Cyclopes, sirens, seductive goddesses, and sea salt on the skin under the bright Mediterranean sun. For many, the Odyssey represents the origin of adventure stories, and its protagonist, Odysseus, fertile in stratagems, the archetypal adventurer. However, we often forget that Odysseus’s journey is a return, a homecoming. As Santiago Alba Rico points out: “The Odyssey narrates, then, the adventure of a man who does not want adventures, and this flight from adventure is the condition and the goal of all his adventures, of all adventures in general: what distinguishes a true hero from a bachelor mercenary” (2016, p. 224).

For Odysseus, Ithaca represents not merely a territory to return to, but a web of connections that remains waiting: Penelope, Telemachus, Laertes, his home and his native land. The meaning of his journey, therefore, lies not in the conquest of the unknown, but in preserving, through distance and the danger of oblivion, that which makes his return possible.

This return is made possible by the other adventure in the Odyssey , that of Penelope. Hers is an adventure of stillness, of waiting, and of memory, which, by weaving and unweaving her cloak, enables Odysseus’s return. Penelope’s mission goes far beyond a mere stratagem to buy time: it is the gravitational center of the Homeric saga. Odysseus’s greatest risk is not being devoured by giants or swallowed by the waters of the wine-soaked Pontus; his greatest danger is oblivion. To forget, in the arms of the sorceress Circe, that there is a land that awaits him; to forget, intoxicated by the promises of immortality from the nymph Calypso, that he has a son who longs for him; To forget, sated with lotus in the land of the lotus-eaters, that he has an elderly father who mourns him, and ultimately, to forget amidst the siren songs that there is a woman weaving a cloak upon a warp upon which his identity, his very essence, depends, an identity that risks dissolving in the waters of the Mediterranean. Is not the famous final scene of the arrow being shot between the eyes of twelve axes a representation of threading the needle through the original cloak, a reintegration into the warp of the home?

The figure of the weaver is one of humanity’s fundamental metaphors. Associated with human destiny, even in Greek mythology, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos weave their fatalistic labors using the spindle, the ruler, and the scissors. However, far from the tragic fatalism of the Fates, Penelope’s weaving offers support, enables, a thread that binds and envelops in a mantle of tenderness. The narrative in the Odyssey is possible because Penelope sustains the text. It is important not to forget the relationship between weaving and text: the word “text” derives from the Latin “textus ,” meaning woven fabric. In the weaving of the prudent Penelope, there is a narrative that sustains the identities of all the Homeric characters.

This conception of weaving as an image of connection and protection did not disappear with the ancient world, but rather reappeared, in new forms, in the Christian tradition. The Virgin’s mantle, the shared cloak of Saint Martin, and the Pauline image of the mystical body express a relational conception of existence. Even the Shroud of Turin and the pictorial representations of Veronica allude to the idea of ​​a trace that remains inscribed in a web of connections. Weaving here does not represent a simple sum of individuals, but a community in which each existence acquires meaning through its belonging to a whole that sustains it.

However, this relational image of existence underwent a transformation with modernity. In contrast to metaphors of weaving, belonging, and shelter, those linked to individual initiative, work, and production began to gain prominence, in line with what Charles Taylor calls “disengaged reason” (2024, p. 203). We find a clear example in Tennyson’s famous poem, Ulysses (Bloom, 2000, pp. 75–76). In his reinterpretation of the Homeric text, the British poet has Odysseus leave home to embark once again on adventure. It is significant that he never once mentions Penelope’s name. Where Homer situated return, waiting, and the connection to home, Tennyson privileges forward movement, adventure, and individual affirmation. Penelope, who does not conquer but preserves and sustains, is thus excluded from this new representation of Odysseus.

“Reality is always interpreted. And the first interpretation consists of naming it” (Marías, 1984, p. 29). Julián Marías’s words become especially relevant when we observe how the metaphors we use to name reality can also guide our understanding of it. English, of course, has textile terms like fabric , which we find in expressions such as social fabric ; however, alongside them appear other equally central images like web and net . While fabric retains the image of a weave, web and net simultaneously refer to connection and capture. Web designates both a fabric and a spider web; net , both a network of relationships and a fishing net. Where the warp and the fabric evoke welcome, continuity, and belonging, the net always retains the possibility of entrapment, control, or appropriation. One need only observe the digital panopticon (Han, 2014) into which social networks have transformed to recognize this ambiguity.

But perhaps the problem isn’t the network itself. A warp is also a network. The difference lies in the type of link it establishes. A network can connect, but not every connection constitutes a web capable of sustaining existence. We can be connected and yet not be interwoven. The warp points to something different: it doesn’t simply unite pre-existing elements, but participates in their very constitution. This distinction will be fundamental to understanding the scope of Rof Carballo’s “affective warp.”

Far from being mere poetic devices, metaphors are ontological and epistemological tools upon which human thought is founded. As Ortega (1957) states: “Metaphor is an intellectual procedure by which we manage to grasp what lies furthest from our conceptual power. With what is closest and best understood, we can achieve mental contact with what is remote and most elusive. Metaphor is a supplement to our intellectual arm, and represents, in logic, the fishing rod or the rifle” (p. 391). In the pure concept, in the idealistic wasteland of definition, there is a tendency toward taxidermy in which the defined object fixes its form, escaping the inexorable flow of time, at the cost of losing all that is vibrant within it—its tectonic, seismic essence. Situated between reality and definition, metaphors attempt to capture part of that original movement that allows them to be “active poetic metaphors” (Zambrano, 1987, p. 51). There exists in the cultural heritage of humanity a collection of “metaphors that we can call fundamental” (Zambrano, 1987, p. 50).

A true diviner of the human depths, the Galician doctor Juan Rof Carballo inserts himself into the human history of the metaphor of the loom with his concept of “affective warp” (Rof Carballo, 1961).

According to his theory, our organism is not the undisturbed unfolding of a predefined plan, but rather is forged in interaction with others. Our emotions shape our biology. The Nietzschean intuition that the deepest truth does not reside in abstract knowledge, but rather “in its embodiment, in its character as a condition for life” (Nietzsche, 2019, p. 184), resonates powerfully. For this Galician physician, we are constituted through others, not only in the psychosocial or spiritual realm, but also in the biological. As Rof indicates, “in his affective relationships, man seeks and, so to speak, constructs with them a complex network complementary to his internal tensions, to his hidden equilibria” (1967, p. 25).

Our pronounced immaturity at birth necessitates a network of others who, through a transactional relationship, complete us. This network is more than a protective net. From it will derive our capacity to order reality; our biological substrate of hope will depend on its proper weaving; it will structure our limits and horizons and allow us to integrate all our dimensions into a biological unity. The network is not, therefore, an external structure that envelops an already formed individual: it is the framework within which that individual becomes who they are.

Rof Carballo’s work moves between medicine, philosophy, anthropology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and art. His is a multidisciplinary body of work that I believe reaches its zenith when it is housed and articulated within the living metaphor of the warp. The very word “warp” carries the slow rhythm of the spinning wheel, the intimate warmth of a blanket, the security of a knot, the scent of an old-fashioned haberdashery, and the childlike tenderness of a lullaby. In the concept of affective warp, Rof manages to capture an anthropological reality with millennia of history, in a theory that simultaneously explains, consoles, and allows for an intergenerational perspective on the past and the future.

In a “liquid” modernity (Bauman, 2017), dominated by networks, the pop triumph of the multiverse is hardly surprising . Beyond its original meaning, the term has become a cultural image of the indefinite multiplication of possible worlds. The multiverse is the metastatic hypertrophy of the network, the ultimate fantasy of that Victorian, predatory Ulysses who constantly flees forward without needing to return. In a way, it constitutes a web without a center, a substitute designed to satisfy the consumerist thirst of a generation raised on the infinite scrolling of the internet.

The greatest danger in this infinite web is not the cyclopes or the sirens, but again the forgetting of our own identity: becoming, as in the famous scene between Ulysses and Polyphemus, nobody : “no one is my name” ( Odyssey , IX, 366-367).

Faced with the disorientation of the multiverse, we need to recover Penelope’s loom. The metaphor of the warp returns us to a support that enables without capturing, that stabilizes without imprisoning. In contrast to networks, where the central figure is the image, the looking and being looked at, in the warp we plunge the needle into a living fabric in which we can affirm with Pedro Salinas (1991, p. 67):

To die

in high confidence

that this life of mine was not only

My life: it was ours.

José Luis Barrachina. Graduated in Nursing from the Catholic University of Valencia (UCV). Student of Philosophy at UCV

***

Sources:

Alba Rico, S. (2016). Reading with children . Barcelona, ​​Spain: Random House Literature.

Bauman, Z. (2017). Liquid Life . Barcelona, ​​Spain: Austral.

Bloom, H. (2000). How to read and why . Fourth Estate.

Han, B.-C. (2014). In the swarm . Barcelona, ​​Spain: Herder.

Homer. (2013). Odyssey . Madrid, Spain: Cátedra.

Marías, J. (1984). A Short Treatise on Illusion . Madrid, Spain: Alianza Editorial.

Nietzsche, F. (2019). The Gay Science . Barcelona, ​​Spain: Ariel.

Ortega y Gasset, J. (1957). The two great metaphors. In Complete Works (Vol. 2). Madrid, Spain: Revista de Occidente.

Rof Carballo, J. (1961). Affective fabric and illness: Introduction to a dialogical medicine . Madrid, Spain: Labor.

Rof Carballo, J. (1967). Violence and tenderness . Madrid, Spain: Prensa Española.

Salinas, P. (1991). The voice I owe you / Reason for love . Barcelona, ​​Spain: Círculo de Lectores.

Taylor, C. (2024). Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity . Barcelona, ​​Spain: Paidós.

Zambrano, M. (1987). Towards a knowledge about the soul . Madrid, Spain: Alianza Editorial.