“The Many are like spoilt children!” said Critias fiercely. “Pericles has given them far too much – full employment! Disabled workmen’s compensation! Pensions for widows and public sanatoriums. Nowadays you can’t even tell a slave from a freeman by the clothes they wear.”
“Sports festivals,” said High Anxiety, sighing, “religious festivals with drama and music. I’ve paid for a lot of that. Prominent men aren’t safe if they don’t make themselves popular.”
“Most social welfare is paid for out of the United Greek Defence Treasury – not from our pockets,” the Golden Mean pointed out. They brooded on that for a moment then High Anxiety said, “The refugee camp – have you heard the news from there?”
They had not. He told them that two days before some refugees had died of black putrescent swellings in the armpits and groin; Dr Archileos had attended them and had died that morning of the same illness.
“A plague,” said the Golden Mean slowly, “could compel us to negotiate peace with Sparta. I doubt if Pericles could survive that. He acts like a god but he’s not immortal.”
“The fates are tired of him,” said High Anxiety, “A sheep on his farm near Megera has given birth to a unicorn – a black ram with a single horn here –” (he touched the centre of his brow) “– instead of two. It was born blind in the early hours of the morning and died six hours later at the height of noon. You see what that means?”
The others smiled and shook their heads.
“It means Athens will be destroyed if it continues to be governed by one man. A well balanced state needs two leaders, one for The Many, another for The Few. Well, The Many have their Cleon. If you speak out for The Few, Theramines, you will get my vote.”
“And mine,” said Critias.
“You are more suited to that job,” the Golden Mean told High Anxiety, “since you read the omen that way. Has Heavenly Reason said anything about the unicorn?”
“Yes. He opened the skull and found the brain was distorted. Instead of two lobes like a walnut it had one that came to a point, like an egg. He said it was one of those freak births by which Nature sometimes produces new species. Most distortions are unhealthy so the brute dies, but when a new shape is useful to a beast it lives and gives birth to more with that shape. It’s useless arguing with Heavenly Reason of course. He may be absolutely right, scientifically speaking, but I believe Nature is governed by Fate so is full of warnings for us. The unicorn was born on Pericles’ farm so is obviously a warning to him.”
“What are you plotting, my fellow citizens?” asked Aristophanes, joining them.
“Do you think we’ll tell a popular political satirist that? Think again,” said the Golden Mean, smiling.
“Behold!” cried the dramatist, pointing to the couple at the wine table. “Our Darling is adding philosophy to his empire.” “I hope Socrates doesn’t suffer by it,” said Critias. “Nobody is better company – he’s amusing as well as wise.”
“Socrates suffer?” said the comedian chuckling, “He’s incapable of suffering. His demon protects him against attackers from every quarter of the compass.”
Socrates was saying, “So you feel able to advize the Athenian state?”
“Yes.”
“On shipbuilding? Or where to dig a new harbour?”
“Of course not. Shipwrights and surveyors know about those things. I would advize on the largest political matters – war and peace.”
“So you know the right times to go to war.”
“Yes.”
“And the right people to fight.”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean by ‘right’?”
“I mean – ” said Alcibiades, paused, then sat down, pressing a finger to his lower lip.
“That’s not a hard question,” said Socrates helpfully, “What reasons do we give when we go to war?”
“We say we’re wesisting a wicked thweat, or haven’t been paid what we’re owed.”
“So when you advize people to make war you’re talking about justice? A war is right when it is just?”
“Not...always. Though when it is not just we have to pwetend it is.”
“Then you might advize the Athenian people to fight an unjust war?”
“Yes,” said Alcibiades boldly, “Because I love my land and her laws and any action which incweases her safety or power will seem wight to me!”
“Well said. And if a friend meant to increase his safety or wealth by killing or robbing a neighbour, what would you say if he asked for advice on the right time to do it?”
“You know what I would say,” said Alcibiades groaning. “But one citizen is not an entire state. What is bad for the first can be good for the second.”
“Hum. Tell me, which people do you admire most: those who risk their lives fighting injustice or those who increase their power by unjust fighting?”
“You know what I would admire most. Usually. Under normal circumstances.”
“But there are political circumstances when you would urge the people you love most to do the thing you admire least?”
“Yes!” said Alcibiades desperately. “Yes, because it is customawy political behaviour.”
Socrates, who had been leaning tensely forward in pursuit of the argument, clapped a hand to his brow and staggered back as if from a stunning blow.
“By Zeus I never thought of that! You’re right, you know. You argue beautifully. You’ve really driven me into a corner, Alcibiades. I don’t think there’s an answer to that one.”
His hearer stared at him suspiciously. Socrates said in a very ordinary voice, “So you plan to be one of those customary politicians? The kind that do what most people would do in their position? But didn’t you start by saying you wanted to be great?”
Alcibiades rubbed the side of his face ruefully while Socrates watched him keenly, kindly. Aristophanes the comic playwright had been listening to them for some time. With a forefinger he prodded Socrates in the chest saying, “I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with S.”
They looked at him enquiringly. He appeared to be slightly drunk which was not the case but enabled him to talk more freely at parties. He said, “Sssseduction. You, Ssssocrates are trying to sssseduce our Darling.”
“I’m hoping to make a friend of him.”
“No, you’re fishing for another disciple. All this man’s friends are his disciples, Alcibiades. You must have seen them around the marketplace. There’s a fat drunkard who makes money by telling rich folk that the goal of life is happiness, and a thin man in rags who says he’s a realist and would rather be dead than happy. There’s Chaerephon, a scientific democrat who investigates the guts of beetles and wants total equality of income, and Critias, that mine-owner over there who says only the rich should be allowed to vote. There’s even a cobbler who acts as unpaid secretary and writes down their conversations! A very peculiar crew.”
“What do you teach them, Socwates?” asked Alcibiades.
“Nothing,” he said smiling, “Nothing but what I learned from my mother, Phaenarete, the midwife.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She wasn’t a prolific woman. With my father’s help she made only one human being – ” Socrates slapped his chest “– but she helped a lot of others into the light who would never have opened their eyes without her, and aborted some that weren’t wanted. Have you heard of my voice? My demon?”
“Who hasn’t?” said Aristophanes.
“It’s nothing special,” said Socrates, ignoring him, “Everybody has one and it’s the best, the truest bit of them, but a lot of folk can’t hear their inner voice because of loud ideas shoved at them by friends and experts, greedy cliques and governments. Good ideas are a gift from God. He doesn’t send me any so I try to rid my friends of ideas that don’t fit them. I want to hear your voice, Alcibiades, telling me the fine godly things you really believe. But before I hear that voice you’ll have heard it first: inside yourself.”
&n
bsp; “How do you rid folk of bad ideas?” said Aristophanes. “Do you use a flue-brush?”
“I use dialectics,” said Socrates, smiling at him.
Alcibiades stood up and told the comedian, “I’m going to a very different party from this one, but I want to see this ugly little wisest man again. May I, Socwates?”
“Please, yes.”
Alcibiades left. The comedian chuckled, helped himself to wine, said admiringly, “You really are a demon. I was trying to spoil your game but I helped you with it. I helped you with it!” “Have you money to spare, Aristophanes?”
The comedian produced a small leather bag, tossed it up and caught it overhand with a chinking sound.
“Can I have some?” said Socrates humbly. The comedian untied the mouth of the bag and held it out. Socrates removed four silver coins. His friend said, “Take more”.
“This is enough. A little at a time from a lot of different people stops them crossing the street to avoid me.”
“You’ll soon wish you had taken the whole purse because I am going to mock you in a play.”
“Why?”
“Because I am sick of clever buggers hanging about the market spouting smart ideas that leave ordinary, sensible people confused.”
“I am not a bugger Aristophanes and, as I’ve just said, I do my best to weed out what you call smart ideas.”
“Perhaps, but there are still too many clever buggers around and if I mocked the others they would sue me for libel. You won’t. Will you?”
“No.”
“Because your demon won’t let you!” cried the comedian, laughing.
“That’s right,” said Socrates sadly.
Depressed. I need a chapter describing a performance of The Clouds, but no matter how hard I study that play I cannot get the jokes. It caricatures Socrates as a sly meteorologist enriched by spreading fog through the minds of disciples. Aristophanes, as in all his plays, is satirising part of the democracy – in this case experts who taught fashionable young men the most modern ideas. He is surely attacking a very pernicious idea, like our recent one that Capitalism has abolished Socialism and brought world history to a satisfactory end. He is probably also mocking fashionable jargon, like our own dysfunctional instead of bad, vertically challenged for short, chronologically gifted for old, downsizing for dismissing a lot of workers, outsourcing for employing more poorly paid foreigners, spin doctor for writer of speeches that make lies seem truthful. In another fifty years such speech will sound meaningless along with comedy satirising it, not because folk will be talking more sensibly, but because the spin doctors will have invented a new truth-concealing jargon. And The Clouds was written two and a half thousand years ago! Yet I am sure Brecht or Ibsen COULD have made a funny, cutting, relevant modern version of it.
Remember, Tunnock, you are not a Glaswegian Brecht but a retired schoolmaster with literary ambitions inspired by Plato’s Symposium, which has Socrates joking about love with Aristophanes and Alcibiades, and rejecting all pretence to wisdom, preferring “right opinion”, which he describes as a referee between wisdom and ignorance. Scottish Enlightenment philosophers called it common sense. Socrates was therefore a sceptic like Diogenes, Voltaire, Hume, Nietzsche, not a system-builder like Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant. And he defended common sense with uncommon courage. After the Shining Sands sea battle a huge parliamentary majority voted for the mass execution of sea captains who had not reclaimed the bodies of the dead. Socrates was president that day and Xenophon writes that he declared the vote illegal under Athenian law, which said everyone accused of a crime should be tried for it separately. Socrates ruled that a parliamentary majority, no matter how great, must not break its own laws. Courage was needed for that. Alas, next day the lot made a coward president who legalized the mass executions. Thucydides writes that Socrates, after the majority voted to invade Sicily, went through the streets shouting that this would lead to disaster. It did. Like Aristophanes he was of the anti-war minority, but strongly opposed majority decisions because democracy dies without that opposition.
Yet Plato’s later dialogues have Socrates advocating government by a clique of celibate academics who employ military police to manage productive people, rewarding the chief policemen by letting them rape who they like – an adolescent fantasy. And Aristophanes dramatized him as a money-grubbing obscurantist homosexual who sits on a rooftop to seem nearer heaven until an enraged pupil burns his house down. Was the play a flop because Athenians disliked the jokes? Or because Socrates went to every performance and stood quietly in the audience, showing the difference between himself and his caricature on stage? Or is Nietzsche right in saying Socrates started the decay of noble Athenian thinking by making men doubt their manliest instincts?
I cannot solve these problems, nor can I condemn to obscurity chapters on which I have worked so hard. Having given a copy of them to the Mastermind I have posted another to Chapman,5 hoping Joy Hendry will print one or two.
Late afternoon saw from behind, outside Kirklee corner shop, young thing inadequately dressed for cold winter weather. Short bright purple hair twisted into spikes like sea urchin’s. Naked zone round waist tattooed with scorpion holding flower. Tight wee denim jacket above nude zone, broad belt of square metal studs under it, belt holding up denim skirt with frayed hem, not much wider than belt. Net stockings, high-heeled sandals, not plump anywhere. Repulsive. Dislike thin lost pathetic girls, however tartily dressed.
Entered shop, bought milk bread biscuits Sunday Herald then lingered in the warmth. Brooded over magazine display. Every cover seems designed by the same agency using the same women with perfect figures and complexions. They wear less on male pornography mags, more on female fashion and scandal mags, those on motorcycle and computer covers are irrelevant to contents, yet still catch the eye shouting sex sex sex sex sex. The big Byres Road newsagents Barrett’s has some unsexy covers, but The Economist, Scottish Field, House and Garden are hardly visible among shelves of glamorous repetitive women-baited cover photos – always photos, perhaps because art schools no longer teach drawing and painting. And nearly every cover lists an article with sex in the title: “Twenty Ways to Dress Sexy for the Under Fifties!”, “Are Beattie and Blanko Still Having it Off?”, “The Men Who Make Me Come, by Gwendoline”, “Sixty Celebs Tell You Their Dirtiest Bedroom Secrets”.
Had forgotten the girl outside shop when, leaving, saw her from in front. A fierce accusing scowl showed she was no helpless waif. It halted me, dazed and breathless. A moment passed before she noticed me, said, “Who do you think you’re staring at?”
I muttered, “A good looking lassie.”
“I cannae say the same about you.”
“Of course not, I’m an old man.”
“A fat wee ugly old man.”
“But harmless,” I pointed out.
“So what?”
I said she seemed to have waited a long time for someone, if they didn’t turn up she could come to my house nearby for a heat and something to eat and drink.
“That isnae all you want to give me,” she sneered. I said anything else she got was for her to say, and gave her a card with my address. She asked why my name was not on it and I said, “No name, no pack drill”.6
She looked across the street, then behind her, then sucked in her purple-stained under lip, then said, “Can I bring a friend?”
“Not if he’s a man,” I said firmly. She said bitterly, “Don’t worry, he won’t be.”
“See you later perhaps,” I said and skipped briskly home, my blood buzzing. At such times, thank God, a glorious excitement fills me that no memory of past disappointments can spoil.
Upstairs I turned on the gas fire, regretting that since the city went smokeless in 1969 I could not build in the grate a blazing heap of coals. I made a cosier space inside the room by pulling the sofa up to the hearth rug, placing the armchairs at each end and, on the coffee table between, the three tier cake-stand with plates of Abernethy biscuits, choc
olate biscuits and strawberry tartlets. On the sideboard I laid out glasses, brandy decanter, open bottle of red wine, then took precaution of locking other wines and spirits in bathroom geyser cupboard, leaving one bottle of red in kitchen. I put a ragtime roll on the pianola, sat down and waited. And waited. And waited. Then fell asleep.
I was wakened by doorbell shortly after pub closing time, jumped up, switched on pianola, rushed to open door. A troop of girls marched in, led by a bulky older one in a military khaki overcoat, my wee urchin-head coming last. They stood in the lobby looking around as if I was not there, but followed me upstairs after hanging coats on hall stand. I was not alarmed. There were only four and I always feel safe with women. Men sometimes punch each other for no good reason but petty theft is my worst experience of women. They wanted wine. I served it and sat sipping brandy, the commander of the troop beside me, the rest as far away as possible and whispering to each other while beasting into the biscuits. The commander said, “Have you nothing modern?”
I deduced she was speaking of the music and said, “That’s Scott Joplin, he’s modern.”
She said, “You don’t know what modern is. Have you no more booze?”
“Some,” I said and went down to the kitchen, she following. I was glad only one other bottle was visible. As I uncorked it she said, “What do you want Is for?”
“Is?” I said, puzzled. I know that young folk sending text messages on mobile phones shorten their names to one syllable, but was confused by such savage brevity.
“That pal of mine you picked up.”
“That is none of your business,” I said.
She said, “Things will go easier if you come clean. Do you want her to tie you up and spank you?”
“Tut tut,” I said, “No no.”
“Do you want to do it to her?”
“Certainly not.”
“So what do you want?”
I lost my temper and shouted that I wanted pleasant female company and whatever that naturally led to, which (I repeated) was none of her business! None at all! She frowned, nodded thoughtfully and said “You shouldnae be dealing with Is. You should deal with me.”
Old Men in Love Page 5