Mnemosyne’s Touch: Multiplicity of Forms
I like to imagine the Greek’s goddess Mnemosyne as the mythic image behind all memoir. Her figure offers many metaphors for the forms used in writing memoir. Because she is a Titan daughter of the Earth Herself, it is in Mnemosyne’s nature to produce embodied forms of expression. Her gifts are being able to take memories from what Shakespeare’s King Theseus called the “airy nothing” in Midsummer Night’s Dream—the stuff of her Father Sky, and ground them in word, voice, poem, story, song, dance, ritual, and study. The memoirist stands in Mnemosyne’s lineage as she re-collects particular events and constructs a text which will bring these wisps and fragments of sensory impressions into material form.
The Greeks understood Mnemosyne’s capacity for the sheer multiplicity of forms through the expression of her daughters, the Muses. While there is evidence in Pausinia’s references to earlier Greek texts of two generations of Muses, the first comprised of just three feminine characters, Melete- Preparation, Mneme- Memory, and Aiode- Song (Gantz 55). By the time of Hesiod, these characters increased to nine. In Hesiod’s Theogony, the Muses are described as the offspring of a divine love between the Titan Mnemosyne, whose maternal proclivities toward embodiment were further amplified by the ordering principles of their father, Zeus. Each Muse was ascribed a particular form of expression; they were known to the Greeks as: Euterepe, Terpsichore, Calliope, Clio, Melpomene, Urania, Thaleia, Polyhymnia, and Erato. Gail Thomas describes the Muses as figures who “...educate our soul: they teach us to be able to hold forms in the soul, forms that guide us making music, in moving, in speaking, in writing, in grieving, in worshiping, in playing, in singing, and in loving”.
While Thomas is particularly interested in how the Muses are present in contemporary culture, and especially in the ways they inform the making of cities, I am interested in their influence on form for women writers of memoir. Viewed from Mnemosyne’s vantage point, women’s memoir can, of course, take multi-forms; she gave birth to nine Muses, nine vantage points, each with her own unique perspective, her own creative mode. Mnemosyne as mother of the Muses celebrates the multiplicity of ways memory can be expressed.
Angeles Arrien, anthropologist and author, explores the nine Muses and the various forms each inflects as guide for personal creativity. She goes on to explain that while each Muse has her own realm, each muse is also “capable of suggesting the range of all the disciplines taken together. Each of the muses represents a path to creativity and has her own distinct role or function in leading us further into our creative lives...”.
This aspect of the muses is another characteristic of Mnemosyne: her ability to call up a whole through a part. Memories evoked by the scent of bread baking can call up an entire scene from one’s childhood, and from that one scene, a whole life, and from that life, a family, from that family, a culture. Circles then become nested in circles. Memoir can begin with the musing on sensory fragments, and after reflection, manifest in myriad ways. Text can be historical under the musing of Clio, sorrowful by way of Melpomene, reverent under Polyhymnia, comic by Thalia, musical under the influence of Euterpe, heroic by Calliope, full of desire and remembrances of love by way of Erato, kinesthetic and embodied with Terpsichore, and metaphysical and other worldly with the soft eyes of Urania. Each Muse evokes a particular form, one which can both call a story forth and give it shape.
In Musing Memoir workshops, I encourage writers to imagine writing first with Mnemonsyne’s influence, locating the memories that live in matter. Next, I invite writers to consider each of the Muses as unique lens for their material. If you are interested in more information, contact me through the website for details on future courses and workshops.
