“You are wearing pomegranates,” he says abruptly. “You are mother and daughter?” I pause halfway out the door. “Yes,” I tell him. “Mother and daughter.”
“Demeter and Persephone. All right, then.” He motions us back inside and starts the car.
We drive northwest out of Athens into a yellow-gray haze. Elefsina/Eleusis is wreathed with ugly industrial slums, cement factories coughing up white, phlegmlike smoke. The sky droops with pollution. Ann reads from one of a half-dozen guidebooks that we have lugged across the Atlantic Ocean, while I stare through the window at the sun being swallowed into grainy clouds, disintegrating into pinpoints.
The Demeter-Persephone myth had been enacted at Eleusis annually for around eighteen hundred years. Thousands of initiates came from around the Panhellenic world to go through secret rites of death and rebirth known as the Eleusinian Mysteries.
These involved a symbolic going down into the underworld, called the kathodos, and a rising up to new life, known as the anados. Eleusis had been one of the greatest religious centers in all antiquity, and at the heart of it was not a divine father and son, but a divine mother and daughter. How extraordinary is that, I thought when the notion of visiting Eleusis popped up. What I did not consider, not even when I woke from the dream of Ann falling through the cavity in the kitchen floor, was that traveling here would evoke my own version of kathodos and anados. I lean my head back on the seat and close my eyes.
Ann conveys a stray piece of information from the book. “The earliest of the ruins go back to the fifteenth century BC. That’s,” she computes in her head, “more than three thousand years.” A couple of miles later, she says, “Did you know that everyone who went through the Mysteries at Eleusis experienced a secret that made them no longer afraid of dying?”
The air is brighter once we reach Eleusis, some of the Attic blueness of Greece breaking through the foul crust. As I step from the car, I drop my unzipped bag in the street and out rolls the big red pomegranate that had been on the breakfast buffet at the hotel, part of the decorative centerpiece. To Ann’s embarrassment, I had convinced the server to wrest it from the display and give it to me. Alexander stares at it lying beside the car tire.
Ann’s look says UN-believable.
I grab the fruit and stuff it back into my floppy purse.
“I’ll wait for you,” Alexander tells us. “You cannot get a taxi back to Athens from here on Sunday. How long do you need? One hour?”
“Three,” I say.
“Two,” he tells me firmly, and I don’t argue.
I am floored by the vastness of the ruins. They are strewn across the slope of a hill which is hedged by the Bay of Eleusis on one side and mountains on the other three. It’s as if there has been a volcanic eruption of stone and marble—toppled columns and rooftops, remnants of temple walls, chunks of altars and statues. Ann and I clutch the brochures and maps we picked up at the gate and stare into the morass of sacred debris. An abandoned mother-daughter continent. We are the only ones here.
I chatter to Ann as we wade into the remains, postulating about the style of the columns—Doric? Ionic?—pointing out engravings of eggs, flowers, and Demeter’s wheat, trying hard to be an animated tourist. But almost immediately we come upon a well from the sixth century BCE—now called the Kallichoron Well—and I stop, plunged back into the myth—Demeter scouring the earth for her lost daughter and coming to Eleusis, where she plops down beside a well and mourns for Persephone. Something is over for her, really over.
The well is encircled with flat stones, cut in the shape of petals, giving it the appearance of an age-pitted flower. We walk around it, peering inside. It is empty except for a few tattered spiderwebs. Once, long ago, it was called the Well of the Beautiful Dances. Initiates gathered around it to commemorate Demeter’s grief, dancing in solemn circles. The guidebook suggests you can see the path of their dance worn into the courtyard pavement. Ann makes an earnest search, but cannot find it.
“Do you see it?” she says.
I shake my head and sit down, feeling heavy, like one of the ponderous, blue-gray Eleusinian stones, coming to rest in a dark gravity I cannot reverse. I pull out my journal, and Ann drifts off with her camera.
Our aloneness in the ruins engulfs me. Quietness rises. The ringing of a church bell. Wind slapping the chain on a distant flagpole. What is the conversation that needs to go on inside of a woman at this juncture in her life? Is it really the one about relinquishment, grief, and return? I look around, and for a moment I think I will forget all of this. Just be a tourist again. But sitting in the compost of this demised world, I know I’m here to enter that very conversation. To face irrevocable truths and grieve a little . . . or perhaps a lot. Then start to let go.
Something is over.
I watch Ann in the distance as she moves toward the Plutonian, a large, cavernous rock that represents the spot where Persephone disappeared into the underworld. Now and then as she walks, she turns and watches me back. Once I see her lift her camera and take a photograph of me, unaware she is capturing a surrender, a caving-in of my heart. I sit in the passing of our old relationship, the one in which she was the little girl and I was the grown-up mother, and I try to finish what I never did when she left home for college—letting her go into her own life. And my daughter unwittingly preserves it.
In what seems like a cruel trick of timing, women often find themselves letting go of their daughters around the same time they must let go of their identities as younger women. I am clearly in the vestibule of menopause, otherwise known as perimenopause—a strange foyer where you find yourself waiting around to be ushered into the real room, the final room. In the beginning, I spent a fair amount of time telling myself I didn’t belong in there. Then the small jolts of truth began. I had my first bone density scan a few months before the trip. My doctor gave the results to me over the phone: osteopenia, the prelude to osteoporosis, spots where the bone was just starting to leach away. This had to be an appalling mistake: I took calcium capsules. I exercised.
“This can’t be right,” I blurted.
“Bone loss can begin around menopause,” the doctor said. I didn’t hear much after that. I heard bone loss. Then loss.
Why does the approach of menopause feel momentous and sad somehow? It certainly doesn’t bother me that I won’t have more children! Please. I only know there’s something unsettling about a door that closes forever. I feel a vague lament about the changing of my body, the alterations in my appearance, the bleeding out of motherhood, the fear that I will not find the mysterious green fuse again. As I listen carefully to myself, I overhear a confused murmuring inside: What now? What will be born in me now?
My mind goes to the pull I feel to write fiction. Ever since I stood in the Tate before the painting of Mary receiving news of her pregnancy, I’ve framed this inner pull in the imagery of birth—of a creative child.
But despite whatever intellect I try to apply to the situation, I cannot deny that when the womb folds its red tent, at some level it becomes a primal confrontation with limitation. There seem to be deep, archaic, often unconscious beliefs about the womb as the place of fertility and feminine fruition, and when the womb is spent, all kinds of illogical feelings can surface, feelings that one’s creativity and identity are over, too.
I have not wanted to admit the small sorrow I feel. No one is supposed to lament about menopause anymore—fifty being the new forty and all. Turning fifty is about freedom and hitting your stride, and I do believe this. But everything has its opposite, its shadow, a darkness that defines the light. Rebirth is almost impossible without that darkness; I have at least learned that over the years. I tell myself I am experiencing the death of myself as mother, the death of myself as a younger woman—precious old lives going by the wayside. Of course, I should let myself grieve. To deny the grief is to squander a transforming and radiant possibility. Everything in me knows this.
I find my yellow Swiss Army knife near the
bottom of my bag. Wasn’t cutting hair a symbolic act of grief in some cultures? Without thinking about it too much, because that would surely stop me, I cut off a small lock of my hair. I snip it spontaneously, spurred by a desire to ritualize the moment, to etch it indelibly into myself. I stare at the short, dark curl in my palm, then toss it into the well.
When I leave the well, it is past noon, the sun a small lemon near the top of the sky. Following the site map, I wander into the remnants of a temple dedicated to Hecate. Apparently her supporting role in the myth earned her an impressive monument.
For a long time, Hecate was a powerful divinity in the Greek pantheon, but gradually, as patriarchy took hold, her status deteriorated. She went from magnificent crone Goddess to gargoyle-y hag, the harbinger of nightmares. By the time Homer wrote the myth, the metamorphosis was already under way. I gaze at the ravages of time on her lost temple and wonder if there are any divine, postmenopausal figures left anywhere.
In Christianity, the image of God as an elderly man with a white beard has presided over art and religious imagination, but there has never been an image of an old female God. Not even Mary, who came down to us through the centuries as a young Virgin and Madonna. An ingenue. True, her darker features in the icon in the Athens cathedral conjured the feeling of the Old Woman for me, but I’ve never actually seen Mary pictured that way. No Marian wrinkles and sagging cheeks.
I roam about in Hecate’s pile of rocks. In the myth, no one dares to tell Demeter her daughter has been abducted. It’s fearless old Hecate who hears Demeter’s cries and breaks the news to her. She lights a torch and joins Demeter in the search and rescue. And, in what I’ve always thought to be a cryptic end to the story, Hecate shows up at the reunion and afterward accompanies Persephone wherever she goes. For the first time, I wonder if this isn’t an allusion to the old woman’s rightful place in the Goddess trinity of maiden, mother, and crone—a feeble attempt to restore her past.
A flight of steps leads up to a rectangular terrace where prickly cacti grow wild in the stone crevices like an incarnation of the crone Goddess herself—vexing, unbridled, subversive, tough, and vibrantly green. I look around for shade, finally sitting with my back against a rock in a shrinking puddle of shadow. I fan the neck of my white sundress, trying to stir a breeze.
Coming to Greece seems to have split open a strange, nocturnal piñata full of nettlesome dreams. Last night I dreamed about digging up a bone. At first I’m thrilled, the way a paleontologist might be at unearthing a dinosaur bone. I’m sure the bone is rare and probably valuable. But as I turn it over in my hands, I’m seized with trepidation about it. I have an urge to shove the bone back in the hole.
This is the Old Woman’s bone.
Naturally, any time you stray into the landscape of feminine age, menopause, or the exodus of children, the archetype of the Old Woman turns up, arriving like cactus from rock. In the dream, I can’t decide whether to keep the Old Woman’s bone or bury it again. It’s revealing to me that I revere the Old Woman and am repulsed by her.
One of the more provocative lines in Carl Jung’s book Memories, Dreams, Reflections is his assertion that finding the image concealed in an emotion calmed and reassured him. Obviously, the Old Woman is the image concealed in my emotions. Knowing this does reassure me, filling me with clarity and hope, but now the dread has surfaced.
The reason is suddenly plain to me. She holds my dying inside of her.
I look around for Ann and see her fifty yards away staring at a bust of Marcus Aurelius on a fallen tympanum. The shimmer of heat falls over everything. I feel my small life, impossibly brief. Tears float on the edges of my eyelids, then recede.
Simone de Beauvoir was of the opinion that if, at menopause, a woman gives her “consent” to growing older, she is changed into a “different being,” one who is more herself, one who is complete. I get to my feet and climb down the temple steps, picking my way through the cactus, wondering why we do not have ceremonies of consent.
Ann and I promenade along the Sacred Way, the path of the initiates, moving through the gates of the Lesser Propylea, into the Telesterion where the faithful were initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. We end up in the small museum on top of the hill.
Inside it is a small orgy of beauty—black and toffee-colored vases; curving statues of the fleeing Kore; votive carvings of torches, pomegranates, flowers, and wheat; marble sculptures of women with big, elaborate baskets balanced on their coiffed heads; terra-cotta vessels that once held honey and wine, layered and decorated like russet wedding cakes.
I pause before a plaque that portrays Demeter holding her grown daughter in her lap. It is a depiction of the reunion, the heuresis.
I motion Ann over and together we stare at the tenderness that has somehow been chiseled into their embrace. In the back of my mind, I see Leonardo’s sketch of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist—the grown-up Mary sitting in her mother’s lap.
“What’s the hardest thing about being my daughter?” I suddenly ask Ann. I don’t know where this abrupt question has come from or why I’ve asked it.
“I don’t know,” she says blankly, then frowns in an effort to at least try and think up an answer. She shakes her head, shrugs. “Really, I can’t think of anything.”
Then she turns the tables. “What would you answer if Grandma asked you that?”
“Oh. Well . . . I would probably say . . . the Easter rabbit cookie tin.”
As I form the words, it seems entirely possible that what I wanted all along was to answer the question myself.
“You mean the cookie cutter Grandma makes the bunnies with?”
“Yes, that one.”
It is the cookie cutter, practically the size of an actual rabbit, hand-forged and revered. It belonged to my grandmother, who passed it to my mother, who each year rolls out scarves of dough, stamps the cookies, ices them white, affixes pink jelly-bean eyes, and personalizes them with everyone’s name. To date I have received fifty bunny cookies with SUE on them.
What I most remember about this opus was my mother’s timeless absorption in it, humming and singing as she worked, lost in a domestic ecstasy that I could only try to imagine. The ancient Greeks had a Goddess for every sphere of life. Jean Shinoda Bolen, a Jungian psychiatrist and author, introduced me to the idea that these Goddesses also represent patterns and gravitations inside every woman. And one or two of them will always find dominance. The home and hearth belong to Hestia, who was at the bottom of my psychic totem pole but who, I was pretty sure, was at the top of my mother’s. Even more of a Hestia woman than a Demeter one,
Mother seemed happiest when making and tending home, the sewing machine whistling and the Mixmaster whirling. Her deepest impulse was to nurture, to simply dwell; it had nothing to do with ambition and achievement in the world. The bunny tin must have grown into an emblem of that in my mind, a kind of Hestian scepter. And yes, I realized now, it was the hardest thing about being my mother’s daughter, because it symbolized how we were different.
I once remarked to Mother that if the Easter bunnies were to live on, she would probably have to pass the cookie cutter on to Ann instead of me, and we both laughed, but there was a tacit judgment in my little joke, an unintentional refusal of her satisfied, unhurried labor. How had I come to believe that my world of questing and writing was more valuable than her dwelling and domestic artistry?
Standing in the deserted museum, Ann scrutinizes me, trying to figure out what the cookie cutter has to do with anything. I say, “Your grandmother’s gift has been different than mine. It’s not just that she makes the bunny cookies, but she finds the depths of herself in doing it. Do you know what I mean?”
Ann nods and I realize I’m only now understanding it myself. In some way her cookies remind me of the sand mandalas I’ve watched Tibetan monks spend hours meditatively creating then sweeping away—a sacred art that is more about process than product, more about being than doing.
r /> “I wanted to go out and do things—write books, speak out,” I tell Ann. “I’ve been driven by that. I don’t know how to rest in myself very well, how to be content staying put. But Mother knows how to be at home—and, really, to be in herself. It’s actually very beautiful what she does—”
I stop, grasping that I’ve just articulated a split in the fabric of myself. My longing to meet my mother in a deeper way has never been a matter of love or closeness, but has come from an invisible rift in me, from my unknowing diminishment of Hestia and her world. My mother’s world.
“What both of you do is important,” says Ann, holding my gaze, and I see she is moved by my outpouring. This telling of secret things.
I look at Persephone in her mother’s lap. “I know,” I say. “I think part of me just longs for the way Mother experiences home.”
Ann has already explored the Plutonian, where the faithful memorialized Persephone’s descent and return, but she comes again with me since I haven’t seen it yet. As I step into the gaping mouth of a cave, cool, thick shade drops over me, then the smell of old, dank earth. Looking up, I inspect the stone arched over my head, crenulated in white, umber, and charcoal-gray colors. It’s not hard to imagine being swallowed and spit back out.
I try to focus on the reunion—not the one in the myth, or even the one with Ann, but with the more mysterious Persephone in myself. It occurs to me that Ann and I may each be searching for something that resides naturally in the other: Ann, seeking her true self, her autonomy and voice, her place in the world; and me, looking for the sap of spring, the ability to conjure a new dream of myself and bring it forth. Ann is new potential in search of ripening and I am ripening in search of new potential.
My initiation into my fifties seems to have as much to do with the Young Woman as it does with the old one. In the myth, Persephone and Hecate both show up at the reunion and become inseparable—the Young Woman accompanied by the Old Woman—suggesting a new coupling in a woman’s psyche.