Page 12 - GALIET THE KING AND THE CORPSE: The Four Cardinal Corners and the Quest of the Blue Cloak, the Mask and the Sword IV GALIET THE KING AND THE CORPSE: The Four Cardinal Corners and the Quest of the Blue Cloak, The Mask and the Sword

The majesty of these geometries sings to our essence and to the struggle within our tripartite2 beings. The three principal characters of the sub-frame story,3 King Trivikramasena, Vampire Vetala and Monk Ksantisila, by virtue of their very natures, can be interpreted either profoundly or simply. At a profound level, these characters represent the endless conflicting aspects among logos (mind), thumos (spirit) and epithumia (body)4 cleverly personified by King Trivikramasena, Vampire Vetala and Mendicant-Monk Ksantisila respectively. For King Trivikramasena, dweller of light, to carry Vetala is to journey with his thumos during his quest into the shadowy grounds of perdition, epithumia. To be saved, King Trivikramasena must embrace his thumos, listen to it intuitively and solve its riddling mysteries with his sacred logos. Yet, of these two, which is more primordial, logos or thumos? The riddle dance suggests that both are genuinely interdependent. While Vetala’s thumos, all-knowing and all- seeing, is guide and seer, King Trivikramasena’s logos is disciple and presence: Vetala tells, asks and zaps; King Trivikramasena listens, discerns and fetches. This is the circular
2 Reference to Plato’s tripartite soul logos, thumos, epithumia. Plato. Complete Works. Republic. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 1997.
3 I have called the King and the Corpse a sub-frame story since it forms part of a larger work.
4 These are Plato’s divisions of the soul. Grube, G.M.A. ed. and trans. Plato Republic. Book IV. Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing, 1992. 434d – 441d.
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