Cleito

Mixed media oil painting with collage, 22x30 inches. 

“They retained a certain greatness of mind, and treated the vagaries of fortune and one another with wisdom and forbearance, as they reasoned that qualities of character were far more important than their present prosperity…” — Plato, Critias

Titled Cleito, after the mortal whom Poseidon falls in love with and gives birth to the several Kings of Atlantis. In the legendary Greek account of the world’s origins through a divine Creator— the demiurge—, the Critias dialogue is a sequel to Plato’s theological and teleological account of the universe, its astronomy, material structure through the base elements, the physiology of living creatures, and a tripartite constitution of the human soul as first proposed in the Republic.

What I love about reading these ancient accounts of natural processes is that the Greeks took the vastness of the universe, its laws and necessities as something we could understand; its intelligibility could be known to us and made rational, but best taught and articulated through myth and metaphor. The best teachers are the storytellers. After a book-length exposition of the divine creation of the world, under the two registers and worlds of Being and Becoming, somehow the description isn’t enough and Plato crafts up the legend of Atlantis to further explain his cosmology. The senses dance with the imagination. Since ancient times, symbol and myth have educated people and infused the matrix of meaning into life. In nourishing meaning and storytelling, we connect to a greater power.