Is anyone here Greek?

The late writer Marvin Bell wrote a poem for his wife, titled simply, “To Dorothy.” It begins:

To be beautiful inexactly — how beautiful. It makes me think of the complexity of this notion we have of the beautiful. Some things are beautiful and some are not. Some of us are beautiful and some of us are not. Who gets to decide? Based on what criteria? Why do we care?

I’m writing this while sitting outside with the sky above and the earth below. I stand and walk up and down the alley, breathing as I move, inhaling the world around me. It’s as if the Earth were made for us, or perhaps more accurately, as if we were made for the Earth.

Recently, I’ve been reading about the new $250 million, 172-minute-long Hollywood blockbuster that is bringing Homer’s Greek epic “The Odyssey” to IMAX screens across the planet. This is the kind of thing Hollywood loves — swords, helmets, chariots, sandals, men and women in long robes, beauty queens and testosterone-fueled soldiers, betrayal, jealousy, degradation, petulant heroes, the victorious and the vanquished, the human experience in Wyoming or in Indonesia or Southern Chile or northern Finland somehow the same.

Such films are commonly romanticized versions of imagined histories fueled by our periodic need to escape the present, the lives we are actually living. But with the new “Odyssey,” current political and social discord has leaked in as a result of director Christopher Nolan’s decision to cast Lupita Nyong’o to play Helen, the Greek beauty queen kidnapped or maybe run away to Troy only to later regret her impetuous flight. Lupita Nyong’o was born in Mexico City of Kenyan parents. She considers herself to be Mexican-Kenyan. She’s Black.

Casting Nyong’o to play Helen has driven some in the blogosphere to apoplectic heights. We’re told the casting is a “woke” gesture meant to destroy Western civilization and everything upon which that civilization has been built. Elon Musk has said that in casting Nyong’o, Nolan was stomping on Homer’s grave. In some reports, Mr. Musk said it was pissing on Homer’s grave. Matt Walsh, a Daily Wire podcast host, said there’s not a single person on Earth who thinks Lupita Nyong’o is the most beautiful woman in the world. Imagine how much trouble Mr. Walsh must have gone to in order to check with each person on Earth about Ms. Nyong’o’s beauty.

The conservative influencer Tanya Bass complained that Helen is a “historically white character” and that casting Nyong’o is “racism against White people.” It’s a funny complaint for a couple of reasons, one being that the Greeks of Homer’s time — about 2,800 years ago — had no concept of race analogous to that of ours.

Another important detail in any examination of Helen’s racial makeup is that Homer’s Helen was born from the union of the god Zeus in the form of a swan and the Spartan queen Leda who may — or may not — have been of human parentage. Following her assignation with Zeus as a swan, Leda laid a clutch of eggs. It was from one of these eggs that Helen was born. Well, hatched. It makes the question of skin tone at best murky.  Better said, irrelevant. Was Helen Black or white?  Maybe she was covered in feathers. Has anyone measured the length of her neck?

The last big-screen depiction of Helen was in the 2004 film “Troy” in which the world’s most beautiful woman was played by the German actress Diane Kruger. Kruger is a blue-eyed, blonde-haired white woman. Those “Aryan” features were idealized by the Nazis. And yet, while “Troy” director Wolfgang Petersen was born in 1941 in Germany, I can’t recall anyone accusing him of being a Nazi for casting Ms. Kruger as Helen.

Let’s end with another poem on beauty, this one written by Frank O’Hara, who claimed it was a literary autobiography:

When I was a child
I played by myself in a
corner of the schoolyard
all alone.

I hated dolls and I
hated games, animals were
not friendly and birds
flew away.

If anyone was looking
for me, I hid behind a 
tree and cried out, “I am
an orphan.

And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!