Page 23 - GALIET ABSENCE AND Presence's Loom: Helen and Penelope IV

This all-consuming yearning of hers, this longing, this romantic pang to return to beauty, to ideal bliss, whether it be to return to her connubial bliss, Eden’s Biblical Garden, Hesiod’s Golden Age, or the Isles of the Blessed never ceases; it is universally heartfelt, time upon time, secular or divine. It longs for Holderlin’s poetic sublime, an immanent dwelling that beckons a poetic existence beyond a meritorious one, for “though full of merits are humans, for poesy they dwell on earth.”25 It signals towards Eliade’s return to the sacred; and it reminds the feminine of her mytho- poetic, psychic, and cyclic womb, these the living roots of Queen Penelope’s inmost ontology past the hours of eve.
Unable to dwell in a universe bound, marked, suffocated, stifled by the suitor’s ‘peras’ 3⁄4 ‘as everything defined’ 3⁄4 Penelope desperately thrills in her boundless cunning of forming and deforming, weaving and un-weaving. Thus, drenched in ‘apeiron’ 3⁄4 ‘as everything undefined’ 3⁄4 she both allures and terrifies the other. Thus, unbound by the constraints of the day, she nests, at night, in immanence to retrace how, once upon a time, in phusis, or Ius Naturae she dwelled; and how, unwilling to remarry, she, as far from Nomos and Ius Civile, in grief journeys towards presence’s élan. As she unravels Laertes’ funerary robe, she undoes the weavings of melancholy, and thereby dwells not in absence, but in night’s immanent
25 Hölderlin, Friedrick. Selected Poems and Fragments. Trans. Michael Hamburger. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.
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