Theodore Roethke’s query and the affirmative response it invites create this book’s terrain.¹ The heart of this inquiry is a consideration of what it means to perceive the self and whether, following Roethke, through such perception the self becomes something different, a difference to be understood religiously. The idea arising from the whole of this book is that “soul” remains a meaningful word and idea for human life, not in a material or metaphysical sense, but to express those features of human being that emerge in the attempt to perceive the self. Specifically, in trying to perceive the self, there...

Socrates’ somatic, living-animal analogy of discourse can be read in terms of its depiction of a living creature with all the associations befitting a blooded, fluidly integrated, fleshy body.¹ A dynamic, teeming body is suggested by the animal analogy, and it is in this sense that the structured exuberance of thePhaedruscan be considered. It is a teeming text. Its teeming quality is one way that Plato counterpoises the text with the difficulties of self-perception and the static forms of engagement that writing can condone. The replete character of the text is thus both a way to “tellslant” the...

The living-animal analogy of discourse can also be imagined in terms of the fluid integration of limbs and bodily systems within breathing creatures, such that no single element becomes a fixed center of its vitality and this vitality is instead dispersed throughout its features in dynamic patterns of change and motion. ThePhaedrusis a fluid text in the way that a living animal is a fluid body. This fluidity, or more specifically, this fluid integration, is how Plato tells the truth not only slant, but also “in Circuit.” “in Circuit.” This “in Circuit” approach to truth telling is needed...

My final reading of the living-animal analogy is in terms of the decay, dissolution, and destruction to which a blooded, breathing creature is subject. The teeming, fluidly integrated animal body can also be rent asunder, whether through deliberate force, the gradual dissipations of neglect, or simply the ineluctable effects of living through time and necessity. The fragility of the living animal—and of discourse that is modeled in its image—is expressed most emblematically in thePhaedrusthrough forms of oblivion. In the dialogue oblivion and recollection are not simple obverses of each other; recollection does not return fully triumphant,...

Plato was a builder of texts who knew better “not to trust” their structure and “how too few / rafters bear / too much roof,” given their aspirations toward apprehending and expressing truth. Indeed, he characterizes the written word as an “image” or “phantom” of ensouled discourse.¹ And yet as the preceding chapters have illustrated, he wrote, despite his suspicions of the power of written form. His integration of forgetting within the dialogue form, whether explicit conceptual content or implicit structural feature (both examined in chapter 3), can be regarded as the “ghost ribs” he has left behind, which paradoxically...

Kay Ryan’s poem “Post Construction” is surely an oblique meditation on Emily Dickinson’s rendering of the house built by poetry, a rendering that partially expresses the point of written form I have identified with Plato.

The Props assist the House

Until the House is built

And then the Props withdraw

And adequate, erect,

The House support itself

And cease to recollect

The Augur and the Carpenter -

Just such a retrospect

Hath the perfected Life -

A Past of Plank and Nail

And slowness - then the scaffolds drop

Affirming it a Soul -

—Emily Dickinson (729/J1142)¹

Dickinson’s poem evokes...