What I Learned From Flawless Tapestries About Defiant Legacies
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Arachne made a goddess furious, Minerva tore her tapestry apart. This myth has everything: perfection, defiance, and the price of telling the truth. Welcome to What I Learned From… "Let her contend in art with me; and if her skill prevails, I then will forfeit all!" — Arachne, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses What I Learned From …Oh, foolish hubris! The Greek/Roman myth of Arachne usually gets flattened into a warning: Don’t get too proud, don’t challenge authority, don’t forget who is in charge. A mortal girl thinks she is as good as the goddess Minerva? Of course she gets punished. I know this version well. In university, for the capstone project in my Latin minor, my advisor handed me the 15,000 line Latin version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and said “Bring it back translated by the end of the semester.” Sure, dude. Line by line, I rendered the text as academically precise as possible. Every literary and grammatical decision was shaped by what I knew the text was “supposed to say.” But even then, I bristled. These stories rarely read as tidy morality tales…and that’s what makes them interesting! They’re messy and full of contradictions. Most boiled down to gods behaving badly and mortals being told to accept it. Arachne’s tale is a perfect example. She was not a princess or a nymph, she was simply the daughter of a Lydian dyer, known for her weaving. Her skills were so extraordinary that people came from far distances for her wares, whispering she must have a gift from Minerva (you might know her as Athena), the goddess of wisdom and craft. Arachne rejected the suggestion. She had never seen the goddess at her loom. Why should she credit her talent to someone who had never taught her? It was her own hard work that had made her excellent. Well, Minerva wasn’t stoked about this. So she disguised herself as an old woman and warned Arachne to show more humility. Arachne refused, insisting that if Minerva wished to challenge her directly, she was welcome to appear. I can only imagine that it was in a flash of blinding light that Minerva revealed herself. Two looms were set, and they began to weave. Minerva’s tapestry was condescending, four cautionary tales in the corners of mortals punished for challenging the gods; all arranged around her own victory over Poseidon in claiming the city of Athens. She edged it with olive branches, a symbol of her rule. It was a warning as much as it was art: “Do not forget your place mortal”...woven in golden thread. Arachne’s tapestry was something else entirely. She filled it with scenes of the gods’ misdeeds: Zeus disguising himself as a bull to abduct Europa, as a swan for Leda, as golden rain for Danaë. Poseidon in the form of a ram, Apollo deceiving mortal women, Dionysus as grapes. It was a roll call of trickery, seduction, and assault. Line after line, she rendered the violence and hypocrisy of the Olympians with such flawless precision that Ovid tells us that Envy herself could not find a fault. Minerva could not beat her, and hooboy was she pissed about that. She tore the tapestry to shreds, struck Arachne with her shuttle, and left the mortal girl so humiliated that she tried to hang herself. Like most warriors of the age, she would rather leave the world on her own terms than live under the weight of Minerva's inferior victory. It was her final act of defiance, resisting power rather than letting Minerva’s version of the story stand. Minerva either saved her at the last moment or brought her back from death, transforming her into the first spider. Either way, Arachne was condemned to weave forever. This is usually told to us as a warning, but when you read closely, the real story emerges: Arachne was not punished for arrogance, she was punished for accuracy. Her work exposed truths the powerful did not want spoken aloud. Heck, in her epic meltdown and tantrum, Minerva became the very thing Arachne had depicted: a god abusing her power. Ovid himself knew something of this tension. He wrote under the reign of Caesar Augustus, a ruler eager to present himself as a restorer of virtue and order. Any art that hit the public purview was meant to reinforce that image. The interesting thing about the story of Arachne, which was barely a folk tale in oral tradition before Ovid added it to his collection, is that weaving was often a metaphor for poetry. Maybe the tapestry was Ovid’s own sly commentary on so-called gods in his world? It’s no coincidence that Ovid was eventually exiled from Rome for, in his own words, carmen et error ("a poem and an error.") Myths and folk tales were both entertainment and enforcement. When I translated the hundreds of pages as a dutiful twenty-year-old (guys, I was super fun!) I turned in the clean version my advisor expected…but I felt the tension. The lessons we are taught from the tale of Arachne are perhaps not the perfectly presented takeaways that simple scholarly readings deliver. Instead, we as observers are supposed to see the hidden message: Art is not meant to appease power. It is meant to tell the truth, even when it enrages those who would rather keep their authority unchallenged. The gods change, but the playbook doesn't. You know, like algorithms and gurus selling you on how to make six-figures next week…if only you give them offerings and promise to sing their praises. Arachne shows us that work created with both precision and passion lasts. On that note…today is a bit of a milestone for me: The 300th issue of this newsletter. 🎉 You could say that I have been weaving my own tapestry, one thread at a time. As time has passed, a clearer picture has evolved. The point for me now is a dedication to the truth and stories we find in our craft. I am tired of the mass-produced meh of “what works” online writing, this endless stream of polished performance with nothing at its core. These are loose threads, brittle and disposable. What we need — what will last — are writers and creators who are willing to put their full skill and conviction into the loom, to speak to the truths and tales that matter. That is not hubris. That is legacy. Previously in This Writing Life …All the good stuff you were meant to see but probably didn’t.
Worth Reading …The pieces that made me pause last week.
Notes from the Masters …Craft advice that holds up, straight from the ones who lived it. “I don’t know about lying for novelists. I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they’re telling the truth. The fact is they’re using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they’re telling the truth about the human being—what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.: — Maya Angelou Prompted: Your Move …A spark from this week’s essay. Use it to write your own. Choose one of your creative strengths. Now, write a short story or scene where a character is punished for using that skill too well. Glossary of The Forgotten …Because life’s too chaotic for bland words. Veridical [vuh-RIH-dih-kuhl] (adj.) — Truth-telling that is not bent by wishful thinking or power’s illusions. The word slipped into English in the early 1600s, drawn from Latin veridicus, a fusion of verus (“true”) and dicere (“to say”). In its earliest uses, it described visions and dreams that proved true, especially unsettling ones. You’ll find it tucked into philosophical treatises, psychology texts, and the occasional ghost story. But in an age of truthiness and brand-safe content, veridical has mostly vanished. Too hard to weasel out of, it's a word for the kind of story that refuses to flatter power. One that is woven with both skill and conviction, even when it makes the comfortable squirm. Sorta synonyms: truthful, candid, veracious Use it for: the friend who tells you what you didn’t want to hear, the testimony you swear to in a court of law, the tapestry that cost its weaver everything but still hangs in the light. Want to read more in-depth Glossary entries? Catch up on the archives and find this week’s newest one. Try This Thing …No promises. Just a potentially brilliant shortcut or two. Need the perfect word, but tired of stiff thesaurus results? WordHippo digs up fresh, modern, and colloquial synonyms that actually fit a normal person’s writing. The Final Chuckle …Serious writing deserves unserious endings. Honestly? This feels kinda tame for what’s swirling in my brain any given moment in time. ‘Til next time ~ Elisa PS - A little fire, a lot of ink, and not a trace of synthetic vanilla from a beaver’s butt. Keep your eyes peeled next week, it’s finally happening. 👀 |