The following letter appeared in this morning’s (26 March) Opelika-Auburn News:
To the Editor:
I was startled to see Rudy Tidwell’s response Feb. 27 to a letter of mine that was published in your paper four years ago.
Tidwell refers to my letter as though it were recent; he dates it Dec. 19, but gives no year. In fact there were two letters from me on the subject of Tidwell’s views on “Invictus,” one published in your pages on Feb. 22, 2004, and the other on Dec. 23, 2004. I haven’t written anything on the topic since then. Moreover, Tidwell already responded in print to both letters at the time (whether on the letters page or in his column I forget); so I’m not sure why he’s resurrecting this old dispute.
Four years having passed, I unsurprisingly no longer have handy the original column by Tidwell that I was criticizing at the time, and your readers don’t have access to it either. (It doesn’t seem to be on the Internet.) So it’s unclear how they can be expected to judge between my description of it (as an insult to the author of “Invictus”) and Tidwell’s description of it (as merely a disagreement with the poem’s ideas).
I do recall, however, that Tidwell described anyone who agreed with the message of “Invictus” as “in a worse condition than an imbecile,” a memorable phrase which I may perhaps be forgiven for interpreting as an insult to the author (as well as to many others), and not merely as a criticism of the author’s ideas.
Roderick T. Long
Plato characteristically describes particulars as copying or imitating Forms, and this seems to imply that particulars resemble Forms. … But does Plato’s metaphor commit him even to this? The answer, surely, is No. … The very being of a reflection is relational, wholly dependent upon what is other than itself …. It is for this reason that, though you may call the reflection of a red scarf red if you so please, you cannot mean the same thing you mean when you call its original red. … The reflection does not resemble the original; rather, it is a resemblance of the original. This is its nature, and the whole of its nature. … It will be objected that Plato compares particulars with reflections and pictures indiscriminately; that pictures are not merely resemblances of, but stand in the relation of resemblance to, their originals; and that, therefore, the above interpretation cannot be attributed to Plato. But this objection overlooks the nature of his theory of art. The analogy is drawn, not to the picture as a picture, but to the art object … [I]t is essential to apprehending a picture as an art object that we may take it to be, not a resemblance, but the very thing it resembles, as we may mistake a reflection in a mirror for the thing reflected. Viewed as an art object, the picture no longer retains its independent character; it is assimilated to that of a reflection, which is to say that its full meaning is relational, dependent upon the nature of its original. … [Resemblances] stand to their originals as the dependent to the independent …. Plato’s metaphor of imitation brilliantly expresses a community between different orders of objects, different levels of reality; it does not, as his recent critics have maintained, collapse that order.
I’m happy to report that