Page 30 - GALIET BEAUTY´S LURE: WAR Helen of Troy and Margareta of Germany IV

Ascent and Plunge.
Her beauty transfixes all to greatness and fall. She weaves her song as if a Sirens’ song. She sings and breathes death. She weaves and weaves heroic epics, quests and their cataclysms. There is a crescendo towards the ideal, and a diminuendo towards the bestial. She arouses torching lust and phosphorescent dreams but sepulchers them. She is altar and precipice. Her volition to remain in the altitude spells crematoria. She unfolds and folds grand events and collapses them. She is sun and moon. She illumines and eclipses. She leads mortals to ascent only to be crushed by her.
Lady Beauty at times reveals, at others, conceals. She reveals in her weavings war. Yet, she has her dark mysteries, too, sealed. She does not reveal particulars in her red robe weavings. And names in her works are cryptic or concealed: they are not clear. Hence, the poet creates riddles, beckoning for others to decipher, to utter, what the he is forbidden to utter: her terrible mysteries. She obscures what must be silenced: guilt.45 Beneath her bleak gaze, Celan’s poem beckons to utter what cannot be uttered; it aims to conceal what cannot be concealed. “Celan’s poems reach us,” says Gadamer, and yet “we miss them.”46 As if his poems were a “message in a bottle,”47
45 All of Celan’s writings were “a futile attempt to silence the voice of his guilt,” says Feldiner. Similarly, it can be argued that Helen weaves the events of the Trojan War because she feels guilty or blameworthy, as suggested in Roisman’s article. Felstiner, John. Paul Celan. Poet, Survivor, Jew. London: New Haven, 1995. Footnote 2. 23.
46 Gadamer, Hans. Gadamer on Celan. Trans. Heeinemann and Krajewski. New York: State University of New York Press, 1997. 63.
47 Gadamer, Hans. Gadamer on Celan. Trans. Heeinemann and Krajewski. New York: State University of New York Press, 1997. 63.
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