Penelope and Ulysses (21 page)

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.
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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 t
he
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 artist 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 beauty
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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”
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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.”
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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.
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I came into my life late, and I will never leave it again.

I have struggled with the idea and praxis of going public, putting my vision on paper and offering it to both kindred and the stranger. I have hidden my work and my creative thoughts and worlds from others, simply because I do not want to be confined or formulated, “and when I am formulated . . . [and] pinned . . . how should I begin to spit out . . . my days?”
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The other tension in me is that I do not desire to lead, I simply desire to share and to return to my solitude.

Through this journey that I have shared, I learned some things about sharing that I had forgotten.

If I do not give myself permission to share this with others, my avoidance and silence would be an admission that the sensitive and intelligent do not belong here; in truth, we have a great need for the sensitive, compassionate, and intelligent in our life and world.

Where would I be if my humankind family had not left their song for me to share, challenge, inspire me, and keep my soul warm in the darkest night?

This type of invention and exploration is a process of finding inner worlds that so many fear to travel in or speak about, the inner worlds that connect us to life, others, the past, present, and future, the inner voice of “self-ownership.”
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Within this struggle and inspiration I discovered that if I did not share my song with others then I would not be worthy of what my navigating ancestors have offered me freely. I also discovered that unless I was willing to share this vision, it lacked the affirmation of blood, my devotion and commitment to it. Although I love the songs that others have left for me, this is my song, and in humility and gratitude I say thank you to them, and you, for staying, for seeing, for exploring what I invented and created.

Thank you for allowing me the gift to share this creativity with you.

Thank you for teaching me to offer my work.

I thank those that have waited for me:

the past generations and navigators;

those that are with me now;

and those that will wait for me when they arrive later.

All that has been written is from

Myth

Fact

and Nonsense.

Endnotes
 

1
The Bible, Deuteronomy 8: 2-3 (King James Version)

2
Nietzsche, Friedrich.
The Gay Science
, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974, § 276, p. 223.

3
Ritsos, Yannis. From
The Fourth Dimension: Selected Poems of Yannis Ritsos, transl. Rae Dalven.
Godine, 1977.

4
Miller, Alice. “The Essential Role of an Enlightened Witness in Society”, 1 January, 1997. From:
http://www.alice-miller.com

5
“Socrates said he was not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world”. Plutarch (Greek essayist and biographer, A.D. 46-A.D. 120), “Of Banishment”.

6
The epitaph on the grave of
Nikos Kazantzakis.

7
“Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood, and thou will find that blood is spirit”. Nietzsche, Friedrich.
Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by Thomas Common
. The Pennsylvania State University, 1999.