Is Missing
The static blooms of Adonis provide us with an answer to our question ‘What would the lover ask of time?’ As Plato formulates it, the answer brings us once again to the perception that lovers and readers have very similar desires. And the desire of each is something paradoxical. As lover you want ice to be ice and yet not melt in your hands. As reader you want knowledge to be knowledge and yet lie fixed on a written page. Such wants cannot help but pain you, at least in part, because they place you at a blind point from which you watch the object of your desire disappear into itself.
Plato is perfectly aware of that pain. He re-creates it over and over again in his dialectic, and its experience is intrinsic to the kind of understanding he wishes to communicate. In the Phaedrus we have observed this re-creation especially on the analogic level. Plato’s analogies are not flat diagrams in which one image (for example, gardens) is superimposed on another (the written word) in exact correspondence. An analogy is constructed in three-dimensional space. Its images float one upon the other without convergence: there is something in between, something paradoxical: Eros.
Eros is the unspoken ground of all that happens between Adonis and Aphrodite in myth, which is reenacted in the ritual of gardens. Eros is the ground where logos takes root between two people who are having a conversation, which may be reenacted on the written page. Rituals and reenactments take place outside the real time of people’s lives, in a suspended moment of control. We love such suspended time for the sake of its difference from ordinary time and real life. We love the activities that are placed within suspended time, like festivals and reading, for their essential unseriousness. This love worries Plato. A person seduced by it may think to replace real time with the kind of time appropriate only in rituals or in books. That would be a serious, damaging mistake, in Plato’s view. For, as there is no exact correspondence between rootless plants and a dying Adonis, so there is only a symbolic correspondence between written words and real logos. The person who mistakes symbol for reality is left with a dead garden, or with a love affair such as Lysias prescribes for the nonlover. Something is missing from such a love affair, as life is missing from the garden, something essential: Eros.