Old diary piece of Koon Woon

 

January 28, 2010

I believe this Journal idea is a sane idea and will help keep me in this class, school, and in life itself.

6:10AM in Seattle now and it is still dark; the streetlamps are visible through the slits of my blinds as I look up to the computer screen. Some people have already finished fornicating, showering, and breakfast and are commuting to work. The stretch of the freeway between Everett and Seattle and for that matter, all the way down to Tacoma bumper to bumper like electrons in a tube of copper wire in the making of this terrain a mega city in a decade or two. I have not driven a car in almost 40 years.

My mythic journey? In my imagination and delusional states, I have been many things – including that of the Director of the National Security Agency. My job was so secretive that the location of my office was top secret, so secretive that even I didn’t know where my office was. I belonged to an organization simply known as Insiders. We operated the government itself while pretending to be janitors at top government offices and multinational corporate headquarters. There are various ways we communicated that were rather slow and primitive, including the use of hiding messages in books in the public libraries. Why were we able to control the world even though our methods were so primitive at communicating with each other? Planning! And Intelligence! We must anticipate events and conspiracies and military, social, and cultural movements way ahead of time. In this regard, we were almost as good as the Triad of the Chinese Intelligence as it was revealed in the British M1’s The Jackdal Files. We shared intelligence with the Mossad, or the Israeli intelligence. They have the best technical apparatus, but we have the best political analysis.

I have been at my outpost for the last 30 years now – Seattle Chinatown. Hey, folks, I will let you in on a secret --- Seattle is the first place in the world that will be most likely be hit by a nuclear bomb from China or a Chinese sub. The brain of the US government is no longer in Washington D.C. but in Seattle. I have nuclear codes. It is based on Deontic Logic. For example, I might be on the phone with someone (where that person is don’t make any difference, if the conversation is picked up by the Chinese Second Artillery Force, which controls nuclear missiles. For example, a person and I may be discussing the price of Lychee tea in Seattle Chinatown at the Uwajimaya Asian Market and Emporium. When I appear to be not making sense to the party I am speaking to, the Second Artillery Force will realize that I have been poisoned or stressed to the point that I have decompensated to the point that I cannot not relied on to do my job. At that point, they will fire nuclear missiles at Seattle. This is all the details I can divulge unfortunately. I am sure you want to know more. Such is this kind of life.

We only show you that there is a puzzle. But once you think you have solved the puzzle, you will see that there is another puzzle within this one, and so on either ad infinitum or terminated at some point. Then, The Truth in Rented Rooms.

I am aware that there is a paranoia delusion with elements of grandeur in my morning illness. It is all right. It kept me alive all these 40 years of my illness. I never wanted to kill myself no matter how bad things deteriorate to, because in the morning, I always feel grandiose and happy.

Pancreatic File of Koon Woon

 

Pancreatic File [BOF May 3, 2026]: 

 

The end is near. V is telling me that characters on Wagon Train are her sons. Television can give us another possible world to ponder, but it is an implausible world.

I still go see V everyday at the nursing home except the days I have chemo. I fear the chemo is no longer effective. This makes V and I have about the same timeline.

 

I got bad news last November. The chemo helped for a while, but now it looks like palliative care.

 

The question is “Now what?” Everything is accessible – memories, possible worlds, the actual world, and there is perfect knowledge as it characterizes the S 5 Modal System.

 

She said, “You can see the world through the eye of the needle.” She was a seamstress most of her life. The needle was her livelihood. And she was my grandmother who rubbed my forehead to fearless sleep. She spooned me cod liver oil, and her garden greens were loved and abounded.

 

At the Triple L

 

Snow drifts down

Settling in crotches of the birch

Temperate drop as the cab enters the compound

 

I found my way to Mr. Schuler’s office.

It was an austere room.

He peered over his glasses and motioned me to sit down.

This is a memory, when I was sick, but not as sick as I am today.

Mr. Schuler is not a literary figure; he was a colonel in the air force.

“I don’t think you will be here very long,” he said, “you can think your way through problems.”

Then he asked me if I had a will.

After the interview he called Roy to take me to my room in one of the cottages.

 

When I got there, I saw three small beds in the same room.

There was a clicking noise, sounded like Morse Code. But it was just the heater trying to come on.

It was a cold January with the biggest snow in 20 years, and the cab did not make it all the way to the compound when I arrived. I lugged my suitcase the rest of the way, weakly, as I was in the mental hospital for three months.

 

At the cottage, I heard noises from another room. I peeked into it. Three televisions were going simultaneously, and three motley fellows were engrossed in television life. They did not even see me.

Then I backed up and went by the alcove. There was a jigsaw puzzle in progress by some insomniac.

 

I decided to lie down. Soon I was asleep and dreamed that I was Dr. Zhivago in the coldest of Soviet winters.

 

Stan Burris woke me when he came into the room. He was dressed in a dirty corduroy overcoat and boots. He is the reason I am at Triple L.

 

I thought Stan was a spy from Canada when we were in the hospital.

 

He told me that this compound was a great place to roam in because of the land size. And it was peaceful. He did not tell me by peaceful, it means “half-dead.”

 

I thought he was my friend. He needed support only. And it took me another twenty years to realize that what he said about being a baby in an orphanage and was not held the first six months made him cold. Not in temperature but in lack of empathy.

 

I will be stuck with him for another twenty years. That was how difficult it was for the mentally ill to find a friend and companion. We are ghosts that live in isolated Gulags all over this beautiful land of America.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Memories by Koon Woon

 

There is something insoluble in my tea that you poured

 

I don’t know what it is. Could be a memory of the cold tea in our China village of Nan On, in the bedroom on the teakwood table from the teapot spout I drink in childhood as a schoolboy, when our rooster crowed daylight, when getting up to the winter cold air was the first test of the day…

 

The tea is hot now like the anger I feel in this country when called a racial epithet. This country now has lost all its rights to be a world citizen, and in self-defense, I must be a world citizen and not a denizen of this country, where the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” came from motherland Shakespeare…

 

But more than this, it took me so long to find you, like a rose surrounded by brambles and a yellow chrysanthemum just beyond my height, radiant, that across my childhood years, the pond water was the right tepid temperature to swim in, and the love of ferns I found in these woods nearby as I wandered into it to the hidden waterfall we called the Diamond Falls, near the PUD in Aberdeen, on the foothills of the Olympics, where Darren the Native American fellow would disappear for a month at a time with bow and arrow to test the survival skills of his forebears, like I surreptitiously read the Chinese dictionary to see familiar faces, all 50,000 of them…

 

But long ago I also received my first rejection in a box of a phone booth when she sent icy words up my spine, as the winter booth is fogging up with my breath. Tea is pronounced incorrectly by foreigners as the Cantonese dialect has 9 tones, and each tone has a different meaning and “cha” could mean error…

 

But later I came back to my native culture when my poem, “A Smoke Break at the Nuclear Command,” was published in the Hong Kong online journal “Cha.” So now comparing cultures and phonics I found your love is quenching of thirst as the land of tea…

 

All in all, our love is not a mistake, after a lifetime of them, and now as we sprout snow on our heads, we find that insoluble stuff in my tea is love…

 

Koon Woon, April 18, 2026, Seattle

 

 

 

Prose Poems by David Booth

Lignum In Luce Lignum means wood in Latin though I remember my one classical brother telling me that it also had to do, if I could believe him, with the movement of natural light across the surface of a solitary piece of wood over the course of a day spent making a word bank, a lexicon for what you see there, what happens to your senses. ~ Pallets suggest the pallet-makers. The extent to which this is lost on shippers and handlers drives me bananas. Pallet-makers may or may not call any one pallet they nail together Pallet the God while freight forwarders go about their business like Automaton. ~ Nowhere on the farm are skulls set upon sticks, as I was told some would be, but remain in use in the heads of sentient beings coexisting. The person who told me to expect skulls on sticks slurs his speech, which may explain our misunderstanding. This gives me an idea. A history of slurred speech is one worth telling. ~ Who can say if the blue wheelbarrow goes unused anymore? It may be in constant use whose owners are workaholics. We admire their work horses (as the blue wheelbarrow remains wedged in Mulch Mountain) but can’t pat their noses, one after another in a long line of stoics, without one bolting. “A horse walks into a bar,” workaholics tell us to ease the tension, and the bartender says, “Hey buddy, why the long face?” One wonders what fraction of animal stories pressing mammals together like odd bedfellows ends in punchlines like horses leaping from quays into rolling green oceans to tread water. ~ Cows use horns as sense organs. Horns give cows a sense of their surroundings and metabolisms. Cows without horns can’t feel anything. A hornless cow doesn’t know who a cow is as an entity. Farmers take horns off cows so cows won’t notice cows close by. Cows with horns require a wide berth. Enter the personal space of a cow with horns and see if cow likes it. Cow is a strong-willed being. Who goes near cow now? If you do, see cow get out of the way of you. —Dreaming Cow ~ A transcendent god was overheard listening to bigots today. It was overheard listening to codependent women and mansplainers with some alcoholics in their ranks who were the industrialists plotting the clearcutting of forests meant to last forever. The poet Nerval intones Christ among the olives as I ask after trees, Are you holy? the Lord lifted his thin arms to the sky, as poets do after the silence and the loss of his friends’ belief… I saw him once too, you know, but my dream showed him in snow, barefoot among the evergreens. There was a wintry scent and the look of it, his noble mien slipping in and out of view amid dipping branches more real than I would have imagined, his approach across the drift, in one tired word, breathtaking. To not wake up is to go on living. ~ What lives in the rotting stump with carpenter ants, beetles, gorging termites if not usual suspects? Sunlight reshapes the city block, a square measuring one-point-seven million square feet, with its apartment complexes, cineplex, food court, a thousand or more sacred pedestrians, into a shrinking circle whose surface recalls the open face of the stump, with its core and radial lines and rings of life inviting you to rub it with your finger.   A Girl Gets Her Heel Caught in Her Mother’s Pocket Noia is the most sterile of human feelings. It’s the child of spiritual numbness and mother of nothing. It isn’t merely sterile in itself but renders sterile everything it invades or gets close to, etc. —Giacomo Leopardi (September 30, 1821) [Please accept la noia as the noun meaning the bore or the boredom in Italian and not, for Ben Lee, that loanword from the Greek leading to a mental wandering demeaned by paranoia.] Ben Lee is not original. His only talent, if originality and talent go together, rests in teaching sentence structure in easy-to-remember ways to teenagers in need of remediation. If this feels like a fishing expedition on his part, well then fine: who will lift him up for a second? Who will take his place modeling deep reading to boys caught in their strides between drifting away and quietly joining and saying without pride what makes them special? His own Original Scene appears every day as metal lockers with combination locks, desks in rows and circles, rollcall and acned faces, posters of essential authors, including one mystery figure John Dewey who no boy is curious enough to ask about, and fire-drill and live-shooter protocols. On May 23, 1832, the Italian social critic Giacomo Leopardi writes in his hodgepodge manual, “Original men are not as rare as we think,” also true of a woman. If he does not clarify that the discovery of one’s own originality springs from intentional, repetitive doing toward a desirable product, is it because one also makes beautiful gestures involuntarily, when originality and beauty grow as enmeshed in the realm of the unintentional, the automatic, as they are in a performance of Christmas Oratorio? Strangers kiss their children hello and goodbye with childless men and women looking on in admiration. What makes this beautiful scene feel like originality to Ben Lee if not his suspicion of a happy upbringing as a myth suddenly dispelled by incontrovertible shows of affection between parents and their little ones? The teaching profession fills yearly with originals unsure of their true callings. Teaching is an accessible career, a profession, if not everyone can be Restorer of Antiquity for the Smithsonian. Poplars grow outside Ben Lee’s window with green teachers heard through their own windows telling their students to look to the boy on their left and the boy on their right to see who can follow instructions. Who can contemplate a question without an answer? Who among us is a true original? What of originality is intentional? What is beauty? To what extent do we understand this about ourselves? Given this insight or lack of insight, what practices will we develop for self-regulation over the course of a lifetime? Mother and daughter board the train at Duboce Triangle heading south away from the school building. The daughter so forceful and scrutinizing for or like someone so young, the mother a small woman in an artists’ smock with a spot of yellow on her chin and earlobe and flecks of green on her wrist. Her head gray like down flung from a pillow, she shares a face with her daughter, only hers is gaunt as her girl’s oscillates between concern and knowledge as happiness. Pressing her thumb into greens and yellows while climbing her mother some of the way to heaven is conjuring a burly father when her heel gets caught in her mother’s pocket like a foot stuck between two ribs and she must hang from her mother’s neck until freed from it. Asking if rails stretch out before us into the distance is the right way to say it, for she must look in the direction we are heading, the child catches Ben Lee staring. Leopardi lies open in his lap like he is reading. Whispering aloud to her daughter that people can’t always help overhearing, for Ben Lee’s sake the mother uses originality in a sentence: The root of the word originality, origin means God or the extent to which someone feels their connection to it, like an old Sufi saying that there are as many ways to God as there are people. Because she whose mouth is stained purple, whose mother wants her to get down off her, cannot draw stairs and perspectives, wheels draw closer together as the space between rails narrows. Some mothers issue daughters challenges instead of warnings: Be quiet for ten minutes without even coughing, and I will give you something. Daughters think it over. Be not budge-friendly when our originality we are coaxing. The inverse of the Leopardi maxim, No one is original, is as old as the hills, buildings, and pedestrians passing in the rain beyond the window. A girl sits beside her mother on a train fake coughing. Like parenting, the supervision of other people’s children, some teachers in their probationary periods have yet to notice, slackens diurnal rhythms while accelerating the passing of seasons down to a few seconds. Ben Lee must execute more exhilarating lesson plans if he wants to capture a child’s imagination. He must sit some part of the workday by himself in silence, if not in meditation more ritualistically. Original and unoriginal men and women are one and the same when they are and are not tired.   Of Civilizations Soon Wiped Clean (Improv for Joan Riley) No scene has a meaning, no scene moves toward an enlightenment or a transformation. The scene is neither practical nor dialectical; it is a luxury—and idle: as inconsequential as a perverse orgasm: it does not leave a mark, it does not sully. —Roland Barthes, “Making Scenes” On the word go, players bring to life what’s inherently dramatic in a prompt their audience devises for them: You’re in a job interview but forget what you’ve applied for [Go]. You’re stuck in an elevator with strangers’ feigned serenity filling the box like water [Go]. You’re lost in a foreign land whose language is half as Greek as architecture dreamlike [Go]. You’re a door-to-door salesman sprung from midcentury America to sell enough perfume samples to win a Caribbean cruise from Central Manager [Go]. You’re a spy spying on your ideal nation for one you despise [Go]. You’re a hostage-taker demanding for your lone hostage breath food water shelter sleep clothing [Go]. Not your original but a freshly implanted artificial intelligence churns out second-person prompts for performers seeking catharsis to act on [Go]: ~ One of two mountaineers, no sooner have you reached basecamp than you must gesture to your darkened audience (nightfall) snow falling upon outstretched tongues. You must remember to look at your companion when speaking your desire, agree on a general direction for the scene commencing, hog no limelight whatsoever but more like grown siblings reminiscing about a warm, distant birthplace, listen closely for the creaking floorboards of First Home. Please make her look good as she makes you look good as you make those entering stage left and right look good. Assume or decline the role of headstrong caretaker and never look back on your decision [Go]: ~ An understudy playing Simple Simon in tonight’s performance of The Cherry Orchard, you grew up believing you would have no one to talk to. Tolerating hungry faces whose mouths ache to explain something, thespians listen to you past midnight. If they’re sleeping together why not join them [Go]: Your date to the Sadie Hawkins dance will teach you French kissing if you let her. She will explain the mechanics of dry humping failing to mention a surprise ejaculation at the end of each session. Your classmate’s interjection: “Let’s see the brilliant move, Mister, if you have one” [Go]: You're a bluesy guy after all, as is your companion, to wit. She lies next to you gently snoring while you stare into space in the belief that, whether you would amount to anything without her, the two of you combined form the mind of an inventor. That you have a hard time holding down a job, you're working on it. Your giddy charm, what a coworker calls symptomatic of an illness, is something to work on. [Go]: You ask a woman if certain positions determine the gender of the child you want to conceive together. Enumerating ways, doggie, butterfly, modern missionary, lazy grind, rocking horse, reverse slither, and so on, you never mean to objectify her. You've known her since the third grade. You're thinking about her thighs this morning [Go]: You are a high school English teacher finding your classroom crammed with semblances of those once living—Anne Frank, Cesar Chavez, Black Elk, James Baldwin, Hellen Keller, Emily Dickinson. Rachel Carson spots a brown pelican through birding binoculars as the North marches to war, and the South. Your students raise their hands to ask the whereabouts of weapons civilian soldiers brandish in old photos. Where are the hats now? Shoes? Buttons? What clocks we count on to keep appointments. What bicycles we ride for the love of going places. What brand of glasses bridges the nose of Keith Haring whose splotchy face, a picture of an illness, is a self-portrait [Go]: Float like Ophelia floats in the heavy raiment of the period once you have dropped from willow tree into brook. Swap your speech as she once swapped hers for flowers growing more garbled by the second. Sink down with palms up [Go]: Principal Joan Riley approves your improvising scenes about most things not personally experienced but never the dead and dying in Palestine without first understanding who in the audience is grieving [Go]. Huddle with your students in a bombed-out shelter for who bombs the same shelter twice without fresh intelligence [Go]. Accompany other people’s children into scenes from civilizations soon wiped clean—Mayan, Minoan, Mississippian Mound Builders, Petra, Easter Island, Khmer, etc. In an age of anger, when everybody looks to see who is exotic, is part of what makes a Roman a Roman her not living outside the empire? Who will say, “I am aware of your concerns—you want to be respected.” [Go]: ~ One of two mountaineers, you reached basecamp an hour ago and have yet to receive an official welcome. Crowd onto the rickety old stage with the other players, chitchat in silhouette, pass the flask while set builders erect a sagging doorframe [poetic], snowshoe, crampons, sunscreen, hook, avalanche transceiver, winter wren, cloud, jetpack, falcon, wings, pale blue, weather balloon, that evening star, Leonids to animate what older folks call heavens: Dip of Bell ladles earthly light late in a nuclear age, such lively details ensemble mates, generous imagination, the theatergoers. [Go]:

Note from Iceland by David Gilmour

Dear Woonians, In the Faroe Islands, the Streymoy Island capital town of Torshavn, I have been fascinated by a small river that runs like a rushing, babbling brook through the town from high in the hills. Locals give directions to various places by its course, naming it simply the little river; it runs like one and has noisy falls down basalt rocks in places. The splash of narrow cataracts is prominent in one area particularly, the City Park. Built for people to experience a woods on a treeless island, the planners shaped the arboretum around the brook. It is magical, an Arcadian coppice, thickets among ferns and sprawling deciduous trees, the canopy merely feet above the wanderer’s head with leaves dripping from recent rain showers. The paths are likely damp and soft underfoot with perambulator tracks marking the course of nannies’ walks with infants, who so early in their sensory life can enjoy nature’s ambient sounds: the aviary of twittering, clacking, cawing and whistling birds, the little river babbling and hissing beneath the ferns, and friendly engaging gossip of nannies’ crossing paths in the maze of trails, which are steep from the incline of the escarpment the park was planted on. If any of you know the experience of Tacoma’s Pt. Defiance Park, similarly riven with damp trails hammered down to rocks and roots from years of runners and tramping hikers, this island’s version of it has the advantage of the waterway. Having spent time meandering along the maze of paths, encountering a statue of a nixie maiden or the memorial to local fishermen lost to U-boats in WWll, or sitting by a bridge when it isn’t raining, taking in the birdsong, my destination is the Faroe Islands National Art Gallery, situated at the north end of the park. Here I might reference Seattle’s Volunteer Park and its art museum and botanical conservatory, but they are in plain view and the road through it with parked cars and the lawns with scads of picnicking families often make it a people’s crowded commons. The Torshavn park with its gallery secreted in the woods is like a maze, barely frequented even now in tourist season; and so I am able to enjoy it like one of Theocritos’ shepherds, expecting to hear Pan piping around a corner. The gallery, once discovered, is a must see for art lovers. On one occasion, I had a private viewing of the collection, no other soul had arrived. The attendants did not want to engage about the exhibition, and the coffee server looked shocked when I asked how she liked the collection. With no one to discuss the art, I felt some slight disappointment. I asked if people, especially tourists, know how to get here, given the maze test for entry. A shrug of the shoulders was my response. OK, this wasn’t my only visit.Back to the idyl and the Enchanting Brook and Koon’s admonition to “Look Beyond.” My host, whose bnb house I presently stay in, told me about his boyhood years paddling in the town’s little river and being cautioned by his mother not to pick the watercress or bring frogs home. He and his friends spent long hours in the summer playing and splashing in the cool stream. Sometime lieing down in it and having it stream over them. Later he learned it was a sewage runoff in the old days, downhill from the sheep pens, when he was unconcerned to notice the flotsam and jetsam that floated by. He was amazed that none of his gang ever had E.coli infections. Myself, I played in such a city “stream” in England which ran through cow pastures, rich in brown patties and portobello mushrooms, which—only the latter, mind you—we kids often collected. Besides that, I would gather big bunches of watercress from the cow-tromped banks, and my grandmother said, “Lovely! Good lad!” And tea-time salad was made with the cress and even fresh dandelions from the back yard, where I, short-trousered, often took a quick pee before dashing back to the street games. In those days, hygiene was optional, never a precaution, and cleanliness was next to the torture of a rough kitchen-sink wash before Sunday school. The taste of ash on toast fallen from the fork into the grate or the mud on carrots plucked and chomped fresh from the garden was considered a dose of protective medicine: “A bit of dirt never hurt” was my grandmother’s proverb about probiotics; her looking out for me, looking beyond. We played football (Soccer) in cow pastures and besides coming home slimed up, we often had a few choice, shiny dung beetles in a jar to add to our frog spawn collection. Though I say truthfully, I never was inclined to drink from the neighborhood frog pond. —David

Personal Essay by Rick Fordyce in the Seattle Times

3/9/24, 10:22 AM The Seattle Times https://replica.seattletimes.com/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pubname=&pubid=84d463e0-c035-4c49-902d-95c722bfe073 1/3 Even on Cape Cod, the smell of cedar takes me back to Granite Falls MY TAKE | Personal essays BY RICK FORDYCE - SPECIAL TO THE SEATTLE TIMES Do you believe in fate? I don’t. But maybe I should, given how it all began. I was 19 when I went to the Fremont bar, the one that on Wednesday nights had a live band and cheap beer and would take any fake ID under the sun. I saw the girl in the corner who was not dancing, downed my beer and after a brief introduction, onto the dance floor we strode. It was a few dates later that I was introduced to her older brother, who happened to drive a supply truck for an Eastside roofing company — for all those hundreds and hundreds of cedar-shake roofs. His regular helper was out, he needed one for the next day and off I went. There’s been no turning back. At first, in that winter of 1972, the job took us all over the Eastside, from Bothell to Renton, with Kirkland, Bellevue and Issaquah in between; a carpet of tract houses unrolling over forests and farms from the shores of Lake Washington to the Cascade Mountains. We started early from the tiny office in Kirkland — 7 a.m., which for a 19- year-old stoner was a challenge. First, it was over to the supply yard, where a forklift loaded the flatbed with enough bundles of cedar shakes for two or three houses. It is one of the purest smells I know of, freshly split cedar; slightly pungent, almost intoxicating when inhaled, a doorway into a world outside of which nothing else exists. And then it was off in the truck to Newport Shores or Somerset or Juanita or Yarrow Point. I’d back the truck up to the newly framed house, put a plank across and handcarry 20 or 30 50-pound bundles of fresh-split cedar shakes onto the roof, slatted so that the cedar could breathe because it still sought oxygen. And then there were the shake mills of North Bend and Granite Falls. Over time, when the Kirkland yard ran out, they trusted me to drive the 40 miles up Highway 9 to Granite Falls, where the shake mill sat at the base of the Mountain Loop Highway. I grew up around the University District of Seattle, which in 1972 looked like a university district, but the shake mill in Granite Falls, which in one form or another had been there since 1900, looked like 1900. Into the muddy yard I pulled the truck, and into the office with the order I went, and then drove the truck to the splitting shed where the pallets of bundles awaited. And it was there that I could catch a glimpse into the shed of the work crew as they split the shakes. In that winter of 1972, the Burt Reynolds movie “Deliverance” was playing in theaters, and had the director ever needed extras to populate the Appalachian hills that the cast wandered into, they could not have done better than the older crew members of the Granite Falls mill. Few had all 10 fingers; their grins, aimed at the green city kid, revealed teeth — those that were remaining — of yellow-green, stained by cigars, the glowing stubs of which angled out through the whiskers of their mouths. Clothing, in warmer weather, was denim and flannel but in the rainy winter months, old, dark, bulky coats, stitched and patched, covered the multiple layers underneath. Muddy boots, and, on some, a pointed wool cap, completed their work garb. The enormous old growth cedar trees that once carpeted the Northwest coast are largely gone, but homes were made to last. By the 1970s, the use of the last of the true old growth for cedar shakes was ending. Before then, that was all that was used and driving around rural Puget Sound one would frequently see a long-ago collapsed barn, or shed or cabin with a still functioning roof. Raining out? No problem, salmon supper’s at noon in my great-great-greatgreatgrandfather’s longhouse, one Indigenous citizen may have said to another, back in the day. I will still occasionally put on a red cedar roof, but only in the wealthiest of neighborhoods, as the price of cedar shingles is now prohibitive despite the use of the inferior quality new growth. Back east on Cape Cod, where once upon a time my shingling trade migrated, the occasional red cedar roof comes along in the wealthiest of ocean-view neighborhoods. There, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, when I open a bundle and the wondrous smell of cedar fills the air, I will snatch the small white label as it blows away and read the mill location, which now is usually Forks, 3,000 miles away. But sometimes the label will say “Granite Falls.” And I remember it all began on a dance floor in Fremont. Rick Fordyce is a Seattle native and third generation Washingtonian. He is the author of three books of fiction, including “I Climbed Mt. Rainier With Jimi Hendrix’s High School Counselor and Other stories of the Pacific Northwest.” He lives in Seattle and on Cape Cod.

A letterof intent ___________________ koon woon

 

Statement of Purpose                                           

MA English

Koon Woon

January 12, 2022

 

Statement of Purpose

 

     Today, at the age of seventy-two, what can an advanced degree in English literature do for me? Surely the practical uses of this advanced degree will be limited. So, I need to ask myself the purpose of literature itself. For me, literature is the closest thing to a description and guidebook to the human enterprise. Civilizations rise and fall, people are displaced, blend together, and people start or abandon different social, political, and aesthetic enterprises. What is touted in one era may be of little regard in another. How a people and an empire be measured as great or as pernicious depends on the point of view. But in its basic premises, literature for me is more than a sociological or a biological study of humans in groups. It is a record and sometimes a debate over vying thoughts, insights, and beauty that capture all aspects of the human enterprise in literary forms, such as novels, poems, plays, and other works

 

     America, a relatively newcomer on world stage as an empire and civilization, but no one refutes the fact that it is the most powerful of nations the world as ever seen. The best descriptions of it is a democracy, a land of many voices, harmonious as well as cacophonous. Its spirit has been fair and generous. It has stood up to oppression of many kinds for itself and for weaker entities. Its reach and projection by land, air, sea, and space is truly remarkable. And that “policeman of the world” is never asleep in advocating and defending democracies. Its adversaries ought to tremble in his boots when he just think of a fleet of aircraft carriers. On the other hand, power can be misused when its deployment is easier to be unleashed rather than diplomacy or cooperation It can be like “a bull in a china shop” breaking fragile things of value without even the conception of it.

 

     I was born in a small village in China that had no running water or electricity, I was in China as a small boy during the Korean War and its aftermath when China was not a member of the UN and was viewed as an enemy of the United States. When famine and bad governmental policies ravaged China in the late 1950s, no one came to its aid and over 40 million Chinese starved to death. The excuse was simple enough. It was a Communist country. Then in 1960, I immigrated alone to join my family who was already in America. This oddity and inconvenience is a result of the immigration and racial injustices done to the Chinese in this country. One only needs to look up The Chinese Exclusion Act in US history.

 

     But this is not the reason I want to study American literature in UNO. I don’t want to embarrass anyone or myself to say that I had my share of bad luck with mental illness and consequently been homeless 3 times, locked up in psychiatric hospitals, and relegated to halfway houses. Nor do I want to complain about living in a tenement for seven years in a 10’ x 10’ room, wherein I cook, ate, slept, and studied for 7 years, and wrote an award-winning book of poems that was used as instructional material in college. And I washed my laundry by hand and hung it to dry in my room. The reason I want to study American literature is to ground myself better in it and hopefully contribute something of my own. If America is great, let’s keep it great.

 

    

 

    

"The Warsaw Pact" by Koon Woon

 

The Warsaw Pact

 

There are losers from Eastern Europe living in this apartment building, as well as Asians, and Blacks and a couple of indigenous people. We are sometimes a conflicting community. But the Whites, albeit poor, rule. The Russian is seldom home for this reason? I am China-born Chinese and my age should command respect, but it doesn’t. Things are not like they are in the old country.

 

In some ways, this is a Jean-Paul Sartre story. There are a few viable exits and so we wait for Godot. Sometimes one can smell death coming on and sometimes one can narrow it down to which of the nine floors. And when an occupant is not seen for a prolonged period of time, their worried relatives will find a putrefying mess in that room. And so it goes, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

 

It seems though that the formula 3% Chinese living here is both admired and resented. According to Emily the Black lady with one functioning eye, the Whites and the Chinese got all the money. It could be so, but the Chinese who don’t play along with the white agenda remain in Chinatown, where massage parlors mushroom in recent times when smuggled aliens are well hidden in the Chinatown conclave where the police seldom assess unless it is horrendous enough of a crime such as Wah Mee.

 

There are all kinds of misconceptions here, of course. Approximately half of the people here are disabled and of those, half are mentally ill, and the other half are seniors enough they either don’t care or unable to care. But it is like Roethke’s “Root Cellar,” the Congress of stink here struggles to survive.

 

(To be continued…)

 

- Koon Woon

January 7, 2022

 

 

Lewton Jones

 

Lewton Thomas Jones

19^th Century American Poetry

Graduate Paper

 

Edgar Allen Poe and Emily Dickinson wrote poems that explored the idea of death. Two poems that I will discuss by these two poets are “Because I could Not Stop for Death” by Dickinson and “Spirits of the Dead” by Poe. I will compare these two poems and hopefully give insights in how these two poets used language in poetic form to try and understand death. The poems will be examined line by line and commented upon.

Line one in the poem “Because I Could not Stop for Death” begins;

                  “Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me.”

Poe’s poem “Spirits of the Dead” begins with;

                   “Thy soul shall find itself alone ‘Mid dark thoughts of the grey tomb-stone.”

 The first line in Dickinson is a statement that appears first person. Death is personified as a courteous being that treats her kindly even though she would not stop for it. The word “because” implies that she the speaker is in need of explaining why she could not stop for death. Poe’s first line implies second person being addressed --probably the reader. He writes that the soul shall find itself alone. The word soul implies a spiritual difference to the body. (Biblically) The soul is alone and has “deep thoughts of the grey tombstone” which assumes that the soul can contemplate its own grave and is alone.

The second lines of Dickinson’s poem continue;

                    “The carriage held but just our selves And Immortality.”

 She creates a view of a carriage which might be a coffin or at least a metaphor for some transfer to somewhere. She uses the word “held” which implies a secured state of being as well as “ourselves” which seems to mean all people. Dickinson separates death from immortality, however, and it appears to be a passenger. Poe’s second lines in “spirits of the Dead” feel lonelier than Dickinson’s;

                    “Not one, of all the crowd, to pry Into thine hour of secrecy.”

Poe suggests that the soul is not privy to any clues of death as it is in a crowd of other spirits who don’t have any knowledge of your  death ,which is a secret.

The third line (2^nd Stanza) in Dickinson’s poem continues;

“We slowly drove, he knew no haste, And I had put away My labor and my leisure too,  For  his   civility.”

The carriage on this journey is in no hurry-- in fact there is no indication of no real urgency (“no haste”). We assume that death is the driver and is a civil one, -- as the voice in the poem relaxes from earthly duties such as work into more leisurely  things in life. Death is polite for Dickinson so far in the poem. Poe’s next lines - (2^nd stanza), seems to suggest a certain empathy from the other side as well;

                   “Be silent in that solitude, which is not loneliness.”

To be silent sounds like a suggestion to be patient or submissive to the soul’s inevitable journey. The difference between Poe and Dickinson is that Poe’s death so far is invisible and dreamlike whereas Dickinson’s seems to represent real objects and real people we are more likely to encounter in our waking reality. Poe suggests some ambiguous kindness in that the solitude presented is not lonely. The next lines explain why;

               “For then The Spirits of the dead, who stood In life before thee,

                are again In death around thee, and their will Shall overshadow thee; be still.”

 When Dickinson refers to others as ourselves, Poe in these lines sees the other participants in this realm as spirits who stood before him that could be people who are no longer living or other strangers. The uniting of the dead surrounds the lone soul in Poe’s lines with a will or power to put darkness around you (“overshadow) which tells you to be still. Even when Poe suggests a natural connection with other spirits, his images of death are more ominous than Dickinson’s so far in these two poems.

In stanza three Dickinson writes;

                “We passed the school, where children strove At recess, in the ring;

                 We passed the fields of grazing grain, We passed the setting sun.”

 Dickinson appears to be looking at scenes of her life, her childhood in regard to recess and being in a ring. The next line could be about fruition or maturity such as the harvest of fields of wheat or grain. The word “passing” suggests dying and is used in that way when someone dies. The sun setting is the end of the day or the end of the speaker’s life . In comparison, Poe’s first lines in the third stanza the poet say;

                  “The night, though clear, shall frown, And the stars shall not look down

                    From their high thrones in heaven.” 

Poe’s ‘place in time’ is dark like the night, and even though you can then imagine the night ‘frowning’ as if in an unfriendly look to the lonely soul. This soul has come into a void which has no stars unlike the night which was heavenly before death with stars shining down. Poe is describing death at this point of the poem as an unsure deliverance to a strange place, whereby Dickinson has no fear in her visions thus far.

The fourth stanza of Dickinson continues the poem’s direction;

                            Or rather he passed us; The dews grew quivering and chill,

                             For only gossamer my gown, My tippet only tulle.”

Dickinson now suggests a discomfort that is she is chilly because she is not warmly dressed. Her garments are more appropriate for a wedding which could mean a new beginning rather than a funeral or ending. She seems to welcome death as her new life. The ’he’ in her line could be a male suitor who controls the action in her passing or death in accordance with God. Poe using the word heaven suggests the same sentiment. Both poets have a sense of providence. Poe’s next lines from stanza four confer with this notion;

                     “With light like hope to mortals given”

He then darkens this providence with the next lines;

                    “ But their red orbs, without beam,

                      To thy weariness shall seem

                      As a burning and a fever Which would cling to thee for ever.”

 The red orbs (stars) could be the eyes of the dead /spirits around the soul which are now very tired (rather than chilled like Dickinson) rather hot like a burning (Hell?) “like a fever” which grabs onto the soul forever. Poe might be describing death or the consequences which wait for the soul after death. Poe’s death feels much more dramatic and solitary than Dickinson’s at this point in the two poems.

The fifth stanza of Dickinson’s poem on death says;

                  “We paused before a house that seemed A swelling of the ground;

                                     The roof was scarcely visible, The cornice but a mound.”

Dickinson seems comfortable with her death in these lines about where her new house or grave is to be.  She has personified death and cannot stop him. It appears to be a sort of house that is seen from a distance in relation to her unexpected death. She is unprepared and getting closer which is a little frightening. The roof could be the grave stone over the mound of earth. Dickinson however is much more stoic than Poe and less dramatic. She accepts her plot in the earth. Poe seems to be a wandering spirit in an unknown place.

The fifth stanza in Poe’s poem on death concludes;

                           “Now are thoughts though shalt not banish,

                            Now are visions ne’er to vanish; from thy spirit shall they pass No more,

                            like dew-drop from the grass.”

The word “now” is in present tense, implying that the place is present, as well. The thoughts of the soul continue forever as well as one’s visions-- which for Poe were not very forgiving considering his tortured life. The things which you bring from this life into the next are permanent for Poe.  Unlike Dickinson’s final death home, his version of death was one of no rest. Poe’s imagery, such as in the’ sparkle of dew on the grass’ (stars) is poetic, and its poetic ‘beauty’ could also follow the soul into the next world, although he continues with his ominous settings.

The last stanza in Dickinson’s poem “Because I Could not Stop for Death concludes with;

                       “Since then ‘tis centuries, and yet each Feels shorter than the day

                        I first surmised the horses’ heads Were toward eternity.”

Time stands still in Dickinson’s death as centuries pass and she sleeps away.  She also remembers the journey to death in the carriage with the horses’ heads as a projection to where her soul was going which was eternity. She seems to say that eternity is inevitable and defies explaining anymore in earthly terms anymore  than the narrative description of directions that a horse in this corporal life might take. When Dickinson uses the word “surmised” we assume that a material brain was postulated something. If Dickinson is already dead then the interior mind talking is really her soul which is really living in her poem and its words. It is possible that she wrote the poem in speculation it would be read after her death as a musing on where she will be. Her overall theme seems to be that death is not to be feared which is quite different than Poe’s. Dickinson sees death as a natural part of the endless cycle of nature. Her personality and religious beliefs may also reflect her intentions in the poem. Dickinson was a spinster-- reclusive and introspective --and tended to write about her isolation and death, but she was also a Bible reader and a Christian and that could explain her optimism about dying and seeing death as a friend.

 

The last stanza of Poe’s Poem “Spirits of the Dead” suggests a different view;

                               “The breeze, the breath of god, is still, And the mist upon the hill

                                Shadowy, shadowy, yet unbroken, Is a symbol and a token.

                                How it hangs upon the trees, A mystery of mysteries.”

 Once again we see Poe’s writing style as much more dramatic than narrative as Dickinson’s, as well as his vision of death. The description of the place of death for Poe is spooky and feels gothic but he refers to God having a breath which presumes a life force like the Holy Spirit which is Christian in context. Poe’s eternity is still—and, unlike Dickinson, he was concerned with ,though natural, yet somewhat uncomfortable visuals surrounding the actual grave, which embellishes the place where the dead are in waiting. The “token” could be a symbol for the living to witness. Poe’s is shadowy and with the repetition it underscores this gloomy place where trees stand above graves. Poe used words for effect more than meaning so it is the poem itself that holds the meaning.

The last line “A mysteries of mysteries” is different than Dickinson’s conclusion which states that she understands how time works and how she will feel in her resting place. Poe compares the hell and heaven in this life as counterpoints to what is to become and concludes that both are synonymous in meaning: “High thrones in the heaven’ and “red orbs, without beam. “ The rest is imagery for Poe, who unlike Dickinson, kept the poem independent of the didactic and the philosophic truth construct. He felt poems should be short and build to a high point and then end. Dickinson wrote her poems almost biographically. Death could be the ultimate drama for Poe in his poem while Dickinson might have just liked the word play using death as a gentleman coming to see her to take a ride in his carriage and possibly marry.

 Dickinson seems confessional in her view of death while Poe is entertaining the reader with his vision of it because for Poe only the spirits of the dead know the answers where as Dickinson seems convinced that she can see through the veil of life’s question via her academic intellectualism and poetic use of language. For Dickinson the contemplation regarding death in the poem “Because I could not Stop for Death” is an experience she is looking back on; “tis centuries”. Poe was pursuing death simply by his lifestyle. His poetry was a livelihood as well as an art form. Dickinson used poetry to imitate life and was free to write without it needing to provide her sole  financial source of survival. Poe was in the public eye and his internal thoughts needed to be at least entertaining. Dickinson had the interior privilege due to a secure life at Amherst to muse upon life at a distance and keep her sensitivity in a drawer. Death was a visitor for Emily but for Poe it was a continuation of his fight with God and the suffering and fear of loss. Emily suffered from the death of loved ones as well, but she was not in the trenches of everyday life in so much the way Poe was.

In conclusion, it is possible within these poems to get a glimpse of how people like Poe and Dickinson viewed death. In the two poems discussed, we can surmise that they both were poetically preoccupied with death personally and they expressed it so in their work. Death was a suitor in a carriage for Dickinson and for Poe it was a graveyard dark with spirits. In both poems death is present in the here and after. They are interior poems, describing death in an abstract way using nature and human made symbols as their metaphors.

  In a letter Dickinson wrote; “A single thread joins mighty to meek. Death, Exhilaration and the Perfidies of the Universe make companions of housewife and statesman. Thought and Soul-Companions share a solitary room. It’s a Window a mirror, its door defy the key no gate secure it’s garden except Eternity.” (August 1, On the Death of Abraham Lincoln) Bauldelaire said of Poe” It is this admirable, this immortal instinct of the beautiful which makes us consider the earth and its spectacles as a revelation as something in correspondence with heaven. The insatiable thirst for everything that lies beyond, and that life reveals is the most living proof of our immortality. It is at the same time by poetry and through poetry, by and through music that the soul glimpses the splendors of the tomb. Edgar Allen Poe was also absorbed by the idea of unity-a fond dream.” (Bauldelaire on Poe 1952 Pg 140-142))

 

 

 

koon woon

Walking randomly in the snow in search of memories There have only been a few serious snows in my life. I left home during the first heavy snow. Things were becoming unbearable. The rebellion was internalized. I had no friends to share inner pains. I would drive from Aberdeen to Ocean Shores and back; or; sixty miles for no reason and to nowhere. The car was a symbol of freedom, but it was unearned freedom. I loaded some blankets in my car and drove off to Seattle. I was looking for love, the kind I did not find until my present snow, the one I was walking in today. It spans an interval of fifty years. What I watched: Dr. Zhivago, where human legs protrude from the snow. What I heard was a calm silence. I first stayed with PaTrick and William E in Wallingford. Someone else was paying for the rent of the house. I believe it was John who worked for Boeing. There was a lot of dope, including laughing gas. But Hayceed beat his woman who was always topless. He said he was a poet and read his poems at the Last Exit coffeehouse on Wednesday nights. I was frightened, more or less, and so I moved out to Freemont when I got an apartment above a tavern. That year, Aurora Avenue was impassable. Buses even stop serving, I was stuck in the snow and I walked across Aurora to buy cooking utensils and groceries. I got no mail for several weeks. I was isolated and lonesome beyond belief. (Snows): Freemont 1969 LLL 1980 Mrs. Wong’s rooming house 1985 West Seattle Alaska House Apts. 2021. I was looking for love and I did not find it for fifty years. It was not romantic love. It was more like The Woman of the Dunes. Now I realize that love is antientropic but it runs downhill with the ease of gravity.

Lewton Jones' on deconstructing Plato

 

Lewton Thomas Jones

Philosophy of Literature

Dr. Smyth

 

Deconstructing Plato

 

Plato was a sophist first most and a changeling of socio-political dialect.  He tells us in The Apology that he was present in court at the trial of his mentor Socrates, he also says he was one of the friends who offered money to help Socrates.  In the Phaedo he appears that he was absent from the taking of poison by Socrates in prison due to being sick at the time.  Was this just artistic literature?  We need to dig deep to find out who Plato really was and what motivated him and understand what appears to be a very strange metamorphis concerning the stages in his life.  Xenophon mentions that Plato was in the inner Socratic circle.  Aristotle writes that as a young man Plato had been a pupil of the Heractitean philosopher Cratylus.  Plato, according to the Alexandrian chronologists, was born in 427 BC and died in 346 BC aged eighty-one.

 

Plato lived during the Peloponnesian war during the oligarchy of the “Thirty” set up by the Spartan in Athens at the end of the war.  Plato seems to have two faces.  In his dialogues to Charmides and Gridas (friends of Socrates?) he alludes that he was a close relative of the “two” oligarchs which seem to be the genesis to his extreme rules regarding Athena democracy.  Plato traveled after Socrates’ death, visiting Megara and his friend Eucleodes.  He visited Cyrene for mathematical camaraderie with Theodorus.  He went to Egypt acquiring priestly knowledge.  In Italy he mingled with the Pythagoreans.  He is even rumored to have visited the Persian Magi and other magis. This hardly sounds like the doubting philosopher who uses Socratic dialogue to show that nobody really knows anything. Plato was calculated and aware of power.

 

In the Symposium we are told philosophy is a love of wisdom (not superstition or political dogma).  It is about passion, truth, and _____ i.e., the collect of the human soul.  (A soul according to Plato is in distress with “a half formed idea” . . . is likened to the pains of childbirth, and the philosopher is presented, in his relation to his disciples, as the midwife of the spirit.  His task is not to think for other men, but to help them to bring their own thoughts as birth.”  “Philosophy is, in Plato’s eyes, ‘a way of life,’ a discipline for character no less than for understanding.”

 

*The mind of Plato

A.E. Taylor Pg. 35

1922 Constable and Co. University of Michigan Press

 

He speaks of mimesis in his Theory of Education, i.e., like is known by like. *  His theory of education is dominated by the thought that the mind itself inevitably “imitates” the character of the thing it habitually imitates.”  That said, let us see Plato as the manifestation of his ideas and their true fruition. * “Just because the aspiration after wisdom is the fundamental expression of the mind’s true nature, it cannot be followed persistently without resulting in a transfiguration of the mind’s true nature (Plato):  Its ultimate affect is to reproduce in the individual soul those very features of law, order, and rational purpose which the philosopher’s contemplation reveals as omnipresent in the world of genuine knowledge”

 

This individual soul I see is Plato’s own reflection.  It is the transference of Sophist, empirical visions towards the world outside.  In this case Greece and Athens.  It could be described as an intellectualism emotion, a passion for inner truth.  The soul for Plato has to do with his imitation of Socrates and his interrogation methodology.  Plato’s vision of morality is based on his idea that knowledge can be known by the virtuous.  The danger here of course is that those who aren’t virtuous in Plato’s world are seen as lawless and ignorant to the truth.  This changeling imitator of metaphysics is Plato who doesn’t see science as a possibility without knowing the “character of things.”  This is accomplished by dogma which eventually is the world Plato logically assumes is necessary.  Plato sees mimesis as everyday “opinions” a lot of dissonant and changing beliefs in contradiction with themselves. 

 

Science, as we know, has fixed, consistent truths, absolute, grouped and joined by logic and necessity.  Deduced from true principles.  To accommodate this need for science, Plato writes his “Theory of Ideas.”  He is echoing two premises.  (1) Heracliteansism and Socrates.  The flux and motion of things and the universality of truth.  We basically just imitate Plato’s supra-physical world in our everyday life activity.  We become changelings like Plato, thereby making sure he is not alone in the world and in fact the mind-god of our collective consciousness. 

 

It is Plato who tells us what we need to know about why we are here-this smacks of Stalinism.  Stalin’s biggest achievement in control was to use philosophy to convince people they need not look outside society or control.  The fixed power is there to be imitated as we actively learn to obey it and grow to like it.  We, as misguided thinkers in Plato’s view, are to strive to understand exact ideas even if we are really relegated to create approximate and imperfect resemblances of Plato’s world of ideas.  A.E. Taylor writes – Science is assuredly something more than true opinion; it deals with things which cannot be perceived by the senses, but only conceived by thought.”

 

This rationality and its sense of external logic appealed to Plato because now ideas do exist.  Literature, poetry, and art, are just imitators of this purity.  Plato, we can guess, wasn’t good enough at comedy, satire, and tragedy to write literature or poetry so it must exist before it creates something.  This consistency is not a consistency for Plato.   Venus DeMilo would be a copy of beauty to Plato who saw beauty as something identified from an idea or distal form just as with virtue.  In Platonic language a thing or person who is beautiful may become unbeautiful by not participating with beauty which in itself, according to Plato, never begins or stops.  The perfect triangle world of Plato puts man as just man itself.  Plato, as we know, uses his mind to exalt ideas, yet he is imitating the logic of his predecessors, i.e., the sophists, the pythorgeans, the logicians, etc.  He simply replaced dialogue with a stoic objective quality control.  This thinking becomes a political idea.  Creativity is out and obedience is in.

 

Pg. 154 Plato: To Totalitarian or Democrat

Thomas Landon Thorson

1963 Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

 

“The most striking difference between classical political philosophy and present-day political science is that the latter is no longer concerned at all with what was the guiding question for the former:  The question of the best political order.  On the other hand, modern political science is greatly preoccupied with a type question that was of much less importance to classical political philosophy: questions concerning method.

 

Greek semantics via Plato created the need for method.  By imitating Plato’s language of reflective perfection, the Western world has become a system of political consciousness operating in a speculative language of an assumed virtuous priori.  This is our manifest destiny it would seem.  Anything that just describes the world such as poetry or literature is unfunctional because it is not ruled by political functionality.

 

Plato wanted philosophers to control the policies.  In his letter VII Plato writes “and so I was forced to extol true philosophy and to declare that through it alone can real justice both for the state and for the individual be discovered and enforced.  Mankind (I said) will find no cessation from evil until either the real philosophers gain political control or else the politicians become by some miracle real philosophers.”¹

 

Plato had a contempt for the working population R.H.S. Crossman writes* (pg19).  “It is clear that the shortcomings of the antidemocratic revolution were the first great disappointment of Plato’s life.  Now he realized that ‘gentleman’ could behave worse than the demagogues of the proletariat.”  (Eros and the party at the Symposium attest to this.)  Crossman goes on to say “this did not alter Plato’s profound contempt for the working population.  Plato remained an aristocrat, convinced that the peasant, the craftsman, and the shopkeeper were incapable of political responsibility.  Government was the prerequisite of the gentry, who did not need to earn a living and could therefore devote their lives to the responsibilities of war and politics.  Plato had a special word, banausic, to express his contempt for their menial occupations.” (pg 19)

 

We can see this is imitated today by the “experts” hired by the rich to explain to us what is going on in the “real” world.  Western civilization still imitates much of Plato’s ideas, politically, culturally, and scientifically today.  The new Realists of 1912 made a futile attempt to stop this madness when they proclaimed “the independence of what is known from the knower.”  Their first polemic was that idealists (Plato would be one) made illicit use of the fact of over egocentric predicament to argue fallaciously from the tautology that everything that is known is known to the conclusion that everything that is – is known.  Of course the dye had been cast on Western consciousness so that thinking like this was considered illusionary, etc.  Plato would agree, I am sure. 

 

Aristotle said of mimesis – that art imitates nature thereby one actions of the character, brings out the universal, whereas Plato had a low opinion of most art forms because of their imitative nature; removing them from as he said from “truth,” or the “real” thing.  In the Republic Book 3, 395 Plato also warns that bad qualities may rub off on the artist who imitates a bad character.  He goes on to show the contrast between mimesis and diegesis (narrative).  His point is to show there is more of a distance between the storyteller and the story told.  This would apply to Plato’s use of showing us who Socrates was as well.  Once again we can see the nature of Plato.  He does not practice what he preaches.  It would seem he has a sociopathic distance from whoever he speaks to.

 

Plato Unmasked

Keith Quincy

Eastern University Press © 2003 Keith Quincy

 

In the Philosopher’s Education, Chapter 10, in the dialectic Socrates says to Glaucan: Mathematics, geometry, and other studies have a defect.  They begin with certain unexamined assumptions, employ them as axioms, and make deductions from them, creating a vast tissue of deductive reasoning, all of it consistent and logically water tight, but resting on unexamined ideas.  It’s the function of the dialectic to examine those assumptions, and many others.  Asking why and how they can be shown true by demonstrating that they are deducible from higher order ideas or forms, ascending one scale until the one idea, that of the good, is reached, from which all other ideas may be deduced.  Glaucan responds: A noble undertaking.  Socrates responds: not everyone can manage it.  We have to weed out the unfit.”

 

The question I would ask is who is saying this, Plato or Socrates?  Who is the unfit?  Where is the good to imitate?  It is a changeling we call Plato wearing a thousand masks and propelling humanity into a false consciousness that remembers nothing of history but continually repeats its mistakes.  What is the philosophy of literature?  You are reading it, but my imitation is unique because I did not know Plato or Socrates.  Just like Aristophanes, I will have to create comedy in this linguistic tragedy.

 

Kierkegaard

Translated by Lee M. Hollander

University of Texas Press 1923 – 1960

 

Kierkegaard says of Plato ____ He sees love as comical like Aristophanes.  It is a category of contradictions.  Kierkegaard says “what I shall demonstrate now is that love is comical. (pg 54) By love I mean the relation between man and women.  I am not thinking of Eros in the Greek sense which has been extolled so beautifully by Plato, who, by the way is so far from considering (Symposium Ch 9) the love of woman that he mentions it only in passing, holding it inferior to the love of youths. (12).  I say love is comical to a third person.

 

It is Plato’s dietetic nature that he tries to put Eros into the pure forms such as a Platonic love.  Kierkegaard goes on – (Pg 55) (Symposium, Ch 29) if one should answer Plato about love, i.e., that one is to love what is good, one has in taking this single step exceeded the bound of the erotic.  The answer may be offered, perhaps that one is to love what is beautiful.

 

Plato’s absolute virtue in idea or form needs laws to protect it because it merely invitation and subject to Eros and logos which he acknowledges as the ultimate interactions to virtue and truth.

 

Kierkegaard (Pg 55) from the (Symposium Ch 24) continues “again if I should refer the erotic element to the bisection of which Aristophanes tells us (15) when he says that the gods cut a man into two parts, as one slit flounders, and that these parts thus separated sought one another.  There is no reason for the thought to stop at this point.  The gods might divide man into three parts.  Kierkegaard concludes, “as I said that love renders a person ridiculous if not in the eyes of others then certainly in the eyes of the gods”

 

Hereby we have the symposium with Socrates looking like a babbling clown cajoling about Eros, according to Plato.  The philosopher as a two-headed Janus clown, one profound, one subject to the whim of a flesh party.  Where is Plato’s ideal goodness?  Do poets represent the illogical that permeates Plato and Socrates in these dialogues?

 

AC. Grayling

What is Good

Weidenfeld & Nicolson © 2003 London

Page 106

 

“Among many Christian Renaissance thinkers the ethics of Plato seemed far more congenial than those of Aristotle.  Two aspects of his views made him attractive.  One was his claim that the form of the good is the highest being, and that the supreme good consists of the contemplation with it.  Naturally the Rennaissance admirers of Plato such as Marsilio Ficino identified the form of the good with God.  

 

God, for Plato, was the laws he imitated or wrote.  He could not empirically operate as a true philosopher without reaching for a dogmatic proof.  The poets were a reflection of his own imitation of truth.  At least they knew a narrative was an expression of one’s self.  Plato, like Freud, felt that he spoke for the entire mind of the universe.  The Protestant religion reflected Plato’s goodness as A.C. Grayling writes – “By one getting of money, by honest endeavor in trade and commerce, a respectable sign of God’s favor, even if such a life was not quite the best that could be envisioned.  Plato’s semantics became the Western irony, no longer just philosophy but religion itself.  A great imitated imitation of abstract tit for tat.”

 

Aristotle sought metaphysics and common knowledge, breaking away from Plato’s elite revelations toward “fixing” other’s minds.  “A.C Grayling writes, “Another point of disagreement (with Aristotle) was Aristotle’s claim that since reason is the highest of man’s qualities one best life for man is the life of contemplation.  “Let’s get back to Homer (presocratic).”

 

Homer was an influence on Plato – Homer who by saying Okeanos begetter of god’s and mother teth’s declared all things be the offspring of flux and motion.  Plato didn’t think Homer is the forerunner – Hericlitus was aware of this when he said “You can’t step in the same river twice.”  Plato moved away from the kinetic life to present static narratives that presupposed a priori that only he and Socrates understood.  Aristophanes was able to breathe life into Socrates by showing the humor of the man himself versus the icon of the cave and sage indirect.

 

The Presocratic Philsophers

B.G.S. Kirk

Cambridge University Press © 1957; 1983

Page 278

 

“All things are full of gods Aristotle says in the deanina about Thales vision of the whole world as somehow alive and animated.”  I submit that poetry is what describes this animation.  Shelly called this embellishing the mute phenomena which can only truly exist when a poet sees it.  The poet creates its metaphorical presence.  Just as Shelley also described the soul within a soul in his poem “Epicpsychideon.”

 

The Sophisi

Pg 328

 

“Aristotle in the Sophist says that Empedocles was the first to discover rhetoric and Zeno the first dialectic. – By didactic Aristotle has in mind the sort of philosophical interrogation pursued by Socrates in the early Platonic dialogues.”

 

The question elicits from his interlocutor assent to an endox on a belief in good standing accepted by everyone or most people or the experts, which he then forces him to abandon whether by reducing it to absurdity or by showing that it conflicts with the beliefs the interlocutor holds.  If one suspects the motives or the tactics of the questioner one will be inclined to change him with being a mere controversialist (antilogikos) which is what Plato had in mind when he describes Zeon in the Phaedrus.  Do we not then ____ this eleatic Palmedis argues with such skill _____ the same things appear to his listeners to be both like and unlike, both none and many, both at rest and in motion?

 

Plato can’t find logos in this ebb and flow of human relation.  He is isolated from the human stage itself and the person he writes Socrates about was in the middle of human folly it seems all the time.   Plato has the same paralysis James Joyce said of the Irish, the inability to free yourself from that which imprisons you.

 

Jacques Derrida of Grammatology

Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

John’s Hopkins University Press

 

Jacques Derrida writes, “Knowledge is not a systematic tracking down a truth that is hidden but may not be found.  It is rather the field of free play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions, the closure of a finite ensemble.” (Ed 423, SE 260) (Pg 220 Portrait of an Artist) (Pg xix Translators preface).  James Joyce wrote, “I shall be a priest of eternal imagination transmuting the daily bread of life into everlasting life, I will use my wit, my cunning and the smithy of my soul to create the uncreated conscious of my race.”  Unlike Plato, Joyce knew that experience had a cognition that ceded Platonic dialogue for it called into being a life with presence and consciousness.

 

Experience for Jacques Derrida he says (Pg xvii) “as for the concept of experience, it is most unwieldy here.  Like all the notions I am using, it belongs to the history of metaphysics and we can only use it under erasure.  “Experience” has always designated the relationship with presence, whether that relationship had the form of consciousness or not. (Eros; Plato’s perfect love comes to mind for me here) – he goes on – yet we must by means of the sort of contortion and contention that discourse is obliged to undergo, exhaust the resources of the concept of experience before attaining and in order to attain by deconstructing its ultimate foundation.  It is the only way to escape “empiricism” and the naive critiques of experience at the same time (89.60). Pg 127. 

 

Regarding forms or ideas that Plato was in the wise to – Levis Strauss writes the symbol had been borrowed but the reality remained quite foreign to them.  Even the borrowing had a sociological rather than intellectual object.  For it was not a question of knowing specific things or understanding them or keeping them in mind, but merely of enhancing the prestige and authority of one individual or one function at the expense of the rest of the party.  Plato’s idea that poets were just imitators and philosophers were the real thing is suspect when we think of Socrates and Plato in a kind of cult of fame announcing all phenomena which they discovered first or claim to have.  When we deconstruct Plato we see that he is an imitator just like the poets he condemns as superficial agents of truth.  (Pg 48 & 49)

 

Friedrich Nietzsche

J.P. Stern

Frank Kermode

Penguin Books

N.Y. © 1978

 

Nietzsche writes about the birth of tragedy as a duality of the Dionysian (Eros) and the Apollonian (order).  He feels that “when the Dionysian element rules, ecstasy and inchoateness thereafter:  When the Apollonian predominates the tragic feeling recedes.  Plato at least, according to Aristophanes was justifying Socrates as a Dionysian player who not only played at Eros but rejected the Apollonian order with laws.  He deconstructed the Socratic world of thought and made it into a city where laws controlled unvirtuous people.   This need for balance was the swing in Greek culture Nietzsche talks about when he says “The balance is achieved for the first time in Aescylus, and then again in Sophocles: by the time Euripides and Socrates come to dominate the literacy scene, the Dionysian element is authenticated and at last all but completely suppressed.”  Enter Plato who creates a Socrates he merely writes about and imitates as a passing of the torch of knowledge as Nietzche states, “in the Bacchal the thwarted god takes his revenge.  Nietzche goes on, “the decline of Greek tragedy begins when creative ecstasy is suppressed and has to give way to cold calculation.  We see Plato as one comic tragic imitation of what was once Greek.”

 

Nietzche goes on to say, “now the old myths ceased to be experienced as parts of an ecstatic religious ritual and become objects of rational analysis; the gods and their stories come to be judged according to the prosy maxims of reasoned justice.”  In order for Plato to conquer poetry, comedy, tragedy, and literature he needed to claim philosophy as the true knowledge.  He then created a world that fit his imitation of a Greek city.  It was now a Utopia for the guardians of his ideas of what a city should be. Socrates is no longer doubting for us,instead we have an artificial philosopher who modifies information to fit the needs of his own logos.

 

Nietzsche feels that art is one of “the ruses of life; tragedy has always had a vital function: to protect men from a full knowledge of the life destroying doom that surrounds them.”  Nietzsche sees “Euripides and Socrates ugly and artistically unified.”  The Platonic dialogue to him is an “effective parody which in their superficiality and optimism no longer acknowledge the reality of the abyss of suffering.

 

In conclusion, Plato needs to be deconstructed to allow life to breath.  He is an obstacle to discovery.  His is the knowledge of stagnation and imitation.  He is the seed of Western tyranny and state control.  He lets mind control replace speculation.  Derrida sums it up very well. (Pg 139)

 

Jacques Derrida

Dissemination

University of Chicago Press © 1981

 

“Undecidedly, mimesis is akin to the pharmakon.  (Plato as metaphor)  no ‘logic,’ no ‘dialectic,’ can consume its reserve even though each must endlessly draw on it and seek reassurance on it.  “As it happens, the techniques of imitation, along with the simulacrum has always been in Plato’s eyes manifest by magical, thawmaturgical.”

 

We must deconstruct Plato to protect us from the past so we don’t imitate it for the present or for the future.  Plato is just a name; a word; a self-proclaimed man of importance.  The city is still the city of individuals free to think.  Let the self be the self.  Plato was an idea, a formed a triangle of imprisonment . . . a much to do about nothing . . . a spectre of double vision announcing its presence through writing and ideas.  Anointing us in repetitive idioms that are mere echoes of the original moment.