Eros and Thanatos
According to legend, Helen of Troy was ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’… I have no idea whether Homer’s Iliad reflects actual events, or whether it is a tribute to the mind of a brilliant story-teller. The tale of a prolonged conflict between the Greeks and a city state is profoundly human, psychologically true, and even today we recognize ourselves in the echo.
A palpable sexual tension between Helen and Paris, a prince of Troy, the guest of Agamemnon is so patient and intense… Who seduces who? Agamemnon’s loss is so intolerable that he marshals the support of his fellow Achaean tribal chieftains, launching a ten year siege of Troy, ending with the devastation of the city, and wholesale slaughter.
“Was she worth it?” Is that the question to ask? Instead I find myself fascinated with the conundrum of desire, human desire. How insatiable, resistant to satisfaction, like a fire that burns until nothing is left…
When I think of Homer’s telling of how a ten year long blood bath was ignited by the free-fall of sexual tension by a young adult male and a young woman, a collision of the zest for life haunted by deathly consequences –somehow it seems familiar, wonderfully and tragically human.
I have liked Rick Springfield’s 1980 song for many years. I hear it often on the radio when I am driving. The story of envy, the temptation to betrayal, is told in all of it’s stark physicality. The story teller will have none of a Platonic, ‘pure love’ abstraction, – rather the description is down and dirty, of desire that burns like a fire. “Where can I find a woman like that?” to which reason would scream – You can’t! Jessie’s girl is the one and only, as was Troy’s Helen. The compulsion of desire, a felt friction in our bodies, as if a collision of opposing force is occurring, is what makes the human experience, well “human” does it not?
