Playdough , Pluto and The Whole Damn Thing

Playdough, she said and that got me thinking how I must Google Plato one of these days to refresh my credential as a pseudo-intellectual even though I recall his Republic disinvited me with my poetic license. Anal-retentive Plato must have moved a vowel and suddenly Pluto was on my mind.

Pluto has had many lives. Probably my first faint memory was of Pluto Water in my father’s drugstore. This was a laxative; maybe the one Plato used. Then there was the Disney dog in cartoons. However, in the chronology of the Great Ledger, the name goes back to Greek mythology. Pluto was the early name of Hades who ruled the Underworld. He got the short end of the stick when the universe was divided among the three brothers, Poseidon (oceans), Zeus (above) and Pluto (below).

Before any of that, but as yet undiscovered, was the planet Pluto. So named because it was dark being furthest from the sun. The first two letters of Pluto are also the initials of Percival Lowell, the astronomer who speculated in 1905 that there was a Planet X. Twenty-five years later Pluto was found and in 2006 it was un-found being drummed off the list and relegated to dwarf status. Imagine the humiliation. On the other hand it may be better to be the first among the B list than the least among column A list.

The other notable thing about Lowell is that in 1896 while pointing his telescope at Mars he inadvertently closed the aperture and swore he saw canals on the red planet which turned out to be the arteries on his own retina. However this spawned the fiction of H.G. Wells’, War of the Worlds and Ray Bradbury’s, Martian Chronicles. And then there is Elon Musk preparing his getaway on rocket ship X just in case. Make sure not to bump into Zeus.

Aristotle had it right. The world is indeed in flux. Planets come and go. We are shadows, merely, on Plato's wall. And words are as elastic as a glob of Playdough to be shaped as we will. We might discover canals on this parched land, hear water music and uncover sixty-watt bulbs in dark places.

When did you start writing poetry, the lawyer asked. When did you stop, I replied.