The Whole of Western Civ

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The Whole of Western Civilization

Yesterday, in Dr. Mike’s waiting room, a most subversive piece of literature fell into my hands. Dr. Mike is my dentist, and I was there for a root canal. Somebody had left a book behind, a slender hardcover, on a chair across the room. I made a mental note to tell the nurse, but she never came, and the longer I waited, the more that book intrigued me. I tried to make out the title from twelve feet away, tilting my head this way and that. But I couldn’t make it out, and I felt like a thief when I slipped across the room, picked up the contraband, and skidded back to my chair.

The spine said, Odyssey: The Sequel, which struck me as hilarious. I burst out laughing, startling the receptionist behind her little window. I must have been the first case of laughter in a waiting room for dental patients. I smiled amiably to let her know that all was well and that I had not suddenly gone mad with fear waiting for a root canal. Pacified, she turned her attention back to what she was doing, and I opened the book, fully anticipating a farce.

But no. The preamble told me that the manuscript had been discovered years ago, had been lost in the bowels of the library of some university, had been re-discovered, and had only recently been translated. The first two pages of the manuscript were never found which meant that both the author and the original title of the work are not known. The present title was culled from the contents of the work as the most fitting, although the editors and translators begged the reader’s pardon regarding certain assumptions they had made for the sake of coherence. The manuscript, they said, was in pieces when it was found, and time and the weather had ruined much of it.

Personally, I’ve never cared much for Odysseus. I mean, the accolades heaped on that man throughout the centuries are wholly undeserved. Just what exactly did the man accomplish except to find his way home? Penelope, however, has always fascinated me. I mean, I know that this exaggerated ideal of a woman was most likely the figment of a man’s imagination, and one who was blind to boot. But she is my namesake, or rather, I’m hers, and it’s always nice to have someone who’s a shining example for a namesake. Which, probably, explains why I tried to emulate her. Not that I ever truly could, because I could never be that perfect. I even pondered whether or not I even wanted to read this sequel, which, undoubtedly, would bring me face to face with a few more of my inadequacies. But then, I had nothing better to do. Innocently, I turned the page and became, instantly, acquainted with a bombshell.

When Odysseus came home after his twenty-year sojourn, ten years in Troy, ten years bobbing on the high seas and frolicking on assorted shores, he settled condescendingly and comfortably into the retirement so aptly described by Tennyson and drove Penelope up the wall. Since so much of the original is missing, we have, unfortunately, only glimpses of just what all happened to Penelope after she took an ax to her weaving loom and thoughtfully watched it burn in the fireplace.

But the Sequel tells us this, at least: she grew increasingly tired of having Odysseus around the house. He rearranged her kitchen. He put her cups and saucers into military row. He drove her crazy shooting flies off the kitchen wall with bow and arrow, and, as if this were not maddening enough, he had the disconcerting habit of stopping smack in the middle of a sentence, with a hand cupped to his ear as if he were going deaf, saying:

“You hear this?”

“What?”

“The song!”

“What song?”

“Can’t explain it. You had to be there.”

She didn’t hear a thing, of course, and was merely exasperated beyond endurance at being constantly reminded of the blissful moments in his life from which she had been excluded.

To make matters worse, she was deeply embarrassed at his boring everyone to tears with the tales of his journeys. The same old stories, over and over again. War, blood, gore, deception, narrow escapes, and heroic self-promotion. Every time someone wandered into the palace, he latched on to him or her like a leech with his stories.

More than once, she kicked him under the table when they had company to get him to change the subject. But he merely looked at her, startled, saying something like:

“Whatcha kick me for? Did I say something wrong?”

Whereupon she was deathly embarrassed, and everyone else thought she was truly a spoilsport for not letting the old man have his pleasure. There was no harm in what he did. So what was she trying to do?

When no one was around who’d listen to him, he amused himself with shooting arrows at a dartboard the black center of which he had painted into an eye. Penelope, who frequently walked the halls of the palace on this or that errand, shook her head seeing him such. Like a kid with his toy. There was something so sick about an old man who thought his prowess hadn’t left him. She knew well enough that Athena lifted that arm for him, and why didn’t he just admit it.

She had come to loathe his talking to pigs as if they were people. And he loudly counted sheep before Morpheus’s arms finally enveloped him. Unable to go to sleep herself, she wished more than once that this god would just take him. He snored abominably, and now and then stopped breathing altogether, which made her sit straight up in bed, waiting, petrified, for his next breath. And would it even come? Or would she have to shake him? Or call the palace guards to help her? It was pure torture.

But then she felt guilty for feeling so utterly exasperated. How could she think such thoughts? She had always prided herself in being a loyal, faithful, and virtuous wife, dutiful, loving, tolerant. Just what, lately, was the matter with her?

Of course, she knew well enough and had admitted that to herself long ago. She had grown sick and tired of that Loyal Wife Image (LWI). Life was passing her by, or rather, a large hunk (chunk, of course) of life had already passed her by, and the more she thought of that, the more desperate she felt. His tales only exacerbated the fact that the gods had given her life, but not a life.

And while she had been sexually frustrated for twenty long years, he never ceased to speak of the sensual liaisons he had enjoyed. To be fair, even a blind man could see that these god-sanctioned liaisons had been engaged in only because they saved his life. Still, he didn’t have to rub it in.

Penelope, who had been taught never to get angry, did not. She thought, at first, that the hot flashes that made her stand out among her handmaidens like Little Red Riding Hood were the onset of menopause. They were not. They were the denial of pure, unadulterated rage. What, she asked herself, slamming cabinet doors and kicking laundry baskets, is your problem, Penelope? You wanted to wait, and, waiting, you got what you wanted.

“What did you say, dear?” Eurecleia asked, looking up from plucking a chicken.

“Oh, mind your own business!” Penelope said.

She hadn’t meant to say that. She had never said an ugly word to anyone. Least of all to Odysseus’s good old nurse. “Oh, I’m sorry!” she said, and burst into tears, and ran into the bedchamber, and threw herself onto the timbered bed, feeling utterly lost and abandoned.

Truth be told, she had rather liked the suitors. The muscle ripplings, the buttock tightenings, the searing looks as she sat wet and weaving. Few things bolster a person’s ego—especially one who doesn’t have a life and is expected never to have one—more than having the opposite sex drool over you in multitudes. Of course, she had been tempted.

What was Homer thinking?

Nor did it help that the nymph Nike whispered into one ear, “Just do it!” and Zeus into the other, “Use it or lose it.” And all the while, that damn loom got in the way. Everyone else would have jumped at the chance. But not Penelope.

Knowing well that one’s history stands or falls with one’s image, she resisted the temptation. The Madonna/Whore syndrome had not yet been invented, and, surely, she wasn’t going to touch that one with a ten-foot pole.

Still, she had looked upon the suitors’s slaughter wistfully. As far as she was concerned, this thing could have gone on forever and ever. Sadly, her husband put an end to it and gave her instead himself, to love, to honor, to obey, and to look at.

She also knew that if anyone even suspected that she was sick and tired of the LWI, the whole of the Ithacan culture would be undermined together with the premises it was based on, that is, the Heroic Ideal (HI) and the LWI. And the “Loyal” in the LWI implied not only loyal. All sorts of confining images went along with it, such as an unwavering commitment to servitude and menial labor, and perennial cheerfulness.

And her weaving days were, of course, by no means over. Weaving was a prerequisite to becoming a member of the LWI. But she was sick to distraction of weaving the same boring floral motif over and over. At the same time, no other motif offered itself. Commonly called Weaver’s Block, it was, and still is, a most disabling and frustrating condition.

Watching, gloom in her eyes, Odysseus shoot darts at that dark eye one evening, she said, wholly discouraged:

“I don’t know what to weave.”

“Why don’t you weave my story?” he said, never breaking his aim.

“Oh, great idea!” she said with shining eyes. Or rather, her Image said with shining eyes. Why hadn’t she thought of this herself? What a fitting tribute to her husband! To have, finally, a true goal, a true purpose, work that was meaningful and sanctioned—what bliss!

And so it was that she began weaving the tapestry that was later to hang in Dido’s palace at Carthage.

We remember that Dido greatly admired the intricacy of weft and warp, so small, so lovely, so perfectly even, while Aeneas was, as usual, quite taken with the big picture: death, destruction, and discontinuity.

But as she wove, Penelope became more and more depressed. How come, she asked the gods, do men have a fate, a destiny, and women don’t? How come I am objectifying the yarn my husband spins so prolifically and weaves so eruditely with winged words?

As if her life and herself, although merely weaving and waiting, served no purpose worth an Epic. After all, she had born a son. Wasn’t that meaning and purpose enough? And if it was meaning and purpose enough, why then was she so unhappy?

We are told that one of the reasons may well have been that she lost her son long ago, figuratively speaking, pining as he did after his father who was never home and whom he did not know from Adam.

Which reminds me of a plane trip I once took with my three-year-old son who also did not know his father from Adam. Thirty-six thousand cruising feet up in the ozone, the child suddenly wailed, “I wanna get outta here. I wan my daddy.”

This put the platitude that absence makes the hard (why do I keep making these Freudian slips?) grow fonder into a new light and changed our relationship considerably and henceforth and forever. I learned that, if you want to be loved, be absent.

As for Penelope, she learned soon after her husband came home that none of the things she had accomplished, thought, felt, dreamed were worth as much as her Image. It was this that people expected, remembered, and treasured. The rest of her was marginal.

Her hands being busy weaving, her mind was free to roam, and the more it roamed, the faster the shuttle flew through the warp threads. Occasionally, she stopped her hands from moving and wondered just why she was doing what she was doing. This hideous pattern of war, deception, blood, body parts, betrayal, greed, revenge—why was she paying tribute to it by weaving it?

The unknown author of this sequel does not give a ready answer, leaving it to me, the reader, to extricate. And, of course, I know well enough: She would have felt guilty as Hades if she didn’t finish what she started. That too was part of the LWI.

After days of mad weaving, she must have felt like the woman in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” present but absent, married but alone, well but sick.

One evening, weaving steadily away like the Lady of Shalott, sort of as if a curse were upon her and the faster she wove, the longer the curse could be held off, she looked up and at Odysseus who was busy shooting arrows at the Cyclopean eye of his dart board.

“I so would like to write and tell my own story,” she said. And sat up straight and startled. Where did these words come from? She never knew she wanted to write.

“Why don’t you then,” he said.

But there he had her.

She had nothing to tell. She thought about it. What, in her life, was truly memorable and full of suspense and truly fascinating to tell? What had she done with her life but bear a son and an Image? And inventing her own patterns and unraveling them? And all in the pursuit of waiting for a man to come around to her one of these days because she was so dutiful. Who’d care to read that?

I know exactly how she felt that moment. Call it genetic memory, or myth, or archetypal pattern, whatever. All I know is that Jung defines it as the feeling imagery that passes from generation to generation to generation. And that feeling imagery gave me chills. I, too, had begun to write. That was twenty years ago. I mean, They (whoever They are) always tell you to write from experience. No wonder I couldn’t make a go of it. Now I know why. Penelope didn’t have a life and no destiny, and neither did I. Briefly defined, destiny is synonymous with getting a life. Put her life, as far as Homer was concerned, in a nutshell, and it consisted of loyal waiting, birthing, weaving and undoing, and a bed. Made of a tree, of all things.

Some critics have said that Penelope wasn’t a very interesting woman. She sort of lacked the spunk that all the other women in Homer seemed to have. On the one hand, she’s held up as a loyal and faithful wife, on the other she’s faulted for not being promiscuous enough. Talk about being squeezed between a rock and a hard place. It’s what’s haunted her spiritual descendants throughout the millennia.

In any case, this fragment ends with the line: “... and thoughtfully perused her burning loom.”

Of course, she had first finished the tapestry.

Had she not finished the tapestry, or had she burned it along with the loom, the whole of Western Civilization would not have unfolded as it did. Dido would not have hung the tapestry, and Aeneas wouldn’t have seen it. Dido wouldn’t have seen him cry and been moved to tears by such a hero. Slim chance she’d have fallen in love with him. And he, thinking her clinging, wouldn’t have left in the middle of the night and, subsequently, founded Rome. Since there wouldn’t have been Romans, they wouldn’t have conquered most of Europe and civilized the Barbarians. No texts would have been written in Latin. No texts translated into Latin. No Roman Catholic Church founded. No Madonna. No Aquinas. No Papal indiscretions. No Reformation. No squabbles over church doctrine. No leaving for America. No America. And, certainly, no HI’s and LWI’s.

“Come on in, Penelope,” the cheerful voice of Dr. Mike’s assistant sang into the waiting room. I followed her into the torture chamber, and she put, gleefully, a bib around my neck, just in case I drooled.

“I’ll have to sedate you,” Dr. Mike said, scrubbing his hands at the sink, smiling down on me, over his shoulder, mournfully.

“What?” I said.

“Your jaw, my dear,” he said. “Go ahead and read. That shot will take a few minutes to work. Have to get you good and numb.”

“If you must,” I said, but my thoughts were with Penelope. I was, without a doubt, one of her descendants. Not that I could prove it, genealogically speaking. But the archetypal pattern, the repetitive and circular nature of myth were painfully clear to me.

My husband built a textile empire, and, certainly, he does not have the time to raise our son and to run a household. Somebody has got to hold Ithaca together for him to pine after and come home to. I mean, Cafavy couldn’t have written his poem had there been no Ithaca for Odysseus to come home to.

Anyway, the next fragment tells us that Penelope didn’t have a clue what story to tell when, loom in ashes, she went for paper and pen and found a quiet, secluded, lovely spot in an olive grove with a view to the sea. Paper scrolled in her lap, she stared out at the vast expanse of water, which she knew only as a State of Waiting. She was surprised to find it round, rhythmic, and full of writhings and movings and sweet little waves that kissed her feet and licked at her soles and caressed the arches of her feet, and climbed up her ankles and pulled back and came again. And again.

What, she thought dreamily, had he accomplished with his journeys? Absolutely nothing. Horseplay that had tragic consequences of which he was proud. Homes wrecked, thousands of fatalities, and all for a woman who had nothing to recommend her but looks. And he had saved his own hide. Which she would never have done, selfishness having been drummed out of her when she was a little girl. And while he was so engaged, she, Penelope, had held the whole of Ithaca together. For which they called Whom a Hero? Something was terribly wrong with a world that applauded such.

She looked around. It was spring. Lovely little flowers everywhere. The trees in their spring green. The ocean breeze soft. In that setting, the Muses should have fallen all over themselves trying to get to her who was open and willing to give them a try.

None showed.

All right, she thought, I’ll do it on my own. Briefly, she considered the classic “What if” story. What if he had stayed home in Ithaca? In her mind, the Idylls of the King unfolded in lovely images. But no. The last thing she wanted to write about was him. Besides, how could she adequately write about a man when she wasn’t a man?

The gods had pity on her and whispered the word “Invocation” into her ear. Then she remembered. If she wanted the Muses to come, she had to invoke them, as Homer had done. Being new at this, she didn’t know that ritual and knowing the ropes are part and parcel of the creative process. She thanked the gods, unscrolled the paper, and wrote:

“Tell me, Muse, of the woman of many struggles....”

Once so invoked, the Muses came. They took one look at her and bowed out. They had no trouble helping a man of many journeys. But a woman of many struggles? And in her own home? That was more than they could handle. What was inspiring about that?

No blood, no glory. It was that simple. They’d be the laughing stock on cloud-shrouded Olympus.

“Change your Image,” they told her, “and we may be able to accommodate you.”

Penelope was devastated. Without the Muses, she was mute. How could she possibly tear the beloved LWI that was literally fused with the very fabric of her culture out of people’s hearts and souls? How could she tell them that her life was an Epic every bit as worthy of a tome as those that rattled on and on about HI’s?

Just then she had a terrible, terrible thought. It struck like lightning. She even pulled her feet out of the water for fear of being electrocuted. She, and she alone, had created the LWI! She had done it. No doubt in her mind. She had been the one who had stood waiting and weaving. She had been the one who raised that boy all by herself, constantly vexed by Athena who made the boy rebellious and pine after his father whom he did not know from Adam. She had been the one who had held Ithaca together for Odysseus to rule over once he got back. She alone had turned the reigns over to that man who, by his mere coming upon the scene, thought it was his birthright to rule over everybody and everything he had not created. His dad had done that. And when he left for Troy, she was looked upon as a mere proxy, when she should have insisted on that her efforts be royally rewarded. Something like a fifty-fifty deal.

(Much later, Heidegger would, of course, confirm her self-discovery by stating categorically, “You are what you do.”)

Good Zeus, she said to herself, what hast thou done to yourself, Penelope? You were such a good little riveter, dearest, and what do you have to show for it? Not a thing.

Which reminds me that I once called the Social Security office to find out what my income would be when I turned sixty-five. They asked me whether or not I had worked.

“What do you mean?” I said. “Are you trying to insult me, sir? Have you ever cleaned toilets and wiped up baby vomit and tried to get lipstick out of a starched shirt and....”

“That’s not what I mean,” the guy said, and I found out that I wasn’t entitled to a dime. Because I had not worked. “However,” he added, consolingly, “your husband is entitled to benefits, and should he die while he’s on benefits, you’re entitled to a reduced version of these benefits.”

“Excuse me?” I said. “What if my husband dies before he turns sixty-five?”

“He better have provided for you, lady, or you’d be up a creek.”

The memory of this conversation still gives me chills. I could, in other words, either get a job and abandon my son and home and hearth to strangers, or I could keep up the LWI with possible dire consequences. What if my husband took off with a nineteen-year-old redhead just as he turned sixty? But all I could do, for the moment anyway, was to accept that the ardent and dedicated work of my days meant nothing. It didn’t even count for Social Security. And until I finally found the time to write my life’s story and had it published, my life would soon be forgotten, no matter how dutiful I had been.

Penelope had a much better idea. Faced with the prospect of eternal oblivion, since only tales told in Epics survive the test of time, she devised a marvelous plan to change her fate and, therewith, the fate of billions of people. The plan was so good, I sat up straight in my chair with enthusiasm. If that plan were implemented now, the whole world would be transfigured in an instant.

“Lean back and open your mouth, Penelope,” Dr. Mike said. “Wide.”

He is a gentle man, but that shot felt like a thousand volt hot-wire in my jaw.

Talk about subversive. I mean, that plan. Even a blind man could see that this mere wisp of a book had not only not been recently discovered, it had, most likely, been purposely suppressed for millennia. Not only Socrates, or Jesus, or Gandhi, or King were aware of the Power of Passive Resistance, so was Penelope. In fact, she invented the concept.

She worked out all the details and devised back up plans in case something went wrong. Then she prayed to Hera, asking her to strike all the women, except her, mute. It was a prerequisite for the success of the mission.

Hera came in a flash and was glad to oblige.

Next, Penelope called all the women together and led them out of the city and to some lovely caves down by the ocean. There she bid them to sit down and do absolutely nothing for seven days. Penelope also sat down, and that, as Clytemnestra so fittingly said, was that.

Within three days, the infrastructure of Ithaca had broken down.

The fiasco began on the first day and night, when Ithaca was plunged into utter darkness. The lords had forgotten to fill the olive oil lamps and to trim the wicks. It never occurred to them. The women always took care of such things.

On the second day, a thick fog rolled in from the ocean. You couldn’t see three feet. The lords, not knowing just where things were on their own properties—having had their wives and sisters and daughters and mothers to ask—couldn’t find the pens and coops of the animals. And why wasn’t there anything to eat in the house? And how do you light a hearth anyway? And what’s a cooking spoon? And where is a comb around here?

On the third day, black clouds rolled over Ithaca, and it got dark as Hades. The ocean churned and writhed and rose and swept over the island. The lords, previously coaxed by wives, sisters, daughters, and mothers who told them exactly what to do in an emergency, didn’t think of battening down the hatches, and all the homes, including the palace, were flooded with water, sand, and mud.

On the forth day, all the animals escaped from coops and pens. The goats, pigs, chickens, sheep, and cattle, all ran happily into the four winds. At about the same time, Ithaca began wreaking of the creatures of the sea that had been swept in by the flood and now lay dying and decaying. But no matter. The lords were hungry, and since the hearths had not been tended, they built huge bonfires and barbecued what the sea had bestowed, whether it looked edible or not.

On the fifth day, the lords began raiding the gardens that the women had neatly planted in the spring. Unmindful of the fragility of plant life, they stomped all over the vegetation. They ripped off what looked ripe to them and stomped the rest into the ground. The difference between a plant, a flower, and a weed had always been an enigma to them anyway.

On the sixth day, the sun rose to a sorry sight indeed. Ithaca was a filthy mess and smelled to high Olympus. Whatever had called itself “lords” was now an indefinable, uncivilized horde of creatures that looked exactly alike, being, as they were, covered with mud, excrement, and bits and pieces of decaying food stuck to them. Needless to say, existence mattered much more to these creatures than essence. And appearances didn’t mean a thing. Their hair was matted, their teeth unbrushed, the precious homespun hanging in shreds on their emaciated bodies, the bone buttons gone. The scene looked like Genesis run amok.

On the seventh day, the women rose and bathed themselves and their children. They washed their clothes. They bound flowers into their hair. They took off their camisoles and burned them, as a sacrifice to Hera. Then they embraced, and, forming a solemn procession, walked proudly back to the city. Respect and recognition for the work of their hands was now theirs, they were sure of it. They would create a National Literature that celebrated the accomplishments of women. They would implore the gods to punish the Muses for their contemptuous attitude. They would ask for equal status and reward for their services and sacrifices. Hera restored their voices, and their songs rose to Olympus as they walked.

Approaching the city’s wall, a pitiful horde of unrecognizable creatures spilled out of its portals, crawling toward them, on hands and knees. These creatures were so muddy and soiled, they were indistinguishable from Adam before he was formed. Every so often, that sorry lot of indefinables rose, though only to their knees, and raised their emaciated hands in supplication.

The women stopped, confused, horrified, paralyzed at the sight. Their actions had been drastic, but to be responsible for such tragedy and drama—this they had not expected.

They all moved at once, including Penelope. Like maniacal mother hens, they rushed to these poor creatures. They hugged them. They kissed them. They cooed to them. And then they raised them up and took them home to dote on them.

The End.

I burst into tears. What an opportunity! How could Penelope screw up like this? At the very moment she held all the cards? I mean, the very premises (HI and LWI) on which the whole of Western Civilization is based would have changed course had she stood her ground and negotiated. Instead, she let her emotions rule her actions, and all the women followed suit. She ruined everything.

“Hey,” Dr. Mike said. “I’m working on a delicate piece of tissue here. What’s the matter? Did the shot wear off?” Weakly, I shook my head.

“Good,” he said. “When it does, you’ll be in a lot of pain. I’ll prescribe some painkillers, so don’t you worry.”

* * *

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Home If you want to write The Good American Short Stories Various Info Memories of VMI