 |
 |
A Platonic dialog(ue)
Shagion: Hornias, why is it that male animals and female animals shag?
Hornias: Shagion, Because they are horny.
Shagion: Is that why Plato wants to go into Socrates’ cave?
Hornias: We’ll have to ask him.
Shagion: Do they learn it through wisdom?
Hornias: It is all in the mind.
Shagion: So when you batter the entrance of my cave, sometimes it lays out the welcome mat and others it says no, is that Wisdom too?
Hornias: We’ll have to ask the Sphinkter who guards the entrance.
(At the point we have a choice, we could go back to the antique, travel down into the underworld and ask Sphinkter, or we could carry on in pure logos and noun?)
(We think the Sphinkter story is better left to the manner of Handel or Bach.)
Shagion: Do you think the Spinkter is actually in the know, or simply obeying orders?
Hornias: I think I was told in the gymnasium that there are voluntary and involuntary muscles, so it must be one of those.
Shagion: But which Hornias?
Hornias: I think we had better ask Plato.
Shagion: Well, we could still proceed, for if it is being ordered, by whom?
Hornias: It could be the mind.
Shagion: Is that the same as Wisdom?
Hornias: Or the soul?
Shagion: Or the self?
Hornias: We’d better ask Plato.
Shaagion: He’ll only tell us to ask Socrates.
Hornias: Remember Phaedrus told us that story about the horses and the charioteer, which he said Socrates had told him?
Shagion: Yes, I remember it well, but I could never decide who I wanted to win. I rather liked the horse with the snub nose and the short thick neck, he looked like Socrates.
Hornias: Perhaps he was telling us something about who was giving the orders to Spinkter?
Shagion: But remember there were seven basic tales, seven types, between the three of them, which took a long time to tell.
Hornia: Well, he did always say he didn’t know anything, so that was his way, of working around the matter. We have taken a walk with Spinkter to see who gives him orders.
Shagion: And we don’t know whether we have reached the brain or the ghost.
Hornias: And while we are talking about it we aren’t doing it.
Shagion: All this learning just gets in the way.
Hornias: Ah, but if we hadn’t learned, we wouldn’t know.
Shagion: That is true, but how did we learn to cuddle?
Hornias: We sort of taught ourselves didn’t we?
Shagion: But is cuddle in the soul or the mind?
Hornias: I wonder whether thinking about cuddle will take it away?
Shagion: Is that why there isn’t a book of cuddle?
Hornias: Perhaps.
(There is a point of knowing inflection here. What is dialogue for knowing inflection?)
Shagion: But we have solved the fourth arm problem. Shouldn’t we have learned that from the pedagogue?
Hornias I’m not sure we are supposed to cuddle the pedagogue?
Shagion: Well that is the difference between knowing how and knowing that?
Hornias: I know how to cuddle and I know that I am cuddling.
Shagion: Yes, but we knew we were cuddling before we knew how to.
Hornias: It must be instinct.
Why is it that Dryden, Pope and the rest were so keen on translating and immidating Homer, Horace and Virgil but not Plato? What is the translation tradition of the dialogues?
Writing an imitation of a dialogue is much harder than simply writing. There is the sense, intention, feeling, tone. Too many errors of knowing.
Leaving out all the really obvious our points, and turning what is held to be the obvious their points on their heads needs concentration, then none of them will get it, but we wont explain.
The book of Horny will do this after the manner of Jeptha.
Making the stage directions quite so clear might be a distraction, or knowing?