Page 13 - GALIET ABSENCE AND Presence's Loom: Helen and Penelope IV

unto death4 3⁄4 to nothingness, a nothingness that, paradoxically, deciphers the meaning of her existence, salvation, which becomes her refuge, a presence, a permanence sacrosanct to her; for how she fears the unthinkable hour of her anguished farewell, and the lugubrious loss, at times inevitable, of her identity, never unwoven, or torn apart in real dualisms such as Helen’s as Queen of Sparta, and Princess of Troy, but ever faithfully woven to Ithaca, Telemachus and her Odysseus. Dwelling identity whose spirit is enmeshed with the lovely halls of her paradise, “these halls so fair,/so filled with treasures, halls/that I’ll remember, even in my dreams,”5 halls of years of being she does not wish to abandon. Thus, desolate Penelope of the sad hours, “...weave(s)/that mighty web by day; but then by night,/by torchlight, she undoes (I undid) what she (I) had done.”6 And thus, she weaves, by sun- lit day her possible absence in nostalgia’s woven streams, and unweaves, by starry night, her possible presence with longing dreams.
Trojan Helen, too, a great web weaves, neither to undo her salvation, nor to preserve her wedded bliss with Menelaus or Paris, but to commemorate her mythic presence in the war struggles Trojans and Achaeans endured for her sake:
4 This term is aptly used by Kierkegaard to express Penelope’s despair arising from her dialectical, tragic tensions. Once remarried and away from her home, she will cease, in Kierkegaard’s sense, to fulfill a loftier, divine purpose. Her despair is that she “wants to die...not please another man.” Ody., 20. 67-78. 405.
5 Ody., 19.559-587. 398. 6 Ody., 19.117-148. 383.
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