soracities:Dunya Mikhail, from ‘Tablets II’ (trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid)[Text ID: “Your lookpasses
soracities:Dunya Mikhail, from ‘Tablets II’ (trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid)[Text ID: “Your lookpasses through melike lightning.”]But now Alcibiades has spoken of the words and gestures of love as things hurled at the other like bolts of lightning. This image knits together, with extraordinary compression, his views about sexual ambition, knowledge, and risk. A lightning bolt strikes all at once, unpredictably, usually allowing no hope of defense or control. It is at one and the same time a brilliance that brings illumination and a force that has the power to wound and to kill. It is, one might say, corporeal light. (…) In the world of Alcibiades, the illumination of the loved one’s body and mind strikes like a moving, darting, bodily light, a light that makes its impact by touching as well as by illuminating. It is rather like what happens to the sun in certain later paintings of Turner. No more a pure, remote condition of sight, it becomes a force that does things in the world to objects such as boats, waves, a just man’s eyes — all of which are seen, in so far as they are thus illuminated, to be the sorts of things to which happenings can happen. The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium, Martha Nussbaum -- source link
#dunya mikhail#poetry#martha nussbaum#prose#comparatives#m-#m. lit.