Page 29 - GALIET ABSENCE AND Presence's Loom: Helen and Penelope IV

“for the sake of dishonored me and the blind act of Alexandros, us two, on whom Zeus set a vile destiny, so that hereafter
we shall be made into things of song for the men of the future.”48
Helen’s perfidious song dwells as dishonour’s rift, while Penelope’s fragrant song becomes honour’s gift: what bastion of measure and fame, never far-off from Penelope’s blissful connubial pillar, sustaining heaven and earth, and always mindful of the cosmotheandric bond amongst nature, beings and divinities, for only a divinity’s might could ever move it.49 This perennial chamber gate of “horn” and “ivory” dreams is the abode of sleep, of love, of secret confidences, and of endless marital trials and odysseys in presence woven.
Just as Odysseus undoes the olive tree’s “long-leaved limbs” to make bare, so as to carve and form his “true and straight” nuptial bed pillar out of bursting olive seed, Penelope undoes the long-threaded intricacies of warp and weft to denude her gloomy loom, so as to conserve, not nostalgia’s dream, but their oikos’ beauty, its presence, its truthfulness, its uprightness, these their wedded bliss, as if her loosened threads, unwoven, were the succulent, evergreen roots beneath the earth in olive tree entwined.
Fine threads as arboreal roots, and arboreal roots as fine threads, loosely dancing in her ideal cosmos as a
48 Il., 6.355-58.
49 Ody., 23.179-207. 463.
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