The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (12 page)

The United States entered the first Gulf War at the end of the summer. During the late afternoons down in the Cave, the radio preachers were preempted by news reports, and we sat glum and silent, listening. Tom put up a big hand-lettered sign that said, “No Blood For Oil!” in the bookstore window next to Che and came back the next morning to find a brick in the Gandhi section and shattered window glass all over the front of the store.

When there weren't customers in the bookstore who needed help, Rosalita mostly sat curled up at the far end of the couch, reading the stock. Every now and then, something would occur to her, and she would look up from her book and wait for Tom to see her looking at him.

“Cariño mio, ¿por qué no tenemos las historias de Oriente Medio en español?”

“Ah, what a good idea! Is there an especially good one?”

“No lo sé.”

“I'll find out—will you help me find out?”

“Si, querida.”

And she would go back to her book.

So Tom ordered a dozen different books in Spanish on Middle Eastern politics and history, as well as a big compendium of Arabic love poetry that never made it out to the shelves.

“Do you and Tom ever talk about anything other than politics?” I asked Rosalita.

“Oh, yes!” she said, but she did not tell me what.

Hank was a Vietnam vet and began wearing an olive-drab jacket
with lots of insignia all over it, even in the heat of the day, to show his support for the new American war. Stinky had spent the Vietnam era getting stoned at home on account of working for eight and a half years on a Ph.D. from a school he found advertised in the back of
Rolling Stone,
but he nevertheless visited an army surplus store in Millboro and got himself a jacket even more festooned than Hank's. He also started looking sideways at Rafi and muttering things we could never quite catch.

“What's that you say there, Stinky?” Vera finally asked him.

Stinky looked startled for a second and then turned around on his barstool with his back toward Vera.

“Nothing to concern you,” he muttered. “Just cogitating to myself.”

“Because I thought maybe,” Vera said, moving back into Stinky's line of sight, “that you seem to have a problem with one of my bartenders.”

Stinky was picking at the label on his beer bottle and wouldn't meet Vera's eye. Even in the dim light, I could see a red flush starting on his neck and rising.

“Vera, how about when I have something to say, I will apprise you of that fact?”

“Look, Stinky, either say it or don't say it.”

Stinky darted a look at Hank, but Hank was very carefully drinking his beer.

“Why, Vera.” Here Stinky gave a quick, hollow laugh. “I mean, Rafi here, no offense”—darting his eyes over to Rafi—“he's a Moslem, right?”

“Coptic Christian, actually,” Rafi volunteered.

“Same difference,” Stinky said.

“Probably,” Rafi shrugged.

“I think you're getting yourselves beside the point here,” Stinky said with an exaggerated sigh.

“Well, tell us, Stinky,” Vera said. “Just what is your point?”

“The
point,
” Stinky said, “is that the founding fathers of this country did not come here all the way from Britain just to see the place overrun with a bunch of foreigners.” To Rafi: “No offense.”

“None taken,” Rafi said.

“Do you ever listen to yourself?” Vera asked him.

“Don't deny it, Vera. The very foundation of this nation is that this country is for Americans only. That is what we fought the American Revolution for.”

“And now Iraq is for Americans only, too?”

“Don't be purposefully obtuse. We are bringing American-style freedom to people who are basically, for all intents and purposes, barbarians. I mean, those people over there have no respect for life, no respect for the sovereign rights of others, no respect for basic human dignity and freedom and the Constitution of the United States. For all intents and purposes, they're animals. No offense.”

“None taken,” Rafi said.

“This war is to bring enlightenment values to people who are savages.”

“I thought it was for oil.”

“Good grief! We couldn't continue to have this great nation, this shining beacon of civilization, if we didn't utilize oil to run it, could we? You have got to think these things through!”

“I'm starting to get a headache,” Vera said.

“Now the issue at hand here,” Stinky continued, “is that the Moslem-persuasion people—no offense—should not be on American soil. They need to be back in their own country.”

“So they can be civilized into American values?”

“Yes! That's right! Finally you are starting to be elucidated by my point!”

“Stinky,” Vera said, “you are an idiot.”

“No offense,” Rafi said.

I laughed, and so did Vera. Hank had a mouthful of beer, and it squirted out his nose. Stinky turned bright red.

“I don't have to sit here and take this,” he said. “I don't have to be insulted by the likes of you. Stay ignorant—it makes no matter to me.” He got up from his barstool.

“And another thing—I'm not paying for that beer!” Stinky spat, and then hurried out and up the stairs.

The war had a momentum of its own now. It dominated the kitchen-table talk at Boystown. Tom got up several petitions and a pretty good-sized march down Juniper Street. Rafi got shouted at two different times by people who took exception to his skin color, and Jordan was taunted by a cherub-faced child in his preschool class. Orla and Lem hung an enormous American flag from the gutter on the front of their house, but Orla and I did not discuss the war, restricting our conversations as always to my horticultural ineptitude and loose morals.

I listened to the news reports, of course, and talked about them with everyone else and marched with Tom and wrote my congressman. But it still seemed so far away—I didn't see then that it could ever really touch me. Late at night in the Cave, Pancho still played Beethoven, and even later, Danny and I lay side by side in bed with the windows open and the night sounds lulling us to sleep.

The soul, Socrates says, is like a charioteer driving a chariot with two winged horses. One of the horses is good and pure and pulls
the chariot upward on strong wings until at last, from a place even above heaven, the charioteer has a perfect view of Justice, Knowledge, and Beauty. In this place above heaven, there are serene green pastures where the winged horse will be fed.

But the chariot has two horses, and while one is noble, pulling for the pastures above the sky, the other is fractious and ungovernable, a wild thing fighting against his brother, eager to go his own way and escape his harness. Rather than rising steadily toward heaven, the unruly horse wrestles the chariot into Chaos. The two horses of our soul struggle against each other so that the chariot's progress is uncertain and haphazard. Sometimes the pure horse briefly prevails and the charioteer glimpses the perfections of the realm above heaven. But the glimpse is always fleeting because the wild and unruly horse can never be fully conquered, and the struggle between the two is always renewed.

Socrates does not say so directly, but it seems that the unruly horse is the stronger of the two. Human souls do not inhabit, as a rule, the pastures of serenity. Instead, for the most part, our souls struggle and flail in the chaotic world below.

But some souls, though residing in the darkness that is mortal life, nevertheless remember the glimpse they have had of Justice, Knowledge, and Beauty. Even in the midst of earth-bound mortality, they are on the lookout again for the realm above eaven. These are the people who have visions, the people who have dreams.

Socrates says we call them “mad”—those whose souls have not forgotten the glimpse of a place beyond heaven, those who keep their eyes focused there, on the fields that other mortals can't see or have forgotten. They are called mad, but Socrates argues that instead they should be called “lovers.”

Love, he says, is the proper response to the sight of Justice,
Knowledge, and Beauty. Those who have seen beyond this world yearn to return to the place above heaven, and only in the pure and selfless devotion of the lover can we regain it. The purity of our Love suffuses our gaze, and the light of our yearning for heaven illuminates the things we see on earth. In our beloved, we see again the perfection of the realm above. The vision of the realm calls to our souls, rekindling our memories, overpowering us with longing to be once more in the green pastures of forever. Enthralled by our vision, we are helpless to look away.

Love and madness, Socrates says, are twin gifts of our soul. They are the price we pay for the memory of heaven. Our insatiable yearning is all we have left of paradise.

In the woods west of Millboro was a spring-fed pond surrounded by pine trees and quiet. It was probably on someone's private property, but I never knew whose. We called it “Lost Pond” and went there—sometimes just Danny and me alone and sometimes with other people, Rafi and Billy Joe or Jake—on deep moonlit nights when we weren't working or just before sunrise on nights when we were. Tom came with Rosalita once or twice, and by then we could tell that a baby was on the way.