Symmetry Unbound  Exekias, "Achilles and Ajax Playing a Board Game" (540-530 BCE) The Double Business of Writing
"I had a mania for symmetry" -- Samuel Beckett, Molloy
"And, like a man to double business bound I shall in pause where I shall first begin." -- William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Introduction: The Exekias Complex
"La mauvaise union des contraires est celle qui se fait sur le plan des contraires. La bonne union des contraires se fait sur le plan au-dessus.” — Simone Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce
"Though it is true that fire is the enemy of water, moist heat is the creator of all things: discordant concord is the path life needs." -- Ovid, Metamorphoses
Homer, The Iliad
Chapter One: Seeing Double in ""The Secret Sharer" ". . . he would think he was seeing double or imagine himself come upon a scene of weird witchcraft." Chapter Two: Taking the Sky in Metamorphoses "I still can take the sky -- there lies my path." Chapter Three: Staging Rites in Oedipus the King "How can we cleanse ourselves -- what rites?" Chapter Four: Gathering into an Artifice in "Sailing to Byzantium" ". . . and gather me Into the artifice of eternity."
Chapter Five: Setting it Right in Hamlet "The time is out of joint. O cursed spite That ever I was born to set it right." Chapter Six: Reaching Beyond in The Inferno "Where Hercules set up his boundary stones that men might heed and never reach beyond." Chapter Seven: Going Back in "The Dead" "Mr. Brown could go back farther still, to the old Italian companies that used to come to Dublin." |
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