No why. Just Here

A look at Homer’s Odyssey as an ode to waiting…

Am I in love? —yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.

 

-Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse 1978

 

In 1978, Roland Barthes wrote A Lover’s Discourse. A list of fragments; gestures, of the lover at work. Barthes preferred to call them “figures,” all of which pertained in some way, to the discourse of love.

Waiting, is one such example.

Barthes speaks of “Waiting” as the, “Tumult of anxiety provoked by waiting for the loved being, subject to trivial delays…Waiting is an enchantment: I have received orders not to move. Waiting for a telephone call is thereby woven out of tiny, unavowable interdictions to infinity: I forbid myself to leave the room, to go to the toilet, even to telephone (to keep the line from being busy).” A true master of weaving together all that we thought we knew, Barthes breaks down our experiences and turns the mirror upon us. 

Waiting, as a tensile point in time, is ultimately a path toward stasis. One cannot move forward so long as one is fixed by the gravity of the compulsion to wait.

Composed around the end of the 8th century BC, long before the time of telephones, is Homer’s epic tale of The Odyssey; the ultimate, ode to waiting. 

 

On it’s most obvious level, The Odyssey describes the journey of Odysseus, who is away from his wife Penelope, and son Telemachus, for 20 years after the Trojan War. During this time, all the while remaining faithful, and keeping her 50 suitors at bay, his wife Penelope waits.

These 20 years of waiting, marked by a loss of faith, of mourning for her husband, leave Penelope in a state of inertia. She is at a loss. 

Evidently, in Greek Mythology, waiting and loss, are actually, inextricably linked. If the process of waiting implies either never having possessed something, or awaiting the return of something else; then one is at a loss for the duration of their waiting, they are missing something; someone.

As with several other female entities in Greek myth, Homer’s Penelope represents the complexities of the experience of woman. She is both an embodiment of submission, the “weeping”, “waiting”, “discreet”, “observant” Penelope, and yet, a cunning spirit; “alert Penelope”, the one who deceives the suitors blind. She is simultaneously the one who waits, and the one who invokes waiting in others.

If the poem of The Odyssey is furthermore an exercise in the great solitude that comes with waiting, then it is through Penelope that this is illuminated. This resonates with Barthes, particularly if we turn to the words which begin the introduction for A Lover’s Discourse. He writes, “The necessity for this book is to be found in the following consideration: that the lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude.”

 

 Perhaps not much has changed in over 2700 years, from Homer to Barthes and beyond. Missing Odysseus, Penelope is left in a state of extreme solitude. Homer describes her almost disappearing into the depths of grief for her husband; “Icarius’s daughter Penelope, wary and reserved…that radiant woman… suddenly, dissolving in tears.” In her process of longing and of grief, Penelope recedes into herself, like a sea at low tide.

Yet, in the plight of Penelope, in her retreat inward to herself, she possesses great power. She guards the precious household stores. She tests her husband before she accepts him, and ultimately, his love and confidence are her reward. By the close of the epic, it is assumed that Penelope must be, “…the conspicious  prototype of the faithful and long-suffering wife.” Yet she is much more complicated than that. The one who is left behind, the one who waits for twenty years, the one who has the capacity to move forward, but chooses to hold onto hope and love. There has got to be some heroism in that.

The one who leaves for the journey risks plenty, but it is often the one who stays behind who risks more. Penelope risks innertia, immesurable loneliness, endless solitude.

This, The Odyssey, is Odysseus’s story, of his bravery and his courage. Yet I pose that these heroic qualities be equally attributed to Penelope.

 

The one who waited.
  1. no-why-just-here posted this