Penelope and Ulysses (7 page)

We travel and hide

from all the world,

and yet we are both found.

YOUNG PENELOPE:
Agape
mou
,

you are the salt in my bread,

the salt in my tears, the salt in my body.

YOUNG ULYSSES: You consume me and spit me out,

like a fish that flounders.

I cannot live without being in you.

There is no life unless I am swimming in you.

YOUNG PENELOPE: You are a swimmer in life, Ulysses.

In my past I have been in prison,

in confinement, under house arrest.

They even sealed the windows

so that I could not see the sea or sky.

But they could not seal the eyes

of my searching and aching soul.

YOUNG ULYSSES: I did not think that you lived.

I thought that for some reason or other,

men would have hunted you

and netted you,

and you would have died from grief.

For it is true: when you confine a wild bird

it will fret and die from grief.

And you are a wild bird.

YOUNG PENELOPE: I also thought that upon my arrival in your life

you would be bound and bled

and you would have asked me

to travel alone,

alone, alone—

YOUNG ULYSSES: In the sea of life,

you will travel alone.

In the journey of longing

I cannot be separated from you,

as stars cannot be separated from their light,

and all good sailors will tell you,

we are lost on the sea

without the stars to guide us.

YOUNG PENELOPE: Some people say it is better

not to find your other whole

because of the grief and suffering

that is experienced upon physical separation.

I am happy to reach out and accept this price,

to drink of this cup.

And what if I found you bled,

shattered, and broken, Ulysses?

That for me would have been a double death:

first, that the hunters had killed you,

and then your captive sad eyes

would have killed me again.

Does a double death bring about a double life

for a Dionysian dancer,

who has her eyes in her feet?

YOUNG ULYSSES: What a defiant spirit!

What a deep desire I have for you!

No! I burn for you,

in your presence and your absence.

I was convinced that they

would have netted you

for your gifts.

YOUNG PENELOPE: I was promised by my father

to a certain educated barbarian,

who thought that he would break me

by ridiculing and humiliating

my ways of seeing and living in the world.

My father told me that you did not exist.

He told me that I was seeking

a cat with five legs.

He told me that you were dead.

He told me that love does not exist

and only wealth and power

will bring the world to its knees.

I did not want to bring the world to its knees.

I wanted to worship and love another

in all their tragedy and beauty.

I was not allowed to swim or fly,

and I turned inward

to discover the sea and the sky.

At an early age

I was under house arrest,

and my movements

were watched and measured.

I learned to play with threads,

traps, and prisons

so that I could remain,

so that I could continue,

so that I would not surrender

the world that makes and breaks me.

I learned from any early age,

before you pulled me out of the sea,

how to listen without words,

to see what others hide

and where they hide it.

I learned to avoid the hunter and the hunted,

while all the time

I lived in the cave of the hunter.

I had to learn how to remain alive,

in the net of the freshly caught.

I did not compromise

my thoughts, my heart, my body.

I plotted and planned

to find a cut in the net

or a cut in me,

in which I would remain free.

During the day I was obedient

and wore the yoke of the ox and the calf

in obedience.

YOUNG ULYSSES: What did you do during the night,

my Dionysian weaver and dancer?

YOUNG PENELOPE: During the night,

I walked on the forbidden path.

I carved a wing on my right ankle

so that I could fly lopsided to the mountain

that contained the treasures

of imagination and vision.

I searched into the eyes

of all who spoke to me.

I listened with my eyes

to see the flicker of your fire,

to see you just once,

just for five minutes.

I would settle for a second

rather than not have you at all.

YOUNG ULYSSES: I want a universe for you

where nothing dies.

All the great thinkers,

of all cultures and generations

cannot answer

why anything has to die.

YOUNG PENELOPE: Is there a universe that does not die?

YOUNG ULYSSES: Yes, there is a universe that does not die;

it simply continues and is passed on,

generation to generation.

I am not a poet, Penelope.

I am a man of war

and I believe what I see,

not what I am told by philosophers or poets,

although I have an affection

for these sensitive souls.

What I have seen in the struggle for life,

in the struggle with death,

is there is a universe that does not die,

and that universe is the seed of the human spirit

in struggle with longing, separation,

and physical death,

and the greatest desire and longing

to fly back into the heart of their loved one,

to live inside their loved one,

in their longing and living memory.

This universe does not die;

it simply continues,

impregnating the loved one with longing

and uniting them with the infinite in the finite,

having particles from both worlds

in your memory and soul.

These areas of our human life

with each other,

and without each other,

death cannot dissolve or conquer.

We have experienced them,

we have lived them,

we are of them,

and they cannot be removed by death.

Is a man dead when the living speak of him

as though he is still living?

Is that in the past or in the present,

to be continued in the future?

How can a man be dead

when he is remembered and spoken about

among the living?

Is not the most important part of him

alive in the living?

Has he not transformed into many,

rather than one?

Of course this cannot be done

without the courage and strength

of deep lasting humanity.

Kings come and go,

tyrants come and go,

but the uncompromising love

for one another continues.

It only dies when it is betrayed and compromised,

forgotten, or neglected,

or murdered by the laws and actions

of entitlement over the other.

Strange talk for a soldier.

See how your threads have taken hold,

and they cannot be broken,

these threads to my heart

that I welcome?

PENELOPE: Ulysses, did you hear that?

I can hear something moving towards us.

It is slithering in the grass;

it is coming towards us.

I can hear the chains of the civilised barbarian

travelling towards us.

This barbarism that presents itself

as human and humanitarian.

There is stealing of human life,

and the deception of the spider,

the web that will ensnare so many of us.

The organisers and planners

hunt and kill the heart of the universe,

the heart of the young and innocent,

for accumulation, for domination, for wealth, for power.

ULYSSES: I have come to see and understand

that you can do much to improve

someone without education,

without manners or refinement,

without skills or accomplishments,

a man that is confused,

lost, or even betrayed.

But you cannot do anything,

not a single thing,

with a man who has excessive weakness,

a man who has made choices that are based on weakness,

a man who has chosen the destiny of a pathetic coward

and yet will present himself as a leader among men,

present himself as a

human during the day

while he organises armies

and hunts people during the night.

You cannot teach wisdom to a malignant mind.

YOUNG PENELOPE: You have come to understand

so much about the organised,

democratic barbarian

because you have lived among them:

you were one of them.

I love you, Ulysses,

because I know who you were,

who you are,

how you have used your sophistry and persuasion

in taking armies to foreign shores

and bringing back

what has not belonged to us.

Would I have not been happier

with a piece of bread and water,

would I not been happier

to know that my husband

was not stained with blood?

—“for blood will have blood.”
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My beloved, my tormented husband,

do those that you have killed

visit you in your sleep?

YOUNG ULYSSES: You are the keeper

of my unspoken torment and grief.

Yes, they do visit me when I sleep

as I know that the living will soon visit me again

and ask me to return to stealing the land

that belongs to others,

stealing and sealing their lives with lead and spear,

fertilizing their land with their blood,

as we cut away generations to be born.

I know these things, Penelope,

because I have been a hunter

and will be a hunter again,

in the accumulation of my lands.

These men of excessive appetites will seek me again.

I am bound to them

by the blood of the men we have killed.

I am wedded to them

by the blood of the men we have killed.

What binds us is not friendship or humanity,

it is the crimes that we have committed,

it is the spilled blood of another.

It is the spilled blood of many.

YOUNG PENELOPE: You have the courage

to face your decisions

and the demons they have brought

into your life and mine.

Your blood friends will separate us

for they separate the moon from the sun.

They call day, night,

and night, day.

They separate, divide, alienate, conquer, and crush

until one goes mad or dies from grief.

YOUNG ULYSSES: They will come.

They will seek my skills

and later, they will seek you.

You must always be ready for your departure;

one must always be in training

for when the hunter throws the net.

Until that time,

surrender to me

what belongs to me,

what is of me and you.

Teach me about tenderness,

about unbroken and unfractured life.

I have sharp senses.

War sharpens your senses and your appetite.

I have become skinless

and feel things quicker,

deeper, and sooner.

War has disturbed my order

and balance of things.

War has made me dangerous to you!

My love, your future decisions

will disappoint many.

YOUNG PENELOPE: I am happy to disappoint those

who seek to use me

for their self-interest and self-gratification.

I will not disappoint or neglect my decisions

that direct and guide me to my destiny.

YOUNG ULYSSES: What is it, my love? You look concerned.

YOUNG PENELOPE: Ulysses, I fear for you,

for your cleverness will draw

your old friends to you

and both your friends and your enemies

will seek you.

Your gifts, your choices, your decisions

will bring the net to Ithaca,

will bring the net

to our lives,

to our world.

They will throw the net

of domination and oppression

over our world

as you have thrown it over your past enemies’ lives.

YOUNG ULYSSES: My friends are organised

and methodical, democratic men.

They write the law by day,

and by night they steal and murder

strangers, land, and life.

The ones who eat the children of the enemy

like to present their deeds of horror and death

as actions they had to make

for the good of all—

the progress of the world.

Bad deeds are transformed into a necessity.

Their barbaric murder of the sleeping enemy

is transformed into a humane cause

of democratic, civilised order.

One of my soldiers once said to me,

“A job like this is not for a man

without feeling or decency;

I’m not half brutal enough.”
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YOUNG PENELOPE: Was it then that you realised

that we are plunging

into the abyss of pain?

They will open the heart of the kindred and the stranger

with hooks and metal tools of torture

to see if they can capture

the lover and the fool.

And then they will want to put in their hand

to remove all the seeds of the future generations.

The more you maim, torture, kill, and burn,

the more rewards they will give you