And all the while,
her unheard song became louder
in the echoes of my silence.
YOUNG PENELOPE: My love. We cannot escape the turbulence
of the forever making and breaking decisions
of our nature and our destiny.
We cannot escape the sea.
She lives inside us and outside us.
We are floating in her and on her.
YOUNG ULYSSES: The untranslated, unopposed song
became as intimate to me as my breathing
and I realised that her hands reached out
to touch me.
They were your hands, Penelope.
Your long fingers
and pale, delicate skin [touches her hair].
The seaweed had become your hair
that was entangling me
and binding me to her.
YOUNG PENELOPE: “There is the sea and who will drink it dry.”22
YOUNG ULYSSES: I did not struggle, I did not fight.
I floated to the bottom of her world
only to be tossed and spat out.
I woke to find you sleeping next to me.
I had been thrown and I caught you
in the tree
that we have made our bed.
YOUNG PENELOPE: What do think this means?
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?
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.
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.
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,