I Saw Through Platonia
Running time	2:39
Appears on	Inferno
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Comments

• Platonia is physicist Julian Barbour's name (from The End of Time, 1999) for the configuration space of all possible instantaneous arrangements of the universe — his proposed timeless substrate for a radically Machian physics in which time itself is an illusion. The title's "I saw through" is the visionary-mystical register: to "see through" Platonia is to apprehend the eternal One behind the procession of appearances.
• The word Platonia also knits Barbour's physics to Plato's cave, ladder and Forms — and so to the whole Neoplatonic and Christian-mystical tradition (Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, Eckhart) in which the soul ascends through layers of appearance to the Good / the One / God.
• As the album's closing track (2:39), "I Saw Through Platonia" functions as the beatific vision — the Paradiso glimpsed at the end of Inferno. The album began with "Introit" (entering the Mass); it ends by seeing through.