A Platonic Heatwave
It is a hot day. The humidity is thick enough to choke on.
All things are still, but for the occasional breeze that forces its way through the soupy air to push the branches on the trees, the curls in my hair, the sentiments in my spirit.
It is an easy day to see an interconnected Cosmos. At this very moment, I exist in a universe where the cloud and the nebula and the horsefly and the table and my musings are all extensions of that which is truly, ineffably, and singularly real.
But why are these ideas easy to embrace today?
Perhaps the oppressive heat stills not only my body but also my mind, so that for the moment I can peer through the veil of worldly activity to commune with Being itself.
Perhaps the stifled world calls more attention to each individual sense impression—bird and roasting pine needle and airplane and neighbor-in-sprinkler and lemon water — and then weaves them all into the same uncomfortable tapestry.
Perhaps the heat draws my attention to the blazing Sun — symbol of highest Truth to Plato’s followers for millennia — and to the inevitability of its light and the inescapability of its warmth, directly on the skin and indirectly through the ignited air.
Perhaps heat exhaustion perfectly imitates the effects of the mysterious kykeon of Eleusis, creating a state of mind just on the edge between sobriety and drunkenness, between sanity and madness.
Perhaps it was in the hazy Mediterranean summer that Thales first gazed upwards, that Pythagoras first calculated, that Parmenides first rationalized, that Empedocles first loved and repelled, that Socrates first questioned.
Perhaps this teetering is the last dark uncertainty before the expansion and annihilation of henosis, of enlightenment.
Whatever the cause, it is hot today. Very hot. And for some reason, my world sings a paean to the elusive Platonic One.
