Page 17 - GALIET Dido's Triplicity and Aeneas' Duplicity

Dido’s wail in the woods of despair cries to us, as Philomela’s and Lavinia’s34 tongue-less-ness because we have read their speech before their peripeteion. Their pseudo-silences “cast but shade beyond the other lights
sky’s clear, night’s sea,
green of the mountain pool
shone from the unmasked eyes in half-mask’s space.”35
The poetry of Dido of the mourning plains is just as un-silent as her silence in the cavern’s chronic darkness. In the cave, Dido is nothingness: unword, untrace, unshadow. We neither know of “what is” and “what is not.” Nothingness and invisibility. [Unlike the speech-laden invisibility of Aeneas]. This unreality show is a doubt factory: Plato, Medea.
3⁄4 Daedalus’ labyrinth 3⁄4
Yet. Afterwards, multiplicities of voices compete for Ophra’s prime time. Best cavern contestants: Juno and Venus. These hissing goddesses suspiciously glimpse at each other’s unlit palm pilots blurring “what is” and “what is not.” Marriage or not? This uncertainty, unknowing, this endless platonic cave- dwelling, binding us to the text, projects horrific images far from sky’s clarity: Dido commits suicide; Aeneas pietas-pursuit is false.36 Can we say, then, that Dido-in-the-cave is just as silent as Dido’s un-silence in the mourning plains? If
34 Shakespeare. Titus Andronicus. Lavinia is the mirror of Philomela with the added horror that her hands are chopped. Titus’ Lavinia is raped and mutilated by Goths. Shakespeare. Titus Andronicus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
35 Pound, Ezra. The Cantos. New York: A New Directions Book, 1950. Canto 81. 518
36 Aeneas enters his mission through the gates of ivory, of false dreams.
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