Poetry

Poetry by José Cassais

:: Beauty

:: The Sirens

Plato's Sophistry

Reading and following, attentively, the development of one or various arguments on a Plato's dialogue, mainly on those of his last phase, as was the "Parmenides" or the "Sophist", turns to be an and exhausting intellectual exercise that requires, from the reader, a supreme and continuous effort of the imagination. Yet, the matter does not go very further beyond that. One doesn’t find, hidden in the text, great truths, nor any very important metaphysical discovery. The entire question resumes itself (as the advice of the same Parmenides to the young Socrates) into an exercise on futile conversation - lalia; to argue with the intent to confound, simply. Pure eristic. The objective of this is, accordingly to Parmenides, sublime: the exercise of the mind in the quest for the truth. Notwithstanding, are there any valuable conclusions at the end of the innumerable trends of argumentation by whom the skilful Plato leads us? All happens (although not so clearly declared), as, between a master and his disciple, the following model of dialogue is constantly utilized:

- Take heed to the following question: one plus one gives, as a final result, the two?

- Yes.

- And two plus one gives the three as a result, don't they?

- Exactly.

- In the three coexists, then, the two and the one.

- Clear.

- But the two comprises two ones, as we've concluded just a little time ago.

- It is on this very manner that we've concluded.

- Therefore, the three composes itself either of three (three ones) as of two (two plus one) numbers?

- Perfectly.

- Hence, the two and the three are equals.

Who agrees with the sophist? The imaginary interlocutor of Plato? Or it happens to be ourselves, which are reading the dialogue?

Beauty

I see the yellow leaves

Of the persimmon tree

Falling down,

Showing that they are light,

That's why

They gracefully fall

In volutes through the air.

 

(as all that is light and fragile falls)

 

They are welcomed by the grass of the ground

Who doesn't feel their weight;

But they stay there,

Yellow

As they please.

 

And, dead,

They’re still part of the beauty

Which spreads around.

José Cassais

The Sirens

When the sirens began to sound
Nobody paid much attention to them
The conversations were not interrupted
When the sirens began to sound
The operator did not disrupted the connection
That was in the middle
Quotations on the market continued to go up
And down in their empty stairs
And the gunman remained silent
In the dark, lurking
The mother stopped not breastfeeding the child
When the sirens started to ring
And the dogs raised their heads, slowly
Something biting their brains
Nobody realized that that sirens were not the customary sirens
Those that advertise fire conflagrations
And cars being stolen
Or the end of the affliction to the workers in the factory
The day was in his half
When they began their monotonous impersonal refrain
Their acute song (and that was the only one who they knew)
Simpler than that of the machine-guns sounding
Along a barbed wire fence
More primitive than the cry of a bored child
At first no one noticed. But... it wasn't their fault!
They hadn’t been advised that the sirens would sound
Only a chosen few had been trained
To wait for the sound that would come, suddenly
These were still the same, the same
Much later, when the sirens went silent

José Cassais

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