Life Sentences (33 page)

All right, then say hello to the possibility that we could induce the idea of a perfect triangle from our perceptions of innumerable imperfect copies. Alas, that is exactly what has happened, leading us to believe these material things are triangles in the first place. The recognition that X is an imperfect triangle requires prior knowledge of perfect ones, including all their perfect parts (straight lines, intersections at those mythological points, exacting angles), just as the judgment that the two sticks are unequal requires a previous grasp of the idea of equal length itself.

Plato will give the previous objection this much: if our minds have the knowledge of
triangle
in them before our eyes have ever encountered any imitations, seeing these copies may lead us to recall their more perfect counterpoints. This is the first appearance of the Doctrine of Recollection, which will undergo its own metamorphosis, emerging as a belief in innate ideas. Its most recent manifestation can be found in the work of Noam Chomsky. Since, in order to recollect our knowledge of oblongs, squares, and triangles, we have to have first forgotten them (else we could do Euclid in our cradle), the doctrine requires the initial appearance of the concept of
repression, too, later put to profitable use by Freud and on many a patients’ bill.

We have now completed stage one.

This knowledge of
triangle
which I have is not something personal and subjective because, first, the same definition is arrived at separately by different persons at different times; and secondly I don’t think we would want to admit that if I stopped thinking of
triangle
, or if I myself ceased to exist, that the idea of
triangle
would disappear or die with me. And if we all went the way of the hula hoop, the ideal circumference of its vanished hip swaying would still be pr
²
.

So this knowledge is entirely independent of all men’s minds, as all truths are. That is: there is the Idea or the Form Triangle; there is also the general conception that geometers have of
triangle
at any particular time, which may be equivalent to the Form Triangle, depending upon the state of their knowledge; and there is my notion of what a triangle is (my understanding of it), and finally there is the idea which I am presently examining in my consciousness, and this may include only part of what I know. In short: E = MC
²
was true before men existed at all; nor did it come to be the moment Einstein thought it or wrote his paper; nor did it wait to exist until its truth was admitted and its proposal gained currency.

This plane triangle, then, of which I have a degree of knowledge, is an objective, independent, nonmental, and universal Form. We may discover it, explore it, and understand it, just the way we discovered, explored, and now understand Iceland.

We can take any noun, so long as it is not a proper name, and sing the same song about it. No man, however many weights he lifts, can exemplify manhood completely. No woman, even as armless as the
Venus de Milo
or, like Helen, worth a war, can embody beauty utterly, and if we think of Form in the radical new Platonic way, and not as the sculptor, in terms of visual shape, the distance between what we would now call the connotation of a noun (its definition and accumulated meanings) and its denotation (things like ties, socks, soap, and even courage, justice, and love) grows wider than oceans, rather as wide as are different modes of Being.

These Forms are still too much like things, despite Plato’s realization (after some hesitations and confusion) that the Form for disreputable stuff and surly deeds (feces, for instance, or wickedness) does not have the property that it denotes, because the knowledge of evil is a good thing; knowledge of anything, the nature of mud, the kinds of cloud, types of thieves, is good. The Idea Long does not have to be long, or that of Triangle triangular. But the Idea of the Good is good nevertheless, Beauty beautiful, and the Goluptious, I suppose, goluptious.

We have seen the idea of Form travel from its territorial sense—a tribal boundary—to the narrower notion of a physical edge; it then became further reduced to an outline, like a silhouette or sketch. Plato transforms it by giving the concept a new ontology, removing most of its material characteristics, and treating it the way we tend to treat a universal. As rationalists, we shall henceforth understand that we have true knowledge to the degree we can express it mathematically, and see the world through the grammar or the structure of its modes of representation. Rational discourse will be more in touch with reality than the world is, for the world of Becoming, as Plato puts it so memorably in the
Timeaus
, is the qualitative expression of quantitative law. Through all these alterations, the idea of form remains central to the determination of the identity of things, whether it is the tribe, the kind, or the slowly evolving sense of self. With Aristotle, as we shall see, form is returned to objects first as structure, then as function; the world is not merely an imitation, but is a thing made real by its own essential nature. For both philosophers, it is a work of art.

If Greek theater had deep religious implications, as some think, and often functioned as a ritual would, then the actor on the stage, his features obscured by a mask and robe, might be thought to be a mouthpiece for the gods. If the play were significant enough, the words powerful and rich and wise, a moment could occur in his impersonation during which the divine spirit entered him; the soul of the actor who, a moment before, had been reciting the playwright’s words might, so to speak, stand aside, and his speech take on an imprimatur its actual author could not lay claim to—their metamorphosis would be obvious to every ear—for (in a switch no different from Zeus’s frequent changes of form to further an amorous prank or political ploy) these words would be severed from their source of utterance in the actor and from the hand of their author as well; they would participate in the divine; while the audience heard the speech of nature as they had in former times, when leaves whispered and torrents roared and the world, more than words, was alive.

Nothing has changed. When the text sings, the reader listens, and soon her soul sings too; she reenacts thought and passion’s passage, adopts Chaucer’s, Shakespeare’s, Milton’s tone; her head echoes with sounds no longer made by Henry James, who is but a portly poor old bachelor, after all, and she is not the she of household worry
either, or lawyer at her legal tomes, but these words are the words of Sophocles, then, of Oedipus just now blind, and the world is the world it once was when the world was alive.

Like most words,
mimesis
is a nest of meanings. Shadings fly from it like fledgling birds: imitation, representation, replication, impersonation, or portrayal do for Plato; nowadays we could add copy, counterfeit, dupe. Grammatically different forms of what is called “the mimesis group” designate the action of mimicry—or the actor, mime, or mockingbird that performs the tune—while others aim at either the subject of imitation or its result, or sometimes indicate the arena of representation itself: the agora, law courts, or the stage. Mimesis calls the theater home, some say; it is derived from the dance; it belongs to mockery and mime, not always silent, and is often concerned with events and situations in daily life; no, it is the creation of effigies—statues, scarecrows, voodoo dolls—it is the means by which we call upon the gods. But did these meanings of mimesis really compete, or is the competition to be found in the disputatious pages of contemporary scholars, who prefer one meaning (theirs) over others, much as if, in a mulligan stew, one conferred honor and dominance to six pearl onions?

For Plato and Aristotle, I think, the word is still a wardrobe, but it is stashed backstage, where the masks are kept and the chorus instructed. The actor becomes his role, we sometimes say; but what does the role become? I remember that Shakespeare says very little about Hamlet’s weight, nor does he give Iago thin lips and an evil nose, as Dickens would be sure to. How can I impersonate a creature whose visible form is unknown? Merely claim to be he or she? Zeus dons and doffs bodies the way we do clothes. Clouds are camels one minute, streaming hair the next. Some things, like Proteus, have no fixed form, so I could claim I was, while in my workaday togs, one of the sea’s moods. In many paintings Jesus is as blond and blue eyed as a Nazi.

If Socrates has a snub nose and thyroid eyes, his portrait should have the same painted nose put in the same painted place, and the
same swollen eyes painted as protruding—paint for point and point for paint over the whole head. But what good is a likeness
when it is the reality of the thing that should be captured
—should be, yet can’t be—not in another medium. Once, when the world was young and still alive as liquor, the soul itself might slide from fern or face into the leaves that covered Eve and Adam, or love pass from the lover’s adoration into the heart of the adored. But now, when the gods are called upon to come from their own play into ours, how could the transfer be effected?

A god enters, but speaks Sophocles anyway, having, as some say, no mind of his own. In the theater it is only the words that can achieve the change. The music, the moving limbs, the spectacle, from painted drop to gaudy robe and dancing lads, add their emphasis, their rhythm, their emotion to the speech, but what, when Apollo approaches … what will … what will the god say? And the gods will have the character the poets give them; the gods will wear whatever raiment can be sewn; the gods will do as they are told.… But a person whom the audience knows well, such as Socrates in Aristophanes’ satires, will have to have at least the demeanor Athenians are used to. Certainly this is true of Plato’s own challenge to the dramatists.
The Dialogues
are nothing less than the theater of reason where Plato’s Socrates plays the role of the real one. There is an irony in this that has not gone unnoticed … by Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, for instance, who write: “There is an element of contradiction in the fact that Plato criticizes art as mimesis in principle but at the same time works mimetically in producing dialogues in which artistic elements are present.”

In the early dialogues, Plato may be considered to be presenting Socrates to us in his full historical reality, in which case the philosopher’s mimetic skills are governed by historical concerns; whereas, in dialogues of the so-called middle period, Plato’s interests are more and more “artistic” and “fictional.” But I suspect that Socrates’ great speech that concludes the
Apology
is about as faithfully mimetic as Pericles’ Funeral Oration in the imaginative reenactment of Thucydides.
Nevertheless, Pericles must sound Periclean, and speak as the occasion demanded, just as Socrates must press his case for suicide in the
Crito
because so many are alive who know he did so.

But if the features of the person to be represented have to be created, the chances are they will replicate the characteristics chosen by the first imitator who undertook the task and did Buddha fat and Hamlet thin, Desdemona blond because Othello’s black, Jesus fair with a light beard and wavy hair, handsome as heaven—as if he’d been there; because the audience has attended these plays too, and knows what Apollo came arrayed in apart from light, and what suited the Furies and Clytemnestra’s moods. Although each author interprets the myths in his own way, what Electra says has to be in harmony with what Electra was in her last show, her previously recounted story, her rap sheet. Otherwise she’ll not be she, and fool nobody. The operatic custom that permits a fat Carmen to shake the flats when she dances her fandango will not travel any better than the local wine. The success you might have in making yourself similar to somebody else will depend upon the ignorance of the audience you intend to fool, and the success, in creating a tradition, of any previous proponents of your scam. Plato knows there are no gods, that the gods are merely Hesiod’s manner of speaking. How much of Homer did he honor as the truth, or were the poets liars in every rhyme and line?

I bring this unpleasantness up because it may help us to understand the relation appearance has to reality. If reality remains unknown, then Punch is Punch and Judy, Judy, both as real as the husbands and wives in Devon or Westphalia they might have been used to represent, or as present in the world as the warring forces of good and evil. Furthermore, bowing before a curtain of ignorance, any appearance may choose its cause and claim it. I can be said to resemble my uncle Fred only by those who know both of us. If no one knows, no one can gainsay it. If no one knows, no one will care.

Plato became convinced that Parmenides was too quick to dismiss this world of incessant change, too eager to move on (itself an
act of deception) from its illusions to the eternal unshakable plenum that Being really was. These fleeting appearances had to be saved, yet they could be accounted for only if they were explained; and they could be explained perfectly provided this world were indeed a play, much as Shakespeare and others would describe it. It could be saved if the mime it made were as successful as the speeches of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and the world were understood to participate in the Forms through its acts of so eloquently copying them, reality descending to touch our lives like the gods once inhabited the speech of Prometheus, perhaps, or Athena as she made her vows.

And doesn’t Plato say in the
Laws
, when the playwrights clamor to be allowed to ply their trade in his second-best state, that