The Orpheus Descent (51 page)

He turns onto his side and closes his eyes.

‘Do you know what makes dreams so convincing? It’s the fact that they look just like reality.’

The river whipped him down, corkscrewing round. ‘Things’ in the water bumped and scraped him: some were soft and clammy, others hard and sharp; some clung on to his skin and tried to drag him down, so that he had to fight to wrestle free; others knocked him into midstream, where the current was worst.

In the brief moments where he could look up, he glimpsed an endless tunnel lit by a sulphur-orange glow. Yellow-brick vaults curved overhead; sometimes, where they met, iron ladders like portcullises hung down to just above the water.

Would he be spat out? Or was he trapped in an infinite labyrinth, no centre and no exit?

He kicked until he was facing forwards. At least now he could see what was coming. One of the ladders rushed towards him: he grabbed for it, missed, tried the next one and touched it, but the current pulled his slimy hand away before he could get a grip.

What if that was it?
What if that was the one way to Lily, and he’d missed it? Panic made him lose momentum. He sank, gasped, and took a mouthful of sewage. He spat it out, heaving and gagging to get the taste out.

Another ladder was coming up. He spread his arms to slow himself, waited, then lunged. His fingers closed around the rung. The water sucked on his legs, trying to drag him off, but he held on.

His left hand joined his right and he hauled himself up. It got easier as he climbed further out of the water. At the top of the ladder he could see an iron manhole cover. He put his shoulder to it and – miracle – it lifted free. A circle of light opened over him.

He crawled through the manhole to see where he’d arrived.

Next morning, we scramble down a long, broken slope onto the desolate plain. The earth is dry and cracked, even near the river. The heat is terrible. Red sand scalds my feet, but Socrates doesn’t seem to notice. He hurries ahead, gliding over the desert, while I trudge along behind him as always.

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Of course.’

‘Was Euphemus right? Am I a coward?’

‘Not at all.’ The answer comes straight back, like a song you’ve been hoping to hear. ‘You wouldn’t have come here if you were a coward. You’d never have left Athens.’

‘
You
never left Athens.’

He ignores my teasing.

‘But Euphemus’ broader point was correct. Philosophy is about life. You shouldn’t have tried to abandon one to pursue the other.’

‘You said that anyone who really cares about justice, and wants to stay alive for any length of time, needs to keep out of public life.’

‘I think
you
said that, actually. In your pamphlet about the trial. I’m sure I wasn’t nearly so eloquent at the time. And be that as it may, you’re forgetting something else I said.
To fear death is to think oneself wise when one is not.
’

‘I wasn’t frightened of dying. I just didn’t see a way through.’

‘Earlier we agreed that the soul is life. Philosophy is the study of things which are good for the soul, so we should also study things that are good for life. Even public life.’

‘Now you’re playing with words.’

‘It’s true. Cities, states and nations can be good and well ordered, just as much as individuals. One proceeds from the other. If we can establish what makes good people, then good societies will follow.’

Red dust kicks up around my feet. ‘Are you saying I should have killed the boy Dionysius?’

‘Do you think you should?’

‘No.’

‘You probably did more good reading him Aesop’s fables. So much wisdom in those little stories.’

I don’t care about fables. ‘How am I supposed to win? You’re saying I shouldn’t remove myself from the arguments of daily life – but when I do try to get involved, you say I shouldn’t do the bad things that they require.’ This is Socrates at his sanctimonious worst: offering you choices and then demolishing each one in turn. I’d forgotten how infuriating he can be.

‘You’re assuming that if you enter the stage, you have to play the script they’ve written. Why not give them something better?’

‘What?’

‘What was the basis of the method I taught you?’

‘Eliminating hypotheses to reach the first principle.’ I scowl at him: it’s not helpful just now. ‘I feel as if I’ve destroyed all my assumptions, but not found anything to replace them. I’m stumbling around blind.’

‘You’re nearly there,’ he encourages me. ‘There are two ways of being blinded. Either coming out of light into darkness, or coming out of darkness into light.’

‘Which way am I going?’

‘The right way.’

‘I hope I get there soon.’

He sweeps out an arm at our surroundings. ‘We spend our lives in the hollows of the earth, clustered around its puddles like frogs around a swamp. It’s a dark, misty place: no one can see clearly. And because it’s all we know, we assume it’s all there is.’

‘Is there a point to this?’

‘There’s another world above – a true heaven and a true earth, beyond our drab perceptions. The philosopher’s job is to get to the upper limit of our cave – and then pop his head through to the world above.’

An objection’s lurking at the back of my mind, but with Socrates in full spate I can’t put my finger on it. He makes everything sound so straightforward.

‘Now this true world up on the surface is a wonderful place. Out in the sunlight, everything is dazzlingly bright. The plants, the trees, the fruits, even the rocks are infinitely clearer than what we see normally.’

I see the image, but I don’t understand the metaphor.

‘The philosopher can’t stay out in the paradise he’s found. He has to go back down.’

‘Why?’

‘Because having seen what’s above, once your eyes adjust to the cave again, you’ll see ten thousand times better than the people who live there. You’ll be able to help your fellow men distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong.’

‘Do they want the help? Athens didn’t appreciate yours.’

‘If you leave public affairs to men who are only in it for themselves, who think that politics can somehow redeem their moral failings, it’ll be a disaster. They’ll spend all their time fighting for office, and the ensuing conflicts will bring down the government and the state to boot.’

‘That sounds familiar.’

I’ve noticed the change of person – from
he
to
you
. With anyone else, it would just be a different turn of phrase. But Socrates has always been obsessively precise about saying what he means.

‘You have to go.’ He says it gently, and suddenly I realise that the metaphor is about me.

A pang of heartache, an echo of the beach at Sounion. ‘I’ve already lost you once. Can’t I stay?’

He shakes his head. There’s a certain amount of regret, but I think it’s on my behalf rather than his. ‘You have to go back.’

‘I don’t want to.’ Kicking like a child. ‘Go back to Athens, set myself up as an authority on …
what?
What am I supposed to tell them, when I don’t even know myself? Where do I begin?’

‘Everything you need is within you.’ He chuckles. ‘The trick – and, if I may say so, the pleasure – is finding it.’

We’ve reached the column of light. It emerges from a vast chasm in the ground, a mile wide at least. The river we’ve been following pours in over the edge and disappears from sight; on the opposite side, I can see the blue-grey river cascade over in a waterfall that goes on for ever. Lower down, other rivers spout out from holes in the cliff-face. The light makes rainbows in the spray.

A wind blows the spray onto my face. I lick my lips: it’s warm. Looking down into the chasm, I can see the cliffs are riddled with holes. They make windows into the caves behind, layer upon layer, like the galleries of a mine. I can see Sisyphus pushing his boulder up a slope to the rim of the chasm, only to have it roll back past him: if only he could get it over the edge, into the void, he’d be free of it forever. Through another window there’s Tantalus, up to his chin in water but unable to bend his neck to drink because it’s strapped tight to a post. I see murderers and tyrants being whipped with thorns by savage, fiery-looking men; a woman trampled face down in mud; another trying to fill a leaky bucket with water from a sieve. And in the background, on every level, there’s tousle-headed Orpheus, searching frantically for his wife but finding only images and ghosts.

I look up. Oscillating bands appear in the column of light, brighter and darker, so that the whole pillar looks like a rising staircase. Seen from the bottom, it makes a perfect triangle tapering towards a point in the impossibly distant heavens.

Socrates embraces me. Even here, his head only comes up to my chin. I cradle him like a child, though it seems the wrong way round.

‘Remember what you’ve learned.’

I step into the light.

He was back in Syntagma Square, but not as he’d left it. The battle that Ren had rescued him from, days or lifetimes ago, had continued in his absence. The wounded and dying lay everywhere, naked and blood-soaked. Every stone in the square had been torn up and thrown somewhere else; the surrounding buildings had been ripped open like envelopes. A canvas sky stretched blood red across the heavens, bulging in the middle where the smoke pressed against it.

He looked down, wondering if there was a way back. But the manhole cover had vanished.

Probably, you will not even find her.

There was no way back; there never had been. Searching for Lily was all he was.

So look for her.

A scream tore into him. He spun around and saw a woman staggering forward, being chased by a policeman. It was the demon from before, masked and suited, only now it wasn’t just his head on fire but his whole body. The flames didn’t seem to hurt him. He lashed the woman with a whip made of burning barbed wire. A crowd watched, gaunt faces weary with horrors, but no one moved to help. Before Jonah could try, the woman and the demon disappeared into the smoke.

Lily’s somewhere down here.

He set out, drifting wherever he saw knots of people, scanning the faces that emerged from the smoke. In the beginning, his heart skipped each time he saw one. Later – he didn’t know how long – he started to hate the people around him, their sad faces and feeble bodies, the way their bones pressed through their skin. He wanted them to go away, to leave him alone, because each figure in the distance meant he had to keep hoping.

Don’t stop
, he warned himself.
Don’t forget
.

In patches, the paving stones had been lifted to reveal sand underneath, as if the square stood on a desert that had started to break through. In one of these places, he came across a row of heads planted in the sand like carrots. Some of them managed to bend their necks forward enough to touch the ground with their tongues, trying to lick any drop of moisture off it. Blood streaked the sand where it had rubbed their tongues raw. Jonah wanted to rescue them, but they had no arms, and when he tried to pull one out by his ears the screams drove him away.

Was it better to find her? Or to be allowed to keep hoping she might not be there?

Missing her will become the best, most perfect expression of your desire.
He told himself it wasn’t true.

I step into the light, but I don’t fall. The light catches me and spins me up, weightless, right to the very pinnacle of the sky. From here, I can look straight down into a spindle that hangs in the column of light. Eight vast whorls are cupped around its axis like nested bowls, all different colours and widths, some turning one way and some the other. Their rims are flush, so that seen from above they look like eight concentric wheels spinning against each other.

All things that move make music: we just need the ears to hear it. Each of the rings makes a single note, so that turning against each other they play the most perfect song I’ve ever heard.

And as I listen to the music, bathed in that burning white light, the pores open in my soul and knowledge floods through.

These are the things that I understand.

I understand Time. That there is no ‘was’ or ‘will be’, only ‘is’. I understand Beauty. I understand that it doesn’t blossom or fade, not like a woman who’s beautiful in youth but not in old age, or like a boy who has beautiful eyes and a crooked nose. Beauty is the same from every angle, up close or far away, whatever you measure it against, as lasting as time. Everything on earth draws its beauty from the common pool of Beauty, but they can’t increase or diminish it because it’s infinite. You pour more in and it never overflows; you draw some out but the level never goes down.

The whorl spins faster, bending the circles and sounds and colours together. I understand that there is Good, like Beauty, and everything that is good in the world has a share of it. Heraclitus and the sophists were wrong. Pythagoras came closest, but he didn’t go far enough. His numbers don’t add up; perfect intervals create an imperfect scale. The numbers are just another level of metaphor which
describe
the world but don’t
explain
it. The skeleton of the universe but not its soul.

Our souls are life and life is not death and never can be. Everything we need to know is within us – we were born with it – but creation is chaos and as we pass through we forget it. If we live in the world of the senses, we become creatures of the senses. Fallible, partial and ephemeral. It’s only if we set our minds on Beauty and Truth and Goodness, not with the senses but through pure thought, that we rediscover the certain eternal knowledge of our souls.

And that is the path to wisdom.

He couldn’t tell how long he walked. There was no sun; the sky never changed. He’d lost sight of the buildings. But, gradually, he noticed a different orientation. All the people he passed were facing the same way, like trees leaning away from a wind. As if there were something at the centre of the world they had to avoid.

A clang at his feet. He looked down. A broken guitar lay on the ground: the neck had snapped off, and loose strings tangled in a bird’s nest around the bridge. He sat down cross-legged and picked it up. He stared at it, as if he’d forgotten what it was; he tried to jam the splintered halves together, like a child with a broken toy, but they fell apart in his hands.