Page 37 - GALIET BEAUTY´S LURE: WAR Helen of Troy and Margareta of Germany IV

digging graves in the air, and playing up for the dance. They all have idylls and daydreams. They daydream and have idylls with their golden-haired Lady Beauty amidst the moral darkness, the orgiastic cruelty, the dim light of war, the ghastly ashes, and the macabre spectacle of cruelty and death that Lady Beauty in Troy and Europe intonates and detonates. The Master of Death as the Man, the Commandant, or Himmler, or Hitler go on writing to Margareta soon after they kill and incinerate; Paris goes on making love to Helen soon after Aphrodite saves him, soon after Menelaus almost kills him. Yes, he makes love to Helen while others kill and are killed. They daydream with her and have idylls with her. They kill for her, infatuated by her. She perpetuates blindness. It is contagious.68
Prince Paris allegorically plays with his vipers seduced by Helen’s presence, just as Hitler plays with his vipers seduced by Margareta’s ideological daydream (perhaps inspired by his Damsel Stefanie). Thus, Troy and Europe are interwoven in Paris’s physical idyll and in Hitler’s ideological daydream. Both experience the darkness of the terrible sublime. Both play with their vipers, while they daydream and romance, as if they themselves, once transfixed by Lady Beauty’s gaze, unlike the wise, perceiving elders of Troy, had become, in her likeness, the male terrible-sublime themselves. Just as she turns terribly cruel, so they become terribly cruel: they too dismember and cause others to dismember on their behalf. They, too, arouse fear and awe. This paradoxical terrible-sublime duality
68 This form of blindness is contagious in the sense that it passes from leaders to the community; hence few criticize Helen in the Iliad (except when she self-blames); hence, almost everyone in Nazi Germany participates in the propaganda parades.
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