Page 14 - GALIET ABSENCE AND Presence's Loom: Helen and Penelope IV

“Helen in the chamber was weaving a great web,
a red folding robe, and working into it the numerous struggles
of Trojans, breakers of horses, and bronze-armoured Achaeans,
struggles that they endured for her sake at the hands of the war god.”7
Helen of the loom weaves objectivity, the great web of war struggles to trace a history that unfolds for her sake: she weaves potentials for truce and peace,8 war, ruin and the others’ morgue. Penelope weaves and unweaves the mighty web of Laertes’ funerary shroud to trace her own inner tensions: her own symbolic death, by day, and her inmost salvation, by night.
Weaving Penelope weaves, by day, the weavings of her future melancholy: the disconsolation of the coming of her sad absence. A weary and weepy absence that shall creep as Laertes’ funerary robe is artfully finished, somber in the likeness to her soul dying, for “not (to) please another man,” she “wants to die...”9 Thus, her death is finely woven with Laertes’ shroud of death: to weave it by day, is to perish a little; to unweave it by night, is to breathe in spirit. Thus, she comes to be, and truly lives: she is. Penelope is, because she poetically dwells in Ithaca and because she wisely acts.
7 Homer. The Illiad. Trans. by Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951. 3.125-28.
8 Il., 3.11 and 3.97.
9 Ody., 20. 67-78. 405.
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