The Mythopoetic Mind of Plato: The Kingdom-Sage’s Muthos in Timaeus, The Republic, and The Symposium (Parts IX & X)
IX
When all is considered, “[t]he truth about stories is that that’s all we are,”1King 2003, 92. and it matters little what mind you engage with for all humanity is narratively driven, and the world that we live in, the world that we tell in is not by mistake mythic, but a definite conglomerate of ideas and consciousness that provides life to that self-indistinguishable “I” that remembers its truest home through acts of myth. The work of Plato holds no glaring exceptions: the myth of Timaeus exists so that humanity might know Justice, that of the Republic to meditate upon it, and that of the Symposium to realize it. And this metanarrative that has been constructed to explore a possible Platonic worldview is enough of the whole to make a holographic, fractal revival of Plato himself inside his mythopoetic mind. The approach used in the intuitive article of creative and critical acts is centered on the concept of extractions. The purpose is to not define myth—or even worldview—per se but provide a meta-tool for the act of natively defining these concepts as they appear in situ, to extract representative samples for practical applications. And over time, these extractions (that are nevertheless cross-sections of myth, the mythogenic patterns, or rather worldviews) might be able to collectively lead to innovations in the mind and cognitive sciences, perhaps find a method of structurally confirming myth as a total phenomenon of consciousness. For now, the metaphor stands—this experience is akin to being immersed in a play with the original and following acts, given but one superimposed pamphlet in the form of this article and its content with a charge to go back and reread Plato with new eyes, radically.
X. Atonement
Surprise surrendered, in that moment—a bride taking laughter in the pillar of her husband, a Greek wonder as old as those Titan peoples, as all around were in her soft light touched in a weightless renewal. Plucks of instruments proved hypnotic, swallowed the red-sea wines, simply seething psychedelic. And, that man from the old country heard a weary bend in his noble bones, too distant to drink in that good gaiety.
The draught idles of his pain pushed took him away, brushed to a more sombre note of the one endless. The looming, eclipsed leaves were taking in that last bit of heat to cast tender shadows, before that lost Athenian sun was felled to serpentine devourings. Those arches of the Acropolis imprisoning light. Fond flashes of wild memory steeped past all the striking vistas—a kind visage of Socrates, a startling word of Phaedrus, and a brash move by Glaucon—stripping him bare of all his present identity in that flutter, frozen to a marked beat but frantic. These withered hands of white of his were dull to teared eyes old.
A cloth not even Michelangelo could craft swayed to his glint of perception. Then his chin did rise for one he should have bowed to, swearing from early cause to order always to be in her service. Wise age took much from him.
“What breaks you, sweetest Nymph, from the sweeter sounds? Surely, this one man is no interest to a maiden of the festivities.”
“You may not have strength or spirit now to crackle with a thunder divine—but I, yes I, have followed you… once before in disguise, once now in this flesh. I manifest inside humanity to attain its knowledge untasted—no tales recited will ever speak of such acts. I am Pallas Athena, and I have come to comfort…”
“What will become of me?”
“You will be found cold and unlividly dead by the morning, not far from here as you are resting. Athens pauses to mourn your work—without ever knowing you, that deeply.”
“Why not let Hades have his will? What condemns me?”
“Do you have knowledge of self yet unburdened?”
“I would confess, but even age has its embarrassment—I confess not because I am wise or true, but that I know what its value lost means… I foolishly distorted the unities of the soul by a philosophy rationalized, judged and struck people that sought lives I did not understand, to only find evidence of their unfitting demise and detriment by selectively convincing stories of others, never believing in potential. This is my greatest undoing, but I fear most that I have taught this world child, a cruel tool. Where can Justice reside now?”
“That is for the fates to string, but each soul must find it to its own.”
“Catharsis only comes in continuance. I live the eternal death. My body must return to the world as parchment for generations of writers. And since I have procured no ideas of my own, I live the fate of parables in having my soul torn to bits and replace upon the black universe. My friend, remember as I warn all budding philosopher kings, an unlikely man will come prophetic in verse, reviving that Delphic Oracle: ‘This above all—to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.’” And only then and if then, I am freed to skip this redemption immortal, as all must truly listen to that one Justice that resides natively in the soul of philosophers and poets alike.
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Notes
↑1 | King 2003, 92. |
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