​4/ The primordial gods of Eros, Gaia and Erebus arise out of the darkness of Chaos. Chaos I equate with a first primary intentionality that cannot be understood by humans. It is an infinite non-human mindfulness. As the centuries roll on up to approx 400 BCE these non-human powers are then 'humanised' as anthropomophic gods and then rationalised. 'Chaos' becomes the Logos of Socrates.

Primordial Chaos appears to have few human characteristics. It contains every possible definition, including its own negation. It is not like us. It is unknowable. This order of predication can be reversed. We are not like it. But this changes over the centuries so the we become more like the Logos - the first supreme rational good thought. We are made in the image of Logos, whose supreme intention is a Good and loving one. (A strong counter-argument is that we make the Logos in our image. It is a human creation.) According to Plato we can have knowledge of this supreme Good through philosophy.

(Again, I must stress these are my interpretations as I sketch out the next installment in Solon's journey. They serve the purposes of the story.)

The primordial powers of Erebus and Tartarus, the dark shadowy agencies, are more difficult to grasp for me. But one way of understanding them is to consider them in contrast to Plato's Logos - a concept that seems to anticipate The Christian idea of Jesus as 'the word'. This post-primordial idea of a supreme Good is devoid of a shadowy dimension. Indeed the shadowy dimension is the here-and-now of human perception and experience. (Christians, quite rightly, could point to the human aspect of Jesus.) The here-and-now awaits the redemption of the supreme good to 'save' it from itself. This seems to me to be less satisfactory than the primordial first intention which includes Erebus.

The primary opposition in Plato is between the supreme light of Reason/Logos and its shadows on earth. The here-and-now is a pale imitation of the perfection of Logos. I don't believe Solon is drawn to the Platonic schema. Neither are the priest-doctors at the Askepion. They see a harmony in the primordial powers. They probably reject the terms 'light' and 'dark'. It's possible that the cures they offer involves a rejection of these terms.

I'm sure it would be naive to think the early believers in primordial powers didn't see an opposition between light and dark. But what if they saw not oppositions but contraries or even complimentaries? For example, there is water and dry earth. We can consider them to be opposites by virtue of what they are in themselves. Mix them together and you have something more powerful than the constituent parts. Let us consider this to be a key paradigm in primordial thinking. The mixing of complimentary powers produces something greater. To oversimplify: in Plato's schema there are clear heros and baddies. There is the light of knowledge and the darkness of false knowledge, i.e. our perceptions of the here-and-now. Plato seems to separate-off the Light as the true reality. Could the Light and the here-and-now not compliment each other? They might be necessary for each other? By reaching out the Light becomes something greater.

I realise that I am being unfair on Plato. He is an immensely subtle thinker. He is also a great humanist. He captures a rich variety of personalities, human character and experiences; so much so, the human often seems more important than the One /Logos. Nevertheless his schema was taken up over many centuries and placed the here-and-now as a pale shadow of the One. It means that those who can claim knowledge of the One/The Truth can also claim political power over others. They own the narrative. This is a major downside.

Arguably by being truly human, we compliment the One, rather than 'sinning' against it. And rather than attempting to be like the One, we should try to find what is natural to us, embracing our corporeality and desires. Therefore we have to find a definition of what's truly human. But this is well nigh impossible. But let's have a go in the context of the primordial powers and not Plato's schema.

Let's assume Plato's schema produces alienation and anxiety rather than harmony. What if Erebus sits within us? It is our 'weaknesses'. But it is not an absence or a negation. It is part of our very definition. It has a 'heaviness'. But Erebus sets a challenge. It has agency because we can look kindly on its manifestations, both in ourselves and nature. We are moved when we see someone strive to better themselves; a child taking their first step. Without Erebus, this could never happen, because the starting point is always 'less than'. It is the empty-space that allows us move from one state to another. Erebus is always close to failure. When someone we love fails to achieve a goal we are moved by their endeavours and it makes us love them all the more. In turn, they may feel more loved, despite bitter disappointment. Hopefully, they will feel encouraged to try again.

But Erebus is a tragic stage because it is the setting for human thought and action. It is associated with darkness, but there is no true opposition of light. It is easy to see why Erebus is associated with the underworld. It is shadows (rather than darkness). There is no redemptive force to counter this.

Plato gives us a counterforce. By calling it the Good, Plato gives 'Chaos' qualities and makes it an object of thought. But this contradicts the idea that the true First Thought cannot be an object of thought. Possibly the flaw is that by calling it the Good, then any other attributes must be less than good. The 'Good' cannot be uttered without concurrently implying the opposite. Oppositions are created (Light/Dark, Perfection/Imperfection) but these are fallacies. Value judgements are introduced. Earthly manifestations of the Good are imperfect.

In fairness, the Platonists deny the One/Good is an object. It is impossible for us not to ask 'what is it?' and not try to come up with an answer. The natural gravity of thought is to give it a name. It could also be argued that Aehros and Erebus are attempts to give Chaos qualities for the same reason as the Platonists call it the Good. We want to have knowledge of it, we want to acknowledge it, so it must be given qualities that we can understand and measure against the reality of experience. Maybe these value judgements arise because Plato wishes to have knowledge of the One, and the road to knowledge implies making value judgements.

Fo​r the sake of argument, I'm going to say Plato is wrong to re-name Chaos as the Good. There can be no doubt that the world needs a moral compass and it needs redemption from the toil. But the seeds of this redemption are in the desire to care, nurture and love. This is Aehros, not Plato's re-naming of Chaos. At least, we will find redemption in Aehros, not the Good, which is accessable only to those who study philosophy. Aehros is accessable to all, but the Good is only accessable to those who are educated and, let's face it, education costs money. The Good imples a kind of elitism. Aehros is within us, so redemption is within us, if we are true to Aehros. But it also means the tragic setting, Erebus, where the human story is played out, can never be transformed. There is no second coming. But there is kindness and care, which is transformative.

Of equal importance is the realisation that love doesn't guanateee success. in fact, 'success' my not be the true measure of things. Recall the example of the child taking its first steps and the different elements of this moment. There is the loving gaze of the parent, the striving of the child to walk and the child's failure. These three elements make a 'whole'. The child's lack of success is only a part of this whole.

Pergamon is in the grip of a cult of luxury. 'Wealth makes us happy.' Luxury goods bring us contentment and happiness. The cult places the Good here on Earth. Our human weaknesses - failed ambitions, sickness etc. - will be banished. Failure and sickness are looked down upon. They induce disgust. The unity of Aehros and Erebus is broken. The narrow definition of success becomes the measure of success. The result is that most people feel inadequate. The cult creates many social problems, including addiction to a narcotic called kalodaimon, from 'kalo' (good) and 'daimon' (spirit). The Asklepion, the healing centre, tries to cure people of their addiction.

The 'cure' is not to embrace failure and sickness, to fetishise it, but to look at the human condition with sympathy and kindness. So how does the Asklepion define what the human condition is? They formulate an explanatory myth.

Here is a first sketch of the myth:

Out of Chaos comes Aphrodite (Aehros) and Erebus. Erebus is both male and female. Aphrodite is pure spirit, neither male nor female. Erebus produces children and begins to toil the land to feed them, but their hardwork fails. Aphrodite is moved by this - including the failure of nature to produce crops. (The 'entirety' moves her.) Aphrodite longs to embrace Erebus but cannot because she is pure spirit. Her desire causes her to develop a bodily form so that she can embrace Erebus and suckle the children while Erebus continues their eternal toiling of the land. The goal of life, the 'cure', is to cultivate the same love Aphrodite felt for Erebus.

There is a visual representation of this myth at the Asklepion with the aphorism 'Look kindly on the toils'. It will be a sculpture or effigy of some sort. It is not a representation or effigy to be worshipped but the viewer should be moved by it. It offers a path to self-worth. Of course, there is a very real danger that this will develop into a cult of its own. This will be an interesting area to explore. 

My favourite cafe, this morning. A den of culinary temptation. I stopped for a take-away coffee, but couldn't stop myself from taking a pic. 

2/ These primordial forces can be seen as oppositions or not. They induce anxiety when seen as oppositions, but offer consolation when seen as resolutions. 'Resolutions' is not a great word because it suggests an initial problem to be resolved. In other words, there is an opposition to be confronted. However it 'resolves' if we consider the opposition is not between these forces but between the self (the 'I') and these forces. The resolution comes in 'seeing ' where the true oppositions lie and trying to find an identity between the self and these forces. A kind of unity.

History is not just about describing what people did or what they built or their military victories. It is also about trying to understand how they thought. This is especially true when creating characters set in ancient times. And it's not just about their waking-thoughts, but their unconscious assumptions. I mentioned in the last blog post the concept of 'Chaos'. It it out of Chaos that the primordial deities arise - Eros, Gaia, Erebus. Chaos is the greatest thought that cannot itself be thought by humans. It is what gives rise to existence. In itself, it is such a supreme thought that it is impossible to believe it cannot exist. It is one unitary state that contains all possibilities. Within its infinite set of definitions and possibiities, it must contain the idea of existence.

If you are a student of philosophy you may recognise this as a version of what's called the ontological argument. One could also call it the ontological fallacy. We are all guilty of it - probably every day of our lives. A simple definition would be: 'I have a strong thought that X is the case, therefore X must be true'. We all have strong opinions and beliefs about certain things, and the strength of our convictions leads us to belive these must be true. It can even cause us to disregard the facts. Donald Rumsfeld, the former US Secretary for Defense, expressed it succintly when he said that where the facts and the theory are misaligned, the facts are wrong.

It is worth recalling another quote from Rumsfeld:

"As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know."

There are many things to agree with and disagree with here. I'm going to look at two. Firstly, we must have convictions. How can we survive without them? We would not be able to act or brings thoughts/plans into reality without convictions. Convictions arise even though we do not have a complete overview of any given situation. We never have access to all the facts. Sometimes these convictions will clash with the facts. They only tell part of the picture and if we had more facts we might see a different picture. Secondly, the phrase 'unknown unknown' is a contradiction. It is a concept in itself. We know it exists, yet it is a thing we know nothing obout, except that we KNOW we know nothing about it. It is not, therefore, a form of non-being. It has agency. We can look out for it, knowing it may trip us up. It is a hazard on our journey. It has a form of existence, therefore it exists. (Given that something either exists or does not exist. The Law of the Excluded Middle applies here. There is no half-way house.)

Arguably an 'unknown unknown' is truely a 'known unknown'. (Indeed in an Aristophanes' comedy it might be called a 'known unknown unknown'. To which another character will disagree and say it is a 'known unknown unknown unknown'. The infinite regress will only stop with the laughter of the audience.)

'Chaos' is a primordial 'unknown unknown'. No matter how many facts we uncover, the ghost of the 'unknown unknown' will always hang over us. It is a reductio ad absurdum. We can never grasp the complete picture. Socrates takes up this point when he says that true knowledge is knowing what you don't know. It is the basis of enlightened scepticism. Yet in its primordial sense, it is difficult to escape the feeling that it is a dark existential absurdity. Maybe the nearest we can come to having knowledge of it is to believe it is an 'intentionality'. We do not know what this intentionality is. It is hidden from us. Plato and later the Christians believed this first intentionality is supremely good and loving. It is the Light.

I don't get this sense from the primordial version. Darkness in the form of Erebus has an equal say. But if these different primordial forces are not oppositions and the only true opposition is between the self and these necessary first thoughts of nature, then they are not dark if we find a kind of union with them. They have a different presence in thier primordial sense. They are 'heavy' and 'dark' only when we are alienated from them.

​Pergamon has a problem with drug addiction. The doctor-priests at the Asklepion have attempted to develop a cure believing the addiction is the result of a spiritual malaise. They create a cinematic spectacle of these primordial powers, making people confront their fears but with the end goal of resolving the self into these oppositions to find consolation. (I have yet to work out what this spectacle is!) A cult of luxury and wealth has developed in the city which has alienated people from their spiritual selves. The ancient asklepions, essentially healing centres, encouraged people to dream. Patients could stay at the healing centres overnight and the atmosphere was such that the dream-cures seemed to work. Again, I have yet to work out how this fits into the actions in the novel. It is an ongoing process...  (P.S. An 'unknown unknown' or a 'known unknown?)

 Narcissus rejects the advances of many potential lovers, most famously the nymph, Echo. Her pain causes her to fade into an shrivelled whisper of her former self, reverberating through the forests and mountains. Narcissus is punished by being made to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. He becomes a tragic figure because he knows he has fallen in love with his image and cannot have the object of his longings. He has a degree of self-knowledge, but cannot free himself of his infatuation.

Echo's story is interesting. After she falls in love with Narcissus, she follows him through the forest. Narcissus senses someone close by. He calls out "Who's there?" Echo replies, "Who's there?" His words are reflected back to him. I am going to make a loose and personal reading of this moment, and see it as a failure of Narcissus to recognise something within himself. (I've read none of the original versions of the myth, so I am for from being an expert.) Echo's words, her repetition of Narcissus' own words, are an 'authentic' reflection rather than the later 'inauthentic' reflection of his own image in the pool.

Consider Echo as a reflection of the stirrings of love from within. She represents a first 'callout' from the self to love. As such, I am going to associate Echo with Aphrodite herself. By rejecting the stirrings of love, Aphrodite is rejected by Narcissus. She then takes her revenge. Love's denial is punished.

​Narcissus' rejection of Echo when she manifests herself in human form is the first true moment of narcissism. He fails to embrace love. Aphrodite's revenge is to deny Narcissus a true object of love and replace it with an image that cannot reciprocate love. The stirrings of love are something separate from the self who experiences these stirrings of love. If there was no such separation, then how could the 'stirrings of love' be rejected? The self has a natural growth trajectory. If it denies or is denied love then it's growth is stunted 

Tree roots in frozen ground.

The working title of the novel was The Atoms of Love. It was, of course, an ironic concept. What is love made of? In our modern minds we tend to think it arises out of the biological; that its intensity is driven by evolutionary pressures. Its crazy logic is conditioned by the mechanics of organisms adapting to changing environments. Greek tragedy explores how the unthinkable becomes real, driven by love's excesses, its demonic offspring, hatred, and the unknowable causal agency of the gods.

A Greek tragedy begins with a thought that is transgressive and shocking in the extreme. Oedipus is told he will marry his mother and murder his father. Medea tells us she will murder her children in an act of revenge against her husband who has abandoned her for another woman.

Oedipus is the victim of fate. He doesn't willingly carry out his terrible actions. They are the result of his anger when he quarrels with and kills then man he fails to recognise as his father, but mostly the inexplicable and tragic logic at the centre of existence. A horrifying prophecy come true. Medea's identity is grounded in her love for her husband and children. She has forsaken her homeland, parents and family to marry Jason. When he betrays her love, she is diminished to a point of absolute wrath. Her thoughts and actions become the very antithesis of love, the contrary of what brings joy, but she commands our sympathy and fearful awe in equal measure.

Such intense psychological depictions might be contrasted with the Pythagoreans who studied geometry, numbers and music. The greatest of them, Plato, also studied love. Geometry, numbers, music and love are things not made of atoms. We may think of them as dependant on the material, but Plato didn't think so. He considered them to be eternal identities that existed separately and above the world of objects that are born and pass away. The number five is eternally the number five. It doesn't change identity in the way a child becomes an adult or an acorn turns into an oak tree. Instead, it has the power to map the mechanics of the universe. It measures speed, mass, volume etc. It gives us the ability to predict outcomes with great precision.

Numbers can measure the intervals between different notes on a musical instrument. When a pianist strikes a major chord (a combination of first, third and fifth notes of the scale) based on the first note of a scale, then strikes a major chord on the fourth note, then the fifth, introduce a minor seventh note and there is an overwhelming desire in the listener to be taken back to the first chord again. It is the classic three-chord trick of many a rock n roll tune. We are given pleasure and completeness.

The 'meaning' of music is created, not by each individual note on its own, but by the relationship between one note and the next, leading to the almost infinite variety of music. The 'meaning' of the music resides, not in the strings of the instrument, but in the mind of the listener where something resonates with something. What is this first something? This First-Thought?

Given that most of us are drawn to music, it is reasonable to assume this First-Thought existed before we were born. And, given that it is partially constituted of numbers, would be considered by the ancients to be eternal in some way - numbers are everlasting forms. There is also a Second-Thought. It is the 'I' that resonates with the First-Thought. It is the person who is moved and excited by the music. It is independent of the First-Thought, but comes alive and knows that it is experiencing something because of the First-Thought. Without the First-Thought it would be an empty, sad capacity in search of something, because it is incapable of generating its own First-Thought. And what applies to the listener also applies to the composer and performer. Their skill is to surf the wave of the First-Thought.

​Using computers as analogies for brains or clockwork mechanisms as models for the universe is always inadequate. Using animals as a comparison to the human even more so. But I want to break this rule. We have a beautiful labrador dog called Jess who is intelligent, full of love and great company. When my wife and mother of my three children was sadly taken from us because of breast cancer, the children never came home to an empty house after school. There was always an enthusiastic tail-wagging welcome. I can safely say that I could not teach Jess the basic axioms of Euclidian geometry.

I don't believe this makes Jess inferior, just different. But let us assume it to be true, that Jess does not have the capacity to understand the rules of geometry, then it begs the question: what do I already know in order to know geometry? What capacity do I have in order to understand it and use it to build buildings? Indeed this question can be asked of any form of cognition, even where Jess understands the sound of me gathering her walking lead in the utility room signifies we are going for a walk. What does any sentient creature already know so they can understand the world around them? Indeed it could be asked of plants who 'know' to turn towards the sun for energy.

But the route to understanding the 'First-Thoughts' is experience. Not, for instance, the type of question 'what is music?' but 'what is it like to experience music?' We could put the question to dogs and plants but, obviously, we will not get an answer. We cannot know their experience because they cannot tell us. We cannot experiment to understand the experience of plants and animals because it would, most likely, be a form of pseudo-science. One has to be situated 'in-the-mind-of' the one who is experiencing. We can only understand the mechanics of their behaviours, not their feelings of experience.

The First-Thought/s are simple but potent originals. They are the conditions for things to happen. They are the ideas that shape the world. We do not create these forms from nothing, just as we do not create the physical world around us from nothing. Our nearest mountain range was there before we were born and will continue after we pass away.

First-Thoughts are a form of mind. Their potency comes from a capacity to 'will' things to happen. They are a form of desire that is greater than and foundational to the material world. Furthermore, they can be distilled, by a kind of reductio as absurdum, to the greatest First-Thought; the highest, simplest and purest form of intentionality. What could this be?

We could first consider hate. It is a form of First-Thought. The capacity to hate is universal to all of us, but hate is destructive and not generative. Hate needs something to hate, therefore something must precede it. Consider the contradictory of hate; love. Love is self-subsisting and self-sufficient. Nothing need precede it. It wants to give before it takes. It wants to nurture. In its purest form it is happy and content with itself. Yet because it is generative, it would naturally will the 'otherness' of the material world.

This is such a strong thought for Plato and the Platonists They believed that First-Thought forms are a true account of what is truly Real. They have a pure existence somewhere but not here and are not immediately apprehended by the senses. The world of objects and changing seasons and the vastness of space are mere pale shadows of these First-Thought forms which can only be intuited thorough an intensely rational but mystical form of contemplation. But it is what we should aspire to for supreme rational consolation and a flourishing of the good soul.

Many philosophers objected to the abstract 'otherness' of these forms, not least Plato's greatest student, Aristotle. The basic forms of geometry, as with all First-Thoughts, are simply more of the many complex things that exist in the world. The sheer 'thereness' of the physical world, its un-ignorable majesty, is primary. And there is the niggling suspicion that First-Thoughts are an invention of the human. They are accidental to the evolution of our species. Nevertheless, Plato's ideas resonated down the centuries after his death and in more recent times inspired mathematicians, such as Bertrand Russell, who developed logicism and eventually computer logic.

Medea's hateful, destructive rage seems to fly in the face of this primary First-Thought, especially if it is identical to love. She wants to destroy the life she has created. But her story comes into being because she married for love. The gods are responsible for the First-Thought of love, but also the First-Thought of revenge. They are not faultless. The cosmological and the personal are tightly interwoven in Greek drama and philosophy. The intensity of Medea's rage implies the cosmological. Her anger is monumentally present, because the capacity for anger is given from above. But the route to the gods is the intensity of feeling, the experience of being human. This is not only true of the great Greek tragedies but Plato's dialogues. The rich variety of characters in Plato's Symposium sows the seeds of Aristotle's critique; that the perfect First-Thought is too simplistic, too self-identified, too unimaginable to be true. The rich multiplicity of human character, which Plato captures so well, proves this.

Boot prints and bicycle tyre marks in the icy mud today. It was minus three degrees centigrade.

A delicious sponge cake on display at a local cafe this morning. I was very tempted, but only had a take-away coffee - thinking of my waistline!

The top of an old oil can by a corrugated iron panel in a motor garage, London,

I forgot to mention that last week's post was my first ever blog post. There is much advice out there that writers should have a blog to connect with readers. Every writer wants to have a connection with their readers, and blogging seems a good way of doing it. But the main connection between a writer and their readers is their primary writing - the novel, poetry or whichever. Part of the reason I didn’t start a blog earlier is that I didn't know what it should be about. Writing commentaries on books that l read or politics would be very time consuming. Such writing needs careful consideration, which implies a lot of thinking time. I'd prefer to spend the time on writing the next novel. I hope that doesn't sound selfish, but I have a full-time job other than writing.

Of course, a writer's blog could be, or possibly should be, about them. A portrait of ‘me’. This is not easy to achieve in an engaging way. I'm not a naturally confessional person. Why should I even think the minutiae of my life is of interest to others? More to the point, A P McGrath is a pen name, so there is no such person as A P McGrath. How possible is it to write about him? For the time being I will make the blog about my thoughts on developing the story and character elements of the next instalment of Solon of Pergamon 's life - without spoilers! A lot of these thoughts will be about the philosophy and psychology of characters and events. This is the stuff that would come under the heading 'tell' in the phrase 'show not tell'. ln other words 'flesh out' the explanations into character and action with minimal expositional dialogue. Forget the philosophy.

I’m working on a character, a blacksmith who makes metal statues. He also makes wheels, ploughs and pulleys. He has a forge in a cave. There are echoes of the god Hephaestus who was the god of metalworking. By some accounts Hephaestus was often thought of as the god who took the ideas of Zeus and fashioned them into the world. Zeus had the idea, Hephaestus made it happen. Hephaestus is an intermediary between the absolutely divine and our earth. The blacksmith in my story, however, is a very ordinary person, with a tincture of mystery.

His life has been deeply affected by a prophecy from the Oracle. He believes it to be true. Few contemporary novels would use the device of a prophecy. We believe the future has not yet happened, though Einstein's theory of block-time suggests everything that has ever happened and will in the future happen is happening now. There is a corresponding notion in ancient logic for block-time; 'aion', from where we get the word 'eon', which roughly translates as 'always-in-being'. We think of the word ‘eon' to mean 'a very long period of time' - usually millions of years. But in aion there is no time. It doesn't exist. Time is part of the material world, not the eternal. For many of the Greek philosophers, this is implied in the logic of language and its use. This is where they found it.

If a changeless stillness, where everything IS is the true state of the universe, then the future is already happening. It is impossible to envisage this. We can say the words, but I find it impossible to picture it. But the ancients had a very strong sense of this. Plato believed that time was a moving image of the eternally still. This is the opposite of the way a photograph 'freezes' time. Instead, time, space and motion unfreezes the eternal. Time is the movie adaptation of the eternal. The older l get, the more I feel this could be true and in the stillness there seems to be a contentment.

The prophecy in the blacksmith's story is cruel. By trying to prevent it from happening, the blacksmith causes the prophecy to happen. Or does he? It’s impossible to know. I'm not particularly interested in whether the cosmology of aion is true, only the emotional effect on the characters and the reader, and its ability to generate story. In a sense, if the characters and readers go with the idea, then it is true.