Deep Contours

The Parthenon

I find the pursuit of platonic furniture somewhat amusing.
It must be white and bright. For reasons not entirely clear.
We could call it “Sacred Geometry”, a pulling
of the material out from the ethereal.
But it isn’t really that. It’s a performative that
It invokes a sense of it without being it.
Pieces are usually taller, thinner, with clean lines.
Perfect symmetry. A kind of heavenly imagining of
furniture. With angelic beings occupying crystal palaces
In Prisms. Nothing need be that sturdy. There’s little
gravity at play. And everyone is taller, I guess.
Swedenborg was enraptured by such visions.
This realm corresponding with that, informing our
Sensibilities. Furnishings in Mormon temples. The Jefferson
memorial. Greco-Roman architecture. The Parthenon.
Mausoleums. All those graves in alignment before the
golden gate. It is unworldly. A world for the dead.
But it isn’t as well. It isn’t really that. It’s an attempt to
invoke our intuitions concerning it, but no image gets it
There are no beings of flesh and blood there, no food
Maybe some marble fruit in a bowl. Perhaps it is no
heavenly image at all. But rather, a kind of hell.
Certainly beguiling though. It is the stuff of Empires
A myth to die for. This is not to say however that I would
juxtapose this myth with anything I would call “reality”
There is no truth. Or if there is, that truth is a man
who can’t even scream, suffocating in his own blood
We need our illusions. We need good illusions
And that word “good” is a tricky one. Good for me.
A tall wall, as long as I’m on the right side of it.
If you’re playing the game correctly, winning is about
Situating yourself within the right illusion.
“Every time you say you don’t believe in fairies a
fairy dies.”
So, the skill I guess is in discerning the good illusion
And the hedonic calculus won’t get you there
Selfishness is better than good, don’t trust the good!
Bounded selflessness is better, bounded to the self.
Are the illusions pointing beyond themselves,
I think they are. But not in any clearly expressible way
In a way, it seems like an awareness of the wider game
Does get you closer to recognising the deeper contours
There are so many bad illusions. They all have in common
just how good they look from the outside
you’ll probably need to get into the middle of a few
before you realise how they’re all structured.
You cannot compel them through will. You can only
abandon them, you can only choose. If you’re lucky.
But maybe you don’t even choose. I cringe at the cliché
But perhaps they choose you. Or the exceptional ones
on occasion craft their own. I find that remarkable.
Even if they craft a really really bad one, just the ability
I find impressive. I think also part of the recognition of
the contours, lies in one’s ability to discern the need for
One, or the space that one could occupy, despite not having
the ability to bring it forth. It’s probably inaccurate to
say any one person brings them forth… They ride the
swell. Aesthetics is a nice way to think about it, what ever
platonic furniture looks like, one thing is for certain
it doesn’t look like platonic furniture.