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,
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.”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?