What follows is a Platonic Trialogue between Owen Cox, Daniel Fraga and Dimitri Crooijmans. After having been lost for ages, this document has been rediscovered in the cellars of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice.
This rare document, translated from Arabic, hones in on aspects of the stakes of fervent metaphysical warfare undertaken during the fall of Athens in 404 BC. The title has been added post-humously by an anonymous Arabic editor around 950 AD.
Daniel: Dimitri, even before I met you they told me that in plain truth you are a perplexed man yourself and reduce others to perplexity. At this moment I feel you are exercising magic and witchcraft upon me and positively laying me under your spell until I am just a mass of helplessness.
Owen: Do not fret, Fraga, for I claim to be a daimon, a divine being. I have been banished from the immortals gods for ‘three times countless years’ for committing the sin of gluttony and lust and forced to suffer successive reincarnations in an purificatory journey through the different orders of nature and elements of the cosmos. Now I have achieved the most perfect of human states and will be reborn as an immortal. I also claim to have magical powers including the ability to revive the dead.
Dimitri: You're a real rascal, Owen. You nearly took me in. As for you, Daniel. I know what you mean. It isn't that I perplex the others by means of knowing, I carry out the joint investigation by means of decomposing the egos, discharging their fantasmatic relations at each stage. All the way down.
Owen: Rightly so, Dimitri. My world-view is of a cosmic cycle of eternal change, growth and decay, in which two personified cosmic forces, Love and Strife, engage in an eternal battle for supremacy. I tell it to them straight.
Daniel: I'm scared.
Owen: That which is finally dead, is never finally exterminated, for I walk this plane of the poet in the shoes of the madman. Born again, arisen beyond and good-looking. handsome Brits get the best of the power that we keep at bay.
Dimitri: Power, you say. What power?
Daniel: I know what to say.
Owen: Shut up, Fraga!
Dimitri: Why so imprudent all of the sudden, Sir Cox?
Owen: I thought he was our laughingstock, our Girardian sacrifice.
Dimitri: I can't even say what it is.
Daniel: My mind and my lips are literally numb, I have nothing to say.
Dimitri Crooijmans writes at Absolute Spirit