Plato on a foggy day

I spoke to Ms. X today about reason in Plato’s Republic, about the shapes we carry with us in our bones, the squared circles and dodecahedrons of the conscience, transient and visceral. We skipped stones over the surface, trading moments and bits of text like so much colored glass and string at a trading post. “I am worried” I said “about this city and its citizens. I worried about this order, heavy and imposing like a suit of armor over our erotic, fire-like selves; that it will put out our light. I am worried too about living in a world without hard edges, a gelatin universe. What is a body without bones? Am I destined to send myself to prison or to be forever out of doors, beyond the city walls, beset by the advances of beasts and gods and forever out of the grips of language?”

“Here it is,” I said to her “my hopeless little heart. It has loved books and men. Here it is: my shivering fear that all there is for me is a collage of brooding moments, a life lived in a petty pace from day to day, a heap of broken things, all mine and miscellaneous. All prematurely disappointed and sullen faced.”

She did not mock my crisis, or dismiss the poorly written tragedy I was lugging to and fro. Instead she simply heard me and said for my benefit: “Not so fast.”

Quickly, quickly! says the world. You’re running out of time! And whence we are headed and off what cliff we are being corralled there is no time to say. But I would rather sit in a pondering reverie than marry myself to an unexamined suitor, sell my soul to dogma or else dismiss and disengage. Today, I will be a student. I will not rush ahead. I will read each word and wonder as I will and ask with an open heart. And if no coherence visits me, if no Enunciation comes, and I must sit an empty bellied virgin and wait, then wait I will. I will wait like Jonah in the whale or like a tower bound beauty, and fill my time with spinning wheels and aquatic debris and a library of pauses and words.

The world is full of paper men and card board constellations; let them do their play and win their prizes, cry and gurgle and moan. I will watch with one eye and let the other roll back in my head.