The love of Penelope and Ulysses is undying.
Penelope and Ulysses explores the historical and yet contemporary journey into the life and struggles of Penelope, a woman who refuses to be dispirited or defeated. Hers is a strange, complex, and multifaceted world. Her life, surrounded by war, is inextricably shaped by the decisions that men have made for her.
Even so, Penelope refuses to be a spectator-a pawn in men's schemes. She rides the waves of turbulence and danger, surviving on her wit, guile, and pure intelligence. She skillfully weaves her seductive plots to ultimately control the men who would control her. All the while, she schemes, always working toward her escape and eventual freedom.
Penelope is well-read in the philosophies of her world, well trained in battle, and keeps her own counsel. From a life of solitude, she explores the most turbulent adventure of all-the quest for self-actualization, the ownership of her self.
The love of Penelope and Ulysses is undying.
Penelope and Ulysses explores the historical and yet contemporary journey into the life and struggles of Penelope, a woman who refuses to be dispirited or defeated. Hers is a strange, complex, and multifaceted world. Her life, surrounded by war, is inextricably shaped by the decisions that men have made for her.
Even so, Penelope refuses to be a spectator-a pawn in men's schemes. She rides the waves of turbulence and danger, surviving on her wit, guile, and pure intelligence. She skillfully weaves her seductive plots to ultimately control the men who would control her. All the while, she schemes, always working toward her escape and eventual freedom.
Penelope is well-read in the philosophies of her world, well trained in battle, and keeps her own counsel. From a life of solitude, she explores the most turbulent adventure of all-the quest for self-actualization, the ownership of her self.
Penelope and Ulysses: A Journey into the Deepest and Most Longing Love Between Man and Woman
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Penelope and Ulysses: A Journey into the Deepest and Most Longing Love Between Man and Woman
196Paperback
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Overview
The love of Penelope and Ulysses is undying.
Penelope and Ulysses explores the historical and yet contemporary journey into the life and struggles of Penelope, a woman who refuses to be dispirited or defeated. Hers is a strange, complex, and multifaceted world. Her life, surrounded by war, is inextricably shaped by the decisions that men have made for her.
Even so, Penelope refuses to be a spectator-a pawn in men's schemes. She rides the waves of turbulence and danger, surviving on her wit, guile, and pure intelligence. She skillfully weaves her seductive plots to ultimately control the men who would control her. All the while, she schemes, always working toward her escape and eventual freedom.
Penelope is well-read in the philosophies of her world, well trained in battle, and keeps her own counsel. From a life of solitude, she explores the most turbulent adventure of all-the quest for self-actualization, the ownership of her self.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781452506470 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Balboa Press Au |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2012 |
| Pages: | 196 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.42(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Penelope and Ulysses
A Journey into the Deepest and Most Longing Love between Man and WomanBy ZENOVIA MARTIN
BALBOA PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Zenovia MartinAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4525-0647-0
Chapter One
ACT I THE ARRIVALColours of Night
'Exerte erthe apo to skotathi' You have arrived from darkness
[PENELOPE is a tall, strong woman with long auburn hair. A very attractive woman in both her youth and older age, the YOUNG PENELOPE and the older PENELOPE. Her face has character, and she has a piercing gaze that makes most feel exposed. She trains for physical battle daily in her chambers, and therefore she is a disciplined warrior in her own right, although she does not share this with others (your best strength is your best kept secret). She does not flaunt her skill with the sword or her head for politics.
PENELOPE is dressed in warrior's clothing. Her top is leather with binding and buckles to represent her training and discipline. She refuses to forget herself in woman's comfort and co-dependence, and her clothes reveal her as both feminine and a warrior. The bottom of her skirt is long and sheer, revealing her sensuality and femininity. Her long auburn hair and light green eyes give her the appearance of a seductress, a siren. She wears boots and Ulysses's war bracelets.
We find PENELOPE in her chambers, looking into her youth, bringing to life her youth, and the older Penelope in unison with her youth takes the audience through the beginning of her journey.
Music is heard. 'Dance for Man' (Nikos Xylouris) is played while the audience is settling into their seats. Projected images of Penelope and Ulysses, The Tree, and the sea are seen in conjunction with the music.
Lights slowly come on. They are soft and dark blue. The set is in soft night colours with a gentle mist.
PENELOPE and YOUNG PENELOPE are both facing the audience, looking directly into the distance, into the audience. PENELOPE holds her sword facing downward. YOUNG PENELOPE stands beside her. She speaks the first two lines in Greek—in the language of lost and found worlds.]
PENELOPE: [Moves forward and addresses the audience.]
Exerte erthe apo to skotathi.
Exerte erthe apo to skotathi. [You have come from the darkness.]
[YOUNG PENELOPE moves two steps forward to stand by PENELOPE.]
YOUNG PENELOPE: You have come from darkness to take parts of my life, to make it yours.
PENELOPE: You have come to recognise or retrieve something that you have forgotten or lost.
YOUNG PENELOPE: You have come to see if love exists.
PENELOPE: Oh, by that I don't mean comfortable, grey, domesticated love.
YOUNG PENELOPE: I mean love that can break and shatter you on the rocks of solitude.
BOTH: How much solitude can you bear?
PENELOPE: You have arrived at the precise time of my departure.
YOUNG PENELOPE: Ulysses, Ulysses! Haunt me. Drive me mad with longing.
PENELOPE: I want to leave with you the despair and joy—
YOUNG PENELOPE: of a longing and searching, of this love for this man—
PENELOPE: for no other man will do.
YOUNG PENELOPE: This love for an ideal, this rebellious spark in my soul.
PENELOPE: This love that will not compromise
BOTH: The impossible choices of my nature and destiny.
YOUNG PENELOPE: Will you stay? Give me your hand or at least your little finger.
PENELOPE: Please stay, so that I can pass on the sirens' song.
YOUNG PENELOPE: Did you know that sirens are mute? It is their silence and solitude that pierce the heart of your hidden world.
PENELOPE: You all know that the sirens' song is the opening of a man's heart to reveal either its fullness or emptiness. And how much truth can you bear?
YOUNG PENELOPE: Do I have something that belongs to you? Others seem to think that I have something that belongs to them.
I have been kept under house arrest by those who think that I have something that belongs to them.
PENELOPE: Those men in my courtyard are not of my desire, of my passion, of my deep sensuality. They lack the salt of the sea in them. They are not fish, only nets.
Their lives, their masculinity, are nets used to capture the wild bird, the siren. They would even settle for the tail of the mermaid.
They think I watch their nakedness, while all the while I look beyond them into the waves and turbulence of the forever making and breaking sea.
YOUNG PENELOPE: I look to hear Ulysses.
PENELOPE: I search for the sirens
BOTH: Who have escaped the net of the hunter.
YOUNG PENELOPE: I follow the sea with my heart.
PENELOPE: Have you brought the danger and beauty of the sea?
YOUNG PENELOPE: Once I found a bottle with a note floating in the shallow waters of another shipwrecked and sunken world.
BOTH: "There is the sea, and who will drink it dry?"
YOUNG PENELOPE: Ulysses, when we were young you felt that I would drown because I swam in the unmapped and uncharted waters.
PENELOPE: I told you: in these waters they do not throw nets. You told me there are other dangers.
BOTH: The sea can seduce you and keep you.
PENELOPE: The sea has kept you from me. Who can convince the sea to be reasonable?
YOUNG PENELOPE: We are like the bird and fish that have fallen in love. But where do we live? In the sky? In the sea?
PENELOPE: Who would want to tame the passion and desire of the forever making and breaking sea?
YOUNG PENELOPE: I came from behind the sea, and now where do I go when it cuts me off?
PENELOPE: Do I want you to stay? I can see you, smell you, sense you, but something is preventing me from touching you.
BOTH: We cannot touch, I long for your touch. [They touch their breasts.]
PENELOPE: We cannot touch because we both are suspended ...
YOUNG PENELOPE: Above or below our life together ...
PENELOPE: But we cannot thread our lives into the eye of time, into the eye of the needle ...
BOTH: That pierces the heart ...
PENELOPE: And heat of the moment.
YOUNG PENELOPE: I know a lot about threads and how far they stretch and what happens when they break and disappear.
PENELOPE: Sometimes you have to undo the tapestry and start again. But it is never the same.
YOUNG PENELOPE: Something has changed.
PENELOPE: Something is missing.
BOTH: Something is longing.
PENELOPE: What is missing is only the golden threads that hook themselves into the human heart and pull upon the other, to an anchored and shared destination.
It is only those threads that I weave and spin in my arrivals and departures. They lodge themselves in the heart.
YOUNG PENELOPE: In this pulling and tension between what connects and separates us, the golden thread that will not break always pulls the anchor in my heart.
PENELOPE: We are both suspended upon the invisible thread of a time that does not meet the heat of the physical.
YOUNG PENELOPE: We are suspended like stars. We watch the light of the other but we cannot feed from each other's heat. Who are the philosophers who say that the physical does not matter?
PENELOPE: I feel everything through the longing of my body, the longing of my deep rebellion.
BOTH: I am from another world, another time that has burned into the fragility of the passing moment, the moment that has become my eternity.
YOUNG PENELOPE: For I am meant to live from the moments I have had with you for the rest of my life, beyond and further than any trained navigator can go.
PENELOPE: Ulysses, you have shipwrecked me on an island surrounded by men whom I must seduce so that I can remain devoted and faithful to you, so that I keep you alive in me.
YOUNG PENELOPE: How do you seduce a man?
PENELOPE: Through sexual favours?
YOUNG PENELOPE: Through food and comfort?
BOTH: That is not seduction, only a temporary need gratification that one can get with anyone, at any time.
PENELOPE: Seduction of all the senses. I know the secrets of the sirens. I know how to keep men burning and longing. I am from the hidden, the unknown, the untouched.
YOUNG PENELOPE: For ten years they have lived outside me. For ten long years they seek my favours and choice of one of them. At any time they could have and can, conquer, and steal what is not theirs. Instead they wait for the prize.
PENELOPE: To taste and eat from the seed of the seductress who is both a bird and a fish.
YOUNG PENELOPE: Aren't you glad that I learned to swim in uncharted and unmapped waters so that I can live on this suspension of time, in longing? Aren't you glad that I swim in uncharted and unmapped waters, the darkest turbulence of my heart, so that I can learn the secrets of seduction that keep me in love and others desiring me?
PENELOPE: Like you, Ulysses, I am a navigator and influence the burning of my vessel so that you may see me, but others can come and claim this fire.
YOUNG PENELOPE: Like you, Ulysses, I seduce the senses of men ...
PENELOPE: And influence their hearts to follow me ...
BOTH: In preparation for their arrival and departure.
YOUNG PENELOPE: I am your love, and yet I am unattainable and absent from you.
PENELOPE: I am from your hidden world, from your sunken world, from your lost and forgotten ideals, from the ashes of your youth, from the sparks of your passion and desire.
YOUNG PENELOPE: I am the one you love, the one you avoid, the one you hide from, the one you find too intense ...
PENELOPE: too demanding, too overwhelming and yet you will not let me swim past you.
BOTH: Why do you keep me alive in the ashes of your unspoken and unfulfilled?
YOUNG PENELOPE: Do you have any idea the deep despair and aloneness I retreat into when I cannot hear your voice, see the sea in your eyes, feel your heat near me, feel your heat on me and in me?
BOTH: I am Penelope the blesséd and curséd.
PENELOPE: In my courtyard I have naked men that seek me, and I desire and long for the absent, the uncharted, the unmapped.
BOTH: I seek the journey of the heart. I seek the body and seed of Ulysses.
PENELOPE: And there is my blessing and curse. For twenty years I have ached for him, longed for him, searched in the sea for him, asked the sirens about the secrets of his heart.
BOTH: All remain silent. All remain hidden, unseen and still.
PENELOPE: Did you hear that? There it goes again. The creaking and moaning of a vessel that has been on the sea for too long. You all have come from the darkness to take parts of my life, to make it yours. I have travelled into the unmapped and uncharted worlds of the searching, the seeking, the deep longing of the heart.
YOUNG PENELOPE: The unfilled heart.
PENELOPE: The untouched desires.
BOTH: The fires that burn and keep me alive.
PENELOPE: I have waited for you to arrive. You have arrived at the precise moment of my departure.
BOTH: Will you stay?
PENELOPE: Will you take me with you when you leave? Have you been searching for decades or eons, an eternity?
BOTH: "There is the sea and who will drink it dry?"
YOUNG PENELOPE: Have you brought the turbulence of the sea with you, in you?
PENELOPE: Do I want you to stay? I can see you, smell you, sense you, but something is preventing me from touching you.
YOUNG PENELOPE: The physical. How I desire the physical. Even my teacher Socrates understood all experience comes through senses, the blood of the physical.
BOTH: For I desire and know only what is of earth, sea, sky, and man.
PENELOPE: In my tapestry I weave the mighty breakers that have shipwrecked me here.
YOUNG PENELOPE: In my tapestry the salt of your tears and seed can be tasted.
PENELOPE: Do you have the burning desire to be consumed by the journey of the navigator who seeks the hidden, the unknown?
YOUNG PENELOPE: Do you have the courage to swim where mermaids and sirens lose their glory?
BOTH: Or is all your journey predictable and rewarded by the acceptance of mediocrity? Safety and security in the name of love. I am afraid to be without you, love. What of your Journey? The one you were meant to make? What of your Journey?
PENELOPE: There it goes again.
[NOISE: something falling, breaking.]
YOUNG PENELOPE: Did you hear it?
PENELOPE: Did you see it?
[Flickering of fire light]
BOTH: Did you feel it?
ULYSSES [offstage]: Penelope!
BOTH: Did you hear it?
PENELOPE: The groaning of a ship that has carried too much in deep waters, the groaning of my life, the ache of the sirens that are driven by the tenderness of truth.
ULYSSES [offstage]: [loud] Penelope! [soft weeping]
BOTH: There it goes again.
YOUNG PENELOPE: I can hear him, in me.
PENELOPE: I can see him in me. I can hear him in the darkest silence, the mutest world.
YOUNG PENELOPE: He is calling for me.
PENELOPE: He is seeking me.
YOUNG PENELOPE: He is thinking of me.
PENELOPE: All the women he loves have my face. All have to make this sacrifice to him and me.
YOUNG PENELOPE: All witches, all goddesses have to change their face to mine.
PENELOPE: And when they love him it is I who collect him to me. It is I who receives his gift in me. The longing.
[The stage darkens.]
PENELOPE: [holding his sword above her head, whispers] Ulysses! Ulysses! [offers her sword to YOUNG PENELOPE]
[Complete darkness.]
Note: At the end of the dialogue when the elder PENELOPE finishes her "longing of Ulysses," the YOUNGER PENELOPE will take the sword from her hand, lift it up, and run into the next Act, which is "Joy."
The lights will go dark and then light up to a sunny beautiful day, with only YOUNG PENELOPE on stage to be followed by YOUNG ULYSSES and the start of Act II.
Chapter Two
ACT II JOYColours of Spring
[Ulysses and the young Penelope are in their sacred chambers, madly in love, but they also sense that something will enter their world that will change them and their world together forever. Nothing will remain the same, and sensing this, they are vividly intense, enjoying every moment they have together. These moments will have to feed them, in the face of adversity, uncertainly separation, or even death. That is why this dialogue between them is so intense and playful.
The lights work in harmony and together.
As the lights diminish around PENELOPE, the YOUNG PENELOPE will enter the stage and the lights become bright.
YOUNG ULYSSES is dressed as a warrior. He is strong, happy, and in love.
Both YOUNG PENELOPE and YOUNG ULYSSES enter at the same time, YOUNG PENELOPE in front of him and he following her. Bright yellow lights.]
YOUNG PENELOPE: Ulysses, Ulysses. You lost your sword to me. [laughs and puts his sword behind her neck.]
[Music. PENELOPE starts to dance "The Song of Penelope"—a warrior's dance. ULYSSES watches and at the ending joins her in their play and worshipping of each other's body and youth.]
YOUNG ULYSSES: Once more, my love.
[They swordfight with neither one dominating. Then they bow to each other in mutual respect of each other's skills. ULYSSES bows to YOUNG PENELOPE and she returns his sword.
They kneel in front of each other and revere each other's beauty. They are on their knees facing each other in deep longing and desire.]
I swear by all that makes and breaks me, my purpose is to always find you, to always seek you, to always long and ache for you, my beloved and desirable lover. Whatever life, with all its turns and twists, brings or asks, by the power of the gods, the anger of the devils, the rage of the furies, and whether I have been blessed in heaven or cursed in hell; I am in heaven and in hell, I will worship you every night. [puts down his sword and kisses her passionately.]
YOUNG PENELOPE: And will you not reverence me in the morning? For not to be with you would be for me an eternal night in which I would stay on the sea of life searching and seeking and longing for you, in every passing port, every passing face. The earth with all its passing beauty would be a world of darkness.
YOUNG ULYSSES: Did you know, Penelope, that before I saw your face I loved you as a formless shape and flame? You have haunted me since long before I knew your name. When I saw your eyes, your smile, your face [touches her face tenderly], I knew I was with my woman. I knew I had the incarnation of all loving— you are all women to me.
YOUNG PENELOPE: Did we dream of each other before we met? I had already heard your voice in my dreams. I recognised you when I heard your voice. I had come home. Or was it that you had come home to me? I arrived and you had waited for me with kindness and tenderness. Every moment, every second is to be lived and consumed in the fire of our love. You are the fire in my moment and the seed from eternity.
YOUNG ULYSSES: Therefore, there is no other way— I will reverence and delight in the joy that you bring to me for I will need to carry these moments with me when the sea calls me back to her, when my destiny takes me away from you.
YOUNG PENELOPE: The sea—she is your mistress and she surrounds my world. Why are you listening to her murmuring?
YOUNG ULYSSES: I do not listen to her murmuring with my ear. The murmurs, sighs, whispers, and rage are in my heart.
My heart resembles the tides and passions of the sea, swirling and raging the river of blood in me. We are all related to the desires and passions of the sea.
Last night I dreamed that the sea was calling me, "Ulysses, return to me."
All her sirens and mermaids have your face and voice, Penelope, and all were tempting me.
I struggled to hide from her song and all the while my heart beat and raged like her mighty breakers.
My heart never rests. It is always moving, making, breaking, flowing in deep tenderness or dark rage.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Penelope and Ulysses by ZENOVIA MARTIN Copyright © 2012 by Zenovia Martin. Excerpted by permission of BALBOA PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
The Despair and Laughter of My Three Muses....................viiIntroduction....................xv
Characters....................xxi
Act I: The Arrival....................1
Act II: Joy....................14
Act III: Agamemnon....................49
Act IV: Under House Arrest....................84
Act V: The Suitors....................99
Scene 1 – The Wolf....................99
Scene 2 – The Jackal....................108
Act VI: Telemachus....................116
Act VII: The Return....................127
Act VIII: Whispers....................133
Act IX: I Am Ready For My Departure....................147
Some Small Seeds of Gratitude from the Journey....................161