Phaedrus: . . . But let’s be going, since now even the stifling heat is more gentle.
Socrates: Shouldn’t we pray to the gods here before going?
Phaedrus: Yes, surely.
Socrates: Dear Pan and ye other gods who dwell here, grant that I may become beautiful within and that my worldly belongings be in accord with my inner [...]
Archive for November, 2008
speech ending quietly
Posted in God, athens, beginnings, dialogue, greek, language, love?, mania, rule, summer, wind, wisdom on November 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The Voice of the Melian: the City Begins where the City Ends, Part I
Posted in athens, beginnings, greek, history, language, love?, melos, nemesis, polis, stars, the impossible, thucydides, tragedy on November 6, 2008 | 8 Comments »
In the latest comments on “Remember Melos”, itself a comment on a dialogue to which comment can only be late, Finny tries to read the voices of Athens and Melos. This reading begs the question: where is it that these voices can be heard? In what forum, what agora, what city can Athens and Melos have anything to say to each other? What assembly, and what sort [...]
the odour of the lamp
Posted in Abraham, Achilles, God, Moby Dick, albatross, art, greek, history, language, latin, mosaic, polis, sailing, savage, skrim-shander, the impossible, water, whale, whiteness, wind, winter on November 2, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Through the rambling body of any grand or would-be-grand endeavour, poetry, life, and all their bewildered exchanges, it is always in a back-alley, a digression, an out of the way place that unity, kosmos insinuates itself.
Moby Dick, a book not inaptly compared for fantastic uncontainability to a labyrinth through a thundercloud, harbors any number of such out of the way places that promise a truer scope of its impossible whole than passages [...]
