The Orpheus Descent (53 page)

‘This was the right-hand path,’ Jonah realised. ‘They both end up in the same place.’

They followed the circle of torchlight on down the passage. Down to the black pool watched over by the goddess, then up. The noise was so constant now that Jonah barely heard it.

The torch began to fade. Jonah tapped it, then realised it was light from ahead that made it seem dim. They were almost at the entrance. He smelled smoke.

He didn’t need the torch now. He pulled it off his head and dropped it. He stood under the entrance, a square window into the world, and looked up. A red sky churned above him, just like the sky above Syntagma Square.

What world is this?
What would he find if he went up there? He clung on to Lily, terrified he’d lose her.

‘Whatever’s up there,’ he told her, ‘I’ll never let you go.’

She managed a tired smile. ‘Neither will I.’

He cupped his hands and made a stirrup for her. She stepped on and he lifted her, teetering, towards the light. Even then, she was too weak to pull herself through the hole. He had to push her through, sending her sprawling out onto the ground. He pulled himself up after her.

It looked like the old world he remembered, after all. The bleached-white stones of the excavated temple, the basalt trench walls. Lily had already started climbing the metal ladder out of the trench. He followed her up, so fast he almost knocked her over when he reached the top.

She’d stopped, staring back up the mountain and shielding her eyes against the light.

A wall of burning rock swept towards them.

I sat down on the mountain with my head in my hands. I felt as though a lightning bolt had split open my head, burning out my skull. Tears fell from my sightless eyes.

‘I can’t see a thing.’

‘You will,’ Diotima said.

‘Can’t I go back into the cave?’ Suddenly I longed for the comfort of the darkness, to slip back into the dream and hear that eternal music again. Through the ringing in my ears, I thought I could still catch a faint echo of that fundamental note that incorporates all harmonies.

You can’t stay here.

The earth shook under me. I realised the rock I was sitting on had become hot, and the noise in the distance wasn’t the music of the universe, but an angry bellow like a wounded giant.

‘What’s that?’

‘The volcano,’ Diotima said calmly. ‘It’s erupting.’

‘Are we going to die?’

‘If we stay.’

Even then, I might have stayed – if dying meant I could go back to my dream. Then, through the noise and the music and the ringing in my ears, I heard a voice. Not Socrates or Diotima, but – of all people – Euphemus.

While you philosophers sit on your mountaintops drawing triangles, we’re down in the law courts and the Assembly wrestling with the problems of real life.

I found Diotima’s hand and let her lead me down.

Lava flowed down the mountain. In daylight, it didn’t look like much: the consistency of mud and the colour of rock, with just an orange rim at the edge giving away the heat inside. In fact, a scientist could have told you, it was emitting plenty of light, but mostly ultraviolet, invisible to the human eye. The pyrotechnics would come with nightfall.

It moved slowly, a rocky surf rolling over itself, filling in every cave and crevice in its way. It reached the two conical hills and funnelled between them, always taking the path of least resistance. A tree toppled over and burst into flame. A tent turned to ash; a temple collapsed. A petrol tank exploded and blew a fountain of molten lava out of the stream. Through the smoke, through time, you could see shadowy men and women running ahead of the flow: a tousle-haired Orpheus and his wife hobbling on his shoulder; a broad-shouldered wrestler tripping like an old man; a fleet-footed goddess leading them down.

We live our lives between the mountains and the sea, between adamant truth and the endless changing of the tides. We play in the foothills, but we rarely risk the climb. The mountains are too massive, too permanent to contemplate.

But even mountains change sometimes. Stone melts, and the mountains run like water, fired by the heat of a new world coming into being.

That was what happened on my first visit to Sicily, and the events I was part of. Afterwards, I came home.

Plato
, Letter VII

Imagine our situation something like this.

There’s a cave. There are men inside it, collared and chained so that they can’t move, can’t even turn their heads. There’s a fire behind them – which they can’t see – and puppets dancing in front of the fire. All the prisoners see is the shadows thrown on the cave wall.

They’ve been in that position their whole lives. They think the shadows are reality. How could they know any different?

But suppose one of them breaks his collar and escapes. Suppose he stands up and turns around and walks towards the fire. He’ll be dazzled. He’ll see the puppets and he won’t know what they are; he’ll assume they’re an illusion, because the shadow-world of his reality can’t possibly explain them. He’ll shut his eyes and run back to his seat, lock the collar back around his neck and never look back again.

But if there are guards there to take him by the arms, to drag him up the steep mouth of the cave and cast him out into the sunlight – what then? He’ll be blinded. He’ll hurt so much he’ll think the guards have pressed his eyeballs into hot coals.

But, slowly and painfully, his eyes will start to adjust. He’ll begin by peeking at the shadows on the ground, which at least look familiar, though they’re a thousand times sharper and more vivid than anything he’s seen in the cave. He’ll move on to watery reflections, then the objects themselves – rocks, trees, animals. They’ll appear so beautiful and so real that he won’t believe he’s spent his entire life not knowing about them.

Finally, he’ll dare to look up. First at the stars, then at the moon, and finally – last of all – at the sun itself, just as it is.

And he’ll know the truth.

The world looked different at the end of the summer. The wheat had been harvested. Some of the fields were white with ash where they’d burned the stubble; in others, gangs of labourers turned the soil, ready for the new seed. Persephone had begun her journey underground: I was on my way back, too.

I sat by the roadside, on the slope of the causeway, looking out over the swamp. The still water reflected the sky; beneath the surface, the drowned city settled deeper into its grave. On the breeze, I heard someone picking out a tune on a lyre.

I turned my head away, trying to deflect the wind and make the sound go away. I could hardly bear to listen to music any more. After the song I’d heard in the cave, everything else sounded like squawling babies.

‘What are you thinking?’ asked Diotima, sitting on the bank beside me.

‘The same as always.’

We’d come down from the mountain a month ago. The moment I was sure we were clear of the volcano and Dionysius’ men, I collapsed. All I had from the journey after that were dim, watery images: a cart, a city, a quick ship and then the large house in Thurii. I stayed indoors with the caged bird, too weak to go out and too frightened of seeing my step-brother. All I could think about was the cave. Awake, I played it over and over like an actor learning his lines; asleep, I dreamed it so often I no longer knew if I was awake or not. I felt the same way I did when Socrates died. The guests had gone, the lamps were out, and I was left alone in the empty room. I
was
the empty room.

The pink sky softened Diotima’s skin; her dress had slipped down, leaving one shoulder bare. I wanted to kiss it, but I didn’t dare. Since Etna, she’d only touched me to nurse me. She found ways of avoiding me: one night, when I couldn’t stand it any more and went to her room, she wasn’t there. The intimacy of Syracuse had vanished.

That was something I dreamed about, too.

‘I was thinking about something Socrates told me. He said a philosopher’s job is to go to the limit of this sensory world and then break through to the world beyond.’

Diotima nodded.

‘But when I stayed with Archytas, he set me a riddle. A man goes to the edge of the universe and tries to put his arm through. If he does it, then there’s space beyond and so he’s not really at the edge; and if he can’t, then there’s something beyond blocking his way, so he can’t have reached the very limit either.’

‘It’s a paradox.’

‘Doesn’t it negate what Socrates said? Is it possible ever to get beyond this world?’

She shrugged. ‘Do you know why paradoxes work? Because reason can only take you so far before it ties itself in knots.’

Out in the marsh, a crane called, a lament that echoed over the water. I looked up, and caught the setting sun dead ahead. I winced. Even now, my eyes wept if I stayed out too long. By mid-afternoon each day, a familiar throbbing started up in my skull and lasted until I went to bed.

I burrowed my fingers into the wet ground, feeling the secrets that only worms know.

‘Will I ever be able to go back to the cave?’

‘Not that way. Not in this lifetime.’

‘I don’t know if I can bear that.’

‘It’s better like this,’ she told me. ‘The cave’s a dangerous place, even to the initiated. You remember Timaeus?’

I did – the filthy, gibbering madman on the porch of the temple at Locris. Even with everything else I’d seen, it would be a long time before I forgot his hollow, scorched-out eyes.

‘He found the cave, too; he spent two years down there. When he finally came out, the world was so bright he couldn’t bear it. He burned out his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see.’

A sigh – or perhaps it was just the wind on the water. ‘There’s only so much reality we can stand.’

‘What about Agathon?’ I said. ‘Did he go into the cave?’

‘I tried to warn him, but he wouldn’t listen.’

‘So why wouldn’t you tell me?’

‘To protect you. If Dionysius thought you knew …’

I fingered the bulge under my tunic, where the necklace hung. ‘The things I saw – were they real?’

‘They were images.’

‘They felt more real than anything in this world.’

The longing told in my voice. Diotima gave me a stern look. ‘The cave is a window. You can see in, but you can’t get through. You have to find another way.’

‘Where?’

‘
How
,’ she corrected me.

‘How?’

All I got in reply was an impatient look that said I knew the answer already.

Socrates: What was the basis of the method I taught you?

Me: Eliminating hypotheses to reach the first principle.

But what then? In the cave, I’d gone right down to the very foundation of the universe. Where else was there to go?

There are two ways
,
says Parmenides
…

The sophists use relentless questioning to break people down and confuse them. In a way, Socrates was guilty of the same thing, only on a more fundamental level. In Heraclitus’ ever-shifting world, nothing stands up to scrutiny. Every time you think you’ve reached the bottom, it turns into a trap door that drops you further down.

But now I know there’s a bottom. And a top. I saw the column of light rising towards the heavens, the spirals inside making the rungs of a giant ladder. It would be hard, painstaking work, but you could climb that ladder. One step at a time, all the way to the summit. And when you got there, the view would be all the more breathtaking for the effort.

But I couldn’t do it alone. A conversation needs a partner. I reached for Diotima’s hand.

‘Come back to Athens with me.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Of course you can.’

‘For what? To become your wife, locked in the women’s quarters tending my weaving and my children? Is that how you see me?’

‘We could live together as equals. Like Pericles and Aspasia.’

‘The gossip would kill us.’

‘Then I’ll stay here.’ It had only just come into my mind, but I meant it with my whole being. ‘I love you.’

A long, soft silence. She let it stretch over me, settling on my hopes until it smothered them.

‘You have to go back.’

‘I love you,’ I repeated, as if it was an argument.

She smiled her sphinx smile. ‘You’ve forgotten what I told you. Human love is only the first step on the way to understanding. You’re beyond that now.’

‘I don’t want to be.’

‘What’s the true object of love?’

‘Immortality,’ I repeated wearily.

‘For most people, love’s the only way they can taste the immortality of the soul. But you’ve seen further. You won’t be satisfied – and you shouldn’t be.’

‘I want to be with you.’

‘It’s impossible.’

Maybe she was right – but I hated her for it. I stood up suddenly and pulled off the locket. I wanted to be rid of it forever, and the golden scroll wrapped inside.

Diotima held out her hand, but I wouldn’t give it to her. I held the chain and whirled it in a circle. It hummed in the air.

‘If you lose that, someone will find it,’ she warned me, though she didn’t move to stop me. As if she’d already seen everything that would happen. As if she knew that late one night, mad with memories, I’d taken a needle and added my own text on the blank flap at the top of the golden canvas. So not everything I’d endured would be forgotten.

Where hundred-headed Typhos shakes open the earth, I went down into the bosom of the goddess.
Next to it, I’d drawn the diagram from Timaeus’ book, the two triangles linked by an arc.

I let go the chain. The locket sailed through the evening air and fell far out in the swamp. It barely made a ripple in the sky’s reflection.

The S
OUTH
P
ECKHAM
C
HURCH OF THE
R
EDEEMER
van reached the end of its journey at three o’clock on a warm September afternoon. Another fifteen hundred miles had gone on its clock, though as no one knew how many times it had ticked back round to zero, that didn’t count for much.