old pond
frog jumps in
plop
Basho
The Phaedrus is an exploration of the dynamics and dangers of controlled time that make themselves accessible to readers, writers, and lovers. In Sokrates’ view, a true logos has this in common with a real love affair, that it must be lived out in time. It is not the same backwards as forwards, it cannot be entered at any point, or frozen at its acme, or dismissed when fascination falters. A reader, like a bad lover, may feel he can zoom into his text at any point and pluck the fruit of its wisdom. A writer, like Lysias, may feel he can rearrange the limbs of the fiction on which he dotes with no regard for its life as an organism in time. So readers and writers dabble in the glamor of grammata without submitting themselves to wholesale erotic takeover or the change of self entailed in it. Like Odysseus bound to the mast of his ship, a reader may titillate himself with the siren song of knowledge and sail past intact. It is a kind of voyeurism, as we see when we watch Phaedrus seduced by the written words of Lysias. In Plato’s view, the Lysian text is as philosophic pornography when compared with the erotic logos of Sokrates. But Plato cannot demonstrate this merely by aligning Lysias and Sokrates as one dead text beside another. The demonstration requires something of a ruse if it is to be truly arresting.
So Plato floats logos upon logos; they neither converge nor cancel out. We have seen other writers contrive such stereoscopic images. For example, Sappho in her fragment 31 superimposes one level of desire upon another, floats the actual upon the possible, in such a way that our perception jumps from one to the other without losing sight of the difference between them. Or again, the novelist Longus floats an apple upon a tree plucked bare of fruit, defying logic and captivating Daphnis. Or consider Zeno who, in his famous paradoxes, suspends moving objects upon the impossibility of motion, so that we see Achilles running as fast as he can, going nowhere. These are writers who share a strategy; they purpose to re-create in you a certain action of the mind and heart—the action of reaching out toward a meaning not yet known. It is a reach that never quite arrives, bittersweet. Plato’s interplay of logoi in the Phaedrus imitates this reaching action. As Phaedrus reads what Lysias wrote, as Phaedrus listens to what Sokrates says, something begins to come into focus. You begin to understand what a logos is and what it is not and the difference between them. Eros is the difference. Like a face crossing a mirror at the back of the room, Eros moves. You reach. Eros is gone.
The Phaedrus is a written dialogue that ends by discrediting written dialogues. This fact does not cease to charm its readers. Indeed, it is the fundamental erotic feature of this erōtikos logos. Each time you read it, you are conducted to a place where something paradoxical happens: the knowledge of Eros that Sokrates and Phaedrus have been unfolding word by word through the written text simply steps into a blind point and vanishes, pulling the logos in after it. Their conversation about love (227a-57c) turns into a conversation about writing (257c-79c) and Eros is not seen or heard from again. This act of dialectical interception has, since antiquity, perplexed those who wish to say concisely what the dialogue is about. But there is nothing inappropriate here. If you reach into the Phaedrus to get hold of Eros, you will be eluded, necessarily. He never looks at you from the place from which you see him. Something moves in the space between. That is the most erotic thing about Eros.