for life stories set to paper. What follows is an account of the exploration I began some ten years back, it weaves through the contemporary thirst for memoir, the metaphor of Mnemosyne as a kind of mythic image for such writing, how her figure is particularly relevant to writers, and the imaginal, cultural, and physiological benefits of engaging this particular kind of writing.