Virgo Season

Socrates: You have observed, then, that the face of the person who looks in the eye of another person, appears visible to himself in the eyesight of the person opposite to him, as in a mirror? And we therefore call this the pupil, because it exhibits the image of that person who looks in it.

Alcibiades: What you say is true.

Socrates: An eye therefore beholding an eye, and looking in the most excellent part of it, in that with which it sees, may thus see itself?

Alcibiades: Apparently so.

Socrates: But if the eye look at any other part of the man, or at any thing whatever, except what this part of the eye happens to be like, it will not see itself.

Alcibiades: It is true.

Socrates: If therefore the eye would see itself, it must look in an eye, and in that place of the eye, too, where the virtue of the eye is naturally seated; and the virtue of the eye is sight.

Alcibiades: Just so.

Socrates: Whether then is it not true, my friend Alcibiades, that the soul, if she would know herself, must look at soul, and especially at that place in the soul in which wisdom, the virtue of the soul, is ingenerated; and also at whatever else this virtue of the soul resembles?

Alcibiades: To me, O Socrates, it seems true.

— From The First Alcibiades of Plato.

Plato uses a play on words here: the word for pupil in Greek is kore, taken to mean “little girl” or “doll” because within the pupil is a little image of the onlooker. But Kore is also the name of Persephone, the daughter of Demeter and the central character in the Eleusinian mysteries.

She is the archetype of the soul, which descends from the divine world of light into the darkness of Hades and who is brought back from there by the guidance of Hermes, the God of intellectual discovery. The very act of looking to the purest part of ourselves is, then, an acknowledgement of the divine inner self which each of us possesses according to the most profound teaching of the Platonic tradition.

— The Good and the human being: the case for philosophy. The Prometheus Trust's Essentials of Platonic Philosophy Course: Paper 1. Tim Addey.

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It didn’t hurt as expected.
I hung upside down stars in your room but the next guest didn’t notice
they shine as brightly aeroplane taillights on a slow ascent.
Where are you now? 
I dream of you in Tsibili, Iran, over some strange border.
On a mountain pass, a blond hair refracts light like a spider web.

Love is as implausible as moonlight, 
yet we shone so brightly with each reflection
before you spun out. Don’t misunderstand me — I have no wound to savour, 
only the cold of autumn came in and my tongue stained pink with pomegranate seeds six at a time, for each month underground,

to mark the end of skinny dipping. 
Diana and her attendants laugh in the forest,
while I load my quiver for the hunt. 
Trills decorate pines like raindrops, 
like Baroque pearls on the ear of a girl. 
Like a shawl falls from a shoulder,
I know that to lose now, 
is to gain immortality. 

A mother would want you safe, 
but we go calmly where I know not 
and come back alive.