Penelope and Ulysses
Page 15
back into metamorphosis—
another birth.
Without movement or wheels,
without maps or charts,
we find our way into the world
and find our way into the next realm,
the next birth.
We find our arrival.
We are there for our departure
and know precisely where to be and where to go
for our unknown destinations.
PENELOPE: Our arrival into life;
our departure into the unknown.
YOUNG PENELOPE: Upon our arrival in life
we are also entering the unknown,
and yet we cling to this known
as if it were the only life, the only experience
that we will ever go through.
BOTH: Our lives are full of arrivals and departures.
PENELOPE: How does it stand here,
that the wheels and trains and planes
move without progress,
and with fixed destinations?
Where is the adventure
if you know exactly where you are going to go,
who you will be with,
what you will wear,
how you will look,
and how you will act.
Where is the adventure
in such a controlled destination?
BOTH: We are all navigators in the sea of life.
“And there is the sea and who will drink it dry?”46
YOUNG PENELOPE: Man, among all creatures,
is the most desirable to me.
BOTH: The most frightening.
PENELOPE: The one that knows of the progress and stages of life,
the cycle of birth and death,
and still pretends that these laws do not apply to him.
YOUNG PENELOPE: The most lovable
and by far the most desirable one.
PENELOPE: It is strange, how when we are older,
words that we have used when we were younger
come back to haunt us.
BOTH: Man has the capacity to create, to make, to invent,
to heal, to love, to harvest peace and prosperity to all.
PENELOPE: How does one know
if one loves from their soul,
from their vision,
from the depths and sleep of eternity?
YOUNG PENELOPE: They make fire in the heart of others.
They make fire for us to see each other.
They make fire and play around it like young children.
They make fire
and give light from their struggle in life and with life.
This fire, this heat and light,
connects us to our lives and to the lives of others.
We become both alive in life and alive in death.
This is what they mean by not being separated by death,
and a love going beyond death.
PENELOPE: It is this fire in the heart, in the spirit of man
that multiplies;
it generates and consumes the fire giver
and the fire taker.
These are the seeds from eternity
that we pass on to each other.
YOUNG PENELOPE: We pass the seed of love,
the seed of fire,
the seed of eternity,
the seed of “memory” to each other.
We infect and affect each other.
PENELOPE: What happens to those
who are seed carriers of memory and fire?
YOUNG PENELOPE: We bury them in the ground
so that they can grow and we can all eat from their fruit.
They let us bury them into the ground.
Surely such evolved people would know
that if they exposed too much fire or light
others who do not want to be seen or exposed
would come to put the fire out, to put them into the ground—
and they still do it, not out of spite or defiance
but out of love.
PENELOPE: Thank goodness we cannot contain
the wild bird’s vision
or the song of the siren.
“It is the madmen and children
who keep the fires burning.”47
YOUNG PENELOPE: What would happen to the world
if we removed the seed carriers from every generation?
What would happen
if we cut down the trees in the soul?
BOTH: We would be engulfed in total darkness.
PENELOPE: The seed carriers
postulate and bury unseen seeds
in the journey of the human heart
to promote justice and peace,
to abolish exploitation of others,
to abolish wars,
to increase the ever-threatened dignity and life of man.
It is love that reaches us
from the shores of the invisible and the visible,
like the siren’s song
echoing a message that cannot be heard
in human voice
that reaches us—from where?
YOUNG PENELOPE: From the struggles and sacrifices of our lives,
from those we kept afloat in life,
from those who keep us afloat from the other shore,
from the rivers of human tears.
BOTH: The aching longing.
The shores that we reach and cannot reach.
The measureless human tears.
PENELOPE: We dream of voyages through our connection
to the seeds of longing.
We create and grieve through the fire of our love,
the fire in our being.
We arrive and depart with the light,
with the burning in our soul
that gives us direction and guidance.
BOTH: Love is in us or nowhere.
Humanity is in us or nowhere.
Kindness is in us or nowhere.
“Eternity is in us or nowhere.”48
PENELOPE: Do you have regrets?
YOUNG PENELOPE: And would you change anything
if you could be taken forward
and backward into your life?
BOTH: Would you change anything at all?
Would you offer your love to a stranger?
Would you feed and clothe a stranger,
wanting and seeking nothing in return?
PENELOPE: I do not have any regrets
upon the journey I have taken,
the love that I have shared,
the love that was stolen and hidden from me,
the long years of solitude
in which I found myself and my life.
YOUNG PENELOPE: I chose to live in the forest
and now I have returned to the sea.
I have multiplied as all fish returning home to the sea—
and so full of seed.
PENELOPE: I have come to an end.
If someone could continue where I have stopped
And there above me and below me,
my life waves to me for recognition.
YOUNG PENELOPE: For life chose me
and I choose life over and over again.
PENELOPE: I chose the road that took me away from
prestige, recognition, and power—
I chose freedom.
YOUNG PENELOPE: How do you bury a man who has loved?
PENELOPE: How do you b
ury a man who has loved?
can it be that the man who does not love
is buried while he is alive, in forgetfulness,
and he is a sleepwalker in his life?
YOUNG PENELOPE: And upon his physical death,
he disappears into the void of nothingness
as if he had never been born.
BOTH: Can it be that the man
who loves the kindred and the stranger never dies?
For we bury him in our mind, in our heart.
We pass him on as seeds for the next generation to eat from.
PENELOPE: This man lives in the fire of our soul and spirit.
These type of seeds stay in our digestion
to stir us up:
into our minds to annoy us,
into our vision to make us weep,
into the darkest night of our soul to give us hope.
BOTH: With deep tenderness and longing
to speak with him once again . . .
YOUNG PENELOPE: I see Ulysses in all the faces of the world.
PENELOPE: Our love goes above and below
the union and mating of man and woman.
Our love is fused and interwoven
with the thread and tensions of seed carriers
—the light givers.
BOTH: I came here to love, not to hate.49
PENELOPE: Have I gone too far?
Will the hunters catch me?
Will they throw their nets over me
and drag me in like a creature
freshly caught from the sea or from the forest?
YOUNG PENELOPE: I think they have declared me mad,
which is better than being declared dead,
for the mad can speak with the dead,
for the mad can speak for the dead and the living.
PENELOPE: The armies of those whom I love
consume me and engulf me.
YOUNG PENELOPE: And I engulf them.
PENELOPE: They will not let me pass until I go with them . . .
YOUNG PENELOPE: Respond to them . . .
BOTH: And I charge full with all my force . . . !
PENELOPE: Did you see the seeds of eternity fly into the sky?
And as they fall, young children,
angels and tormented devils
put them quietly under their tongues . . .
BOTH: To keep them safe, so that they can chew on them
on a dark, lonely night.
PENELOPE: To keep for when there is a crisis.
When it becomes dark and no light can be seen
they will feed on the ancestor’s seeds.
They will feed on the fire of others.
They will feed on the soul that has been left here for them.
BOTH: Now to be sure,
it seems internally and externally dark.
PENELOPE: So lonely and formless.
YOUNG PENELOPE: There is nothing to fear.
Love does not enter through
the expected doors and windows.
PENELOPE: Love is a rebel. Love comes to us.
It reaches us through illegal paths and ways.
It cannot be called love
if it is domesticated, confined, planned.
It cannot be love if it seeks rewards.
This gesture is an illusion of love.
Do you want to remain the same?
No, I go from life to life,
eating away at my life and eternity with a tiny sea shell
YOUNG PENELOPE: We became a tree in the world,
collecting dreams from the sky
and keeping the earth together.
BOTH: Such a love comes through the back door
and challenges us to pull the whole house down.
YOUNG PENELOPE: So that we can see each other.
PENELOPE: So we can create a universe that does not die—
and above all, and below all things
(forgotten, buried, or stolen)—
make decisions we can live with for the rest of our lives.
BOTH: Make decisions that give life.
PENELOPE: Then we can see each other
without shame or fear,
without power or domination.
BOTH: We will see each other.
PENELOPE: In the battle of my life
the lessons of war
are that we must fight
to keep something alive—
to keep love alive.
Of all the fires of the heart
love is the only inexhaustible one:
it unites both the kindred and the stranger;
it unites both life and death.
[PENELOPE’s dialogue ends with the celebration of a coming dawn]
[MUSIC LYRICS: “If we want the sun to return
we have much work and much struggle
as a united people,” “A Solitary Swallow,” by Odysseus Elytis]
THE END
Some Small Seeds of
Gratitude from the Journey
I thank you for waiting for me.
I thank you for travelling this journey with me.
As a poet, I have struggled with the idea of taking pictures, writing the vision down, writing about the struggle and the discoveries of the human heart that is in love with the seeking and searching Psyche.
Plato believed a person consisted of three parts:
•the mind, the intellect
•the heart, the passions
•the instincts, the sexual drives
The guidance for our human journey comes from the heart: it guides the mind to merge reason with compassion and justice—not just intellectual rationalism, a form of self-serving agenda also known as sophistry.
Plato also believed that the drives need to have the heart to guide them; otherwise, the “dark horse,” as he wrote, would turn the person into a brute. It is the heart that is the centre of all life, and Plato believed the centre of the person needed to guide both the mind and the drives. Lacking this guidance, the person would be either indifferent to others or a savage.
So it has been for me. I have travelled into the journey of the human heart, and I realised there was another part to this—the unison with Psyche. It is Psyche that urges us on to travel the road of the humane, seeking the path within the labyrinth of our human journey and the miracle of others who travel beside us, before us, after us, and those that live with us now.
Psyche travels in dark passages. All things grow from the fertility of darkness, and there is no rest for one who follows the path of Psyche. It is her purpose to challenge us so that we find the seeds from the infinite and then she insists that we bring these seeds of humanity into the light for all others to see, share and feed on.
Solomos wrote, “The eyes of my psyche are always awake; they never sleep—always awake.”
Heraclitus knew of these uncharted and unmapped journeys of the human Psyche when he wrote
“You could not reach
the ends of the Psyche
though, you want the whole
Way; so deep is its nature”
One creates from raw materials when one is on this journey: raw materials as they come from the unknown and the unexplored—the dream world, as it is known in some cultures. In others it is the quest and vision. In others, compassionate and humane creativity. The creator of such a world has to be both mother and father in this creative and dangerous journey—dangerous because the world may reject this creator for their findings and the gifts they make through the expression of their art.
But for an a
rtist not to take this journey or this risk would only destroy them from the inside, as they have abandoned all they see, worship, connect to, struggle with, and deeply love.
How does one surrender the journey of their heart and psyche to the stranger and the kindred?
With humility and gratitude.
As a writer I express my journey through masks. Penelope and Ulysses are such masks. Through these masks I am creating other people to speak for me the many tensions and dimensions, the search within the labyrinth of human passions, of human betrayal, of human longing, of human compassion, of human struggle and surrender. One creates a whole world: the map of their soul and human journey. This is done from the deepest affection for others and our world—as Yannis Ritsos writes, “so we can understand each other.”
All our arts and all our lasting artists expose us to deep humanity and longing for a better life and a better world for all of us.
In the culture I shared in my first eight years, I was taught by my illiterate grandmother that having a vision, being creative, and being a seeker of truth and beauty50 was a natural state of being, and anyone who became lazy and indifferent to the struggle of truth and beauty (which we call art) was, by nature and destiny, to suffer atrophy. In this remote part of the world and culture, art was making your life a work of art. We did not have an academic language to tell us what art was because we lived in a seeking, searching, creative way. In my life later life, in the world of academia, I learned that the “academic is fragile like crystal”51 and if one is an “artist” one must be elite and serious.
I decided to stay with the illiterate story teller, and when she could not tell me any more stories, I decided to educate myself so that I could read the messages that my family has left for me, to sustain me, to comfort me, to challenge me, and to inspire me.
Therefore I certainly do not explore, invent, and write to achieve recognition and fame: it is natural to me to travel into the world of imagination (not to be confused with fantasy), vision, and intuition.
When I was a child I used to listen to the trees: they breathe and some actually move. I learned to love the unnamed, the unseen, the untouched, and the unfound. I could not follow the path of others, nor could I lead others to my path. I knew from an early age about the “creative quick.”52
Now that you are leaving, now that the day of payment
dawns, now that no one knows
whom he will kill and how he will die
take with you the boy who saw the light
under the leaves of that plane tree
and teach him to study the trees.53
I came into my life late, and I will never leave it again.