Page 22 - GALIET ABSENCE AND Presence's Loom: Helen and Penelope IV

There exists an almost immanent perceptibility, a scent of the Heideggerian sublime, a breath, in Queen Penelope’s unravelling at night, releasing her temporarily from bondage’s possibility, pervading the natural, and wild feminine, delivering her from the angst of weaving by day 3⁄4 her absence, her Lethe 3⁄4 oppressing her with nomos’ terrifying sunlight as it spreads over the opaque and eerie suitors. Weaving Trojan Helen, however, does not breathe. Always nomos-bound to the war’s end, she is to be wedded to Prince Paris, or King Menelaus. Patriarchy progressively conquers matriarchy’s metaphoric, idyllic dwelling by structuring a new socio-political-religious order.
Whereas matriarchy is governed by death, night, Demeter-Dionysus, Knossos and Eleusis, by existential accidents, natural necessity and cyclical time, chthonic and natural laws, patriarchy gradually imposes nomos, light, Zeus-Apollo, Olympus and the Acropolis, essence and forms, logic necessity and lineal time, the celestial and uranic along its conventional laws and institutions. Thus, Penelope, genuinely longing for her idyllic paradise during three cyclical years, ahistorical, symbolically perishes in her weavings, and rises to life in her un-weavings, while Helen remains steady, neither perishing, nor rising in heartfelt sympathies, always belonging to nomos, never to phusis, always in history’s timeline, not in cyclical time.
• 22 •