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version seven. http://demongin.org |
No Victory, Victoria
Classic Gin
Wednesday, 2006-03-15 | Classic Gin
It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of allegory.
There's no art that I enjoy more than that which conceals a story within a story: I've been languishing for years in the academy and the periodic respite from the endless and inane posturing and theoretical nonsense that the opportuni
ty to read two stories at once that a well-crafted allegory provides is the only thing that has made it bearable.
My mind, it is fair to say, is populated by characters from my favorite allegories. Prudentius' cast of virtues and vices wage unending war in my mind, while the immortal Olympians simultaneously debauch, deflower and destroy in a fantastic demonstration of what to do and, more importantly what not to do. Of the whole cast of characters who live in my head, the one with whom I am in love is called Victoria.
You see Her as a statue sometimes. Most famously, an artist chiseled Herlikeness into marble and set Her up in Samothrace. Herarms and head were removed and She was then placed in a museum. She is still venerated: people take Heraround from place to place and set Her up here and there. If you see Her with Her arms and head attached, you'll notice that She holds a crown of laurel in one hand. She holds the crown out like She's going to put it on someone's head (som
eone who is just a little bit taller than She).
Mostly people think that Victora is nothing more than the matron of atheletes, those men who jump and run and throw and box in Her honor, courting Her, as it were, with spectacle and hoping to win Her affection by a superior display of prowess. If anyone asks, I tell them that I hold atheletes in low regard in spite of the fact that I think atheleticism is a fine and noble thing. My problems with atheletes and their tendency to conduct themselves in a low and base manner aside, I don't think it's beneath my goddess to preside over atheletic contests, to exchange furtive and coy glances with meatheads, but She is at Her most beautiful--I am most in love with Her--when She presides over scenes of indescribable violence. When She turns Her back on the dead and ushers the survivors forward, She is at Her most striking.
Victoria: matron of the lynch mob.
Just as the dead hang in ranks from the tall trees, so their murderers are upheld by Her thousand arms. This is the Victoria that I love the most, the one who men woo with gifts of slaughter and atrocity and before whose altar they stack the bodies of the Nameless Dead like cordwood. She loves them for it. She loves them more than the atheletes who hurl javelins and run races and hope that She'll smile at them.
While my Victoria may flirt with atheletes, She crowns murderers with laurel and takes them into Her thousand alabaster arms for better or for worse, for ever and ever. She holds them close in death and she never lets them go.
And while they may have burned hotly for her embrace in life, the murderers will surely find in death that they wish they could escape her adamantine grasp.
Those who strive on the field ot atheleticism may bear Her cups, but the space on her couch is reserved for the murderers and we shall always find them reclining there. We shall always find them in Victory's cold embrace.
