That Hottie Helen

So lets get the breakdown, the down low, the fast and skinny of a big ol' fat page out of Calasso's book. I took the random liberty to dig deeper into pg. 127 of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, and boy oh boy, I hopped aboard that brain train and found myself speeding hap-hazardously towards Helen's birth/life/ and all the problems it caused. "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" (Calasso, 127). It wasn't Helen's various doing's that caused her trouble, it was the "deceitful cunning" of our good ol' serialrapist boy Zeus. And now back to what made Helen who she was, it was the combination, no not combination, but overlapping of necessity and beauty, creating a lady so fine that Calasso call's it one of "the most formidable theological gamble[s] of Zeus's reign"when he rapes Nemesis <-- what a name! Perhaps in the raping of Nemesis, Zeus in turn created a nemesis in Nemesis-- Calasso goes on to state that "provok[ing] a forced convergence of beauty and necessity was to challenge the law of heaven" (same page in Calasso). So Zeus was challenging his own laws? The cosmic laws?
But that challenge is what turned Helen's life into such a sad state of affairs... I mean here we have the most beautiful woman in the world and she can't even enjoy it, can't even swing her hips with over-emphasized sway without starting a bloody war! Calasso ends this little gem of a paragraph by saying that (me)n would go on fantasizing of her, long after she was gone. In that instance, did Helen leave behind a legacy of beauty? Can all pretty woman give thanks and praise to her who suffered quite literally as being the most beautiful woman in the world. (Makes me think how a Victorias Secret model would hold up next to Helen?) whoa... no wonder men still dream about it.
I know this section wasn't chalked full of startlingly wondrous and superimposed myths, but Helen is still referenced today as a comparison to great beauty So there has to be something more behind that story than what we know....like what Calasso just shared with us!!

That talk of Dionysus today in class and sharing such stories of being under the transcending  hallucinogenic spell of drugs/alcohol brought me back almost a year ago to this day where some friends and myself found ourselves quite suddenly (took a little while) under the trance of psilocybin in a day that I will never forget. Anyway I wrote a poem at the end of that day, still feeling the effects, that helped to turn that memory into the best day ever.  Here it is:

Kaleidoscope Skies and Wizard Staffs- A Journey

Glittering trees waved
tendrils of color
Waves, scattered with laughter,
and views of new worlds.

We were boys of the bog, taken
away from our troubles and swept
to the childish giddiness of
old.

Where cameos of adventure gripped
all; The Steen’s and Max’s, Beersti’s
and Dub’s, and of course Deucel.
We were us, scattered together
in the beauty of our world.

A world without apathy, a quintessential
paradise where weird waves swept us
too and fro.

Rivers of dead trees flowed as gently
as a laughing brook, flecked with
the deciduous yellows of Fall.

A Fall that melted into a pulsating
being, beckoning us, waving to us,
enveloping us.

Where wizards ripped openings
into the clouds, a magic that connected
us into a discordant harmony.

How the sky faceted into a jeweled
kaleidoscope, spinning a myriad of
pieced clouds into a hypnotically
translucent painting.

We were beautiful on the edge of our
own world, pioneers of life
that witnessed eagles as majestic
as the dragons of ancient lore,
carrying the moon to the heavens.

We were swallowed into it all, and
together we were lost in a place we
all hope to find again.

Photo by: Kjersti Johnson