5356. HELEN OF TROY, MEET PANDORA

HELEN OF TROY, 

MEET PANDORA

Only children would choose children things : that and the

old Jewish wave of the future. Keep them in mind, feed them

rubbish, and we can sell something to them on the sly. Pandora

was sent by Zeus to punish humans for Prometheus' theft of

fire and the end the Golden Age. She did her job, we figure.

When she opened the jar of death and pain and other evils

upon the world, I wonder how different is that from Jehovah

to Zeus (Jesus) and Eve in the Garden of All Much the Same.

A relatively straightforward presentation, in any case, of the

beautiful woman as a mechanism for disaster; an instrument of

Divine vengeance. Hesiod adds that Pandora, in addition, had

agency, strength, a mind and a voice, each allowing her to 'devise'

evils for humanity. Opening that 'jar' or 'box', a fateful choice with

obvious sexual overtones, was selectively chosen by her own

devised will. Redundancy noted, yes. She is more than a statue,

and there's the rub. Helen of Troy bears the same : a companion

volume to the loves of Man. Springing from cultural anxieties 
about female beauty and sexuality. Yet they don't call a radio 
Helen of Troy. Yet. We roam through our own subconscious with
a butterfly net of our choosing, selecting out the this and that. 
What we walk away with is the person you know. In this case, 
let's portray a marriageable girl, the idea springing up, a liminal 
figure who must cross the world of childhood to not, from 
the house of her father to the house of her husband. 'She must 
be sufficiently reluctant to suggest she will not stray once she 
is married, but she must also actively desire her new husband.' 
Helen, the most famous adulterous wife in the Western tradition, 
is shown as a woman constantly in this liminal state, who crosses 
over from one household to another : 'many-manned Helen', 
Aeschylus calls her.  Note the pattern on the wall  -  Helen's own 
wallpaper, reluctant to be, vanishes. She is like a beautiful child, 

running out on her child game.

-

Now the questions come : Are beautiful women always 
necessarily  bad? Is this instance meant to show? Nothing
like that at all? Is History still crawling with only a 'Man's' desire, 
the vain lust for a  Goddess in human form? Is female constant 
sexual desire always a  force for destruction? Is she semi-divine? 
Ever-young? Ever-beautiful?  Can there be such a thing? Modern 
version of misogyny do not  account for the possibility that 'bad' 
women might also be goddesses?  Lest my TV eyes fail me, this 
all  must be? I see people still pushing  an eternal feminine 
youthfulness concealed, despite their nefarious words, 
as voracious and wild sexual conquest.

-

The story goes : Zeus wanted to reduce the human population 
(see then our own Genesis 1 through 10), so he arranged for the 
birth of the two characters who would make the Trojan War 
inevitable. Achilles and Helen, representing 'seductive female' 
beauty and 'destructive male' strength. Both were half-human, 
half-divine  -  Achilles being the son of the mortal Peleus by the 
sea-goddess Thetis, and Helen the daughter of Zeus in the form 
of a swan and of the Spartan queen Leda. Owing to this parentage, 
she hatched from an egg; the first mark of her unusual,
not-quite-human status  -  the only female child of Zeus by a
mortal woman. An exceptional woman then, this. Other
versions in turn show her as the daughter of Nemesis, or
 'Destruction'. Helen's beauty is not subjective, as it was written
that she was 'beautiful' in some 'absolute and total way that 
defies description.' Equally irrisistable to any man  -  'a beauty
upon which all beholders agree can bind a generation of heroic
males under oath and generate an enterprise as cataclysmic as
the Trojan War.'



[UNFINISHED YET, author]..