Writer, reader, software engineer. Founder of Stoa.
Working on something old, working on something new.
Hall Αʹ · Catalogue
Essays by Caleb Ontiveros, 2024–2025, on Stoicism, freedom, God, books and becoming. In the painting the first ten keep shops along the colonnade, and the rest look out from the bays of the upper gallery; the name in ochre italics is the one the stoa gave it. All open on Substack.
Hall Βʹ · About
Caleb Ontiveros left a philosophy PhD to build things. He is a software engineer and a writer, and he likes startups, running, animals and metaphilosophy, the philosophy of how philosophy should be done.
Cat. 20 · the only living thing in the paintingThe bird who walks out with you is a house finch, Haemorhous mexicanus, the everyday bird of Midwestern feeders and porch lights, a long way from Athens. Caleb likes animals, and a colonnade with nothing alive in it seemed unfinished. Inside he keeps to the stripes of sun; on the threshold he waits on the step; outside he takes the olive branch nearest you. The male’s red comes from pigments in the seeds and berries he eats; the female, who arrives at dusk, prefers the reddest male she can find.
His songWhen you tap him he sings one of nine field recordings of real house finches, shuffled. Recordings by Jonathon Jongsma (xeno-canto XC124078 and XC99546, CC BY-SA 3.0) and by Francis, Ortega & Cruz, PLoS ONE 2011 (sample recording, CC BY 2.5), via Wikimedia Commons. Cut into short phrases, faded and levelled; the clips are shared under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Hall Γʹ · In the aisle
Halfway down the colonnade stands a torso of Apollo: no head, no arms, the legs broken off at the thigh. Rilke wrote this sonnet in Paris in 1908, after a torso like it in the Louvre.
Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,
sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.
Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz
unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz
und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;
und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.
We never knew his unheard-of head,
where the apples of his eyes were ripening. But
his torso glows still like a candelabrum
in which his gaze, only turned down low,
holds and shines. Or else the curve
of the breast could not dazzle you, and in the slight turn
of the loins a smile could not run
to that centre which carried procreation.
Or else this stone would stand defaced and short
beneath the shoulders’ translucent fall
and would not shimmer so, like a wild beast’s pelt;
and would not break out of all its edges
like a star: for there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
Exodos · Exit