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Plato

SOCRATIC DANCING

 Love made me journey as often as I could

from Birkenhead to Birmingham by steam train

in 1962 – from Woodside’s glazed roof

to Snow Hill’s canopy of girders –

stopping at Chester, Chirk, Gobowen,

Oswestry, Shrewsbury, and, through the Marches,

via Wolverhampton to the ‘Workshop of the World’:

a landscape of fields, canals, small market towns

becoming blackened terraces of cobbled streets.

 

That year I had opted to study

Ancient Greek Philosophy. The journey

would be a couple of hours of silent reading.

Aristotle’s treatise on ‘Coming To Be

And Passing Away’ fitted the rackety-

rack of the wheels, the odd spouts of steam,

the curvetting of telephone wires,

and the colours of weathers and seasons.

But Plato’s Republic, with its heavy

humour, ponderous dialogue and smart-arse

front-man, Socrates, had me counting the sheep,

and admiring the sepia views of Rhyl

and Scarborough above the seats opposite.

 

Perhaps Socrates was dyslexic. He left,

as far as we know, nothing in writing.

Untutored in the classical authors

I had thought his historical fame

dependent on the puppet master alone

until, this year, I came across a piece –

in Practical Mechanics, I think it was –

about his young friend Xenophon: rebel

mercenary, military strategist,

kindly trainer of horses, writer.

Each morning, for exercise, Xenophon

describes how Socrates on his verandah

would dance, a cappella, as it were.

No doubt it was the old man’s tripping

of the light fantastic that prompted

Athens’s Watch Committee to accuse him

of corrupting the youth of the city.

 

Somewhere in Wolverhampton, on the end

of a terrace overlooking a canal,

was painted in white, with a sign writer’s

precision, ‘ETERNITY! Where will you spend

ETERNITY?’ As we passed I would smirk,

as young poets in love are wont to do.

 

Woodside station has gone, and, everywhere,

the steam and the smoke and the soot, of course,

but maybe the graffito, weathered,

is still there, a ghost. Socrates chose

to drink the hemlock rather than self-exile,

as his friends and followers urged. More dangerous

dead and chronicled, he must have guessed,

than forgotten on some sparse islet,

dribbling into his wine.

 

 

THE NETHER PORTAL

Fifty years ago the garden of what is now

our house was five times its present size –

a garden that had been a field, and a heath.

A builder turned an orchard, borders

and most of a lawn into three modern

terraced houses and eight lock-up garages.

Part of what remained of the lawn was a dump.

 

Occasionally odd things still turn up –

like bits clinker, rusted iron, and, today,

a small piece of coal, of anthracite,

its planes and angles glinting like lightning

in the blackest of skies as I hold it up

to show my ten year old granddaughter.

‘What’s this, do you think?’ ‘Obsidian?’ she says.

‘It’s coal,’ I say. She looks at the geometry

of its blackness with the wonder I would feel

if I were to see obsidian. Seeing

my face she helps me with my homework.

‘It’s black volcanic glass. And in Minecraft

the Nether Portal is made from it.’

 

Plato maintained that the structure of the world

was cuboid. According to the elder Pliny,

Obsidius, an explorer, discovered

the sable glass in Ethiopia,

and was impressed by its sharp rectangles.

Stone age peoples made it into arrow heads,

who maybe believed in that portal,

through which Persephone and Orpheus

separately, reluctantly, descended – each returning,

one with glory, one with remorse. And I think

of the others, unnumbered, getting the coal

this child of the future has marvelled at,

coal that has set fire and water at odds

to envelop the world, rendering it

all desert or ocean.

 

 

 

OCCAM’S RAZOR…

…a maxim named for a Franciscan friar,

William of Ockham, from the Surrey village –

and from London, Oxford, Avignon,

Munich – Pope’s enemy, Emperor’s friend,

dying just as the Black Death was scourging.

 

It is a metaphor, not logic chopping –

best summarised, perhaps, as ‘less is more’,

‘don’t over-egg the pudding’, even

‘fine words butter no parsnips’. He was

the radical philosopher of his age,

a nominalist – words are words, ideas

ideas, no more, no less. Plato, relinquo!

 

Avoiding an A3 rush hour traffic jam,

I drove through Ockham one rainy night,

watching the headlights follow the bendy turns

of the old field system and glisten

on the hedgerows and the oaks, and I thought

of the little boy, the brightest scholar

in the priest’s small school, being taken

for Mother Church’s future to London

in a jolting ox cart, his Latin

a passport through Europe.

 

 

 

THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY

‘Senator Boethius is the last of the Romans whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged as their countryman.’

Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon

 

Dante and Beatrice saw Boethius –

the sixth century consul, chamberlain,

intellectual and family man –

in Paradise: one of the twelve shining lights

in the sun’s heavenly firmament,

along with Solomon and Aquinas.

 

Imprisoned in a tower for alleged treason

and under sentence of execution,

he wrote De Consolatione

Philosophiae, a dialogue

between himself and Lady Philosophy,

reflecting – he in prose, she in poetry –

on wealth’s and fame’s transitory nature,

on virtue transcending fortune: almost

glib, smug if it had been written in freedom.

His paragon, Plato, would have inspired him,

and Socrates busy in prison.

Did he act it out in his loneliness?

 

His assassins – who killed him, according to

conflicting accounts, with axe, sword, club, garrotte –

did not record his last words. He was murdered

on orders of Theodoric, his erstwhile

friend, king of the Goths and Italy.

He was venerated as a catholic

martyr, allegedly walking headless

in death, and a catholic theologian,

his revered writing influencing

Augustine, for instance, as well as Dante,

masters and servants of allegory.

He was without any superstitions

or Christian beliefs, and zealous

for the public good so might have found such

hagiolatry amusing – or merely

a sign of their dark times.

 

 

 

ONLY ONE IN STEP

i

 

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is

somehow very ‘Thirties: lots of chaps in

the dark behind high walls; much shadow-play

with unidentifiable voices;

belated, blinding suddenness of light.

The decade’s putative worthies (who all,

by the way, seem to have been chaps) go forth

unknowingly in parallel: e.g.

Hitler in Berchtesgarten, Wittgenstein

(Adolf’s erstwhile peer from Linz) in Cambridge.

Did Wittgenstein walk with Blunt, Philby,

Burgess and Maclean as the fifth man?

Meanwhile, elsewhere, at Trinity College

A.E. Housman tutored Enoch Powell: two

classicist lads from the West Midlands – and

the land of lost and wistful laddishness.

 

 

ii

 

Our Enoch – the wife’s second cousin twice

removed – although he always acted the

philosopher-king, indeed believed it,

in Parliament, in uniform, in the

groves of academe – appeared to labour,

tormented, in the dark, poor soul. Always

a solitary, he was chained to the

metaphysics of empire, protocol

and tribe: from the ‘Rivers of blood’ to ‘No

Surrender!’, preferring voluntary

exile to certain public failure. Yet,

see how, the fluent theme has become a

continuo – ‘influx’, ‘deluge’, ‘flood’, how

his acolytes have grown, like dragon’s teeth,

loquacious prisoners in Powell’s teeming,

booming cave of phantasmagoria.[1]



[1] The poem has previously been published on this site and is one of the most visited.

 

 

 

ONLY ONE IN STEP

 

 

 

 

Plato's Allegory of the Cave

 

 

 

 

 

i

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is

somehow very ‘Thirties: lots of chaps in

the dark behind high walls; much shadow-play

with unidentifiable voices;

belated, blinding suddenness of light.

The decade’s putative worthies (who all,

by the way, seem to have been chaps) go forth

unknowingly in parallel: e.g.

Hitler in Berchtesgarten, Wittgenstein

(Adolf’s erstwhile peer from Linz) in Cambridge.

Did Wittgenstein walk with Blunt, Philby,

Burgess and Maclean as the fifth man?

Meanwhile, elsewhere at Trinity College

A.E. Housman tutored Enoch Powell: two

classicist lads from the West Midlands – and

the land of lost and wistful laddishness.

 

Our Enoch giving chase

ii

Our Enoch  – the wife’s second cousin twice

removed – although he always acted the

philosopher-king, indeed believed it,

in Parliament, in uniform, in the

groves of academe – appeared to labour,

tormented, in the dark, poor soul. Always

a solitary, he was chained to the

metaphysics of empire, protocol

and tribe: from the ‘Rivers of blood’ to ‘No

Surrender!’, preferring voluntary

exile to certain public failure. Yet,

see how, the fluent theme has become a

continuo – ‘influx’, ‘deluge’, ‘flood’, how

his acolytes have grown, like dragon’s teeth,

loquacious prisoners in Powell’s teeming,

booming cave of phantasmagoria.