More Barthes and Plato

In thinking more about the relationship I think with the 'Nautilus,' Barthes leaves it open ended in his romantic view of the drunken boat. There is a value judgement, in that observing or following the 'Drunken Boat' we are free to explore and absorb or engage life. There is no reference to responsibility. In Plato's Cave if you manage to 'see the light' you then have the burden of going back in the cave to toil next to the unenlightened which by some accounts would be worse than the original 'ignorance is bliss' scenario, of toiling without ever leaving.

Mythologies

I have been meaning to sort of reflect on 'One Dimensional Man' but have gotten sidetracked with Barthes, ' The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat.' This very short little piece seems an interesting metaphor for a number of the things we have been reading and questioning all throughout this course. His observations in regard to Verne's 'exploration of closure' and his remarks on Verne as constructing worlds that were 'finite.' I have been spending a great deal of time ruminating these concepts, in that there is this struggle, active struggle, to contain ones world in any number of ways, it is the world of Marcuse's 'One Dimensional Man,' it is the necessity to define a secure and rational existence. And by the very act of doing so we are prevented from leaving the cave.
I went back to Plato to reacquaint myself with the shadows on the wall and I will now explore Rimbaud's 'Drunken Boat' to understand, "the boat which says 'I' and, freed from its concavity, can make man proceed from a psycho-analysis of the cave to a genuine poetics of exploration." This ,in closing, caught me by surprise and in its simplicity, arrested a moment in time.