Page 17 - GALIET ABSENCE AND Presence's Loom: Helen and Penelope IV

halls, its welcoming permanence while she unweaves by night.
Penelope’s constant doings and undoings reveal what Helen’s weavings do not: her duplicity at dangerous crossroads. In her lonely, heart-rending odyssey, Penelope becomes cunning Hermes. Because Queen Penelope disdains to part, she eagerly leaps to trace her weavings by day, and to untrace her un-weavings by night. Unlike Helen, Penelope dwells in the liminal horizon of being, in-between knowing, and not knowing; between Olympus and Hades; undoing presence and doing absence; undoing to be, doing not- to-be; as if she were also an irresolute, feminine Hamlet (without his calamitous dénouement), ever torn between whether “to be” or “not to be,” compelled to destroy to be, and to create not to be, so as not to stir things; creating to avoid remarriage, and departure; uncreating to preserve marriage, stature 3⁄4 ever loom- tossed between “the here” and “the there,” for “so does her (my) soul shift, thrust, now here, now there,/not knowing whether she (I) should stay beside/her (my) son and keep all things intact.”15
In these wretched hours of day-felt weary trial, and of night-felt guile, Penelope tosses whether to remain or depart, to be saved or suffer demise.16 Her tragic fine threads 3⁄4 veins 3⁄4 are tragically woven in her loom of disquietude. What quandary! Always fretting between night’s light and day’s night, the ideal and the
15 Ody., 19.503-530. 396. 16 Ody., 17. 124-151. 321.
• 17 •