Penelope and Ulysses Page 5

  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,
<
br />   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.”25

  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.”26

  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

  and make you even more famous and wealthy.

&nb
sp; The more you kill,

  with every hunt and netting,

  the more you will lose your way,

  the more you will become a wanderer

  in the realm of shadows

  you used to call “your life.”

  You will not be physically dead,

  but more dead than the dead will you be.

  When you no longer can find your way home,

  the voices, hands, and embraces of the dead

  will hunt and haunt you.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: I have learned and participated in such horrors

  by sacrificing others.

  I have learned that you must navigate your own vessel,

  and you must follow your nature and destiny.

  This is the lesson of the Promethean fire maker,

  even though I have not lived as a fire maker

  and fire giver.

  BOTH: And let the fires burn.

  YOUNG PENELOPE: So that the living can see me.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: So that the dead can find me.

  YOUNG PENELOPE: To give light to the world,

  you first must burn.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: You are one of these women

  who I can neither find nor lose,

  for I am always searching, longing,

  seeking, aching for you.

  You are all women.

  My desire, longing, aching,

  my joy in life.

  I have looked into the veil of mystery

  and I have seen your face.

  I have heard your voice,

  I have touched your breast,

  I have tasted your skin.

  You are the mistress of my body.

  Come to me.

  [PENELOPE embraces him.]

  YOUNG PENELOPE: There is no possible way

  to reach to the bottom of your world.

  There is no possible way to reach

  to the top or the sides.

  You continue swimming. Look!

  And there float your phantoms,

  reaching out for both of us!

  Of all the men I could have been with,

  I chose you,

  not because I am blind to who you are

  and what you have done,

  but because you have the capacity and humanity

  to realise and admit your frailties

  and the damage you have caused to others

  for your benefit.

  I could have been with another,

  but I chose you,

  for the strength that you have

  in your character.

  Now ask me,

  would I choose another man

  before you or after you?

  Ask me.

  ULYSSES: Would you choose another

  before me or after me, Penelope?

  And who would you like

  for me to bring to you?

  Socrates, Plato,

  Aristotle, Pericles?