Skip to main content

“The Phaedrus”

A victim of his passions and the slave of pleasure.

Commentary on “The Phaedrus”

The Phaedrus plops the reader into a dialog between and Phaedrus on the outskirts of Athens. We are thrust into a dialog unaware of the greater context.

At stake is love and rhetoric. How does one express depth of passion, the telling of the idea, the crafting of the concept?

Memory is the key to the craft of rhetoric. Imprecise memory cannot do justice to a complex work. Is memory exercised at the expense of others? Can souls recall the holy things they saw, or have the lost the memory of the holy things. Memory lingers on scenes that have passed away. Can a memory be memory carried to true the true beauty?

Is rhetoric an invocative exercise in finding the sacred truth? Is rhetoric memory? Do we craft form within ourselves a vision of reality, perfect or flawed, and then commit this to words?

The dialog is a commitment to finding truth. Words are expressions of deeper truths. When words touch us, we form deeper bonds to them. Our memory becomes and incorporation of the rhetoric.

We consume words and make the part of or minds. Words are like food, the most truthful elements like proteins, bind to us and fill us with energy. Yet truthfulness is a perception and a flawed one at that.

Love and passion for words and dialog, the sophist pleasure to which they are enslaved. The words that find meaning give a deep and lasting pleasure to being.

Such is the tradition.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reflections on “Stalking with Stories,” from Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache by Keith A. Basso.

Keith A. Basso finds embedded in the the language of the Western Plains' Native Americans a memory code of place tied to stories. Human memory is often organized in associative patters. Different cultures have different depths of association based on their interactions with their environment and their means of producing food, shelter, and clothing. The Inuits, who live in the Arctic have many words for snow; modern technical fields have their own complex jargon; language morphs to reflect the underlying complexity of the daily interaction of the individual with his or her environment. Basso illustrates how the traditional hunter gatherers of North America formed a rich linguistic bond between their culture and the spaces they occupied. What perhaps is most surprising in Basso's telling is the incredible detail and richness of the prescriptive association. His research into the the rich linguistic depths of the Western Apache reveals a form of thought that seems alien to the we...
1 comment
Read more

A Reflection on Anne Frances Wysock’s English 202

Current archeological theory puts the origins of writing in Mesopotamia over six thousand years age. It is hypothesized that the first symbols where clay tokens used to account for products used in agricultural trade. Somewhere along the line an entrepreneur started using a reed stylus to mark inventory down on a piece of clay. From these mundane origins as a primitive spreadsheet, cuneiform writing evolved. A surprising number of cuneiform writings have transition themselves to the digital age. The Internet is a hungry information beast, devouring Cuneiform, Sanskrit, Aramaic, Hebrew, Mayan, Latin, Greek, Demonic … any text from any era, be it on clay tablets, stone, papyrus, bamboo, frescos, or paper. An insatiable cavernous void in mind of humanity demands to be filled with knowledge. Reading transforms writing into knowledge that fills the void. What is writing? Writing is a noun that is a verb. Writing is an act of transmitting thought through an intermediate media. What parts do...
Post a Comment
Read more