Page 28 - GALIET BEAUTY´S LURE: WAR Helen of Troy and Margareta of Germany IV

and ingeniously devise cruelty. Like beasts they drool over their catalogues of torture to be marshaled in the plains and fields of War beyond their doors and abodes. Their dwellings, too, abysmally mirror an idyllic Deutschland, or Hitler’s mountainous abode, as if these were images, too, of Paris and Helen’s amorous bedroom conjugating romance amidst the clangor of bronze shields, and spears, and the clangor of shovels hammering the ground, digging their graves in the Trojan fields, amidst prayers and wails, and dirges and funeral songs, no less atrocious than Auschwitz’ death fugue, as they await, within their own barbed wired walls, the jubilant greeting of the Master of Death to have them play up for the dance while they drink for terribly beautiful Helen and Margareta’s sake, in thorny, and incomprehensible heart-pang their black milk of daybreak, as if the black milk were a Trojan libation. Death fugue’s uncanny song mourns and mourns for the ashen dead, as Homer’s Troy, too, mourns and wails for dead Hektor and its heroes, dead, as the Trojan women, too, in Euripides shall mourn. It weeps and mourns for the atrocities endured for Menelaus, and Paris and Priam’s obstinate flame and sake. Indeed, it had once been foretold that Paris would burn Troy.44
In this song of death, paradoxically beauty dwells. This is Lady Beauty’s other gaze. She encourages sublime quests, but also wrecks. In the confounding maze, she cremates Troy and Auschwitz with her gaze. She is the femme fatale. “So terrible is her likeness to immortal goddesses,” whisper the
44 March, Jenny. “Helen.” Cassell Dictionary of Classical Mythology. UK: Cassell, 1998. 183. Seneca. Trojan Women.
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