Page 9 - GALIET Dido's Triplicity and Aeneas' Duplicity

Index of Images From Vergil MSS Vat. lat. 3225 and 3867, Folio Recto 161
How to read. Poetically or Logically? Subjectively or objectively? Invoke in us Dionysus or Apollo, Hesiod or Plato, Heidegger or Derrida? “The nature of art is poetry,” Heidegger says, and “the nature of poetry, in turn, is the founding of truth.”2 Anti-Socratic. Think of the inspired musings of Mt. Helicon, not as imitation, but as truth. Passion. Think of Hesiod’s bliss versus Plato’s tragedy: Muse, Virgin, Mother, Crone, natura naturans, apeiron forever silenced in him. Fleeing. Exchanging her. For whom? Philosopher king, natura naturata, peras. If Heidegger’s “poetry is truth,” then Plato’s Cavern is truth. “Through poetry we disclose ourselves as beings,” Heidegger says, because “language names, it brings things into the open.”3 Whose open fields? Pathos, Logos, In- betweeness or Rhizoming?4 But. Language also divides. Still we are poetic beings, poetic dwellers, Heidegger affirms. A text is multiplicity, Deleuze and Guattari respond. A text is metaphysical and undecipherable, Derrida says. Between Philosophy and Literature, it dwells like Minerva’s owl.
1 vergil.classics.upenn.edu/images/images.html and www.iraqiartist.com/.../ sadiq_Toma_2.htm
2 Heidegger. Poetry, Language and Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. 71.
3 Heidegger. Poetry, Language and Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. 71.
4 This alludes to Deleuze and Guattari’s theory on Rhizome poetics: Poetry without beginning or end, not rooted like trees, but on the surface, laterally, like a potato rhizome celebrating multiplicity rather than binaries. Deleuze & Guattari. Rizoma. Trad. José Vásquez Pérez y Umbelina Larraceleta. Valencia: Ediciones Minuit, 1976.
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