mounted his horse, and rode into the chasm which closed behind him, neither hero nor gap ever to be seen again.
Iris is scared of the dark. She has dreams in the dark and she’s scared of the dark and of those dreams, who in the dark might arrive and tell her to sing. The carpet beneath her bed is a dark green and in the night looks black and deep.
One by one I drop the animals into the gap, but none of them is living, and the gap won’t close. I know the sacrifice isn’t right. But every time I step into the abyss my foot meets solid ground, and I walk out of the room, down the stairs, to the kitchen where the coffee has turned itself on, and where I spend an hour, before the family wakes, Iris in my own bed, reading Dio Cassius’s Roman History.
I guess I mean to say that the oracle is dark to me. The hole won’t let me in. The command is loud, but hard to obey.
The song must begin in ignorance. Nobody knows the song.
Socrates on the day he is to die running his hand through Phaedo’s golden hair.
How to imagine it so fully as to feel it. The boy’s hair in my hand; or, the man’s hand worrying though my hair. What do I want to feel.
He’s talking about the immortality of the soul.
He says that all his life he’s had a repeating dream. In it a voice speaks and tells him to make music. Thinking philosophy the best of all music, he spoke to men and listened to their answers, making of ignorance found a truer melody, one maybe only the gods could hear.
But now, in these days leading up to his death, that oblivion now only hours away, he wonders if he has obeyed the command given to him night after night. Has he made the right music? Has he sung the song?
Maybe all the words have ended up being silence. He doesn’t know. Maybe all the words fell into the ignorance they emerged from. Maybe I guess I don’t know isn’t a song.
And so, every day in his prison cell, he has composed poems about animals for children to hear, and hearing, to learn to sing along.
One poem is about running your hand through the fur of a sleeping lion.
One poem is about a lion feeling a hand worry through its mane.
Some Scholiasts believe these two poems are one and the same. Others claim they were never written.
Phaedo, who alone might know, never told.
“To Carthage then I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves,” writes Saint Augustine before he was a saint.
A strange and lovely phrase: there sang all around me in my ears.
A kind of omen, or so I’ve come to think it—a kind of description of an omen.
In Greek the word is ἡπατοσκοπία. It means inspecting the liver. What is most inner becomes most outer and then the future might be known. The blood flows through the body, whispering the secrets the liver cleanses it of, secrets that, like Augustine’s song heard in Carthage, come first from the air itself, molecules adhering to the blood cells coursing past the lungs, turning red the blood that circulates the rumor through the body entire. Some augur comes to cut the abdomen open and read there in the entrails what is to be read. I might call it the creation of the mind. It has to learn to see itself outside of itself. It can’t be kept a secret. It must spill out. Like a poem.
Of course, the augurs don’t perform this action on themselves. Not like poets do.
Maybe, more than teach us what to fear, they teach us how to do so. Maybe hope follows, or not. Nothing they warn of do they speak of plainly, those omens. They elicit the interpretation that in their obscurity they frustrate. In the silence we feel when we witness the omen, we learn something about quietness: that we cannot speak into the omen’s speaking. So seldom is it charged with peace, that quiet. Often we call it mystery, by which we mean helplessness. We want a teacher, but none exists—or the ones who call themselves teachers we don’t know how to wholly trust. Instead of a teacher we get an empty space. It floats in the head or above it. Fill me up, it says. But we don’t know how to fill it. Or it’s just a banner with a headline scrolling past on the nightly news. The Dow Jones Industrial Report. Or the Sphinx with a riddle made just for you.
Throughout their history the Romans took note of the omens that worried them. It begins at the beginning:
. . . landed near Laurentum, called also Troy, near the river Numicius, along with his son by Creusa—Ascanius or Ilus. There his followers ate their tables, which were of parsley or of the harder portions of bread loaves; for they had no real tables. Furthermore, a white sow leaped from his boat and running to the Alban mount, named after her, gave birth to a litter of thirty, which indicated that in the thirtieth year his children should get fuller possession of both land and sovereignty. Since he had heard of these portents beforehand from an oracle he ceased his wandering, sacrificed the sow, and prepared to found a city.
I guess some oracles predict omens, and if this happens to you, as it happened to Aeneas, then you’re always on the lookout lest, in missing the sign, Rome never gets founded.
Not that he knew.
Alba is the city he founds. It is the mother of Rome. Rome is founded by Romulus. His mother was a wolf.
Another, of Lucius Tarquinius:
“When Tullius had at length reached boyhood he went to sleep on a chair once in the daytime and a quantity of fire seemed to leap forth from his head. Tarquinius, seeing it, took a lively interest in the boy.”
And of Tarquin, Lucius’s son or grandson, whose tyranny ended the reign of kings in Rome:
Once the Sibyl came to Tarquin carrying many books “gifted with divine inspiration” and offering to sell them at a high price. When Tarquin refused she burned some of them and offered what remained at the same price. When he declined to purchase them again she burned more and offered what remained for the same price as before. Impressed by her audacity, he bought the few books that remained for the cost of what it would have been to buy them all in the first place. Though no one could understand the contents of the pages, many men came to read them to glimpse the truth of what they held. One man copied out some pages for his own use, and when this deed was found out, Tarquin thrust the man between “two hides sewn together and drowned, in order that neither earth nor water nor sun might be defiled by his death.” They killed the man who copied from the ominous books by making him into a book, binding him between covers. The death between those covers wouldn’t contaminate the world. Afterward, this punishment became standard for those who committed parricide. The copied word is the child of the original, τόκος to λόγος, a token of the first power, and it steals the force that doesn’t belong to it. Just as a child does when he kills his own
