Page 13 - GALIET THE TORCH, THE GODDESS: On Poesy Plato IV

By Socrates’ prohibiting the emotional or unlawful and wanting to transpose a binary to its “opposite”, he is proposing nothing less than a shift in the paradigm, a shift in perception of reality: a permanent escape into the “other” by rendering us immoral, powerless creatures incapable of exercising free will when it comes to matters of piety and the Good and, therefore, Socrates, in inverting the natural order, places our divinity outside and beyond ourselves. How Socrates entices us to escape from the dungeon, from the womb of the cave 3⁄4 that mighty world of shadows, ignorance and “unreal” appearances 3⁄4 into the vast opening of light, the heavens beyond where only the infallible, the true, the good, the universal, the eternal and the “real” forms exist and endure. In seducing us into shifting our perception from belief to Knowledge, Socrates also persuades us from poetry to Poetry, for everything in the material or physical world, he says, has its corresponding essence “ness” in the beyond. I personally know this Form exists, whether we name it God, Essence, Atom, Neutrino, Mind or Energy, its presence is felt and can be experienced by those who choose to seek it, uneducated and educated alike. Yet, perhaps Socrates censors poetry because he is unable to cope with what shadows he is seeing or experiencing: the labyrinths of the unbearableness of being reflected in the agonies and joys of living poetry. This lower form of belief or poetry, for Socrates, is a subversive knife belonging to the
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