Penelope
digital video with sound, 2015
shot in Waco, TX, text written and recorded in Chicago, IL, commissioned by Justin Velander Holt
a contemplation of Penelope from Homer’s Odyssey.
voiceover text:
What a foolish thing it is — you spend so much time preparing to commit to the presence of someone else, grooming your devotion until it is ready to sigh on someone’s shoulder, some man you have spent much of your girlhood imagining. You wonder whether it will be difficult to always want him when he wants you — you wonder if he will be handsome, you wonder about the scent of his hair pressed near your cheek as he sleeps, or what tic or habit you will have to employ all your grace to ignore. You must assume you will love him, but you cannot help but worry that the base physical reality of him being there might sometimes get in the way of loving him. Weighing all the affection you feel against the filth of life, a man’s kind words and noble actions against his dirty laundry, drawn-out belching, hair in the sink, flicking snot, itching balls, the I have seen too much of you and my days are growing less mysterious and romantic. You think about how you will preserve the coy smiles and the passionate love notes despite the day-in day-out of years. You prepare yourself to love a constant presence in the face of time. But we are wrong. All along, we should have been preparing for absence. It is hard enough to love a man in flesh and blood, how do you love a man in empty air? What does it mean to love a man I cannot see? It is dangerous to let him become like a god, something to be worshipped from afar while distance smooths out all his rough edges, but dangerous too to be without devotion, to let yourself forget, to live your life as if you were not caught somewhere between a wife and a widow, a woman made of waiting paces. Who am I for you when you are not here? Who are you for me when you are not here? And who am I for myself?