everything was wrong.
And in addition, there was no way out. The interlocking between the defective instrument and the defective subject produced another perfect Chinese finger-trap. Caught in his own maze, like Daedalus, who built the labyrinth for King Minos of Crete and then fell into it and couldn't get out. Presumably Daedalus is still there, and so are we. The only difference between us and Horselover Fat is that Fat knows his situation and we do not; therefore Fat is insane and we are normal. "They are compared to sleepers in private worlds of their own," as Hussey put it, and he would know; he is the foremost living authority on ancient Greek thought, with the possible exception of Francis Cornford. And it is Cornford who says that Plato believed that there was an element of the irrational in the World Soul. 1 ( 1
Plato's Cosmology, The Timaeus of Plato,
Library of Liberal Arts, New York, 1937.
)
There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.
PARSIFAL: I move only a little, yet already I seem to
have gone far.
GURNEMANZ: You see, my son, here time turns into
space.
(The whole landscape becomes indistinct. A forest ebbs out and a wall of rough rock ebbs in, through which can be seen a gateway. The two men pass through the gateway. What happened to the forest? The two men did not really move; they did not really go anywhere, and yet they are not now where they originally were.
Here time turns into space.
Wagner began
Parsifal
in 1845. He died in 1873, long before Hermann Minkowski postulated four-dimensional space-time (1908). The source-basis for
Parsifal
consisted of Celtic legends, and Wagner's research into Buddhism for his never-written opera about the Buddha to be called
The Victors (Die Sieger).
Where did Richard Wagner get the notion that time could turn into space?)
And if time can turn into space, can space turn into time?
In Mircea Eliade's book
Myth and Reality
one chapter is titled, "Time Can Be Overcome." It is a basic purpose of mythic ritual and sacrament to overcome time. Horselover Fat found himself thinking in a language used two thousand years ago, the language in which St. Paul wrote.
Here time turns into space.
Fat told me another feature of his encounter with God: all of a sudden the landscape of California, U.S.A., 1974 ebbed out and the landscape of Rome of the first century c.e.
ebbed in. He experienced a superimposition of the two for a while, like techniques familiar in movies. In photography. Why? How? God explained many things to Fat but he never explained that, except for this cryptic statement: it is journal listing #3. He causes things to look different so it would appear time has passed. Who is "he"? Are we to infer that time has
not
in fact passed? And did it ever pass? Was there once a real time, and for that matter a real world, and now there is counterfeit time and a counterfeit world, like a sort of bubble growing and looking different but actually static?
Horselover Fat saw fit to list this statement early in his journal or exegesis or whatever he calls it. Journal listing #4, the next entry, goes:
Matter is plastic in the face of Mind.
Is any world out there at all? For all intents and purposes Gurnemanz and Parsifal stand still, and the landscape changes; so they become located in another space -- a space which formerly had been experienced as time. Fat thought in a language of two thousand years ago and saw the ancient world appropriate to that language; the inner contents of his mind matched his perceptions of the outer world. Some kind of logic seems involved, here. Perhaps a time dysfunction took place. But why didn't his wife Beth experience it, too? She was living with him when he had his encounter with the divine. For her nothing changed, except (as she told me) she heard strange popping sounds, like something overloaded: objects pushed to the point where they exploded, as if jammed, jammed
And in addition, there was no way out. The interlocking between the defective instrument and the defective subject produced another perfect Chinese finger-trap. Caught in his own maze, like Daedalus, who built the labyrinth for King Minos of Crete and then fell into it and couldn't get out. Presumably Daedalus is still there, and so are we. The only difference between us and Horselover Fat is that Fat knows his situation and we do not; therefore Fat is insane and we are normal. "They are compared to sleepers in private worlds of their own," as Hussey put it, and he would know; he is the foremost living authority on ancient Greek thought, with the possible exception of Francis Cornford. And it is Cornford who says that Plato believed that there was an element of the irrational in the World Soul. 1 ( 1
Plato's Cosmology, The Timaeus of Plato,
Library of Liberal Arts, New York, 1937.
)
There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.
PARSIFAL: I move only a little, yet already I seem to
have gone far.
GURNEMANZ: You see, my son, here time turns into
space.
(The whole landscape becomes indistinct. A forest ebbs out and a wall of rough rock ebbs in, through which can be seen a gateway. The two men pass through the gateway. What happened to the forest? The two men did not really move; they did not really go anywhere, and yet they are not now where they originally were.
Here time turns into space.
Wagner began
Parsifal
in 1845. He died in 1873, long before Hermann Minkowski postulated four-dimensional space-time (1908). The source-basis for
Parsifal
consisted of Celtic legends, and Wagner's research into Buddhism for his never-written opera about the Buddha to be called
The Victors (Die Sieger).
Where did Richard Wagner get the notion that time could turn into space?)
And if time can turn into space, can space turn into time?
In Mircea Eliade's book
Myth and Reality
one chapter is titled, "Time Can Be Overcome." It is a basic purpose of mythic ritual and sacrament to overcome time. Horselover Fat found himself thinking in a language used two thousand years ago, the language in which St. Paul wrote.
Here time turns into space.
Fat told me another feature of his encounter with God: all of a sudden the landscape of California, U.S.A., 1974 ebbed out and the landscape of Rome of the first century c.e.
ebbed in. He experienced a superimposition of the two for a while, like techniques familiar in movies. In photography. Why? How? God explained many things to Fat but he never explained that, except for this cryptic statement: it is journal listing #3. He causes things to look different so it would appear time has passed. Who is "he"? Are we to infer that time has
not
in fact passed? And did it ever pass? Was there once a real time, and for that matter a real world, and now there is counterfeit time and a counterfeit world, like a sort of bubble growing and looking different but actually static?
Horselover Fat saw fit to list this statement early in his journal or exegesis or whatever he calls it. Journal listing #4, the next entry, goes:
Matter is plastic in the face of Mind.
Is any world out there at all? For all intents and purposes Gurnemanz and Parsifal stand still, and the landscape changes; so they become located in another space -- a space which formerly had been experienced as time. Fat thought in a language of two thousand years ago and saw the ancient world appropriate to that language; the inner contents of his mind matched his perceptions of the outer world. Some kind of logic seems involved, here. Perhaps a time dysfunction took place. But why didn't his wife Beth experience it, too? She was living with him when he had his encounter with the divine. For her nothing changed, except (as she told me) she heard strange popping sounds, like something overloaded: objects pushed to the point where they exploded, as if jammed, jammed
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