The Valley Below

To fertile Phthia. //

There’s a Plato dialogue for every mood when you’re living through the dying days of a democracy. I revisited the Crito, which I blame on every person who has posted anything about “conservatism” on the internet since election results. It is a strange dialogue, it feels more surreal each time, after being away (and changing). Socrates' tone is jarring, like a dull thud that measures our powerlessness, and this stupid, intrusive thought that Crito hardly even tries, in a suspended, too-brief moment of waiting. For a ceremonial ship to arrive, between the sentencing and the carrying out of the execution. During which the prophetic dream hangs in the air,

“Socrates, on the third day you would come to fertile Phthia."

(Fertile Phthia is like the valley below, but for Achilles.)

I sometimes wonder if the oddness of Socrates' voice is because this is the closest the poet ever made it to the “original” flavor of Socrates. There is a historical heaviness, but this could also be the result, I imagine, of the poet’s grief. (Maybe written at about the right time.) And a mercilessness with which Socrates invokes for himself this knotted nest of aporia. He doesn’t come across as pure, so much as impatient, correct, resigned. Tired. He treats it like a summary of repetitions. He draws a very hard line, but at the same time, a weird mix of lines, that don’t gracefully fit together. He leaves for himself no other choice, while he leaves for us quite a few holes.

The laws are our parents and we owe them everything.

Or,

We shouldn’t do wrong to anybody, (or at all), no matter what wrong they do to us.

(Selamat purnama🌕)