Memorial Days and Minotaurs

Matisse Minotaur on the left, Picasso’s on the right

Stories for me are not an interest or a hobby. They are my way of navigating and understanding the world. I consider them a tool for survival. If I am mentally wounded, stories are how I heal. Not a day passes that I don’t see an Odysseus in the grocery store or an Ophelia at the gas station. This is how my mind works.

For about a year now, my mind continually returns to the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. Why? It’s always struck me as a told story rather than an interpreted story. A tautology. The purpose of Theseus and the Minotaur is to sequentially detail what happened with Theseus and the Minotaur. Yes, I’ve read interpretations, but I never find them satisfactory. They just don’t hit me the right way. If there’s a meaning, it has been forgotten.

Today is Memorial Day, a day when we are supposed to remember people who died serving our country in war. One important distinction that many forget: this is not a day to honor living veterans; it is a day to remember members of the military who have died in our wars. Memory and forgetting also define Theseus and the Minotaur.

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In the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, the Athenians, each year, willingly delivered their children (7 males and 7 females) to a monster for slaughter. They thought they were doing this for the greater good, as they believed the sacrifice allowed them to avoid plague. The Athenians are the heroes of this myth.

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Venturing out into the world today, I didn’t see much remembering. Instead, I saw aggressive sloganeering plastered on shirts, hats, decals, and bumper stickers. One t-shirt read, “If you don’t like this flag, I will help you pack!” This message rings more of forgetting than remembering. The phrase is not one of reverence or being thankful; it is accusatory, voiced in the predominate tone infecting the language of our public discourse. This was a shirt. One does not have to speak its words. They endlessly speak themselves, never willing to take a breath or pause for other voices. There is no conversation, and thus there is no thread—a metaphor we often attach to conversation.

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Theseus does not have the thread, and thus he is not the hero. He is simply an impulse, a want. Theseus requires Ariadne’s thread to find his way out of the maze because he cannot remember the way. Once he enters, he forgets. In this way, he is no different than the Athenian children who enter the dangerous labyrinth. He cannot find his way out of the maze without the simple trick of a simple thread, given to him by a girl who remembers what he doesn’t: you must return. Without the thread, Theseus’s war with the Minotaur is endless.

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Another message I saw today, this time in sticker and decal form: “If you don’t stand behind our troops, feel free to stand in front of them!” What is this message trying to remember? To honor? What tone of reverence does it hold? Again, this message acts as a spear pointing toward the world’s minotaurs and the invisible “them.” The message and its senders have lost the thread and perpetually wander a maze of strawmen and invisible enemies. We will not say that America is a great country because we remember what people have done for its cause, even when they were, for example, enslaved. Instead, we forget. We will point to ourselves dressed in the hollowed-out patriotism of the present, messaging that blasts itself continually in the public square. Maybe the phrase I’m looking for is “Look-at-me! Patriotism.” To accept that mindset, we must forget everyone else. No one can name the Athenian children lost to the Minotaur before Theseus’s arrival. Instead, we remember Theseus, who survived the war with the Minotaur.

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The myth is about forgetting, the failure to remember. Without the thread, Theseus cannot escape the maze. When he has no thread to guide him, Theseus forgets Ariadne, who he promised to bring back with him to Athens, leaving her behind on the shores of Dia. He does not return for her; maybe he has forgotten the way. He will marry someone else: Hippolyta. Upon returning home, Theseus forgets to change his ship’s sails—made of thread—from black to white, as white signals to his father that he has returned alive. Upon seeing the black sails, King Aegeas throws himself into the ocean and dies. It’s now called the Aegean Sea. This is how we remember all Theseus’s forgetting.

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I live in a region that is predominantly white. We are certainly a more diverse population than when I moved here twenty years ago, but we’re still a largely white demographic. Among the men here, over time, I’ve witnessed an aggressive militarization of appearance and accessories: dress; camouflage everything, including water bottles; tattoos; altered American flags with different-colored lines or human skulls covered in stars and stripes. Nearly every t-shirt hosts a political message framed in the finger-pointing rhetoric described above: “If you don’t ___________, then ____________!” Add to this gun imagery running on a constant loop; hats with flags where the stars have been replaced by threaded bullets; artful images of the AR-15. “Freedom,” as a word, appears in abundance. It seems we have forgotten the amount of freedom required to display such messages freely and openly, with no fear of being jailed, poisoned, or beheaded.

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Because Ariadne helped Theseus but was left behind, her crown is immortalized in the constellations. The Corona Borealis. She is remembered for her sacrifice, though the people she helped will never know her.

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The amount of profanity I see displayed in public, in full view of anyone of any age, with school buses passing by—Fuck Biden! Or Trump 2024. No more bullshit!—is disturbing. I’m not prudish, as I can curse with the best of them, but this, plus the militarization of public life, is now our natural environment. All these seemingly aimless men preparing for something they don’t quite understand. But whatever it is, they promise it will be big. This has been making me anxious for some time. We’ve forgotten January 6th so quickly that we’re inviting it, and its supporters, back into our lives. This is against the principles we’re supposed to honor today. We would resurrect the Minotaur and send our children back to the labyrinth, all to prove a point no one can quite articulate. 

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So much of this revolves around trust, or trust and misrecognition. In the myth, Daedalus’ maze is the least difficult labyrinth in the story—you can best it with a single thread. The real labyrinths are the invisible pacts and connections that come with social relationships and community structures. The real maze is trusting people who look like us, not the Minotaur, to not be monsters. If I situate Theseus in our world, he is precisely that monster who doesn’t look like one; Theseus is, after all, a hero and a patriot. But in the myth, he’s forgetful and careless regarding the people he’s supposed to respect and care for. He repeatedly breaks his vows. In a charitable reading, Theseus’s tragedies are caused by naiveté and carelessness. But in a “you can’t trust anyone these days” reading, his forgetfulness is intentional and cruel. In 2024, it’s a mix of both. We think we want to “burn it all down” or “drain the swamp.” There are certainly things that we, as Americans and human beings, need to fix. But, if we’re being honest, this contemporary language is truly about “stuff.” It’s about having all of our many “things” available at our convenience. And like Theseus, we are naive enough to think all of this will continue once we turn leadership over to a true monster. Many are eager to blindly do his bidding, which is a form of forgetting. Then all the “things” will go away and life won’t be as easy as it was when we had all the things we tore down because we forgot their value. The lesson hiding inside the maze-like myth of Theseus and the Minotaur is that we can recognize the real monsters.

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Memorial Day. My grandfather served in World War II. He never talked about it. He didn’t wear t-shirts or put stickers on his car to amplify himself while diminishing others, forgetting their importance. He lived a quiet, normal life, and raised his family in post-war America until dying of lung cancer at 55. Lucky Strikes were his brand. Fortunately, he and all his brothers returned home from Europe alive, and they lived and prospered in the immediacy they fought for and that others, who we remember today, fought and died for.