Plato and Perception

Plato imagines a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to seeing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.

Your Childhood In Menton - Lorca

Yes, your childhood: now a fable of fountains. The train and the woman who fills the sky. Your shy loneliness in hotels and your pure mask of another sign. The sea's childhood and your silence where the crystals of wisdom shattered. Your rigid ignorance where my torso was circumscribed by fire. What I gave you, Apollonian man, was the standard of love, fits of tears with an estranged nightingale. But ruin fed upon you, you whittled yourself to nothing for the sake of fleeting, aimless dreams. Thoughts before you, yesterday's light, traces and signs of what might be... Your waist of restless sand follows only trails that do not climb. But in every corner I must look for your warm soul that is without you and doesn't understand you, with the sorrow of Apollo stopped in his tracks, the sorrow with which I shattered your mask. It's there, lion, there, sky's fury, where I'll let you graze on my cheeks; there, blue horse of my insanity, pulse of the nebula and hand that counts the minutes. There I'll look for the scorpions' stones and the clothes of the girl who was your mother, midnight tears and torn cloth that wiped moonlight from the temples of the dead man. Yes, your childhood: now a fable of fountains. Strange soul, tiny and adrift, ripped from the empty space of my veins--I must look until I find you. The same love as ever, but never the same! Yes, I do love! Love! Leave me alone, all of you. And don't try to cover my mouth, you who seek the wheat of Saturn in snowfields, or castrate animals on behalf of a sky, anatomy's clinic and jungle. Love, love, love. The sea's childhood. Your warm soul that is without you and doesn't understand you. Love, love, the flight of the doe through the endless breast of whiteness. And your childhood, love, your childhood. The train and the woman who fills the sky. Not you, not me, not the air, not the leaces. Yes, your childhood: now a fable of fountains.

City That Does Not Sleep - Federico García Lorca

The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the
street corner
the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the
stars.

Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
In a graveyard far off there is a corpse
who has moaned for three years
because of a dry countryside on his knee;
and that boy they buried this morning cried so much
it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.

Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!
We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead
dahlias.
But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;
flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths
in a thicket of new veins,
and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever
and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.

One day
the horses will live in the saloons
and the enraged ants
will throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the
eyes of cows.

Another day
we will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead
and still walking through a country of gray sponges and silent boats
we will watch our ring flash and roses spring from our tongue.
Careful! Be careful! Be careful!
The men who still have marks of the claw and the thunderstorm,
and that boy who cries because he has never heard of the invention
of the bridge,
or that dead man who possesses now only his head and a shoe,
we must carry them to the wall where the iguanas and the snakes
are waiting,
where the bear's teeth are waiting,
where the mummified hand of the boy is waiting,
and the hair of the camel stands on end with a violent blue shudder.

Nobody is sleeping in the sky. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is sleeping.
If someone does close his eyes,
a whip, boys, a whip!
Let there be a landscape of open eyes
and bitter wounds on fire.
No one is sleeping in this world. No one, no one.
I have said it before.

No one is sleeping.
But if someone grows too much moss on his temples during the
night,
open the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight
the lying goblets, and the poison, and the skull of the theaters.

Lubitel 166b fresh from the Ukraine

Old Jack

Shipcity

The End

sisyphus

Spaces of Italian Architecture Modernist 1

spaces of Italian Architecture Modernist 2

spaces of Italian Architecture Modernist 3

Cloths of Heaven. Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

A Coat. Yeats

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.

The old men admiring themselves in the water. Yeats

I heard the old, old men say,
'Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away.'
They had hands like claws, and their knees
Were twisted like the old thorn-trees
By the waters.
'All that's beautiful drifts away
Like the waters.'

Never give all the heart. Yeats

Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.