On the great desire to see where the “plain of truth” is (ἡ πολλὴ σπουδὴ τὸ ἀληθείας ἰδεῖν πεδίον οὗ ἐστιν), which Plato describes in Phaedrus 248b, and after reading the article by Bainard Cowan on “Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory” New German Critique 22 (1981), 109–22:

When trueing a building frame or a wheel, I use tools which in turn refer or bring me back (beyond?) to the plenitude or fullness of the ocean already there. The bubble in the liquid sealed in a hardwood frame in an act of imitation of the horizon line and of adequation to the laws of physics. The quality of the referral depends on the quality of the anchoring of the bubble in wood. When the framing of a window for instance is true—and it is a shock or rather a revelation to discover it—I do not simply take the studs around the frame to be symbols by referring them to absolutized measures or tools severed from being (my trusted level), and stopping at that (and a beer. Wheww, wasn’t that scary?). Something tells me I’m participating in a great mystery (how theological to speak like this, the mystery of presence). For intimations of it, see Hadot’s The veil of Isis: an essay on the history of the idea of nature 2006 (translation of Le voile d’Isis: essai sur l’histoire de l’idée de nature, 2004).

This sense of having access to a great mystery may come as a flash of revelation in all dimensions of life, because trueing our discourse, technology, social activities and systems of evaluation (ethics)—a constant endeavor—can only be a struggle with a cutting, separating, isolating of what existed before, the remembering and contemplation of this “plain of truth” Plato speaks of after the dismembering. The wood has been cut, not necessarily with the grain, by large machines, transported immediately to distributors, used (water-logged) in a new construction. Fat chance you’ll get anything true even if you bought clear heart. Lucky if you stay close, within 1/4″ of this mythical reverberating point.

Perhaps the same could be said of all institutions which are built regardless of grain. The dismembering which is a given in all human activities makes access to the “plain of truth” impossible. In our unhappiness, or severed state, we content ourselves with “experiencing” the world and treating everything as symbols. In our speaking, making, living together in, and valuation of the world, we accept to live in a forest of symbols but forget it is a forest. We “experience” reality and rush from symbol to symbol. That is, we acquiesce to the (now capitalist) demand that we become instances of something that we forgo (or most of us have forgone) while pretending to hearken back to it: being. Yet the tools are so constituted, and so are we, in a physical continuum with the “plain of truth,” that at times we can glimpse something beyond the horizon and recognize it as grace.