My Symposium

            “Has anyone pointed out that this work is misogynistic?  It reads like a bunch of rich white guys at a spa justifying their attraction to young boys and their illicit sexual encounters.”  We were on our second day discussing Plato’s Symposium—a dialogue on the nature of love; and the best, most challenging speeches lay all before us.  Doug had missed the discussion on Monday and was crashing the party with his provocative remarks rather like the drunken Alcibiades does when he comes in at the end of Socrates’ speech to call him a liar.  Doug is a very smart, sixty-something gay man—teacher, lawyer, social worker, who has lived in New Zealand for much of his life.  He is auditing my class.  I respect him and even though I disagree with his sweeping dismissal of a work I love, a work that must be opened carefully to reveal its beauties, his comment touched my own secret trouble.

            Monday had been a struggle.  I couldn’t manufacture my usual enthusiasm for the work, and I plodded through the early speeches dragging the class with me, like a reluctant puppy.  Back in the safety of my office, I said to myself out loud, “oh, I miss S----.”  I had the strongest urge to call his number, to be Ruth again.  I yearned for the kinds of conversations that had felt so real.  I had unsettled dreams of him all that night, and the following day, on and off, I sucked on an unlit cigarette.  Yearning.  The sunny day rained yellow leaves.  The car thermometer read 72.  I walked in my favorite park, thinking obsessively about The Symposium.  I have to figure it out.  I have to take it back.  In my mind, the dialogue was inextricably related to my relationship with S-----, idealized by us both in Platonic and Miltonic terms as a “meet and happy conversation.”  Were those talks true or had I put aside my yearning for truth and the beautiful to function, not as an equal partner, but as his eromenos?  The eromenos is the beloved of Greek homosexual custom—a beautiful creature without needs of his own who exists to service the male lover.  Was I that flaccid-dicked being (a sex slave) or was I Socrates, who, in trying to teach, succumbed to seduction?  I understood that teaching this work was going to traumatize me all over again.  But obviously, I had questions that still needed answers.

            S----- introduced me to the work when he compared me to Socrates—ugly on the outside but when opened up … full of golden images.  He told me that the most beautiful young man in all of Athens was smitten with Socrates and even slept by his side all night, wrapping him up in his coat.  He told me these things, and I knew at once that he fancied himself the beautiful youth, who, for some reason, loved me—a nothing!—and I couldn’t help wanting him to wrap me up in his jacket.  Little did I know if would be a straightjacket!  Even before I had read the dialogue, I was at his mercy.  Driving fast on I-69 from his office, I stopped at Barnes and Noble, bought a copy of the dialogue and read it over the next few days.  S----- had hinted that it contained the secret of his feelings for me, so I read it initially to discover the key.  But there was so much more:  the music of Socrates’ arguments worked like a Siren song and I was reduced, like all the shipwrecked sailors, to white bones on a beach.  Can these bones live?  

            For those of you who do not know the story, I’ll set it up for you.  An elite group of men (dramatists, politicians, philosophers) meet and instead of drinking (because they are all hung over from the night before), they propose to take turns giving speeches in praise of the god, Eros.  There are three main speeches.  Aristophanes, the comic dramatist, tells a myth about early humans—spherical creatures—split in half by the gods, who are driven to search for their other half.  It’s the romantic idea of finding a soulmate, summed up in the pithy formulation that “love is the pursuit of wholeness.”  Socrates’ speech is an account of a series of conversations he had with a priestess who initiated him into the mysteries of love as creative practice:  begetting literal and metaphorical “children,” birthed through the back and forth synergy that occurs between participants in a dialogue.  Finally, Alcibiades (the up and coming general and politician)  arrives plastered, wearing crowns of violets.  He praises Socrates in a sequence of revelatory images and his drunken ramblings are construed as a love poem by big name philosophers like Martha Nussbaum.

            From the beginning, I loved Socrates for his submission to a female teacher, a priestess Diotima.  One of my students suggested that Diotima is his anima, a figure for an internal alterity with whom he converses.  She may be that, but she is also a figure for each and everyone of Socrates’ interlocutors.  Once having seen the Beautiful, we know how to look out for it everywhere.  What I especially loved and still love about his account of their tutoring sessions is the yearning for understanding (that’s why I keep coming to you, Diotima, because I want to understand), its reaching for a connection, its stress on being in an in-between state—between man and the gods, between ignorance and understanding, between self and Other who knows other things and knows them differently than I do.  Despite S-----’s objections to this speech on love, derived (as all of his opinions were) from other philosophers, I could not read it as an escape from the physical particulars, even though Diotima plainly says that we begin with physical beauty but that real love learns to see and value so much more.  Nor did Diotima’s speech seem overly schematic, despite its clear delineation of a process of loving likened to climbing a ladder rung by rung.  I read her explanations as highly metaphoric—a poem about the creative process:  we are all pregnant, we all long to be delivered, and epiphanies, like psychic orgasms, spread waves of joy that enable us to see our lives and the people in them for the beautiful beings that they are.  We see them because we have been seen by an Other with whom we have conceived and born an idea.  “Yes, but your golden hair.  Your beautiful letters.  Your musical soul.  Ruth, you are not like anyone else.”

            I tried to escape by going to the other side of the world.  Semey in northeast Kazakhstan.  Minus 30 every frosty winter’s day.  I taught all my classes around a space-heater.  In the tiny classroom where we met there was a set of English books—Everyman classics that included a volume of Plato.  No—I will not allow myself to read Plato here.  I am in Kazakhstan, and I must learn to look at this world.  I was rigid in my self-discipline, but still he followed me on all my morning walks along the frozen Irtysh with my fists balled up inside my gloves thrust deep into my pockets.  As the sun of March began to warm things ever so slightly, I promised myself that I would document the process of doing Romeo and Juliet with the students here.  I would not think about S.  But then a letter arrived that contained a Plato reference (to Aristophanes’ speech):    I read the letter over and over sitting in the courtyard of the Star Café.  I melted. 

            Yet for me it was always about the dialogue.  I hated going to S’s office, but I loved talking on the phone.  I felt like I was pregnant all the time and was begetting in the beautiful:  discourses about Plato, exegetical missives about Biblical subjects, a book manuscript about Shakespeare’s use of allusions to the Hebrew Bible.  I was blooming, producing abundant fruit.  How could the tree be a bad tree?  I kept trying to tell S that love had to move (Plato says the soul is in constant motion), it had to go somewhere.  Sometimes, he would throw me a bone to let me know he was listening:  “we are on a path,” but I knew it was a dead end because he would never leave his office.  But while I was striving to be a living proof that Socrates and Diotima were right about love—that eros is a begetting in the beautiful—I failed to notice that my beautiful interlocutor was the creation of my own overactive imagination.  In truth, S was ugly in the Homeric and Platonic sense.  I was the one who was thinking, talking, working, writing, loving, he was undressing me, pulling me apart, sticking his protrusions into every opening, and trying to convince me that this was wholeness.  I thought I was okay because I continued to produce, but I should have remembered what Socrates said while Alcibiades was putting the moves on him:  if you think you can trade bronze for the gold of true beauty, you are mistaken, Sir.

            In preparation to teach it, I worked on the dialogue alone.  I was very lonely, but I lived through the loneliness.  I understood that I had always been right about the beauty and value of Socrates’ talks with Diotima.  It occurred to me that what Plato does is appropriate the bonds of host-guest amity that were vital to Homeric culture.  Socrates needs Diotima just as Odysseus needs Athena.  Telemachus struck me as a case in point.  He was an infant when Odysseus went to war and is about twenty years old when the poem opens.  With no memory of his father and a house full of rapacious suitors constantly roasting meet, drinking wine, threatening his mother, Telemachus is depressed and stuck.  That is, until Athena appears to him in the guise of father-figures (Mentes and Mentor); and after only one conversation, he feels his soul begin to move, to sprout wings, and he is suddenly in between childhood and manhood.  As he faces men in their violence, at their ugliest, he defines maturity:  “now I am grown big and by listening and speaking to others can gain wisdom.”  In the face of a good and kind divinity, Telemachus gives birth to a new version of himself.  It had been impossible for him to beget that mature self in ugliness.  Appetite is ugly.  Eating up others’ resources and giving nothing in return is ugly.  S----- is now, in my eyes, the epitome of ugliness and I wonder what god was present that enabled me to produce all that fruit.   

            In addition to affirming my initial reading, I made progress coming to terms with Alcibiades.  I had been deluded by Nussbaum’s reading of Alicibades as a true lover of Socrates and a poet who gropes for images and associations to communicate the inside feel of the love experience.  S----- preached the necessity of being vulnerable and dependent on others; and he, following Nussbaum, dismissed Socratic independence as a detachment from the what makes life beautiful—the ways we can be wrecked and ruined by one another.  When I looked closely at Alicibiades again, I discovered that he is, indeed, in love.  His tears flow at Socrates’ words.  His soul is disturbed, “struck and bitten by arguments in philosophy that hold more fiercely than a serpent.”  He is ashamed before his beloved, but this shame comes from a very specific cause:  he doesn’t want to change, he doesn’t want to move or grow.  “He compels me to agree that though I am myself much in need, I neglect myself and attend to the affairs of Athens.”  Doesn’t love demand that we change?  Doesn’t it call out to our best selves to dedicated work and a journey into a far country?  Of course, it does.  But Aliciabiades doesn’t want to commit, and neither did S.  Both ran away.  Both attempted to use seduction to appropriate beauty in the most dishonest ways possible.  The Symposium (and Alcibiades) tells the truth about seduction:  it is about power, and it is an evasion of true beauty which can only emerge when a space is made and sustained between two cherubim who watch and wait, talk for hours, wrestle and struggle, and wait still longer for the visit of the divinity who will surely come.  It is ugly to play God.

            In the end, it was the class that helped me reclaim The Symposium for myself.  Doug’s comment, working like a lightning bolt that lights up heaven and earth, made me see in a flash the clear line between the philosophers and my abusive therapist.  I was jolted back to S’s room with leather chairs, the footstool piled high with books and papers, the couch where he played with me, the statue of a philosopher and the framed poster of Shakespeare—two posters, actually.  I felt myself drifting far away from my classroom.  Focus.  Quick.  I looked intently at faces—other faces speaking truths that I recognized.  Yes!  They think like I do!  Lauren offered her speech:  “I am more in love than I was when I married Mike seventeen years ago.  He even had his face ripped off in a motorcycle accident, and the love grew deeper.”  Ren offered her story to support the view of love that Diotima teaches Socrates—two students or two teachers or student and teacher.  Who can say which is which?  The roles are impossible to decipher, and that, too, is real.  “Alicibiades is not in love with Socrates,” Cody said definitively.  Cody is a philosophy major, a writer, and an artist.  His contributions are always on point.  “I agree that it is all about power.  There is no meaningful exchange.”  Cody also offered a beautiful reading of Socrates’ alleged detachment—going without proper clothing in icy weather, drinking excessively and not falling asleep, maintaining composure in battle, and drifting into private contemplation in the most surprising places.  “It isn’t detachment, it is freedom.  He knows what is important and he pursues it.  And what is important to him is very real.”  Plato thinks the particulars that Nussbaum and S value so highly are just shadows on the wall of the cave; what is real is more difficult but not impossible to see and feel in the synergy of the dialogue.  I touched something real in that class and felt, as a result, saved, blessed, affirmed, a recipient of amazing grace.  Sammie wanted to add something, “Socrates stands alone all night to think when he is with the army on a campaign probably because he couldn’t find a fit partner with whom to converse.  So … he had to work out his problem alone under the sky.”

            Alicibiades attempted rape.  Socrates, the true teacher, tried to redirect his advances.  Then the privileged young man went round the city in a fit of madness, breaking the noses and phalluses off all the statues of the messenger god Hermes—an erotic figure if ever there was one.  S had a shoe fetish, and was always impeccably dressed.  But Eros is ever poor and homeless and unshod since his mother is poverty.  The contrast is so plain.  How in the world did I miss it?  Socrates, a true student and follower of Eros, is famously unkempt and shoeless, but that’s of secondary importance.  What matters is that Socrates saw the Beautiful once, and, having seen it, wants to see it again and again as if life were a ferris wheel ride and the view from the top always, always delightful.  That is why he pursues his researches and conversations with such tireless dedication.  His path is also mine.  A class convenes.  Every time a student speaks, the possibility exists that the veil will part, the silenus open, and a divine vision will be revealed even for a moment.   

Postscript.  After a difficult week of wrestling with The Symposium and with my lingering love of S-----, I learned from my lawyer that he is closing his office.  “Thanks for letting me know,” I said into the phone, wishing still (as sick as it may seem) to talk to S-----.  I bundled up my load of guilt (big as a small child) and took it down to the river.  I expected to hike with it along the blue water under the crabapple trees and was pleasantly surprised when it just floated away.  I was also surprised at how easily I let it go.  A patch of color blew into my eye.  Orange.  Must have been a falling leaf, but I turned my head quickly and saw the wing of a monarch butterfly.  In love, the psyche grows wings.  I AM.  “Free at last!” I said to myself and wondered how I ever let him convince me that he was the Beautiful.