Night turned mythic for Kenton and me a little more than two years ago. We encountered a man coming out of the dark night with a knife, and we were both slashed.

One might think this often happens in a city like Atlanta, where we were visitors when this happened, in a place where it was foolish for us to be on foot at midnight. However, the police, the emergency services people, and the staff we encountered in both hospitals we visited that night, all, seemingly without exception in our memory, expressed shock, chagrin, and sorrow that this had happened to visitors to their city. They offered us profound apologies, as if they felt personally responsible. The friends we were visiting became our angels. The police called them and they immediately came to Grady Memorial, where we started out. They sat with us there, ferried us to Emory for emergency plastic surgery for Kenton, and cared for us afterwards. That’s another story, for another time.

In the moments we encountered our attacker, things happened so fast that I did not know I was cut until several minutes after it happened. Shock works that way. I was slashed across the four fingers of my right hand. The tendon under the last joint of my middle finger was cut, and the wounding was described as “defensive,” meaning that it was positioned such that I was warding off rather than dealing a blow. Kenton says that he saw my arm raised to the level of my throat. If I had not put my hand up, my throat might have been cut. The slasher cut Kenton’s face without regard to where the blade traveled, and his eye would have been sliced if his glasses hadn’t deflected the blade. So perhaps the instinctive, defensive posture saved my life. Perhaps I was never really in danger of losing my life. I have no way to ever know.

It was good to know that Kenton and I could both survive, and to claim our own stories from that night.

Part of my story, or I could say, my myth, involves the spiral dance I engaged in with our attacker, a black man whom we never could have identified in daylight, and who was therefore truly a shadowy presence. So, he became night itself taking mythic form. I remember turning as he rushed at us, and turning with him when he grabbed me. I then would have put my hand up, and spun off as I managed, without knowing how, to detach myself from his grasp.

There are two mythic images at work here — and probably scores more, but I’m not aware of those as yet, and this is MY myth, after all. There is an implacable presence, black and unidentifiable, black like the night it emerges from. And, there is a spiral.

Newgrange Barrow entrance, photo by Wikipedia user Normaltales. Used with permission.

The spiral is an old image, possibly most familiar to many from the ancient Irish grave barrows. Their stone pavements are marked with spirals, and their passageways align with solstice movements. They are markers in time’s arrow and time’s cycle. In the months after the attack, I remembered I’d more than once had dreams in the years before about being led to the underworld, down a circular, spiraling staircase. The “leader” in these dreams—the psychopomp, the divinity who leads souls to the underworld at the moment of death—was a black woman. In fact, two black women were each the underworld conductor, in different dreams. (And in fact, the police personnel and many of the hospital staff, who see death every day and were so sympathetic, were also black people.)

The black women in my dreams, unlike our attacker, were not anonymous, they were women I knew from waking life. Each had been my boss, in a time before the dreams. Both are highly-educated (one with a Ph.D. from Harvard, one from Vanderbilt). They are high-level executives, both extremely capable, fascinating women in daylight reality. Dreams seem to enjoy making puns. So, these boss-women—my superiors—showing up in these dreams could be my unconscious giving me a glimpse of a “superior” archetype, namely a divinity of death and transition. The psychopomp.

The color of my psychopomps is highly significant to me. I am white. That my unconscious should present this image to me in black is not so surprising. The color can be said to be my opposite, as left is opposite to right. Or, maybe not—the left brain can get stuck in such categories. The right brain operates promiscuously, faithful only to the metaphorical power of the image itself, following in the footsteps of its nonlinear gait. The self-same archetype may present itself someone else in another color. As black is the nominal color of death in the culture I was raised in—the color of moonless midnight, the color of blindness—white in many cultures is the color of death, reminiscent of pus and decay. To many, whites are ghostly. Gweilo is the word many Chinese in North America give to Caucasians—one can overhear the term any day on the streets of Vancouver; historically and politically, it has been suggested, the term is atttributed because of the corpse-like color of the white skin of European colonialists.

So, for me, my nameless black attacker was, and is, a psychopomp. He led me very close to death, and my story is that I live to honor the dance in that liminal transition space. What has happened to Kenton and me more recently, on the anniversary of that encounter, is another chapter in the same book, another reminder to “pay attention!”

I offer my prayers and thanks to the psychomp, wherever he may be. His story is his own, but I can regard him with both compassion and gratitude in my story, my myth. May I learn the lessons I’ve been given to study.