David Bowie

The astronaut explained what it was like to circle the earth once every 90 minutes, and I listened.

It was a different way of looking at the world. It made me think that we do live in a real world after all when we are seeing it as something completely perfect, ordered, precise and calm, as an object doing the same thing over and over again, and that the further away we are from it the more beautiful it becomes.

Christopher Bollas in his book, Being a Character, Psychoanalysis and Self Experience, writes in the chapter, 'The Evocative Object', that "A form potential is a collecting structure for the represention of inner experience." Bollas continues the thought by writing, "the choice of representational form is an important unconscious decision about the structuring of lived experience..."

Reading the Greeks as I am now, I can see how good everything is and actually wants to be, and if not good then actually no more or less than the way we are seeing what we see. Not Greek lives themselves, perhaps, for they were at war again and again, there was great political strife, social dissension, slavery, but that the concept of the individual as sacrosanct was being created and a man like Plato could come put and say that only a philosopher could be king if the good of the state was to be acheived.

Not that much has been made of the fact of Plato writing in the years just after Socrates' execution. I can't even imagine the disruption Socrates' death must have caused in Athenian society, thinking of the disruptions that have occured so far in my own life--the assassination of Kennedy, MLK, the Challenger astronauts dying in space, 9/11--and thinking it's all pretty small stuff compared to what it must have been like to be alive in Athens in 399 BC and to learn of Socrates' death. And that Plato writing the Dialogs was a kind of resurrection...

Sometimes it's tempting to be overcome by the idea that everything's been done that can be done, every thought and every feeling has been thought and felt before over and over, every human action and reaction committed again and again to the point where it's possible that nothing new can ever happen.

The astronaut said that looking down on the earth from space the earth was so beautiful that it was almost impossible to believe how many horrible things were going on down there, and that if it was possible for all 7 billion people on earth to become astronauts, as he'd become, there'd certainly be less turmoil and strife in the world.

What if it all turns out to be language in the end and nothing really exists at all other than our desire and abilty to explain what exists?