Page 21 - GALIET ABSENCE AND Presence's Loom: Helen and Penelope IV

loom-tossed Penelope, too, journeys to her idyllic halls.
Unlike Helen of Troy, Penelope acts to deny her “hateful wedding,”21 her experience of exile, and her real, undreamed nostalgia; thus, unravelling the possibility to bid farewell in her duplicitous weavings and un-weavings in her levity and twilight of being. For Queen Penelope of sorrows, unlike deedless Helen of the dubious words, never ceases to act on her word, and to remember the beauties of her bountiful past, too, in word and memory; thus she undoes Laertes’ robe to breath and live, survive a little longer just to forget the terrifying possibility of exile.
To forget this exile, this possibility, this oblivion, as Lethe, blesses Penelope with presence, Aletheia, in the Grecian22 and Heideggerian sense,23 that is, Lethe as absence (Penelope’s weaving, making), and Aletheia as unconcealment (Penelope’s un-weaving, unmaking). This presence, this Aletheia sings, too, of phusis, while Lethe sings of nomos, her antithesis.24
21 Ody., 18.255-284. 370.
22 Etymologically, Aletheia means unconcealment; and it signifies that which is seen, expressed, and that which is disclosed, or discloses itself, as it really is. Xenoph. An., IV, 4, 15: aletheusai...ta onta te os onta, kai ta me onta os ouk onta. Also in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Vol. I. Ed. By Gerhard Kittel. Trans. by Geoffrey Bromiley. Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1964.
23 In Heidegger’s thought, Aletheia signifies unconcealment as presence. Heidegger. Poetry, Language and Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Collins, 2001
.
24 Inwood, Michael. A Heidegger Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
• 21 •