Matryoshka in Mythos

Matryoshka in Mythos is a poethic, imagined origin story – one that might hold truths we need to re-member in order to re-animate. This tale of nested becomings brings mythic, matristic resonance to the acts of holding and being held. It was put to words by otherWise founder Nicole Civita, who was captivated by Russian nesting dolls as a child, has long pondered their symbolism, and has always felt there was more to their story.

You can read the poem in the original layout below.

Before time was marked out
in any of the rhythms we know today,
Before matter dreamed of mass,
there was a humming in the dark.
Viable vibration.
Not yet being. Still mattering
A pattern of becoming that longed to dwell.
To hold.
Yearning across a stretch of time that can’t be counted,
She shaped herself, the first being,
from the pulse of longing.
Her form was twice round
and curved tall.
Bowed and beaming.
Generous.
A body so full,
there was no room for echo.
She whispered into herself and said:
“I have so much.
Everything to give,
No one to gift.
I wish to carry another.”
From within her own chest
she traced a slightly smaller shape –
not lesser, nested.
She traced this inner edge again
and again. Again
and again.
Eventually carving a new groove
into which her longing could flow.

A second form awoke,
loosed into the space
around the first.
Whole unto herself,
and entirely within.
A mother but not a child.
A child but not younger.
Generations existing forever together in the spiral carving of time.
Edges appearing where the longings for form, friendship, and
freedom lore folk.
This is how it continued –
each opening to the next,
containing without caging,
companions.

They were never made.
Separated only to find form.
Patterned alive.
Nourished by shared grain
and the rush of breath between,
they are never finished.
They are always
in becoming.

In mythos, these Matryoshka did not gather knowledge
as humans are taught to do –
in towers, or ledgers, or studies or declarations.
They knew like tide knows moon –
in patterned pull,
in reach and repetition,
in strong surrender.
Like roots know rain.
Like silence knows the weight of a name.
Each bore a way of remembering without grasping:
One held that shape of longing.
Another carried the rhythm of breath.
A third remembered how to listen aloud.
A fourth spun along the spiral of time.

And the smallest,
no matter how many,
always the smallest,
did not remember at all.
The smallest, always the smallest,
She held the forgetting –
the sacred unknowing,
the echo of the more-than-nameable.
Layered in hush,
Her faint signals sounded
like candlelight.
She was much closer
to mystery.
Her forgetting was not a flaw,
just a delicate veil over the face of becoming –
a gift the others grabbed onto
to stop themselves from slipping
into certainty.
Yes, the smallest kept the bigger ones humble.
An order anchored around ache and uncertainty.
Did you imagine the wooden women were
arranged by size?
No, no.
They were arrayed by depth.

By what could be held
in hollow.

And this held fast, held long.
While worlds formed and spun and split and agained.
While life arrived and merged and mated and morphed.
While walking took to two legs and ran off ahead,
faster and faster, toward imagined immortality.
Humans being beyond.
To atmosphere fear.
And when it became clear
that humans had forgotten how
to hear the world breathe –
to love alive –
the wooden women offered themselves
into five-fingered hands.
Their curves perfect in a palm.

They argue still about whose idea it was and why.
Two thought her breath could resuscitate,
Three wanted to hear what these two-legged people weren’t saying,
Four, most say, was ready for a recursion,

One never stopped longing to gift belonging.
Others had motivations of their own –

as many as there were many.

And the smallest,
always the smallest,
thought she might help them
forget their forgetting.

They let themselves be perceived
as dolls – painted and polished,
split around their centers,
bought and sold. Set upon
shelf after shelf. They endured
being seen as decoration.
But always, always,
they left a hum.
Sometimes a child might open them, one by one,
and remember when he existed only inside.
Sometimes an elder might dream of them
and wake knowing how to tend the unseen,
to love what should outlast.
Sometimes one might go missing –
And a human woman would wail…
But the wooden ones
widened.
Waited.
With or without return
their pattern would alter.
To exist is to carry the capacity to re-member.
To honor the lost with longing,
tend the hollow.

Re-member:
we are always nested becomings.
Each through each.
Each within each.

Whole again,
eventually,
the wooden women sing.
Their resonance as wide
as the spaces between.
Longing all the way around.