SOCRATES/PLATO

10. SOCRATES/PLATO:

‘You too - men of the jury - must not be apprehensive about death for you must regard one thing at least as certain - that no harm can come to a good man either in his life or after his death’ and if that was what I heard in the wind then I figured as much as OK to that and the barge I was watching was trailing swiftly through the Kill Van Kull – some bestial waterway separating Bayonne from Staten Island with a silence I’d not expected a silence almost lethargic in its toning and the undercurrent at least I was sure I’d have been hearing as it slapped at hulls whether that of the barge or of the tug alongside it but instead there was a dreary silence between things and the sun had risen high and bright above the nearby Bayonne Bridge and though sunny it was still the air was cold and I remembered how Winter again only reluctantly loosens its grip on things no matter what the calendar or the days may say or wish to say to whomever it was who’d listen BUT if silence is brave then sometimes MEN are braver or at least have to be to survive and I wondered about all of that as I watched out ahead - water traffic barges smokestacks and the bridge - I wondered of how everything here had gotten started and why and what a mess we'd all somehow over time made of it but I wondered where to fix blame and decided PERHAPS it wasn't just 'everyone' who was to blame for long before this there had been another world and another before that - reeds marshgrass oyster beds fishers natives who lived and dwelt here and who knew every rise and squeak of the land and how to live it and then another force which beckoned came in and stepped over all that had been before it and they laid down too their remnant of everything and these were builders and cutters and they built therefore and cut and they slayed whomever was in the way - any and all notwithstanding caste or place or color or reason - and that land had been filled with blood by blood and it was ruled over by the same logic and reason which somehow still rules today - and all that was cut was replaced by structure and value and work ALL new concepts onto a newer land and I remembered the photos I'd seen of exactly what had been here before an exact 120 years before - the vast mansion and later resort of the LaTourette family the huge house lording over the waterfront the schooners and pleasure boats and excursions and ferries which had frequented these grounds and the old mansion which stood for many many years through its many many designations it too was gone and yeas before (1940's) replaced with housing projects and dirty wharfs and an amusement park and car lots and everything else and like a soiled sediment thrown down another overlay of both time and purpose had stepped in and taken over and mankind's rulings too had changed and all assumptions and ideas and configurations were new and different and over time all that had changed again and then again and what was left was ONLY THE NOW and that was it so what is it that LIVES behind after death ? certainly if the MAN was good so his works too must have been ? but yet I wondered and I doubted all that too.-And then I just got sick and tired of everything else - the sports angle the ball players the rappers the geeks the business types who sport new facial hair and a profit the priests in long black cars with nowhere to go the prisoners with flaps on their taxpayer wallets the flim-flam soldiers of fortune being taken for a ride the monastery types riding side-saddle on the hoof the out-of-work waitresses pretending to see and the people who listen to them PRETENDING not to see and see-through shirts and basket skirts and little girls bending over at five PM to pick up a paper for daddy and then writing their stories so everyone reads and the maniac dousing the fires the homeowner losing his keys while cutting some grass that doesn't belong to him and the appraiser who stops by to appraise while he tells stories of rack and ruination the bikers the killers the tavern-owners fighting hard to stay clean the cop on the beat staying mean the hostess the pieman the lawyer and the cheat EVERY last one of them useless and stupid as anything else - I got sick and tired of it all together and decided then and there to retire to bedlam with everything I owned and that took five minutes and I'm back already building bonfires of constricted hay and the padding from the dowager's sofa : 'but lemme' in but lemme' in please please before Sparky comes home' : and if I cared to explain what I'm saying I'd say it but I don't so I'll forget about that one : and then I heard some guy going on 'and they cut the bad flesh from the open wound and that allowed them to sew it up and you know the cleaner the edges when you get stitched up the better the heal and the mend and if it's straight it'll all grow back together again' and I wasn't sure if that was bullshit or the Thomas Gospel truth and I really didn't care either but I wished whoever it was well and good healing too and I'd gotten my first serious stitches at seven and more at eleven and everything had healed up right well so I had NO dog in that race or whatever those political idiots say when they say it and you know the word 'idiot' in ancient Greece used to mean precisely 'one who did not take part in social affairs or community life' and nowadays it seems it's precisely the opposite wouldn't you say and just yesterday this guy said to me (we were talking about the Greeks and all their old ideas - beat that) he said 'Greece! a people who haven't had a new idea in 2000 years' and I suppose that was his way of summing up lost potential or for the least a certainly shut-down idea-generation since the Golden Age when ideas ran like water through the streets of that ancient land and I suppose it did make some sense but who knows (and who cares) now and like those old guys said 'no harm comes to a good man after his death' and yeah I guess all right to that I second that promotion or whatever advertising lingo covers all that today and if another person ever says 'it's Greek to me' I guess I'll just have to murder his ass and you know how today a large penis is all the rage ? well back in the day of Greece it was the opposite and small penises were seen as the ideal and the reason for that was that (I was being told this) 'they were far easier to slip into the ass' and maybe that was a joke but I never knew and by that token what the Hell Jesus was gay too - get this - out in the desert with 12 men all the time with nothing under their robes sleeping and hanging together and one of his favorite sayings (same guy was telling me this) was 'get thee BEHIND me Satan' which certainly proves the point doesn't it (lucky he didn't just say 'Stan' instead of 'Satan') and when you look at it anyway the only Christianity we know now is the Christianity which was taken over and rewritten and filtered through the Greeks anyway and Aramaic be damned (that was the original language of which all this Jesus stuff was really spoken) and the Greeks it was who extrapolated it all and digested it and put it into the form we have today anyway so what the Hell it was probably all toyed with and tinkered around with by a once-great but now PETERED-out culture that back then didn't any longer know what it was doing and had no energy to do it with anyway - SO - be careful with that religion stuff you never know where it's been and if Jesus was a guy than there could have been a sin and it wasn't really original because I'm sure it had been done before - if not by the Greeks than somebody.-So that's my line in the sand my NORAD my early-alert system and whatever else I leave behind I'll leave you some notes about Armageddon or the Apocalypse or whichever you'd like and if I pen them correctly you'll never understand a thing and you'll have an excuse to plead ignorance but if I miss the mark (as I usually do) you're in trouble deep in shit up to your neck and your proverbial balls are most certainly in the frying pan a'sizzle so take your choice my gain will be your loss and all that backwards bullshit folderol let the Devil take the hindmost (that's another gay biblical Greek reference as well and there's a million more of them too) peccatore peccatum stevedore stromboli and build a better mousetrap and even I'll but that.