Page 32 - GALIET ABSENCE AND Presence's Loom: Helen and Penelope IV

rivers, we are, and when we do not step in the same rivers, we are not.” In Heraclitus’ river, there is a feeling of things “scattering and gathering, coming together and dissolving,”59 just as in Penelope’s spacious loom Laertes’ funerary robe and her marriage comes together and dissolves, insinuating a constancy, a flow, where being is always in-between things always dwelling in-between presence and absence, Aletheia and Lethe, and the currents of change.
Being, in this sense, is the running stream, or Penelope’s wide web, where every contrary of Heraclitus’ gathers in unity: the ever-flowing motion of Penelope’s weaving and un-weaving as what is not, and what is, just as the ever flowing, ever filling and ever emptying river of the same thing that is and is not60 singing and mirroring the tears of chaos and the joys of harmony expressed in its sameness. Its waters beckon true being, that is, for the infinite to flow into the finite, the atemporal into the temporal, and separation into unity, just as Penelope beckons the infinite arboreal roots to flow into the finite threads to weave not her departure, but her longing for permanence and true being, weaving into un-weaving, and absence into presence. There is a leap, a motion as motionless as the blissful connubial pillar, a truth in whose bosom Penelope’s cycles of doing and undoing spin giving way to oblivion and unconcealment in
59 F 34 Plutarch, On the E at Delphi 392b 10-c3 Babbit. 41.
60 Aristotle. Metaphysics, Book 4, Chapter 3, 1005b, 25. Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Metaphysics. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: The Modern Library, 2001.
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