Life Sentences (31 page)

Suppose Homer’s shepherd has nodded off while tending his flock, and the arm on which he has cradled his head has also fallen asleep. He wakes to find it unaccountably numb and unresponsive. It prickles as it rouses itself. Or he missteps while climbing about on the rocks, and puts his foot where he did not wish it to go, or he sneezes repeatedly, perhaps hiccups, suffers cramps and spasms, grows weary without reason, and, most particularly, dreams. These are just a few occasions in which his body may not seem to be his, but apparently has ideas of its own—is, in fact, its own boss. When Rainer Maria Rilke saw a man afflicted with Saint Vitus’ Dance jerking spasmodically on a Paris street, he wrote of it as if it were a case of limbs in revolt, a loss of the body’s essential commonwealth. The independence of the penis is notorious.

Homer’s shepherd would have less sense of revolt than this, since he would have no central self, no conception of a unified body, because it was “comprehended, not as a unit but as an aggregate,” as Bruno Snell suggests in
The Discovery of the Mind
(1984). His limbs would be his as his goats were his, often off on their own; it would be
his own legs that walked like Rodin’s
Walking Man
, all stride; and it would be two accommodating cheeks that blew into his pennywhistle air from lungs that wanted music. In this world, you know who you are because of the way you are greeted; it is the eyes of others, as they see you, that you see. Again, as Snell argues: “there was no one verb to refer to the function of sight as such, but … there were several verbs each designating a specific type of vision.” And these were defined in terms of facial attitudes—staring, gaping, peering, gawking, squinting—each representing how one looked when one looked.

Although whatever elements of nature the shepherd encountered would be aggregations much as himself, he was not personifying his world or peopling it with creatures—filling an otherwise empty cupboard—because, as Henri Frankfort insists in
Before Philosophy
(1949), “primitive man simply does not know an inanimate world …” His world is given to him already “redundant with life, and life has individuality, in man and beast and plant, and in every phenomenon which confronts man—the thunderclap, the sudden shadow, the eerie and unknown clearing in the wood, the stone which suddenly hurts him when he stumbles while on a hunting trip.”

Language was relatively holophrastic, and with different words for different unanalyzed activities, it offered no clue to the parts or interrelations of what was named, as if
gallop, canter
, or
trot
bore no more resemblance to one another than knitting, swimming, or a headache. Some aspects of reality were more torpid than others, but even a rock could be roused, and would resist when struck or moved. In Greece, particularly, dry riverbeds might leap to torrential life overnight, springs gush forth from stone, trees speak, animals plan, the heavenly bodies coast across the sky like ships bearing gods. Actually, they
were
ships bearing gods.

We are still inclined to kick the coffee table that has barked our shin, or think ourselves persecuted by a run of bad cards, or blame black cats for Halloween’s rain. We may observe that “spring is late this year,” or believe that good weather is paid for by bad. We tactfully
don’t blame God for sending a great wind to destroy our trailer; instead we thank Him for letting us escape with our lives, even though we are likely to feel “under a cloud,” cursed, and pursued by the Furies. Families, like the Kennedys, have fates—and to have a fate is never a good thing. Causes that I am used to will feel natural, and the appearance of their effects will be expected, as Hume has explained, purely out of habit—birds flock at evening because they always do—it is when they act otherwise that I take particular notice and perceive their behavior as an omen, because it is the untoward that signals the presence of the gods.

With only sun, moon, and stars to measure with, my sense of space and time is likely to be elastic, determined by expectation and awareness. The distance to Grandmother’s house, as we sleigh ride over the river and through the trees toward it, is so much longer than the route and runners we slide home on; the time it takes for this lecture to pass may seem painfully extended, but once it is over, and its audience is asking itself with puzzlement what was said, there will be so little to remember, it shall seem to have lasted no moments at all. The paradoxes of subjective time have been often remarked. Space has the same elasticity. Around us there is always an area that remains ours and must not be invaded. We shrink it for travel on the subway train, and expand it sometimes on an empty avenue so that someone’s stare, though it comes from across the street, feels intrusive. Whatever feels secure, welcoming, familiar, is home. So our one home may have many realizations. That Goldilocks has been there in our absence, though nothing is damaged or missing, is still felt as a violation. While there is but one origin of life, one paradise, one Armageddon, Day of Doom and Judgment, there are many couplings, gardens, battlefields, or pits of hell that fit the bill. In short, the same place can be in many places at once like a Holiday Inn, and occur in more than one time too, as New Year’s Eve does, if the ritual is right, the occasion propitious, and the time zone different.

Skills, traits, habits are properties that belong to people like hats,
so that a man can misplace his courage (“lose heart,” as we still say), or find that, during the night, his eloquence has been stolen from him as Ulysses’ was, or that he can’t hit the curveball anymore. What to us might be as purely phenomenal as shade or a river’s reflection, or utterly relational, such as the placement of a knife by a plate or a cup in its saucer, or as abstract as the Pythagorean theorem to the pre-Classical Greek, is as much a material thing as a shield or a bowl of soup. It is extremely difficult for us to envision it now, but the problem that presents itself to Socrates in the
Phaedo
, as he begins to examine those comforting arguments for the survival of the soul, is made more difficult by being the reasoning of a realist that has been contaminated by animistic dispositions, and still further confused by rationalist assumptions that are as daring as they are mistaken. A brief look at the passage might pay dividends, provided the market stays bullish.

We might be able to maintain that life continues even when death threatens it, if we can insist that living and dying are activities that form a single continuum—the living of one thing is the dying of another. This strategy is one of the first Socrates suggests as a remedy in the face of his own demise. The rationalist that is stirring within him recognizes that terms which act as significant contraries, such as
short/tall
and
hot/cold
or
living/dying
—their meanings being mutually dependent on each other—must be defined together. Now we call them co-relative terms. In addition, he assumes—what rationalists suppose with characterizing regularity—that linguistic connections mirror natural, non-linguistic ones, so that not just the knowledge of
good
and
evil
(to cite a notorious instance) are necessary to each other, but that good and evil themselves are Siamese twins. As an animist, Socrates proposes that these correlatives are causes of one another: only the living may die and those who die do so while alive, and do so only having brought about more life—“opposites come to be only from their opposites” is the preferred phrase. Being dead, in short, is a steady and active business. Similarly, the small comes from the large, the cold from the hot, and vice
versa, because without
up
where would
down
be? (An aside: for such things the positivist needs only his scales. It is either ten or twenty centigrade, and there is no value in using vague words like
hot
or
cold
when the precise and objective are at hand; so if the baby is eight and a half pounds, well within healthy limits, terms like
large
and
small
lose employment. Meanwhile, the rationalist replaces both felt warmth and measured temperature with the improved or impeded movement of molecules.)

Not only does Plato confuse things of no degree—like life and death—with things that have more degrees than a commencement—such as hot and cold, better and worse, living and dying—but he cannot, in the moment he has Socrates making the argument, understand how, by adding a small amount to another, you can make it larger, for the small should make something smaller as a bit of salt makes it saltier; nor does he grasp how a number like four can be larger than three yet smaller than five at the same time. If I put one bagel in my sack alongside another bagel, I have not made two bagels, for two cannot be made; these bagels were two all along, as if they were brother and sister, one formerly in Paris, the other in Peoria, now united in Toledo. This confusion will not last. Plato will get it right eventually, but his difficulties indicate how novel the notion of relation was, how tenuous the hold even the master’s mind had on abstract ideas.

The outstanding example of the materiality of thought among early Greeks is their treatment of numbers. They often counted by using pebbles (since bottle caps weren’t available) and formed them into geometrical patterns by placing them at the intersections of imaginary lines the way they are still displayed on the face of dice or on dominos. (Braille, I believe, is also animistic in just this way.) In such a scheme, two becomes an oblong, three a triangular number, four a square, five pyramidal (the first three-dimensional number), eight the cube, and ten (the sum of one, two, three, and four, and stacked in rows in just that way) turns out to be the sacred Pythagorean equilateral triangle, called the Tetractys of the Decad, by which
the cult swore its most binding oath: “By him that gave to our generation the tetractys, which contains the fount and root of eternal nature,” as G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven report in their book,
The Presocratic Philosophers
. These pebble patterns were not mere representations. They were the numbers themselves, and numbers were physical properties of things like roundness might be of pie. Aristotle observed that “the Pythagoreans, because they saw many attributes of numbers belonging to sensible bodies, supposed real things to be numbers—not separable numbers, however, but numbers of which real things consist.” They could be cut apart or divided, added to or subtracted, and so on. Temple columns stood in pebbled rows and spoke their patterns to the sky. Because they were things, numbers could be squared or cubed, and their roots similarly found at the feet of their forms. Other maneuvers time has forgotten. If you squared two by adding two pebbles, you could triangle two by adding one, or hang another in the space above four to make the pyramid called five. The triangle of three was six, and that of four the holy number ten. At parties you can astonish your guests by pyramiding the champagne flutes or doing triangular roots.

Numbers were also something new because, as Euclid wrote, “a number is an aggregate composed of units.” Each one of these units was named
one
. These ones were not aggregates, but indivisible as the soul is alleged to be in the
Phaedo
or atoms are for Democritus. The Greeks hated fractions with the passion of a schoolboy: one-sixteenth, for instance, would be understood as one among sixteen, like candies on a plate, and not, as a shaving from a stick or a chip from a block, a piece of a larger unit. To be one of sixteen instead of one-sixteenth is a redescription that would make any modern spin doctor proud.

Calculations were not initially inhibited by the materiality of this mathematics. Rather, proofs were concretely visible—demonstrable in a literal way. To square a number you pebbled it as a square—sixteen made a splendid formation—and you could see at a glance that four was its root or base. You could cube a number in the same
way. You just needed a lot more stones and some sticks to support them in an extra dimension. If you created a right triangle that had a horizontal base of three and a vertical of four, you might then form squares against each side—sixteen high and nine at bottom. The square that you would have to erect on the hypotenuse would always be the sum of the squares of the other two sides. See it. Believe it. Counting of this kind could conclude any argument.

Moreover, discoveries about numbers came easily and in droves. Since, as Kirk and Raven remark, “Greek thinkers were very slow to apprehend that anything could exist without spatial extension,” most of their advances had a strong geometrical component. Triangular numbers, it would turn out, were the sum of successive numbers, while square numbers were the sum of successive odds, and oblong numbers the sum of successive evens. Six was discovered to be the first “perfect”—that is, a number whose factors added up to its own height (1 + 2 + 3). Distant observers such as ourselves are able to see the intrusion of animistic impulses at every level of these mathematical investigations. The word
perfect
is already a clue. Numbers whose factors added up to the same number (such as two, three, and five, whose factor was one) were called
amicable
, while those whose factors amounted to more than themselves (twelve, for instance, 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 6) were
excessive
, and those that fell short (like nine, that possessed only one and three) were deemed
deficient
. Numerology was getting a foothold. Justice would be described as square and therefore equal to four.

Aristotle, whose remarks on the Pythagoreans are the basis of most of what we know about them, was aware that the number three had a beginning, a middle, and an end. But it can be seen so only if its triangularity is admitted. Three is the model for the first great aesthetic form as well: home, departure, return, or that of the sonata, or the rhyme scheme a-b-a, and that dialectic in which the fixing of an identity—hi!—is followed by the finding of difference—uh-oh!—before the discovery of similarity or resemblance—aha!—is reassuringly made. Of resemblance, more ahas later.