Page 16 - GALIET Dido's Triplicity and Aeneas' Duplicity

Aeneas’ defence. Though Spence’s speech-moral analogue and Farron’s precise Dido do make sense, Spence’s awe at Dido’s powerful Ajaxian, Minervan26 silence is most perplexing and unexplained. Dido is never silent: Dido’s mask is revealed with her thousand words. “Where there is no language,” Heidegger says, “there is no openness of what is or what is not.”27 Language is poetry. Silence is nothingness. un-snow. un-trace.
Have we not, then, been pierced by the vowels of Dido’s lute, her ‘what is’ and ‘what is not’ while in her Cytherean fields? Have we not, then, drunk the black milk28 and seen the bird’s pyre before her tartarean new moon’s climb?29 Poetry is the song being soul of beings:30 word and shadow, word and gesture, lingua and body 3⁄4 un-silence. Aren’t Dido’s incinerating gestures, eyes and verb- essence the drums, lens and lyre of her being and, these, a thousand times more? Derrida might argue that her absence is her presence. However, Dido’s poetic being is present even in Spence’s absence. Her fierce eyes “burn” before they are cast down.
Wood-like.31
As she rushes away, she “hates”32 Aeneas, her “anger blazes.”
[Is this not Dido’s “passive” voice speaking through Virgil’s verse?]
Wail-like.33
26 Spence. 93-94.
27 Heidegger, Martin. Language Poetry and Thought. 71.
28 The Aeneid, (IV, 455).
29 This refers to Aeneas’ feeling when he sees Dido in the Underworld. She is like the new moon. (VI, 453). 30 My deduction from Heidegger’s readings.
31 Allusion to the reason why they burn: cave.
32 The Aeneid, (IV, 475).
33 Allusion to the wails of the nymphs foreshadowing Dido’s own wails and anger.
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