IN the city of Troy, whither our Argonautical voyages had carried us,
we found Helen and that lamentable Cressid who was to Chaucer the
feminine paradox, untenably fantastic but so devastatingly actual, the
crystal ideal—flawed; and to Shakespeare the inevitable trull, flayed
to show her physiological machinery and the logical conclusion of every
the most heartrendingly ingenuous gesture of maidenhood. (But, bless
you! our gorge doesn’t rise. We are cynically well up in the damning
Theory of woman, which makes it all the more amusing to watch ourselves
in the ecstatic practice of her. Unforeseen perversity.)
Fabulous Helen! At her firm breasts they used to mould delicate drinking
cups which made the sourest vinegar richly poisonous.
The geometry of her body had utterly outwitted Euclid, and the
Philosophers were baffled by curves of a subtlety infinitely more
elusive and Eleusinian than the most oracular speculations of
Parmenides. They did their best to make a coherent system out of the
incompatible, but empirically established, facts of her. Time, for
instance, was abolished within the circle of her arms. “It is eternity
when her lips touch me,” Paris had remarked. And yet this same Paris was
manifestly and notoriously falling into a decline, had lost whatever
sense or beauty he once possessed, together with his memory and all
skill in the nine arts which are memory’s daughters. How was it then,
these perplexed philosophers wondered, that she could at one and the
same moment give eternity like a goddess, while she was vampiring away
with that divine thirsty mouth of hers the last dregs of a poor mortal
life? They sought an insufficient refuge in Heraclitus’ theory of
opposites.
Meanwhile Troilus was always to be found at sunset, pacing up and down
the walls by the western gate—quite mad. At dusk the Greek camp-fires
would blossom along Xanthus banks—one after another, a myriad lights
dancing in the dark.
As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night,
O’er heaven’s pure azure spreads her something light.
He would repeat the simile to himself, but could never remember the
correct epithets. Not that they mattered—any more than anything else.