Out In The Alleyway

Now here, some of you will start to perform miraculous things. Literally you will attain special powers. Oh you think not?

So sooner or later I guess we had to get here though.

The good question was posed in some recent pages - 'what is this, about Love being the child of Poverty?'

This whole idea underpins everything that is Christianity at its core. There is literally no such thing as 'Christianity' without this entire concept, intact, straight from the actual core meaning of the affair.

Cristina Soto's just-posted, photograph
of the many layers of blue.

The Symposium is far and away the most complex, the most austerely advanced, and the least understood of all of the works of Plato, whether they be the known authentic works, or any whose authorship is contested among scholars.

Even more complex than any of the texts that deal with maths and geometry, is the Symposium.

Because, the structure is one of many dimensions.

The play, virtually, is designed around a sophisticated dinner, attended only by the highest class, most educated, and esteemed of people including a leading Athenian doctor and the historical Athenian general Alcibiades.

The discussion is deemed so important by these leading figures, that they instruct the host to 'send the dancing girls away' for the rest of the evening.

And this mind you, is still a wine drinking party. And in fact this aspect becomes a crucial 'literary device' (let's just leave it at that for the moment) towards the end.

Here begins this whole matter of 'different dimensions;' for on the one hand, the girls are going to distract, but somehow, we are meant to accept that the wine will not affect the procuring of the truth - which is what they were all going after here.

The Christian 'New Testament' leaps ahead over the subject of well, but really, why?

And also, how did it all begin, and not with the Garden of Eden story, but hey, where did all these 'God' things, come from at all? I mean why not, we just have nothing and then 'Big Bang' then soup and then lightning and then amoeba and then slugs and then lizards and then monkeys and then giraffes and finally, Neanderthals, from where we have only gone backwards ever since.

Plaster model and art by Ben Kommets
and 'Lucky-LBT.'
The Praiseworthy One, Socrates.
Or is that a genie?

LOL

But everything in the Symposium is happening on multiple levels all at once...

So, as people with the modern Western Mind, we must see the Goddess 'Ate' (Destruction/Havoc) now, not with our crass and simple-minded, childish 'modern' Western vision, but in a different way.

Ate is Destruction yes, but then she is the daughter of a Goddess (Eris) by parthenogenesis, of Nyx, with whom Zeus then co-operates, to plant her (Eris) deep into the Earth and so that she (Eris, who is 'Envy') would be here to interact with Mankind in a certain way.

Ate has a daughter, who is 'Poverty.' So right away we must 'see' that Envy causes Strife, which causes Destruction which ends up in Poverty.

But this is not the whole of the matter - 'Envy' is an extremely powerful animating daimones, which causes Men even lazy ones, to work to attain something they desire to have; and only after that, is it sometimes (albeit mostly it is) the case that war and strife ensue when the desires are not achieved.

So we have this great big profile story here going on, this systematic chain of connected psychological events.

And so that is how come we have Poverty coming into the scene now; and that is how we must view her - as a crucial element within a whole profile of connected things.

Moving into another 'dimension' then, Poverty is a God: she is a Spirit, meaning not some kind of wisp of fog in a graveyard, but a super powerful Divine thing. Which means - she cannot die, she cannot be overcome by mortal things, and she has Divine Power, that is to say, Divine means to get whatever she wants.

The wine, the food...
...and our own Poverty.

She goes to a feast of wining and dining other Gods, and she well knows her own suffering and lack, and seeing that the God 'Plenty,' or Abundance, or Resource is completely drunk and fallen over asleep at that moment in the back yard, she purposes to lie with him and conceive a child who will then inherit of his father, some wealth, and therewith resolve her own lack; in a way.

So this then, is the God 'Love.'

From His mother He has literally nothing, but He also inherits from her great contrivance, literally the Divine Skill to make something from out of nothing - since, because she herself is a God, she can do anything, but the way she does it, is from without any advantages at all.

And from His father, He literally gets everything.

And then, in the Symposium, we learn something on another level again, namely that some genealogists of the Gods, regard 'Love' as the youngest of the Gods, and then yet, others of them regard Him as literally the Oldest, through some strange and mysterious means.

And they say that prior to His birth, it was the very reason of His not being there beforehand, that the Gods warred and did violence and many horrible things happened, and that after His advent, He subdued all of them permanently, so that none of them who did not bow to Him were permitted to remain in Olympus ever more. And that only those 'among whom there was ever Love only, and no enmity at all' were allowed to remain in the Heaven of the Gods.

But then, without anyone telling us, we must see that He is in fact a direct descendant of Nyx, of whom even Zeus the Leader and Father of Gods and Men was solely afraid and respected completely. And because Nyx is His (Zeus's) own daughter's (Wisdom)'s aunt or grandmother, He also has a somewhat similar relationship to her too (the Goddess 'Wisdom') although she behaves to him as a daughter and is also respectful anyway.

And if He, Love, is a descendant of Nyx, then by the organized structure of Divinity, He is of the oldest strands of the Divine Vine, as it were.

The Genie is out of the bottle!

We are mortals. In the sense of what is truly speaking Eternal, we have nothing, and we die, to be no more, whether personally, or in any other way as a given certainty.

In the Symposium, suddenly at the end, Plato interposes a new device. He brings in the drunken general Alcibiades, dressed like Dionysus, the God of Wine, and just like Dionysus is often to be found, having come back from a street party, where he has been cavorting with lovers.

Now Alcibiades is a completely historical figure, of whom we know a very great deal.

He was the last 'famous' (there may be others, descendants down to this very day, but none are famous) of the Aristocratic family the Alcmaeonidae, among whose ancestors was the old soldier Nestor, who possessed a large drinking vessel, so huge and heavy that none but he was able to lift it and drink it. And Nestor, was a human descendant of Poseidon's affair with a princess of Thessaly, which makes Alcibiades already regarded 'officially' as semi-divine himself. 

Plato is implicating the ancestral Nestorian Drinking Vessel echo (which Greeks would know about, but is not explicit in the text) in Alcibiades' very presence there at all, and his comportment (his attire and his state of drunkeness), with Divinity and specifically with the God Dionysus. He is making Alcibiades into a real life, earthly, physical material presence or 'hint,' of the actual spirit of Dionysus.

And that simply underscores the point that Plato is making, namely, that here in this part of the 'dialogue,' we are to understand that this is now taking things right down to earth, as in, this is now a real-life thing going on for us to see through the story, but, that it implicates the matter of the 'demi-god' nature of certain people and certain things.

Alcibiades is a literary device, that we are to take as representing the God Dionysus Himself.

And then, 'things get messy' you see, because naturally, Alcibiades is quite drunk. By 'messy' we can also say 'they get real.'

So let us also now 'get real.'

We are humans. We live, we come from nothing and Hawking's Big Bang, and we die. And that's it. Back to the nothing that we are.

Hawking has nothing for us. He is nothing himself right now. A few words on some pages, some digital space in some computer chips, some DNA samples stored in labs in Imperial College London.

Now by the way, so as not to be unfair on 'sci-entists' (those creatures who actually know exactly nothing, in fact), in another plane of dimension in the dialogue, we have heard from the Athenian doctor, Eryximachus, on the physician's perspective of 'Love.' And right convincing it is too.

Alcibiades' 'Naval Marque...'

Meanwhile, Alcibiades is telling us now, things about 'the tire rubber hitting the road,' as it were.

Just a little beforehand, Socrates' old nurse maid, Diotima from Mantinea, had been setting forth how it is that a human mortal person, can become immortal...

A mortal, realistically, in the sense of anything really enduring by way of personal consciousness, literally has nothing and cannot be immortal.

And to a certainty, Steven Hawking is fully dead and completely gone. Maybe he reincarnates, but possibly not, and in all events, even if he did -, not so that his ego and his mind, his actual consciousness, knows anything about it. Yet the whole world is fooled by him when he has the stage, given to him by others, whose motives you cannot see.

Say to the carpet: 'Rise!' And it will not. This is reality.

Whereas Diotima, the 'woman who honors,' or who is honored by Deos (it can mean both things), is credited by Socrates in the Symposium, as inspiring the theory, that God is able to raise dead things or inanimate things, or make mortal things eternal beings. And then she goes ahead and says what 'God' actually is. But it is all wrapped up in the ultra-dimensionality of the Symposium, as a structured Platonic 'dialogue.' And Alcibiades disrupts everything at the end.

Capture though, even just the one time, and even but only dimly too, the 'ultra' meaning of the words that are in there, and the carpet rises but only for the person who has grasped the core.