Penelope and Ulysses (6 page)

Why do you and I continue

to swim where the mermaid

loses her glory?

YOUNG ULYSSES: This is how we are made. By our choices.

The choices that have become

our destiny and journey in life.

And yet, my love,

you have a different destiny from mine.

You are a weaver of the golden threads,

faithful and devoted to finding

the anchor of my threaded heart.

You are devoted to the unwritten laws,

of the golden threads of love.

YOUNG PENELOPE: I am a weaver of dreams,

stars, rivers, mountains

and my home, the tree.

YOUNG ULYSSES: Penelope you are not weak,

and although you weave dreams

you are not absent from life,

like so many women and men

who seek only the security and safety

of the known and taught.

Theirs is domesticated love that prevents them

from taking the journey into their life

and into the life of the other.

My beautiful wild bird and silent siren,

I fear that the world will not allow us

to conspire for too long with each other.

YOUNG PENELOPE: Will others come to separate us?

YOUNG ULYSSES: We do not always steer the course

of our vessel. There are times that the sea of life

will remove us from all

that we have known and loved.

There are times the force and might of others

crash into our vessel,

into our life,

into our world

and nothing,

nothing

remains the same.

YOUNG PENELOPE: The seas and storms of our lives,

the crises of our lives,

remove us from what we have known

as the lighthouse.

In these crises we either remain devoted

to this love or to our betrayal

of all that is life-giving.

YOUNG ULYSSES: I hear many drowning sailors,

long before the sirens expose the secret

of their hearts. Their pleading and curses

can be heard in the winds by all others

who have not been shipwrecked in their lives.

Their laments and tears can be heard

as we sail into the dark waters

of the crises of our life: the breaking away

from all that gave us safety and security,

when the island has been sunk,

the tree has been cut down,

and we surrender to all

that makes and breaks us.

YOUNG PENELOPE: I sense we will be tossed

and turned inside out.

YOUNG ULYSSES: Haunted and hunted

by something that is moving,

breaking, creeping, and crawling

towards our shore.

I can hear the moaning of the sea

as the burdened and overloaded ships

creak with the weight of lead and death.

YOUNG PENELOPE: Nothing will remain the same.

All will change.

We will all be scattered

away from our homes,

away from our loved ones,

away from the safety of the light.

YOUNG ULYSSES: I know my time with you,

I know my time without you.

I have known you in absence

and now in presence.

And there will come a time

in which I will love you

without touching your body.

I love you in absence, once again.

BOTH: In that absence,

you will become as intimate to me

as my breathing.

[
They
breathe
into
each
other’s
mouth.
]

YOUNG ULYSSES: How does one love

a wild bird that seeks to live

in the heart of a navigator

without domesticating or confining?

YOUNG PENELOPE: Your physical tenderness and softness

reduces me to my knees. [
falls
to
her
knees
]

YOUNG ULYSSES: I fall to my knees and give thanks [
falls
to
his
knees
]

to all that makes and breaks me

for allowing me to experience

the miracle of woman.

My woman!

YOUNG PENELOPE: Come kiss me,

my beautiful and dangerous Ulysses.

YOUNG ULYSSES: I love you with such a youthful passion

that I will be able to taste you on my skin

when I cannot be with you.

YOUNG PENELOPE: No heaven or hell will remove you

from the sea that consumes me,

the sea that brought you to me.

YOUNG ULYSSES: The sea that calls me

and claims me as hers.

YOUNG PENELOPE: The sea that I had to travel to find you.

The sea that will keep me from you,

my love,

my love.

YOUNG ULYSSES: The women I knew before you

all had your face.

All the sirens, witches, and goddesses

who enter my sleeping state

will have to have your face,

your hands, your voice, your breasts, your smell.

I will always see your face

in every woman.

So, tell me my clever wife,

when I started training

and teaching you

how to stand in war,

how to defend yourself,

I did not suspect

that you had mastered the craft of the sword.

YOUNG PENELOPE: Why are you surprised?

YOUNG ULYSSES: And why should I not be surprised?

I have always counted and depended

on your clever and cunning ways

in reaching a destination

without being heard or seen.

I know the answers

as you know my questions.

I suspect that you have been training secretly

not only for the battles of war

but also for the knowledge

of our poets and dancers.

I suspect you are acquainted

with the philosophers.

I believe that you have spoken also

with Pericles’s concubine,

the one who so impressed Plato.

YOUNG PENELOPE: Aspesia?

YOUNG ULYSSES: What does the famous Aspesia say about Pericles

and how she seduced

all his senses—all six of them?

Think of this, Penelope.

She would be a woman of your heart.

There was Pericles—married.

Not happily married, but married all the same.

He made laws about the way

other men should live

and how they should

conduct themselves in private and political life.

YOUNG PENELOPE: And just when he had denounced

the lover and fool in the world,

he fell in love, head and all ten toes, with Aspesia.

He paid his friend to seduce

and convince his legal wife

to run away with him

so that he (Pericles) could have a life

with his beloved Aspesia.

YOUNG ULYSSES: Do you think that she also

was a weaver and spinner

of dreams and stars,

and the promise of dawn?

YOUNG PENELOPE: I have come to the conclusion

that very few fall in love, very few can love.

Rather, the fear of being alone

makes them delude themselves

that they are mated for life.

Security, comfort, prestige, acceptance.

Fear, fear, fear, fear.

The fear of being alone.

YOUNG ULYSSES: You, on the other hand, Penelope,

are not afraid of being alone.

You are not afraid to resist,

to plot and plan.

You are a master

with the threads of the heart.

“How I love a clever woman.”
23

YOUNG PENELOPE: The investigation of life:

My place in the world

and the world’s place in me.

I do not want to change the world,

but I do not want the world to change me.

How can you say that you are alive, truly alive,

if you do not search and investigate beyond,

above and below the safety

of taught things,

below and above

the safety of mediocrity?

YOUNG ULYSSES: How can you love if you fear?

YOUNG PENELOPE: As for me, my training with the sword

and my discipline in the art of philosophical persuasion

is to protect you and our son.

It is to protect you, my love.

You look surprised!

You of all people should know

that when life sets me a task

I will continue to live in it

until I can master it.

I do not reveal myself

as one of the hunted or the hunters

in moments of danger and war.

Nor do I show my weakness to my enemy.

Therefore, one needs strategy,

purpose, and planning

to avoid the nets of either

the slave or the master.

YOUNG ULYSSES: And what of your dancing feet, Penelope?

Will the hunter follow your tracks

to the Dionysian worship and reverence for life?

YOUNG PENELOPE: It was you who told me about

the unknown philosopher

who searched into

the hidden things of life,

into the seen things of death,

and into the deep longing for the “eternal recurrence,”
24

the hidden and revealed things of life,

and went mad.

I have seen him dancing

in Dionysian processions.

He is the lover and the fool and he is near.

He had mad dancing feet.

You have to be a dancer

to jump over the abyss.

YOUNG ULYSSES: Is it over the abyss, or into the abyss?

YOUNG PENELOPE: You jump into the abyss.

How else will you know its secrets

and find a way under it or above it?

How else if you do not live in it?

Did he not say that your friend

should have the courage

to be your enemy?

YOUNG ULYSSES: Penelope, do you love me so deeply

that you would risk my anger and rejection

by telling me what I do not want to hear,

what I do not want to face?

Yes, Zarathustra did say

that when you love,

you should have the courage and strength

to expose all parts,

all the unspoken

and all the hidden

to the other.

YOUNG PENELOPE: In our love there is no fear,

no guilt, no shame,

no rations, no compartments,

only reverence and devotion.

YOUNG ULYSSES: This is not an idealistic ideology;

this is a way of life for me.

As a warrior of many battles

and many experiences

in the struggle for life and death,

I have come to realise the world

has gone mad

with either pain or indifference.

Man has lost his way

and struts around in his life,

like a sleepwalker,

and he is not in his life,

and lives out his years

as a shadow of himself.

YOUNG PENELOPE: I could not have the passion and strength I have

if I did not have the will to endure

and ask for more.

I have a deep love for the world

and my place in it—

not outside it,

in it.

YOUNG ULYSSES: You sing to me the song of the sirens,

for you open my heart

and reveal the fullness

that multiplies in truth and beauty,

and expose the complexity and diversity

of my choices

that have brought me to you.

YOUNG PENELOPE: I am your whole,

your equal, not your half.

Not your “other half,”

not the “little woman”

who will pass with time,

who will grow grey and vanish

from your desire and passions,

who will start as your lover,

be transformed into wife,

reduced to sister,

and finally abandoned

as a sexless partner.

YOUNG ULYSSES: I would rather leave for foreign shores

than to place such a yoke

of convenience and commodity

upon our love.

I would leave, denouncing all

that gives me security and safety

rather than to face

a loveless union,

a cold body,

and grasping hands.

Did not your mad philosopher also say

that when you stop loving me,

you don’t understand me?

YOUNG PENELOPE: Yes, Ulysses, Yes! I want you to burn for me.

For how can you be truly alive

if you do not have a fire in the belly?

I wanted to tell you that I am the warrior

who will be with you in all your battles,

lost or won.

I swear by my sword [
lifts
her
sword
],

I am your army, Ulysses.

I am the foot soldier you leave behind

to keep the fire burning,

to keep the fire of the lighthouse alive so that you will always find your way home, back to me.

YOUNG ULYSSES: And who can convince the sea to be reasonable?

Why does it create such strange creatures

like you and I?

Tell me,
agape
mou
, if a fish and bird fall in love—

as at times they will and do—

when a bird and fish fall in love,

where do they live?

YOUNG PENELOPE: You and I are like the bird and the fish.

Do we live in the sea or in the sky?

Do we live in each other’s heart?

Both of us are bound by our nature and choices—

one feeds the other,

and both of us have a separate destiny.

We meet and love and pledge

in the moments

that we forge with our souls, as our eternity.

Both of us will remain with each other

when these moments

of physical intimacy and discovery

have been removed from us.

In your absence

there is a haunting presence.

YOUNG ULYSSES: Penelope, my love,

we are both navigators

in the sea of the life.