Page 31 - GALIET ABSENCE AND Presence's Loom: Helen and Penelope IV

whether she (I) ought to respect.../her (my) dear husband’s bed, or if she (I) should wed/that man...the best of the Achaeans.”55 Her sweet song, un-weaving as permanence and marriage, always embraces her lamenting song of weaving as departure and remarriage. There is a desperate motion between warp and weft that congeals action, that insists to dwell in the penumbra, in between things, stagnating things in the same of the same.
This stillness, sameness, becomes the natural sameness of Heraclitus’ flowing, running river, symbolic of the crystalline rivers of beingness: the river that sings and runs through every human heart: the river of sadness giving way to joy, of hope giving way to despair, of life giving way to death, of sleep giving way to awakening, of water giving way to earth and to the soul,56 or as Empedocles would later claim, of love giving way to strife and strife to love.57 Heraclitus’ says, ‘we step and do not step into the same rivers, we are and are not.’”58 This can be interpreted as “when we step in the same
55 Ody., 19. 503-530. 396.
56 F 44. “Death for souls is the birth of water, death for water is the birth of earth, and earth is the source of water, and water is the source of soul.” Waterfield, Robin. The First Philosophers. The Pre-Socratics and the Sophists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
57 T7 Empedocles. In a way, Heraclitus’ flux and Empedocles’ dynamic love-strife cycles are reminiscent of Anaximenes’ new worldview. Anaximenes postulates that elements are not opposed but are at different stages of a continuum. Thus, he rejects Anaximander’s view that opposites are always unjustly in conflict. Waterfield, Robin. The First Philosophers. The Pre-Socratics and the Sophists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
58 Heraclitus Homericus, Homeric Questions, 24.10-12 Oelmann 41. On page 317 of Waterfield, see note 41. Waterfield says, “with regards to we are and are not, it is possible that an original single fragment of the river existed from which these testimonies derive.” Please see Heraclitus’ T3.
Waterfield, Robin. The First Philosophers. The Pre-Socratics and the Sophists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
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