◐ the cave and the sun — the walk

Not a diagram: a walk-in. You begin chained beside the others facing the wall, with the fire behind and above and the carriers hidden. You can play the prisoners' game and win at it. Then the chains come off, you turn the whole way around (periagōgē), climb the rough road, let your eyes settle in Plato's own order — shadows, reflections, things, the night sky, the sun — and go back down. The divided line tracks where you are in the story the whole time.

The cave's native geometry is not a figure at all. Plato tells it as a journey in stages with a turn in the middle, so the room is a journey in stages with a turn in the middle — the same rule that makes Neoplatonism concentric and Buddhism a wheel. Drawing it as a ladder would have made a Greek into a Kabbalist by accident.