Mid-morning. Breakfast and the Sunday paper. > After a nap you feel much better. This next scene is like none other so far. We are visiting the Supervisor’s lair, if you will.
Lair is an unusual word to use. I think of a wolf’s den or something of that sort; however, looking it up in my Merriam-Webster it says:“1. a resting or sleeping place: BED; 2a: the resting or living place of a wild animal: DEN; 2b: a refuge or place for hiding.”
This is a bazaar word to use, Amorella. Am I mistranslating? Lair just rolled out without hesitation on my part. As a matter of fact the word makes me downright uncomfortable. Visiting your “home” as it were, makes me uncomfortable enough as is. Somehow, I don’t feel this is within my station of existence, even in a fiction.
How odd that is orndorff, you don’t feel bad being with Zeus as he looks up to see something missing.
The story is metaphorical and allegorical in setting. No one believes in Greek mythology as a religion anymore.
I wonder what my point is then?
I was taught to respect a person’s religion even if I do not agree with it. I feel it is a right for an individual to believe what sheorhe wants to believe, or needs to believe for that matter, as long as it is spiritual in nature and non-violent in action. I have agnostic tendencies and others have atheistic tendencies. Individuals have their religious rights in this country.
Not everyone agrees with that point of view.
Well, this is my work with my name on it, no matter, so that is the way it is going to be in here. Writing these novels is non-violent as far as I can see. I ‘empty’ my mind so that you can do as you will with the words in my head, but once they appear I have to deal with them directly and ‘lair’ is one of those words that makes me uneasy.
What would you call a place of rest and repose in this instance?
I don’t know. The Supervisor is detached from Mt. Olympus. I don’t know where the Narrator would be but crouched up in the margins some place, probably the corner of the page, but who knows which corner. I am getting this humorous vision of the Narrator looking a bit like one of William Blake’s paintings of an angel in a corner. The Narrator is not you however, and I don’t picture you looking like a William Blake angel.
I was the Saki character in the first three books. That didn’t seem to bother you.
No, it didn’t. You were a two or one dimensional creature, a Betweener, in those books. What comes to mind is when I was in a hypnotic trance at the university and when I was going back to the age of three I sat balloon-like, floating down this hallway with oak doors and brass doorknobs (I was about the height off the floor as the doorknobs) – though come to think of it, there was no floor. I never realized that before, no floor and no ceiling either. Otherwise it was like going down a long corridor in a somewhat fancy hotel until I reached my third year and I moved within the door and I was at my grandparents with my uncle and aunt and my mother and father and we were having a Sunday dinner. That’s what comes to mind to build a place of rest and repose for you, that is the construction site.
You want me to exist like a conscious balloon floating in a hallway with no up or down levels?
It is hard to construct a place of repose for the Supervisor because I think of you, Amorella as the Supervisor. This is my problem as I just now understand it. I need to separate you, my inner friend and writer, from a character in a story.
That would be helpful. – Amorella.
The human mind, at least, mine appears limited to this universal nature of the Living. Imagination can take me only so far Amorella. The story has to be realistically acceptable to the reader. It is difficult to think beyond the four dimensions the brain accepts as reality. Two dimensions is hard enough, but a place of repose in a single dimension (to fit within the context of the story) is beyond me.
Let’s start with no floor and no ceiling, then from there go to no walls and what do you have left?
The balloon metaphor.
A metaphysical-like consciousness that exists within the elastic confines of self-existence.
I will have to think on this.
No doubt. What do you think high theatre is? Look what Milton did, and Dante, and Virgil before him. Look at the Greek tragedies and comedies. Look at Shakespeare, particularly Hamlet and MacBeth. You have taught those works at one time or another, put them to use in your own way. Moby Dick is another. Emily Dickinson another. Poe. Just keep your sense of gallows humor intact if nothing else. We can come up with something here that makes you more comfortable than me having a lair.
Beowulf the hero and Grendel, a demon descending from Cain. That’s the key, that’s what really bothers me about this. I think of you as angelic-like for how you help me through things as well as with the stories. To put you in a lair would make you demonic-like. It is no wonder I reacted as I did, but consciously I consider a wolf, a wild animal not Grendel. You constantly amaze me Amorella. You help me to see my inner self better. No question about it.
This is what imaginary friends do, old man. Take a break after posting this. – Amorella.
This takes a bit of courage.
Scene 10
This scene is for those who are looking for a sense of perspective and depth with meaning understood.
The Supervisor hovers in thought surrounded by the conceptual being SheanHe is. An airy metaphor does not do justice to size and scope of HeranHis abode of rest. Think of a thought at rest and the grammar will do the resting. Reason is the bones of such a thought.
According to the ancient Greeks, those who were followers of Plato, reason has form, substance, process and/or movement, and an atomic glue that holds the reality together. In other words, human beings need form, substance, process/movement and atomic for the brain to register ‘something’. A noun. The Merriam-Webster dictionary states that a noun is: “an entity, quality, state, action, or concept.”
The ancient Greeks felt that reason, that is science and facts, are stronger concepts than understanding, which contains an hypothesis. Both are forms of knowledge. Belief is opinion which presents a weaker argument than reason and understanding. Conjecture is a weaker form of opinion.
Some ancient Greeks understood that it is possible that Immortal Forms exist; that these Forms may exist outside of the known universe; that some ‘things’ cannot be known; that there is no way to explain ‘god-like or alien’ operations outside the universe; and that therefore, from a human standpoint all knowledge is impossible.
With this, they felt that pure non-existence is impossible to understand; and that anything non-being was only in relationship to something else, for example, the definition of ‘nothing’ or a ‘hole’.
The above are examples of reason with the added neo-Platonic thoughts. Below are more Aristotelian, more practical, more selected things, nouns as we see them. Aristotle was a what –you-see-is what-you-get sort of fellow. These nouns are the four basic elements or essences of human reality plus one: Earth, Air, Fire, Water and the Fifth Essence (that which is without decay; golden, immortal).
To define the abode of the Supervisor, in such a fiction as this, one needs to be reminded of the above as well as this, a definition should be neither too broad nor too narrow; it should not be circular; it should be expressed in positive terms; and it should be simple in explanation.
Thus, the abode of the Supervisor is as a Platonic Form. Yet, in this case, it is a Form composed of thought that is neither curved nor straight. As this Form appears inconceivable to even imagine, think of the form of the abode as a transparent balloon filled to the edge with consciousness and then place a piece of string attached below. A nearly invisible helium filled balloon with a string floating along and up into the sky. You might also imagine a young child crying to herorhis most immediate parent, “My balloon escaped! I want my balloon back! I want my balloon!”
Construct this scene so far, altogether as a grammatically singular noun, and the reader has the Supervisor’s abode in mind if not in heart.
To Zeus, a small piece of Olympian gold is missing. To the Supervisor, resting solitarily in HeranHis abode, Zeus is human imagination plus a touch of the missing gold.
***
Note to the Reader: the logic selections used in first draft of Scene 10 are pulled from my daughter's notes from my week long Logic Lecture used in many of my classes over the years. They were originally developed from a book titled Logic for Undergraduates by Kreyche and from "Logic" in Encyclopedia Britannica. Over the years I added and modified the notes and no longer have the originals. I had to borrow these from daughter who took them in my AP class in the Fall of 1996. Thank goodness she saved the notes as I have little memory of how they were set up.
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