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All right, enough time has (once again) gone past and I think I should acknowledge that I'm experiencing something of a block against writing journal entries. Committing them to memory doesn't work, mailing them to myself doesn't work, filing them away doesn't work; nothing works but heaving to at the keyboard and writing them down.
(A squeal of wheels on pavement, shouted imprecations from the driver, followed by a dwindling rumble of traffic.)
"Are you a man?"
"What is man?"
"All men are mortal, I'm told."
"One may look long and hard to find a man who has lived forever."
"All men, I hear, must die."
"And women too, don't leave them out."
"Men seek women, it may be, in search of immortality."
"That's been said. It wasn't me who said it."
"You've come to a strange place to find it, beneath the tires of a stranger's vehicle. Is that what you seek?"
"You know as well as I do what it is I seek."
"I think I do. Just keep your eyes open, you may find it in a place you haven't looked yet."
"Yes yes, please, don't badger me. I was careless. I'm getting old. I don't want to see the time left to me wasted any more than you do."
"You say so. You're across the street now, there's no point in keeping people waiting."
"Right, right."
"You really ought to work on your opening remarks a little. Just review them, even."
"No, look, I've gone over this. Whose demon are you, anyway?"
"You know as well as I do who is whose demon."
"You say I do. Well, let's go."
And the old man, alone beside the street, set off to meet his accusers, and the jury of five hundred and one.
Today was an exercise in nostalgia for me, for today was Brigadoon day, when the islands of the past emerged from the mist, to fade again for another year. Not a hundred years, just one year, since I'm not talking about an Irish (Maybe not. Welsh? My education has been shockingly neglected on some matters.) village, but of the MUDs where I have seen dreams come to life, and met so many of the people I now think of as my friends.
When TinyMUD started, in August of 1989, its creators never imagined that it would trigger an avalanche of development leading to the hundreds, perhaps thousands of MUDs extant today. Yet it did, and the reaction was so extreme that despite lasting less than a year, the original TinyMUD, often referred to as "Classic", attained the stature of legend, the place where the world, the worlds, were created.
When the day came, finally, that growth exceeded capacity and TinyMUD crashed for the last time, it was almost universally mourned, despite having fallen upon hard times long before its demise. Too many people had impressed their dreams upon it to set it aside in their hearts.
As I've noted elsewhere, it is continually startling how the huge database of the past becomes the trifling reference document of the present. I have a copy of the TinyMUD database sitting on my own machine, taking up so little room I often forget I have it when it comes time to settle some argument about who did what or where or when. With the remorseless advance of technology, running the old TinyMUD database went from impossible, to difficult, to easy.
So it was not long before someone was able to bring TinyMUD back from limbo, using most of the resources of their machine at the time, just for a day or two. Later, other databases from times gone by would emerge for their day or two of waking life, before going back to sleep for a year.
And that's what Brigadoon, and nostalgia, mean to me.
I really wish I hadn't put this item first on my list, but at present the only hope I have of making any progress at all is to take them in order, so, onwards.
Ever since reading an online copy of Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and earlier, Larry Gonick's (one n, I have to remind myself) Cartoon History of the Universe, I have been somewhat curious about the life of Socrates, and what exactly he was trying to get at, and why someone who seemingly spent most of his life being an awful pest had such an influence on philosophical thought.
Part of it is undoubtedly due to the work of his literary executor, as it were, Plato. Even if we trust him implicitly, we're still getting Plato's version, his attempt at encapsulating a lifetime of no doubt damnably annoying argument into several hours' worth of dialogues.
My curiosity lay, as it usually does, fallow for a few years, until one day I got bored enough to fire up a search engine and read the apology of Socrates, a more or less complete account of what he said at his trial, usually accompanied by the events surrounding his death. That final scene bears reading by anyone interested in the craft of writing. Even in translation, the brevity, circumstantial detail, and unrelenting clarity of Plato's description shine through.
The apology itself, Socrates defense and attack on his accusers, conveys, to me anyway, the picture of an almost hopelessly eccentric and stubborn man, obsessed with a search for the truth, the final, incontrovertible truth which he could not cast into doubt through the adroitness of his own mind. That his incessant questioning of anything and everything led the city-state to consider him enough of a threat to put him to death is probably the most compelling demonstration ever made of the maxim, "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think they'll hate you." (I've tried to find the source for this, but a preliminary search didn't turn up anything but a bunch of quote files.)
But leaving all the intellectual and political drama aside, what struck me about Socrates' rambling defence, in which he argues with his accusers, tells the story of his life, and philosophizes on the nature of crime, punishment, death, and the afterlife, is how, well it is the foundation stone of a huge body of thought that came afterwards. An iconoclastic crank he may have been, he was not a stupid man by any means, nor was he affected by the fear of censure or punishment that so visibly distorts and cripples the arguments of the vast majority of cranks alive today. But my admiration for his position should be tempered by the fact that Plato may have worked long and hard to make him look like less of a kook than he may well have been.
Getting back ever so slowly to the point which I originally had in mind when I set about this, Socrates' arguments and comments describe a sort of programme for the development of Western thought: the never-ending search for a final understanding of everything, the compulsion always to doubt, to disbelieve, to turn over old ideas in search of something new, even the faith in technology; of all the people he baffled and irritated, of the artisans alone was Socrates willing to admit that they knew a thing or two that he didn't.
All of which is not to play up the man as the founder of western thought. He has, after all, been dead for a good long time; his ideas are still with us, but not by virtue of anything he did. Still, it's rather startling to read a speech from over two thousand years ago and find it still relevant to the present. I guess that's why they call them classics.
The other aspect of the apology that got to me was the window it opens on the lives and thoughts of the people of Athens. In descriptions in history texts, the rush of events sounds too exciting, sometimes, to be real, but Socrates's idiosyncratic and personal account is a reminder that it happened, and it happened to people just like us, and to those people, Antiquity was the Modern Age, when the past was being overturned and things were really happening.
Which brings me (as the remaining reader cringes and heads for the Dilbert Zone) to the fondness of Japanese animation for characters who redeem themselves by death, or more precisely by the manner of their deaths, and the beliefs it conveys concerning what comes afterwards.
What struck me about Socrates's extensive discussion of the nature of death is that he never once brings up the possibility of reincarnation (I'd better verify this or I'm going to look really stupid.) Death is either, as the summary puts it, "a sleep or a journey", and not a journey back to the beginning of life, but to some other place beyond the horizon of human knowledge.
Japanese thought, on the other hand, seems to be much more concerned with cycles, seeing life as a process without a first beginning or a final end. I had great difficulty with some of the stories I watched before I understood that circular causality was perfectly OK in Japanese drama. When the characters in Please Save My Earth begin having strange dreams of living on the Moon, keeping watch over Earth, their first thought is that they might be of future lives, not of past ones. The conclusion of the series is nearly incomprehensible without keeping in mind that, from the story's perspective, the past and the future can be the same place.
Or at least in Japanese fantasy, anyway, or that particular fantasy. For all I know PSME was a daring leap into new territory in its treatment of time, but given my (negligible) progress with the language, it'll be a while before I find out.
..you will wake up, feeling alert and refreshed. One, two, thrrrnznzzzz....
I'm not quite ready to hit the sack yet (Possibly due to consuming three mugs of coffee, a pot of tea and, just now, a litre of Coke. Possibly, mind you. No need to rush to judgement about these things.) but I'm going to wind this up for the moment with a very belated quote from Avram Davidson's Peregrine: Secundus, related to my take on Phil Greenspun's observations on the temptations of the one-truth world:
"Either I am right or you are right or you are right or you are right: this is obvious. And whosoever is right (although this is of course mere rhetoric, for of course I am right!) is he who holds the truth; and it is the most commonplace bit of logic in the world, which every child can understand and even he who runs may read, that Truth owes no tolerance to Error..."