Menelaus and Helen’s Excellent Adventure

And yet he weeps for him, and sorrows for him, and then it is over, for the Destinies put in mortal men the heart of endurance. — Homer, The Iliad

One of the most difficult things to face in life is injustice, and the world gives one plenty of it; injustice gnaws at the marrow of one’s being even though the ideals of Western culture, indeed much of the world, have been committed to the eradication of injustice for hundreds of years (Thousands, if one wishes to include ancient Greece). Yet, in spite of all these efforts, countless individuals are victims of injustice every single day, our cultural values and political institutions are awash in corruption; individuals seek political office not to pacify a brutish world, but rather the selfish acquisition of wealth and power. Local and federal governments promote mindless conformity while civil rights are gleefully, self-righteously, trammeled. All too frequently it seems as if America has been transformed into a nation of Kafkaesque bureaucrats who consistently punish incredulity and refuse to initiate any independent thought or action.

In the midst of bleak circumstances it is difficult, if not impossible, to find answers, hope, or meaning. It is tempting to think that never before have things been so bad nor fallen so far, but that would not only be wrong, it would be naive. Suppression of civil rights is not new, nor should it be surprising, for humanity has always possessed a great talent for expressing its worst impulses and finding novel ways of imposing its dissipated will upon the masses. Not only are the circumstances in which we live historically familiar, their dynamics have existed in social systems from time immemorial. In his book, Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner writes, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In a sense, Faulkner is echoing James Joyce who, some thirty years earlier in his masterpiece, Ulysses, utters, “History is nightmare from which I’m still trying to awake.” It seems that the desire for power–an irresistible, rapacious, imperial power–which subsequently crushes the human desire for relationship and love under the heel of a boot, is one of the most enduring and compelling instincts the human animal has.

The Iliad describes an uncannily contemporary situation: a superpower ventures across an expanse of sea to destroy a city-state–a diverse, sophisticated city-state rich in natural and cultural resources, located along ancient routes of trade–all because of an inflamed, and therefore unbearable, wound to a pugnacious, arrogant, uncurious, and ill-natured leader’s ego. Easily recognizable to modern readers, the rulers of the Greek state of Argos were Agamemnon and his younger brother Menelaus, two descendents of, even by ancient standards, despicable, treacherous, and barbarous ancestors. Their great-grandfather was the infamous Tantalus who, wanting to test the god’s omniscience, killed, chopped up and served his own son, Pelops, to the gods as a ritual dinner (The gods weren’t fooled and devised a special torture for Tantalus in Hades). Until Orestes (Agamemnon’s son) fulfills his destiny, psychopathic ruthlessness is the most notable characteristic floating in the gene pool of those born unto the House of Atreus. Agamemnon, inexorably influenced by his ancestral nature, seems destined to always choose the worst of any two alternatives presented to him; he is filled with murderous Atê, his peculiar frenzy and his eventual ruin, his recklessness and dissolute violence (he murders his own daughter as a sacrifice to the gods); he capitalizes on an event, which is at worst personally humiliating for his brother, and fabricates a pretext by which he, self-satisfied and self-righteously, obliterates a society.

Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, is not a particularly large presence in The Iliad, but he is something of a weasel: a braggart and a histrionic, a bully who presses his advantage over those who are weaker. In his Poetics, Aristotle describes his character as “indecorous and inappropriate,” strong disapprobation from Aristotle. Helen, the semi-divine beauty, seems rather empty-headed and somewhat uncomprehending of her role in the atrocities playing out before her. But, perhaps that judgment is too harsh; perhaps one never understands the role of fate or destiny in one’s own life during the moment of its unfolding. Nevertheless, her name hints at her destiny: hela means “to destroy,” and na refers to ships, although she proves far more fatal to the relatively land loving Trojans than she does to the Greek navy. After her lover, Paris, is killed Euripides suggests she secretly aids the besieging Greeks in a number of ways, hastening Troy’s fall. Eventually, and with no apparent thought to the tragic events they set in motion, Menelaus and Helen are reconciled and legend has it that they live happily together thereafter in the Elysian Fields. One can almost see them, blithely sauntering off into retirement, content to busy themselves with plans for building Menelaus’ presidential library.

One may easily be made to wonder just how this is fair; how is this even remotely just? How can these two, causes of so much death and destruction, simply live out their lives free from any consequence whatsoever? Homer instructs his readers that “Such is the way the gods spun life for unfortunate mortals, that we live in unhappiness,” but surely this cannot suffice for an explanation; and indeed, it does not. There is an explanation; however, the explanation is imprisoned beneath the lines of the text, it is a non-literal, elusive meaning that defies authoritative articulation and singular definition; it is an explanation that may only be imagined. As a brief aside, imagination is very different from fantasy. Fantasy is, quite simply, an autoerotic diversion while imagination is a powerful, transformational, and potentially unlimited creative endeavor: as the poet John Keats wrote, “I am certain of only two things: the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the power of imagination.”

Once imagination is engaged to the unwritten implications of the text, a multiplicity of meanings may be discovered, exponentially proliferating sets of meanings, meanings that are barely contained beneath the plot driven, logically and chronologically cohering text. One of the meanings emerging from the margins of the text is that the simple, single-minded, desire for love and relatedness is so transcendently redemptive that even grotesques such as Menelaus and Helen are atoned for. Survival, for Homer, seems to be related to the burning desire for relationship and love: Agamemnon is interested only in the accouterments of wealth and the esteem power provides him; everyone and everything else–even his daughter’s life–is a distant second to achieving his own aims, and as a result, once he returns home he is ignominiously dispatched by his wife, slaughtered like a market-bred steer. A desire other than relationship also consumed Achilles; he is filled with hatred of Agamemnon, and wants revenge for the petty and arbitrary way he has been treated. Soon enough, an even more burning hatred and vengeance is born within Achilles when his soul mate, Patroklos, is killed, and as invincible as Achilles appears to be, even he cannot escape the fatal consequence of harboring dark and ugly motives. There are others, those like Ajax, pursuing the glory of battle, which are eventually, and inevitably, dispatched from Homer’s narrative.

But others, like Diomedes, recognize and honor relationships with opponents, and in so doing, appear to live through the brutal and overlong war. Not the least of these is Odysseus, who from the very beginning was reluctant to leave his loved ones and, once he left, ached to be reunited with them. His thoughts never leave his family for long, and all his efforts in battle are directed toward reunification rather than victory for victory’s sake. Perhaps the elderly Nestor survives because of relational longings as well, but in his case rather than longing for another, his relationship is to the past, linked through a sacrament of proper remembering, nurturing the past’s proper place in the present.

That meaningful relationships enhance one’s life is a long established fact: married people tend to have longer lives, children retard the physical and mental effects of aging in their parents, and having a pet of some kind lowers blood pressure and ameliorates depression. Relationships demonstrably improve the quality of one’s life. In fact, relationship may be the fundamental goal of life. After the fall of Troy it is relationship, in all its variations, which commands the attention of the ancient poets: Odysseus’ efforts to return to Penelope; Clytemnestra’s murderous marriage to Agamemnon, Orestes’ devotion to his sister and, ultimately, to the ideals of the city-state and the rule of law; Andromache and Hekabe’s life in Greek slavery; Menelaus and Helen’s happiness.

It may well be that relationship is the entire point of falling. Not until Adam and Eve are evicted from Paradise is a deeper, more conscious relationship to the divine possible. When people fall in love, the fog of romance and the nature of unconscious projections prevent genuine relationship; couples must fall out of love in order to move into relationship. Through neuroses and addictions, one often falls into the depths of oneself, hits bottom if you will, and it is only in the depths of one’s own being that one may glimpse who, or what, one most authentically is. Any structure too imbalanced or one sided is bound to fall, and as reconstruction evolves, a more balanced way of existing is found; a fact no less true for psychic structures than for concrete and steel ones. Falling, in quite literal ways, creates deeper relationships to the material world: learning about gravity, understanding the fragility of the body and the resiliency of skin, finding the limits of kinetic energy and physical ability, mastering self-care and healing; all such essential knowledge is inspired by falling.

Understanding the apparent injustice of Menelaus and Helen’s happiness is to understand the Fall of Troy as the beginning, rather than the end of the story. Falling is never the end of anything; in fact, falling always, and in all ways, reorients one to beginnings, beginnings filled with unlimited potential and the call to deeper relationship. If Troy had never been sacked, Athens could not have emerged as one of the noblest experiments in human dignity and self-determination the ancient world had yet known: there is a direct line of cause and effect beginning with Agamemnon’s involvement in the sacking of Troy, to Orestes’, his son, central role in the establishment of a democratic Athens. When the injustice of falling is immense one tends to become disoriented, focused on the blinding injustice while one’s desire for cosmos, for order, is subverted and the world no longer makes intuitive sense.

Standing in the rubble of fallen things, it is quintessentially human to want to see only that which has been lost. Grief, fear and pain limit one’s vision and direct one’s focus to a former unity, a unity that was an illusion of prelapsarian wholeness. Great courage, and a heroic act of will, is required to see through past illusions which one is yet inclined to mistake for present realities. Menelaus and Helen didn’t “get away” with anything, people like them never do. For, in the most fundamental sense, they must live with themselves and each other as they are; they will not be magically transformed into compassionate, loving, or caring people. They will always be, as F. Scott Fitzgerald characterized Tom and Daisy, “careless people” who, regardless of the gleaming exteriors they cultivate, are filled with a moral cancer and crippled by an incurable soul sickness. What’s more, the story was never about them, but rather the story is about what their extraordinary lack of consciousness helped to create. In the final analysis, it doesn’t matter what kind of people they were, they were merely instruments or tools anyway, subplots within the much greater, perpetually unfolding narrative Psyche commandeers to create consciousness in human beings, particularly the awareness of the necessity of deep, loving relationships, not only to each other, but to Matter itself.

If one can learn to see through the injustice and unfairness that often attends falling, one may achieve a glimpse of the source from which deep relationships and love springs, and with this vision drawing one on, new ways of living emerge and vast reservoirs of consciousness are filled so that life without endings becomes a reality; living without infantile needs for closure, that ubiquitous cultural chimera, which so often results in emotional violence if not actual physical violence, is achieved; desires for love and relationship to be satisfied are surrendered, and in surrender a deeper truth is made clear, a truth that teaches that the aim of such desires–the aim of love and relationship–is not for them to be satisfied, but sustained.