What Happened After Socrates Died?
399 BC at Age 71
One
I don’t know all the details
Back to December
Still burning in the back
Of my mind
Most provided by Plato
Haven’t yet read Xenophon
The Apology of Socrates to the Jury
He’s somewhere in my library
Who apparently extends a different view
Aristotle—a student—picked up after him
I get Aristotle
The philosopher of the Understanding
Hegel would hate me for this!
Picked up after him
Plato that is
There are conspiracy theories
Relating to Alexander the Great
In Athens
He took the hemlock
But after that it’s murky
Great Arab scholars preserved his thought
As related by Plato
The overfull library
Wondrous chamber of thinking
Of Alexandria
Named after you-know-who
Preserved apparently
All of Plato
I have 400 books out of the university library
And another 3000
Of my own
Trying to figure out
Hegel and the American Revolution
And that’s not counting the Internet
Miracle of Miracles
By some miracle
The Greeks the basics of Christian thought
After going through the Roman wringer
Tom Holland
In Dominion
Made it into the Bible
Historian helps us appreciate
The value of the Christian symbol
For the Romans
The hills filled with rotten corpses
Hung on crosses
Disobedient and nasty
Toxic masculinity
Not even worth recording
Slaves esteemed less than dirt
Not even deserving a pauper’s grave
Suddenly made an icon
By the crazy Christians
Fed for decades to the lions
In the Colosseum
Who after a few centuries
In remission
Began to paint the agony
Of Christ
Starting with Caravaggio
And so it is
As Hegel says
That Reason
Paints
Feeling
Through the lens
Of the Understanding
Two
Let me explain
The Understanding
Is the triumph
Of the basics
Being Nothing Becoming
First degree black belt
In Karate
Is the triumph of the very basics
Kick punch chop
From a proper stance
Footwork and balance
Is all
Quantity Quality
Doctrine of Being
Understating being the doctrine
Understanding
Of Essence
The day I fell in love with you
Couldn’t figure out why
But it was sudden
And eternal
I saw your arms
Caryatids
On the Parthenon
And you
Looking at me
The next day
Or the day after
Alone
Shaken by the sink
All shook up
In the basement
By you
The syllogism
Starts with a statement
That is modified
By another
And comes out
The final verse
Which is usually
Most often
An anti-climax
The fixed formula
Of desire
I love you
(Death in Venice)
You could tell from the beginning
What was going to happen
In the theatre
So you focus on colour and nuance
And what was really being said
To Hamlet
When his mother married
His father’s killer
Or so he thought
To be
Or not to be
That is the question
Let me put it simply
Being and Nothing
Three
A tisket a tasket
A green and yellow basket
Wrote a letter to my love
And I don’t know where I lost it
Lost my wallet this afternoon
Pulled it out with my iPhone
Walking
On the way to the grocery store
Listening to
A forbidden podcast
Hours of terror
Kid appears on his bike hours later
At my door
Looked your address up
On the Internet
He said
Gave him
Twenty dollars
I had only
Forty
Four
Hegel says three’s enough
But whatever
Think of the five fingers
But Hegel corrects:
The three is palm
Where’s the thumb?
Two is Hand
And one is fingers
Or something like that
The truth is the whole
And the whole
Is always three
Writes Hegel’s dearest friend
Long after he is dead:
******
“I want to build
“And raise new
“The temples of Theseus and the stadiums
and where Perikles
“Lived
“But there’s no money
“Too much spent
“today I had a guest
“over and we sat together” (1)
*******
Hey, get the syllogism Baby??
That’s my favourite poem of Holderlin
Everybody’s favourite
Except for Taylor Swift
In Vienna
Friedrich Holderlin, Hymns and Fragments, trans and intro, Richard Sieburth, Princeton U Press, 1984