The life of Helen marked a moment of precarious, fleeting equilibrium, when, thanks to the deceitful cunning of Zeus, necessity and beauty were superimposed the one over the other. The rape of Nemesis was the most formidable theological gamble in Zeus's reign. To provoke a forced convergence of beauty and necessity was to challenge the law of heaven. Only Olympus could have sustained such a thing, certainly not the earth, where that challenge blazed uncontrollably throughout Helen's lifetime. It was marked from beginning to end by calamity. But it was also the time men could go on dreaming of, long after that fire had gone out (The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony pg 127).In this telling, the birth of Helen is the catalyst for all of history: first the age of heroes, battles, turmoil and great deeds, and later the age of men, poetry, storytelling and art which follows. Helen is the synthesis of necessity and beauty (chance), and embodies all of the conflict and contradiction that this convergence suggests. The face that launched 1000 ships indeed, and the Iliad, The Odyssey, and all of western literature down to the present day.
With Zeus's challenge to the law, we have in this one figure the source of all human conflict:
- Fascism - the aesthetization of politics
- Marxism - cultural critique as science
- Christianism / Islamic imperialism - religion as politics (mythology as law)
- Communism - politics as religion
- Social Darwinism - aesthetization of science
Conflict Schematic
