Getting Where You Want to Go

Mozart's birthday approaches, so I'm in full on personal funk mode; it doesn't help that I just spent a ton of cash on a veritable mound of 78's and have nothing really to play them on. I had to settle for humming "Collegiate, collegiate, yes we are collegiate" while holding the record in my hand. It didn't help.

A couple of weeks ago, I just barely missed the bus. Normally, this wouldn't be much of an event: I'd wander into the basement of the Union (cuz it's too fucking cold to be standing outside for a half hour) and pick at the crusty necrotic skin on the tip of my slowing healing finger as I sit gazing at the legions of sweaties not studying a god damn thing. But I got it in my mind to walk home. Mind you, this is not a decision to be made lightly, as I live more than a half hours walk from campus. I'd get back to my apartment just as the next bus would be pulling up nearby.

the bus stop

it has escaped me that I must walk
several blocks in the wrong direction
in order to get where I want to go

I was trying to explain to my students the weird circular logic Plato employs in the Symposium to make the simple point that to a certain extent eros is philia. They couldn't fathom why he'd need to pile hearsay upon hearsay upon hearsay just to say that A is B. Well, when A and B are generally thought to be opposed, thus more A and Z, you've gotta do a bit of leg work in order to equate one with the other. You've gotta walk people through step by step, so that when you realize that you're at Z, it seems perfectly natural that you got there. The rhetorical landscape changes ever so slowly that you hardly realize you've gone anywhere at all. Of course, once you wake up from your sycophantic stupor (yes, Socrates - of course, Socrates - sure is, Socrates), you might realize that everything you've been fed is a load of crap.

It's amazing how by merely changing the mode of transportation, you enter an altered state of consciousness. You begin to notice things, generally little things, that in speeding past to your destination, you'd never give a second thought. I'm not trying to propound something as trite as "the road less traveled by" Cavafy's notion that the journey's the thing, but rather that how you get to what you want to know is just as important in producing meaning as the things you discover along the way. Socrates helps us get to know eros: in deconstructing eros bit by bit we become intimate with it in the way philia would demand, i.e. slowly getting closer and closer. By enacting the demands of philia rather than simply stating them and performing some pate comparison, we come to eros without ever quite blowing our load in the way we would if we simply lept to conclusions. The irony of the Symposium is that Plato would have us assume a philic (is that even a word?) relationship with eros and deny the opposition. That brings a whole new meaning to "getting to know" someone.