Part IV

27

Why don't you come out of the shadows? What do you really look like? You're
afraid of something aren't you? What is it you're afraid of?

Beyond the figure in the shadows is the glass door. Chris is behind it,
motioning me to open it. He's older now, but his face still has a pleading
expression. ``What do I do now? ''he wants to know. ``What do I do next? ''
He's waiting for my instructions.

It's time to act.

I study the figure in the shadows. It's not as omnipotent as it once
seemed. ``Who are you? '' I ask.

No answer.

``By what right is that door closed?''

Still no answer. The figure is silent, but it is also cowering. It's
afraid! Of me.

``There are worse things than hiding in the shadows. Is that it? Is that
why you don't speak? ''

It seems to be quivering, retreating, as though sensing what I am about to
do.

I wait, and then move closer to it. Loathsome, dark, evil thing. Closer,
looking not at it but at the glass door, so as not to warn it. I pause
again, brace myself and then lunge!

My hands sink into something soft where its neck should be. It writhes, and
I tighten the grip, as one holds a serpent. And now holding it tighter and
tighter we'll get it into the light. Here it comes! NOW WE'LL SEE ITS FACE!

``Dad! ''

``Dad! '' I hear Chris's voice through the door?

Yes! The first time! ``Dad! Dad! ''

``Dad! Dad!'' Chris tugs on my shirt. ``Dad! Wake up! Dad!''

He's crying, sobbing now. ``Stop, Dad! Wake up!''

``It's all right, Chris.''

``Dad! Wake up!''

``I'm awake.'' I can just barely make out his face in the dawn light. We're
in trees somewhere outside. There's a motorcycle here. I think we're in
Oregon somewhere.

``I'm all right, it was just a nightmare.''

He continues to cry and I sit quietly with him for a while. ``It's all
right,'' I say, but he doesn't stop. He's badly frightened.

So am I.

What were you dreaming about?''

``I was trying to see someone's face.''

``You shouted you were going to kill me.''

``No, not you.''

``Who?''

``The person in the dream.''

``Who was it?''

``I'm not sure.''

Chris's crying stops, but he continues to shake from the cold. ``Did you
see the face?''

``Yes.''

``What did it look like?''

``It was my own face, Chris, that's when I shouted. -- It was just a bad
dream.'' I tell him he's shivering and should get back into the sleeping
bag.

He does this. ``It's so cold,'' he says.

``Yes.'' By the dawn light I can see the vapor from our breaths. Then he
crawls under the cover of the sleeping bag and I can see only my own.

I don't sleep.

The dreamer isn't me at all.

It's Phædrus.

He's waking up.

A mind divided against itself -- me -- I'm the evil figure in the shadows.
I'm the loathsome one. --

I always knew he would come back. --

It's a matter now of preparing for it. --

The sky under the trees looks so grey and hopeless.

Poor Chris.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

28

The despair grows now.

Like one of those movie dissolves in which you know you're not in the real
world but it seems that way anyway.

It's a cold, snowless November day. The wind blows dirt through the cracks
of the windows of an old car with soot on the windows, and Chris, six, sits
beside him, with sweaters on because the heater doesn't work, and through
the dirty windows of the windblown car they see that they move forward
toward a grey snowless sky between walls of grey and greyish-brown
buildings with brick fronts, with broken glass between the brick fronts and
debris in the streets.

``Where are we?'' Chris says, and Phædrus says, ``I don't know,'' and he
really doesn't, his mind is all but gone. He is lost, drifting through the
grey streets.

``Where are we going?'' says Phædrus.

``To the bunk-bedders,'' says Chris.

``Where are they?'' asks Phædrus.

``I don't know,'' says Chris. ``Maybe if we just keep going we'll see
them.''

And so the two drive and drive through the endless streets looking for the
bunk-bedders. Phædrus wants to stop and put his head on the steering wheel
and just rest. The soot and the grey have penetrated his eyes and all but
blotted cognizance from his brain. One street sign is like another. One
grey-brown building is like the next. On and on they drive, looking for the
bunk-bedders. But the bunk-bedders, Phædrus knows, he will never find.

Chris begins to realize slowly and by degrees that something is strange,
that the person guiding the car is no longer really guiding it, that the
captain is dead and the car is pilotless and he doesn't know this but only
feels it and says stop and Phædrus stops.

A car behind honks, but Phædrus does not move. Other cars honk, and then
others, and Chris in panic says, ``GO!'' and Phædrus slowly with agony
pushes his foot on the clutch and puts the car in gear. Slowly, in
dream-motion, the car moves in low through the streets.

``Where do we live?'' Phædrus asks a frightened Chris.

Chris remembers an address, but doesn't know how to get there, but reasons
that if he asks enough people he will find the way and so says, ``Stop the
car,'' and gets out and asks directions and leads a demented Phædrus
through the endless walls of brick and broken glass.

Hours later they arrive and the mother is furious that they are so late.
She cannot understand why they have not found the bunk-bedders. Chris says,
``We looked everywhere,'' but looks at Phædrus with a quick glance of
fright, of terror at something unknown. That, for Chris, is where it
started.

It won't happen again. --

I think what I'll do is head down for San Francisco, and put Chris on a bus
for home, and then sell the cycle and check in at a hospital -- or that
last seems so pointless -- I don't know what I'll do.

The trip won't have been entirely wasted. At least he'll have some good
memories of me as he grows up. That takes away some of the anxiety a
little. That's a good thought to hold on to. I'll hold on to that.

Meanwhile, just continue on a normal trip and hope something improves.
Don't throw anything away. Never, never throw anything away.

Cold out! Feels like winter! Where are we, that it should get this cold? We
must be at a high altitude. I look out of the sleeping bag and this time
see frost on the motorcycle. On the chrome of the gas tank it's sparkling
in the early sunlight. On the black frame where the sunlight hits it it's
partly turned to beads of water that will soon run down to the wheel. It's
too cold to lie around.

I remember the dust under the pine needles and put my boots on carefully to
avoid stirring it up. At the motorcycle I unpack everything, get out the
long underwear and put it on, then clothes, then sweater, then jacket. I'm
still cold.

I step through the spongy dust onto the dirt road that has brought us here
and sprint down it through the pines for a hundred feet or so, then settle
down to an even run and then finally stop. That feels better. Not a sound.
The frost is in little patches on the road too, but melting and dark wet
tan between the patches where the early sun's rays strike it. It's so white
and lacy and untouched. It's on the trees too. I walk back softly down the
road as if not to disturb the sunrise. Early autumn feeling.

Chris is still asleep and we won't be able to go anywhere until the air
warms up. Good time to get the cycle tuned. I work loose the knob on the
side cover over the air filter, and underneath the filter withdraw a worn
and dirty roll of field tools. My hands are stiff with the cold and the
backs of them are wrinkled. Those wrinkles aren't from the cold though. At
forty that's old age coming on. I lay the roll on the seat and spread it
open . . . there they are -- like seeing old friends again.

I hear Chris, glance over the seat and see that he's stirring but doesn't
get up. He's evidently just rolling in his sleep. After a while the sun
gets warmer and my hands aren't as stiff as they were.

I was going to talk about some of the lore of cycle repair, the hundreds of
things you learn as you go along, which enrich what you're doing not only
practically but esthetically. But that seems too trivial now, though I
shouldn't say that.

But now I want to shift into another direction, which completes his story.
I never really completed it because I didn't think it would be necessary.
But now I think it would be a good time to do that in what time remains.

The metal of these wrenches is so cold it hurts the hands. But it's a good
hurt. It's real, not imaginary, and it's here, absolutely, in my hand.

-- When you travel a path and note that another path breaks away to one
side at, say, a 30-degree angle, and then later another path branches away
to the same side at a broader angle, say 45 degrees, and another path later
at 90 degrees, you begin to understand that there's some point over there
that all the paths lead to and that a lot of people have found it
worthwhile to go that way, and you begin to wonder out of curiosity if
perhaps that isn't the way you should go too.

In his pursuit of a concept of Quality, Phædrus kept seeing again and again
little paths all leading toward some point off to one side. He thought he
already knew about the general area they led to, ancient Greece, but now he
wondered if he had overlooked something there.

He had asked Sarah, who long before had come by with her watering pot and
put the idea of Quality in his head, where in English literature quality,
as a subject, was taught.

``Good heavens, I don't know, I'm not an English scholar,'' she had said.
``I'm a classics scholar. My field is Greek.''

``Is quality a part of Greek thought?'' he had asked.

``Quality is every part of Greek thought,'' she had said, and he had
thought about this. Sometimes under her old-ladyish way of speaking he
thought he detected a secret canniness, as though like a Delphic oracle she
said things with hidden meanings, but he could never be sure.

Ancient Greece. Strange that for them Quality should be everything while
today it sounds odd to even say quality is real. What unseen changes could
have taken place?

A second path to ancient Greece was indicated by the sudden way the whole
question, What is quality?, had been jolted into systematic philosophy. He
had thought he was done with that field. But ``quality'' had opened it all
up again.

Systematic philosophy is Greek. The ancient Greeks invented it and, in so
doing, put their permanent stamp on it. Whitehead's statement that all
philosophy is nothing but ``footnotes to Plato'' can be well supported. The
confusion about the reality of Quality had to start back there sometime.

A third path appeared when he decided to move on from Bozeman toward the
Ph.D. degree he needed to continue University teaching. He wanted to pursue
the enquiry into the meaning of Quality that his English teaching had
started. But where? And in which discipline?

It was apparent that the term ``Quality'' was not within any one discipline
unless that discipline was philosophy. And he knew from his experience with
philosophy that further study there was unlikely to uncover anything
concerning an apparently mystic term in English composition.

He became more and more aware of the possibility that there was no program
available where he might study Quality in terms resembling those in which
he understood it. Quality lay not only outside any academic discipline, it
lay outside the grasp of the methods of the entire Church of Reason. It
would take quite a University to accept a doctoral thesis in which the
candidate refused to define his central term.

He looked through the catalogs for a long time before he discovered what he
hoped he was looking for. There was one University, the University of
Chicago, where there existed an interdisciplinary program in ``Analysis of
Ideas and Study of Methods.'' The examining committee included a professor
of English, a professor of philosophy, a professor of Chinese, and the
Chairman, who was a professor of ancient Greek! That one rang bells.

On the machine now everything is done except the oil change. I wake Chris
and we pack and go. He's still sleepy but the cold air on the road wakes
him up.

The piney road goes upward, and there's not so much traffic this morning.
The rocks among the pines are dark and volcanic. I wonder if that was
volcanic dust we slept in. Is there such a thing as volcanic dust? Chris
says he's hungry and I am too.

At La Pine we stop. I tell Chris to order me ham and eggs for breakfast
while I stay outside to change the oil.

At a filling station next to the restaurant I pick up a quart of oil, and
in a gravelly lot back of the restaurant remove the drain plug, let the oil
drain, replace the plug, add the new oil, and when I'm done the new oil on
the dipstick shines in the sunlight almost as clear and colorless as water.
Ahhhhh!

I repack the wrench, enter the restaurant and see Chris and, on the table,
my breakfast. I head into the washroom, clean up and return.

``Am I hungry!'' he says.

``It was a cold night,'' I say. ``We burned up a lot of food just staying
alive.''

The eggs are good. The ham too. Chris talks about the dream and how it
frightened him and then that's done with. He looks as though he's about to
ask a question, then doesn't, then stares out the window into the pines for
a while, then comes back with it.

``Dad?''

``What?''

``Why are we doing this?''

``What?''

``Just riding all the time.''

``Just to see the country -- vacation.''

The answer doesn't seem to satisfy him. But he can't seem to say what's
wrong with it.

A sudden despair wave hits, like that at dawn. I lie to him. That's what's
wrong.

``We just keep going and going,'' he says.

``Sure. What would you rather do?''

He has no answer.

I don't either.

On the road an answer comes that we're doing the highest Quality thing I
can think of right now, but that wouldn't satisfy him any more than what I
told him. I don't know what else I could have said. Sooner or later, before
we say goodbye, if that's how it goes, we'll have to do some talking.
Shielding him like this from the past may be doing him more harm than good.
He'll have to hear about Phædrus, although there's much he can never know.
Particularly the end.

Phædrus arrived at the University of Chicago already in a world of thought
so different from the one you or I understand, it would be difficult to
relate, even if I fully remembered everything. I know that the acting
chairman admitted him during the Chairman's absence on the basis of his
teaching experience and apparent ability to converse intelligently. What he
actually said is lost. Afterward he waited for a number of weeks for the
Chairman to return in hopes of obtaining a scholarship, but when the
Chairman did appear an interview took place which consisted essentially of
one question and no answer.

The Chairman said, ``What is your substantive field?''

Phædrus said, ``English composition.''

The Chairman bellowed, ``That is a methodological field!'' And for all
practical purposes that was the end of the interview. After some
inconsequential conversation Phædrus stumbled, hesitated and excused
himself, then went back to the mountains. This was the characteristic of
his that had failed him out of the University before. He had gotten stuck
on a question and hadn't been able to think about anything else, while the
classes moved on without him. This time, however, he had all summer to
think about why his field should be substantive or methodological, and all
that summer that is what he did.

In the forests near the timberline he ate Swiss cheese, slept on pine-bough
beds, drank mountain stream water and thought about Quality and substantive
and methodological fields.

Substance doesn't change. Method contains no permanence. Substance relates
to the form of the atom. Method relates to what the atom does. In technical
composition a similar distinction exists between physical description and
functional description. A complex assembly is best described first in terms
of its substances: its subassemblies and parts. Then, next, it is described
in terms of its methods: its functions as they occur in sequence. If you
confuse physical and functional description, substance and method, you get
all tangled up and so does the reader.

But to apply these classifications to a whole field of knowledge such as
English composition seemed arbitrary and impractical. No academic
discipline is without both substantive and methodological aspects. And
Quality had no connection that he could see with either one of them.
Quality isn't a substance. Neither is it a method. It's outside of both. If
one builds a house using the plumb-line and spirit-level methods he does so
because a straight vertical wall is less likely to collapse and thus has
higher Quality than a crooked one. Quality isn't method. It's the goal
toward which method is aimed.

``Substance'' and ``substantive'' really corresponded to ``object'' and
``objectivity,'' which he'd rejected in order to arrive at a nondualistic
concept of Quality. When everything is divided up into substance and
method, just as when everything's divided up into subject and object,
there's really no room for Quality at all. His thesis not be a part of a
substantive field, because to accept a split into substantive and
methodological was to deny the existence of Quality. If Quality was going
to stay, the concept of substance and method would have to go. That would
mean a quarrel with the committee, something he had no desire for at all.
But he was angry that they should destroy the entire meaning of what he was
saying with the very first question. Substantive field? What kind of
Procrustean bed were they trying to shove him into? he wondered.

He decided to examine more closely the background of the committee and did
some library digging for this purpose. He felt this committee was off into
some entirely alien pattern of thought. He didn't see where this pattern
and the large pattern of his own thought joined together.

He was especially disturbed by the quality of the explanations of the
committee's purpose. They seemed extremely confusing. The entire
description of the committee's work was a strange pattern of ordinary
enough words put together in a most unordinary way, so that the explanation
seemed far more complex than the thing he was trying to have explained.
This wasn't the bells ringing he'd heard before.

He studied everything he could find that the Chairman had written and here
again was found the strange pattern of language seen in the confusing
description of the committee. It was a puzzling style because it was
completely different from what he'd seen of the Chairman himself. The
Chairman, in a brief interview, had impressed him with great quickness of
mind, and an equally swift temper. And yet here was one of the most
ambiguous, inscrutable styles Phædrus had ever read. Here were encyclopedic
sentences that left subject and predicate completely out of shouting
distance. Parenthetic elements were unexplainably inserted inside other
parenthetic elements, equally unexplainably inserted into sentences whose
relevance to the preceding sentences in the reader's mind was dead and
buried and decayed long before the arrival of the period.

But most remarkable of all were the wondrous and unexplained proliferations
of abstract categories that seemed freighted with special meanings that
never got stated and whose content could only be guessed at; these piled
one after another so fast and so close that Phædrus knew he had no possible
way of understanding what was before him, much less take issue with it.

At first Phædrus presumed the reason for the difficulty was that all this
was over his head. The articles assumed a certain basic learning which he
didn't have. Then, however, he noticed that some of the articles were
written for audiences that couldn't possibly have this background, and this
hypothesis was weakened.

His second hypothesis was that the Chairman was a ``technician,'' a phrase
he used for a writer so deeply involved in his field that he'd lost the
ability to communicate with people outside. But if this wereso, why was the
committee given such a general, nontechnical title as ``Analysis of Ideas
and Study of Methods''? And the Chairman didn't have the personality of a
technician. So that hypothesis was weak too.

In time, Phædrus abandoned the labor of pounding his head against the
Chairman's rhetoric and tried to discover more about the background of the
committee, hoping that would explain what this was all about. This, it
turned out, was the correct approach. He began to see what his trouble was.

The Chairman's statements were guarded...guarded by enormous, labyrinthine
fortifications that went on and on with such complexity and massiveness it
was almost impossible to discover what in the world it was inside them he
was guarding. The inscrutability of all this was the kind of inscrutability
you have when you suddenly enter a room where a furious argument has just
ended. Everyone is quiet. No one is talking.

I have one tiny fragment of Phædrus standing in the stone corridor of a
building, evidently within the University of Chicago, addressing the
assistant chairman of the committee, like a detective at the end of a
movie, saying: ``In your description of the committee, you have omitted one
important name.''

``Yes?'' says the assistant chairman.

``Yes,'' says Phædrus omnisciently, `` -- Aristotle -- ''

The assistant chairman is shocked for a moment, then, almost like a culprit
who has been discovered but feels no guilt, laughs loud and long.

``Oh, I see,'' he says. ``You didn't know -- anything about. -- '' Then he
thinks better of what he is going to say and decides not to say anything
more.

We arrive at the turnoff to Crater Lake and go up a neat road into the
National Park...clean, tidy and preserved. It really shouldn't be any other
way, but this doesn't win any prizes for Quality either. It turns it into a
museum. This is how it was before the white man came...beautiful lava
flows, and scrawny trees, and not a beer can anywhere...but now that the
white man is here, it looks fake. Maybe the National Park Service should
set just one pile of beer cans in the middle of all that lava and then it
would come to life. The absence of beer cans is distracting.

At the lake we stop and stretch and mingle affably with the small crowd of
tourists holding cameras and children yelling, ``Don't go too close!'' and
see cars and campers with all different license plates, and see the Crater
Lake with a feeling of ``Well, there it is,'' just as the pictures show. I
watch the other tourists, all of whom seem to have out-of-place looks too.
I have no resentment at all this, just a feeling that it's all unreal and
that the quality of the lake is smothered by the fact that it's so pointed
to. You point to something as having Quality and the Quality tends to go
away. Quality is what you see out of the corner of your eye, and so I look
at the lake below but feel the peculiar quality from the chill, almost
frigid sunlight behind me, and the almost motionless wind.

``Why did we come here?'' Chris says.

``To see the lake.''

He doesn't like this. He senses falseness and frowns deep, trying to find
the right question to expose it. ``I just hate this,'' he says.

A tourist lady looks at him with surprise, then resentment.

``Well, what can we do, Chris?'' I ask. ``We just have to keep going until
we find out what's wrong or find out why we don't know what's wrong. Do you
see that?''

He doesn't answer. The lady pretends not to be listening, but her
motionlessness reveals that she is. We walk toward the motorcycle, and I
try to think of something, but nothing comes. I see he's crying a little
and now looks away to prevent me from seeing it.

We wind down out of the park to the south.

I said the assistant chairman for the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and
Study of Methods was shocked. What he was so shocked about was that Phædrus
didn't know he was at the locus of what is probably the most famous
academic controversy of the century, what a California university president
described as the last attempt in history to change the course of an entire
university.

Phædrus' reading turned up a brief history of that famous revolt against
empirical education that had taken place in the early thirties. The
Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods was a vestige of that
attempt. The leaders of the revolt were Robert Maynard Hutchins, who had
become president of the University of Chicago; Mortimer Adler, whose work
on the psychological background of the law of evidence was somewhat similar
to work being done at Yale by Hutchins; Scott Buchanan, a philosopher and
mathematician; and most important of all for Phædrus, the present chairman
of the committee, who was then a Columbia University Spinozist and
medievalist.

Adler's study of evidence, cross-fertilized by a reading of classics of the
Western world, resulted in a conviction that human wisdom had advanced
relatively little in recent times. He consistently harked back to St.
Thomas Aquinas, who had taken Plato and Aristotle and made them part of his
medieval synthesis of Greek philosophy and Christian faith. The work of
Aquinas and of the Greeks, as interpreted by Aquinas, was to Adler the
capstone of the Western intellectual heritage. Therefore they provided a
measuring rod for anyone seeking the good books.

In the Aristotelian tradition as interpreted by the medieval scholastics,
man is counted a rational animal, capable of seeking and defining the good
life and achieving it. When this ``first principle'' about the nature of
man was accepted by the president of the University of Chicago, it was
inevitable that it would have educational repercussions. The famous
University of Chicago Great Books program and the reorganization of the
University structure along Aristotelian lines and the establishment of the
``College,'' in which a reading of classics was initiated in
fifteen-year-old students, were some of the results.

Hutchins had rejected the idea that an empirical scientific education could
automatically produce a ``good'' education. Science is ``value free.'' The
inability of science to grasp Quality, as an object of enquiry, makes it
impossible for science to provide a scale of values.

Adler and Hutchins were concerned fundamentally with the ``oughts'' of
life, with values, with Quality and with the foundations of Quality in
theoretical philosophy. Thus they had apparently been traveling in the same
direction as Phædrus but had somehow ended with Aristotle and stopped
there.

There was a clash.

Even those who were willing to admit Hutchins' preoccupation with Quality
were unwilling to grant the final authority to the Aristotelian tradition
to define values. They insisted that no values can be fixed, and that a
valid modern philosophy need not reckon with ideas as they are expressed in
the books of ancient and medieval times. The whole business seemed to many
of them merely a new and pretentious jargon of weasel concepts.

Phædrus didn't know quite what to make of this clash. But it certainly
seemed to be close to the area he wished to work in. He also felt that no
values can be fixed but that this is no reason why values should be ignored
or that values do not exist as reality. He also felt antagonistic to the
Aristotelian tradition as a definer of values, but he didn't feel this
tradition should be left unreckoned with. The answer to all this was
somehow deeply enmeshed in it and he wanted to know more.

Of the four who had created such a furor, the present chairman of the
committee was the only one now left. Perhaps because of this reduction in
rank, perhaps for other reasons, his reputation among persons Phædrus
talked to wasn't one of geniality. His geniality was confirmed by none and
sharply refuted by two, one the head of a major University department who
described him as a ``holy terror'' and another who held a graduate degree
in philosophy from the University of Chicago who said the chairman was well
known for graduating only carbon copies of himself. Neither of these
advisers was by nature vindictive and Phædrus felt what they said was true.
This was further confirmed by a discovery made at the department office. He
wanted to talk to two graduates of the committee to find out more of what
it was about, and had been told that the committee had granted only two
Ph.D.'s in its history. Apparently to find room in the sun for a reality of
Quality he would have to fight and overcome the head of his own committee,
whose Aristotelian outlook made it impossible even to get started and whose
temperament appeared to be extremely intolerant of opposing ideas. It all
added up to a very gloomy picture.

He then sat down and penned, to the Chairman of the Committee on Analysis
of Ideas and Methods at the University of Chicago, a letter which can only
be described as a provocation to dismissal, in which the writer refuses to
skulk quietly out the back door but instead creates a scene of such
proportions the opposition is forced to throw him out the front door, thus
giving weight to the provocation it didn't formerly have. Afterward he
picks himself up out of the street and, after making sure the door is
completely closed, shakes his fist at it, dusts himself off and says, ``Oh
well, I tried,'' and in this way absolves his conscience.

Phædrus' provocation informed the Chairman that his substantive field was
now philosophy, not English composition. However, he said, the division of
study into substantive and methodological fields was an outgrowth of the
Aristotelian dichotomy of form and substance, which nondualists had little
use for, the two being identical.

He said he wasn't sure, but the thesis on Quality appeared to turn into an
anti-Aristotelian thesis. If this was true he had chosen an appropriate
place to present it. Great Universities proceeded in a Hegelian fashion and
any school which could not accept a thesis contradicting its fundamental
tenets was in a rut. This, Phædrus claimed, was the thesis the University
of Chicago was waiting for.

He admitted the claim was grandiose and that value judgments were actually
impossible for him to make since no person could be an impartial judge of
his own cause. But if someone else were to produce a thesis which purported
to be a major breakthrough between Eastern and Western philosophy, between
religious mysticism and scientific positivism, he would think it of major
historic importance, a thesis which would place the University miles ahead.
In any event, he said, no one was really accepted in Chicago until he'd
rubbed someone out. It was time Aristotle got his.

Just outrageous.

And not just provocation to dismissal either. What comes through even more
strongly is megalomania, delusions of grandeur, of complete loss of ability
to understand the effect of what he was saying on others. He had become so
caught up in his own world of Quality metaphysics he couldn't see outside
it anymore, and since no one else understood this world, he was already
done for.

I think he must have felt at the time that what he was saying was true and
it didn't matter if his manner or presentation was outrageous or not. There
was so much to it he didn't have time for prettying it up. If the
University of Chicago was interested in the esthetics of what he was saying
rather than the rational content, they were failing their fundamental
purpose as a University.

This was it. He really believed. It wasn't just another interesting idea to
be tested by existing rational methods. It was a modification of the
existing rational methods themselves. Normally when you have a new idea to
present in an academic environment you're supposed to be objective and
disinterested in it. But this idea of Quality took issue with that very
supposition...of objectivity and disinterestedness. These were mannerisms
appropriate only to dualistic reason. Dualistic excellence is achieved by
objectivity, but creative excellence is not.

He had the faith that he had solved a huge riddle of the universe, cut a
Gordian knot of dualistic thought with one word, Quality, and he wasn't
about to let anyone tie that word down again. And in believing, he couldn't
see how outrageously megalomaniacal his words sounded to others. Or if he
saw it, didn't care. What he said was megalomaniacal, but suppose it was
true? If he was wrong, who would care? But suppose he was right? To be
right and throw it away in order to please the predilections of his
teachers, that would be the monstrosity!

And so he just did not care how he sounded to others. It was a totally
fanatic thing. He lived in a solitary universe of discourse in those days.
No one understood him. And the more people showed how they failed to
understand him and disliked what they did understand, the more fanatic and
unlikable he became.

His provocation to dismissal was given an expected reception. Since his
substantive field was philosophy, he should apply to the philosophy
department, not the committee.

Phædrus dutifully did this, then he and his family loaded their car and
trailer with all they owned and said goodbye to their friends and were
about to start. Just as he locked the doors of the house for the last time
the mailman appeared with a letter. It was from the University of Chicago.
It said he was not admitted there. Nothing more.

Obviously the Chairman of the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of
Methods had influenced the decision.

Phædrus borrowed some stationery from the neighbors and wrote back to the
Chairman that since he had already been admitted to the Committee on
Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods he would have to remain there. This
was a rather legalistic maneuver, but Phædrus by this time had developed a
kind of combative canniness. This deviousness, the quick shuffle out the
philosophy door seemed to indicate that the Chairman for some reason was
unable to throw him out the front door of the committee, even with that
outrageous letter in hand, and that gave Phædrus some confidence. No side
doors, please. They were going to have to throw him out the front door or
not at all. Maybe they wouldn't be able to. Good. He wanted this thesis not
to owe anyone anything.

We travel down the eastern shore of Klamath Lake on a three-lane highway
that contains a lot of nineteen- twenties feeling. That's when these
three-laners were all made. We pull in for lunch at a roadhouse which
belongs to this era too. Wooden frame badly in need of paint, neon beer
signs in the window, gravel and engine drippings for a front lawn.

Inside, the toilet seat is cracked and the washbowl is covered with grease
streaks, but on my way back to our booth I take a second look at the owner
behind the bar. A nineteen-twenties face. Uncomplicated, uncool and
unbowed. This is his castle. We're his guests. And if we don't like his
hamburgers we'd better shut up.

When they arrive, the hamburgers, with giant raw onions, are tasty and the
bottle beer is fine. A whole meal for a lot less than you'd pay at one of
those old-ladies places with plastic flowers in the window. As we eat I see
on the map we've taken a wrong turn way back and could have gotten to the
ocean much quicker by another route. It's hot now, a West Coast sticky
hotness which after the Western Desert hotness is very depressing. Really,
this is just transported East, all of this scene, and I'd like to get to
the ocean where it's cool as soon as possible.

I think about this all around the southern shore of Klamath Lake. Sticky
hotness and nineteen-twenties funk. -- That was the feeling of Chicago that
summer.

When Phædrus and his family arrived in Chicago, he took up residence near
the University and, since he had no scholarship, began full-time teaching
of rhetoric at the University of Illinois, which was then downtown at Navy
Pier, sticking out into the lake, funky and hot.

Classes were different from those in Montana. The top high-school students
had been skimmed off to the Champaign and Urbana campuses and almost all
the students he taught were a solid monotonous C. When their papers were
judged in class for Quality it was hard to distinguish among them. Phædrus,
in other circumstances, probably would have invented something to get
around this, but now this was just bread-and-butter work for which he
couldn't spare creative energy. His interest lay to the south at the other
University.

He entered the University of Chicago registration lineup, announced his
name to the registering Professor of Philosophy and noticed a slight
setting of the eyes. The Professor of Philosophy said, Oh, yes, the
Chairman had asked that he be registered in an Ideas and Methods course
which the Chairman himself was teaching, and give him the schedule of the
course. Phædrus noted that the time set for the class conflicted with his
schedule at Navy Pier and chose instead another one, Ideas and Methods 251,
Rhetoric. Since rhetoric was his own field, he felt a little more at home
here. And the lecturer wasn't the Chairman. The lecturer was the Professor
of Philosophy now registering him. The Professor of Philosophy's eyes,
formerly set, now became wide.

Phædrus returned to his teaching at Navy Pier and his reading for his first
class. It was now absolutely necessary that he study as he had never
studied before to learn the thought of Classic Greece in general and of one
Classic Greek in particular...Aristotle.

Of all the thousands of students at the University of Chicago who had
studied the ancient classics it's doubtful that there was ever a more
dedicated one. The main struggle of the University's Great Books program
was against the modern belief that the classics had nothing of any real
importance to say to a twentieth-century society. To be sure, the majority
of students taking the courses must have played the game of nice manners
with their teachers, and accepted, for purposes of understanding, the
prerequisite belief that the ancients had something meaningful to say. But
Phædrus, playing no games at all, didn't just accept this idea. He
passionately and fanatically knew it. He came to hate them vehemently, and
to assail them with every kind of invective he could think of, not because
they were irrelevant but for exactly the opposite reason. The more he
studied, the more convinced he became that no one had yet told the damage
to this world that had resulted from our unconscious acceptance of their
thought.

Around the southern shore of Klamath Lake we pass through some
suburban-type development, and then leave the lake to the west, toward the
coast. The road goes up now into the forests of huge trees not at all like
the rain-starved forests we've been through. Huge Douglas firs are on
either side of the road. On the cycle we can look up along their trunks,
straight up, for hundreds of feet as we pass between them. Chris wants to
stop and walk among them and so we stop.

While he goes for a walk I lean my back as carefully as possible against a
big slab of Douglas fir bark and look up and try to remember. --

The details of what he learned are lost now, but from events that occurred
later I know he absorbed tremendous quantities of information. He was
capable of doing this on a near-photographic basis. To understand how he
arrived at his condemnation of the Classic Greeks it's necessary to review
in summary form the ``mythos over logos'' argument, which is well known to
scholars of Greek and is often a cause of fascination with that area of
study.

The term logos, the root word of ``logic,'' refers to the sum total of our
rational understanding of the world. Mythos is the sum total of the early
historic and prehistoric myths which preceded the logos. The mythos
includes not only the Greek myths but the Old Testament, the Vedic Hymns
and the early legends of all cultures which have contributed to our present
world understanding. The mythos-over-logos argument states that our
rationality is shaped by these legends, that our knowledge today is in
relation to these legends as a tree is in relation to the little shrub it
once was. One can gain great insights into the complex overall structure of
the tree by studying the much simpler shape of the shrub. There's no
difference in kind or even difference in identity, only a difference in
size.

Thus, in cultures whose ancestry includes ancient Greece, one invariably
finds a strong subject-object differentiation because the grammar of the
old Greek mythos presumed a sharp natural division of subjects and
predicates. In cultures such as the Chinese, where subject-predicate
relationships are not rigidly defined by grammar, one finds a corresponding
absence of rigid subject-object philosophy. One finds that in the
Judeo-Christian culture in which the Old Testament ``Word'' had an
intrinsic sacredness of its own, men are willing to sacrifice and live by
and die for words. In this culture, a court of law can ask a witness to
tell ``the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me
God,'' and expect the truth to be told. But one can transport this court to
India, as did the British, with no real success on the matter of perjury
because the Indian mythos is different and this sacredness of words is not
felt in the same way. Similar problems have occurred in this country among
minority groups with different cultural backgrounds. There are endless
examples of how mythos differences direct behavior differences and they're
all fascinating.

The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born
as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the
Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos,
transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge
that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that
one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one
pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is.

There is only one kind of person, Phædrus said, who accepts or rejects the
mythos in which he lives. And the definition of that person, when he has
rejected the mythos, Phædrus said, is ``insane.'' To go outside the mythos
is to become insane. --

My God, that just came to me now. I never knew that before.

He knew! He must have known what was about to happen. It's starting to open
up.

You have all these fragments, like pieces of a puzzle, and you can place
them together into large groups, but the groups don't go together no matter
how you try, and then suddenly you get one fragment and it fits two
different groups and then suddenly the two great groups are one. The
relation of the mythos to insanity. That's a key fragment. I doubt whether
anyone ever said that before. Insanity is the terra incognita surrounding
the mythos. And he knew! He knew the Quality he talked about lay outside
the mythos.

Now it comes! Because Quality is the generator of the mythos. That's it.
That's what he meant when he said, ``Quality is the continuing stimulus
which causes us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last
bit of it.'' Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion.
Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an
understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the
Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but
to define it all you've got to work with is what you know. So your
definition is made up of what you know. It's an analogue to what you
already know. It has to be. It can't be anything else. And the mythos grows
this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of
analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective
consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The
Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to
either side...that is the terra incognita of the insane. He knew that to
understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That's why he felt
that slippage. He knew something was about to happen.

I see Chris returning through the trees now. He looks relaxed and happy. He
shows me a piece of bark and asks if he can save it as a souvenir. I
haven't been fond of loading the cycle with these bits and pieces he finds
and will probably throw away when he gets home, but this time say okay
anyway.

After a few minutes the road reaches a summit and then drops steeply into a
valley that becomes more exquisite as we descend. I never thought I would
call a valley that...exquisite...but there's something about this whole
coastal country so different from any other mountainous region in America
that it brings out the word. Here, a little farther south, is where all our
good wine comes from. The hills are somehow tucked and folded
differently...exquisitely. The road twists and banks and curlecues and
descends and we and the cycle smoothly roll with it, following it in a
separate grace of our own, almost touching the waxen leaves of shrubs and
overhanging boughs of trees. The firs and rocks of the higher country are
behind us now and around us are soft hills and vines and purple and red
flowers, fragrance mixed with woodsmoke up from the distant fog along the
valley floor and from beyond that, unseen...a vague scent of ocean. --

-- How can I love all this so much and be insane? --

-- I don't believe it!

The mythos. The mythos is insane. That's what he believed. The mythos that
says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of this world is
unreal, that is insane!

And in Aristotle and the ancient Greeks he believed he had found the
villains who had so shaped the mythos as to cause us to accept this
insanity as reality.

That. That now. That ties it all together. It feels relieving when that
happens. It's so hard sometimes to conjure all this up, a strange sort of
exhaustion follows. Sometimes I think I'm just making it up myself.
Sometimes I'm not sure. And sometimes I know I'm not. But the mythos and
insanity, and the centrality of this...this I'm sure is from him.

When we're through the folded hills we come to Medford and a freeway
leading to Grants Pass and it's almost evening. A heavy head wind keeps us
just up with traffic on upgrades, even with the throttle wide open. Coming
into Grants Pass we hear a frightening, loud, clanking noise and stop to
discover that the chain guard has become caught in the chain somehow and
now is all torn up. Not too serious, but enough to lay us up for a while to
get it replaced. Foolish to replace it, perhaps, when the cycle will be
sold in a few days.

Grants Pass looks like a big enough town to have a motorcycle place open
the next morning and when we arrive I look for a motel.

We haven't seen a bed since Bozeman, Montana.

We find one with color TV, heated swimming pool, a coffee maker for the
next morning, soap, white towels, a shower all tiled and clean beds.

We lie down on the clean beds and Chris just bounces on his for a while.
Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression
reliever.

Tomorrow, somehow, all this can be worked out, maybe. Not now. Chris goes
down for a heated swim while I lie quietly on the clean bed and put
everything out of mind.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

29

In the process of taking stuff out of the saddlebags and cramming it back
ever since Bozeman, and doing the same with the backpacks, we've acquired
some exceptionally beat-up gear. Spread out all over the floor in the
morning light it looks a mess. The plastic bag with the oily stuff in it
has broken and oil has gotten onto the roll of toilet paper. The clothes
have been so squashed they look as if they have permanent, built-in
wrinkles. The soft metal tube of sunburn ointment has burst, leaving white
crud all over the machete scabbard and a fragrant smell everywhere. The
tube of ignition grease has burst too. What a mess. In my shirt-pocket
notebook I write down: ``Buy tackle box for squeezed stuff'' and then add
``Do laundry.'' Then, ``Buy toenail scissors, sunburn cream, ignition
grease, chain guard, toilet paper.'' This is a lot of things to do before
checkout time, so I wake up Chris and tell him to get up. We have to do the
laundry.

At the Laundromat I instruct Chris on how to operate the drier, start the
washing machines and take off for the other items.

I get everything but a chain guard. The parts man says they don't have one
and don't expect to get one. I think about riding without the chain guard
for what little time is left but that will throw crud all over and could be
dangerous. Also, I don't want to do things with that presumption. That
commits me to it.

Down the street I find a welder's sign and enter.

Cleanest welding place I've ever seen. Great high trees and deep grass line
an open space in back, giving a kind of village-smithy appearance. All the
tools are hung up with care, everything tidy, but no one is home. I'll come
back later.

I wheel back and stop for Chris, check the laundry he's put in the drier
and putt along through the cheerful streets looking for a restaurant.
Traffic everywhere, alert, well-maintained cars, most of them. West Coast.
Hazy clean sunlight of a town out of the range of the coal vendors.

At the edge of town we find a restaurant and sit and wait at a red and
white tableclothed table. Chris unfolds a copy of Motorcycle News, which I
bought at the cycle shop, and reads out loud who has won all the races, and
an item about cross-country cycling. The waitress looks at him, a little
curiously, and then at me, then at my cycle boots, then jots down our
order. She goes back into the kitchen and comes out again and looks at us.
I guess that she's paying so much attention to us because we're alone here.
While we wait she puts some coins in the jukebox and when breakfast
comes...waffles, syrup and sausages, ah...we have music with it. Chris and
I talk about what he sees in Motorcycle News and we are talking over the
noise of the record in the relaxed way people talk who have been many days
on the road together and out of the corner of my eye I see that this is
watched with a steady gaze. After a while Chris has to ask me some
questions a second time because that gaze kind of beats on me, and it's
hard to think of what he's saying. The record is a country western about a
truck driver. -- I finish the conversation with Chris.

As we leave and go out and start up the cycle, there she is in the door
watching us. Lonely. She probably doesn't understand that with a look like
that she isn't going to be lonely long. I kick the starter and gun the
engine too hard, frustrated by something, and as we ride for the welder
again, it takes a while to snap out.

The welder is in, an old man in his sixties or seventies, and he looks at
me disdainfully...a complete reversal from the waitress. I explain about
the chain guard and after a while he says, ``I'm not taking it off for you.
You'll have to take it off.''

I do this and show it to him, and he says, ``It's full of grease.''

I find a stick out in back under the spreading chestnut tree and scrape all
the grease into a trash barrel. From a distance he says, ``There's some
solvent in that pan over there.'' I see the flat pan and get out the
remaining grease with some leaves and the solvent.

When I show it to him he nods and slowly goes over and sets the regulators
for his gas torch. Then he looks at the tip and selects another one.
Absolutely no hurry. He picks up a steel filler rod and I wonder if he's
actually going to try to weld that thin metal. Sheet metal I don't weld. I
braze it with a brass rod. When I try to weld it I punch holes in it and
then have to patch them up with huge blobs of filler rod. ``Aren't you
going to braze it?'' I ask.

``No,'' he says. Talkative fellow.

He sparks the torch, and sets a tiny little blue flame and then, it's hard
to describe, actually dances the torch and the rod in separate little
rhythms over the thin sheet metal, the whole spot a uniform luminous
orange-yellow, dropping the torch and filler rod down at the exact right
moment and then removing them. No holes. You can hardly see the weld.
``That's beautiful,'' I say.

``One dollar,'' he says, without smiling. Then I catch a funny quizzical
look within his glance. Does he wonder if he's overcharged? No, something
else -- lonely, same as the waitress. Probably he thinks I'm bullshitting
him. Who appreciates work like this anymore?

We're packed and out of the motel at just about check-out time and are soon
into the coastal redwood forest, across out of Oregon into California. The
traffic is so heavy we don't have time to look up. It's turning cold and
grey and we stop and put on sweaters and jackets. It's still cold,
somewhere in the low fifties, and we think winter thoughts.

Lonely people back in town. I saw it in the supermarket and at the
Laundromat and when we checked out from the motel. These pickup campers
through the redwoods, full of lonely retired people looking at trees on
their way to look at the ocean. You catch it in the first fraction of a
glance from a new face...that searching look...then it's gone.

We see much more of this loneliness now. It's paradoxical that where people
are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and
West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread out
in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas you'd think the
loneliness would have been greater, but we didn't see it so much.

The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people
has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance, and in Montana
and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between
people are small, and here it's reversed.

It's the primary America we're in. It hit the night before last in
Prineville Junction and it's been with us ever since. There's this primary
America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And
people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions
of their lives without much consciousness of what's immediately around
them. The media have convinced them that what's right around them is
unimportant. And that's why they're lonely. You see it in their faces.
First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you,
you're just a kind of an object. You don't count. You're not what they're
looking for. You're not on TV.

But in the secondary America we've been through, of back roads, and
Chinaman's ditches, and Appaloosa horses, and sweeping mountain ranges, and
meditative thoughts, and kids with pinecones and bumblebees and open sky
above us mile after mile after mile, all through that, what was real, what
was around us dominated. And so there wasn't much feeling of loneliness.
That's the way it must have been a hundred or two hundred years ago. Hardly
any people and hardly any loneliness. I'm undoubtedly over-generalizing,
but if the proper qualifications were introduced it would be true.

Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is
certainly associated with the newer technological devices...TV, jets,
freeways and so on...but I hope it's been made plain that the real evil
isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate
people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It's the objectivity, the
dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the
evil. That's why I went to so much trouble to show how technology could be
used to destroy the evil. A person who knows how to fix motorcycles...with
Quality...is less likely to run short of friends than one who doesn't. And
they aren't going to see him as some kind of object either. Quality
destroys objectivity every time.

Or if he takes whatever dull job he's stuck with...and they are all, sooner
or later, dull...and, just to keep himself amused, starts to look for
options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for their own
sake, thus making an art out of what he is doing, he's likely to discover
that he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object
to the people around him because his Quality decisions change him too. And
not only the job and him, but others too because the Quality tends to fan
out like waves. The Quality job he didn't think anyone was going to see is
seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it, and
is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality
tends to keep on going.

My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the
world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that's all.
God, I don't want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of
social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out.
These can be left alone for a while. There's a place for them but they've
got to be built on a foundation of Quality within the individuals involved.
We've had that individual Quality in the past, exploited it as a natural
resource without knowing it, and now it's just about depleted. Everyone's
just about out of gumption. And I think it's about time to return to the
rebuilding of this American resource...individual worth. There are
political reactionaries who've been saying something close to this for
years. I'm not one of them, but to the extent they're talking about real
individual worth and not just an excuse for giving more money to the rich,
they're right. We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance
and old-fashioned gumption. We really do. I hope that in this Chautauqua
some directions have been pointed to.

Phædrus went a different path from the idea of individual, personal Quality
decisions. I think it was a wrong one, but perhaps if I were in his
circumstances I would go his way too. He felt that the solution started
with a new philosophy, or he saw it as even broader than that...a new
spiritual rationality...in which the ugliness and the loneliness and the
spiritual blankness of dualistic technological reason would become
illogical. Reason was no longer to be ``value free.'' Reason was to be
subordinate, logically, to Quality, and he was sure he would find the cause
of its not being so back among the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed
our culture with the tendency underlying all the evil of our technology,
the tendency to do what is ``reasonable'' even when it isn't any good. That
was the root of the whole thing. Right there. I said a long time ago that
he was in pursuit of the ghost of reason. This is what I meant. Reason and
Quality had become separated and in conflict with each other and Quality
had been forced under and reason made supreme somewhere back then.

It's begun to rain a little. Not so much we have to stop though. Just the
faint beginnings of a drizzle.

The road leads out of the tall forests now and into open grey skies. Along
the road are many billboards. Schenley's in warm-painted colors goes on
forever, but one gets the feeling that Irma's gives tired, mediocre
permanents because of the way the paint is cracking on her sign.

I have since read Aristotle again, looking for the massive evil that
appears in the fragments from Phædrus, but have not found it there. What I
find in Aristotle is mainly a quite dull collection of generalizations,
many of which seem impossible to justify in the light of modern knowledge,
whose organization appears extremely poor, and which seems primitive in the
way old Greek pottery in the museums seems primitive. I'm sure if I knew a
lot more about it I would see a lot more and not find it primitive at all.
But without knowing all that I can't see that it lives up either to the
raves of the Great Books group or the rages of Phædrus. I certainly don't
see Aristotle's works as a major source of either positive or negative
values. But the raves of the Great Books group are well known and
published. Phædrus' rages aren't, and it becomes part of my obligation to
dwell on these.

Rhetoric is an art, Aristotle began, because it can be reduced to a
rational system of order.

That just left Phædrus aghast. Stopped. He'd been prepared to decode
messages of great subtlety, systems of great complexity in order to
understand the deeper inner meaning of Aristotle, claimed by many to be the
greatest philosopher of all time. And then to get hit, right off, straight
in the face, with an asshole statement like that! It really shook him.

He read on:

Rhetoric can be subdivided into particular proofs and topics on the one
hand and common proofs on the other. The particular proofs can be
subdivided into methods of proof and kinds of proof. The methods of proofs
are the artificial proofs and the inartificial proofs. Of the artificial
proofs there are ethical proofs, emotional proofs and logical proofs. Of
the ethical proofs there are practical wisdom, virtue and good will. The
particular methods employing artificial proofs of the ethical kind
involving good will require a knowledge of the emotions, and for those who
have forgotten what these are, Aristotle provides a list. They are anger,
slight (subdivisible into contempt, spite and insolence), mildness, love or
friendship, fear, confidence, shame, shamelessness, favor, benevolence,
pity, virtuous indignation, envy, emulation and contempt.

Remember the description of the motorcycle given way back in South Dakota?
The one which carefully enumerated all the motorcycle parts and functions?
Recognize the similarity? Here, Phædrus was convinced, was the originator
of that style of discourse. For page after page Aristotle went on like
this. Like some third-rate technical instructor, naming everything, showing
the relationships among the things named, cleverly inventing an occasional
new relationship among the things named, and then waiting for the bell so
he can get on to repeat the lecture for the next class.

Between the lines Phædrus read no doubts, no sense of awe, only the eternal
smugness of the professional academician. Did Aristotle really think his
students would be better rhetoricians for having learned all these endless
names and relationships? And if not, did he really think he was teaching
rhetoric? Phædrus thought that he really did. There was nothing in his
style to indicate that Aristotle was ever one to doubt Aristotle. Phædrus
saw Aristotle as tremendously satisfied with this neat little stunt of
naming and classifying everything. His world began and ended with this
stunt. The reason why, if he were not more than two thousand years dead, he
would have gladly rubbed him out is that he saw him as a prototype for the
many millions of self-satisfied and truly ignorant teachers throughout
history who have smugly and callously killed the creative spirit of their
students with this dumb ritual of analysis, this blind, rote, eternal
naming of things. Walk into any of a hundred thousand classrooms today and
hear the teachers divide and subdivide and interrelate and establish
``principles'' and study ``methods'' and what you will hear is the ghost of
Aristotle speaking down through the centuries...the desiccating lifeless
voice of dualistic reason.

The sessions on Aristotle were round an enormous wooden round table in a
dreary room across the street from a hospital, where the late-afternoon sun
from over the hospital roof hardly penetrated the window dirt and polluted
city air beyond. Wan and pale and depressing. During the middle of the hour
he noticed that this enormous table had a huge crack that ran right across
it near the middle. It looked as though it had been there for years, but
that no one had thought to repair it. Too busy, no doubt, with more
important things. At the end of the hour he finally asked, ``May questions
about Aristotle's rhetoric be asked?''

``If you have read the material,'' he was told. He noticed in the eye of
the Professor of Philosophy the same set he had seen the first day of
registration. He took warning from it that he had better read the material
very thoroughly, and did so.

The rain comes down more heavily now and we stop to snap on the face mask
to the helmet. Then we go again at moderate speed. I watch for chuckholes,
sand and grease slicks.

The next week Phædrus had read the material and was prepared to take apart
the statement that rhetoric is an art because it can be reduced to a
rational system of order. By this criterion General Motors produced pure
art, whereas Picasso did not. If there were deeper meanings to Aristotle
than met the eye this would be as good a place as any to make them visible.

But the question never got raised. Phædrus put up his hand to do so, caught
a microsecond flash of malice from the teacher's eye, but then another
student said, almost as an interruption, ``I think there are some very
dubious statements here.''

That was all he got out.

``Sir, we are not here to learn what you think!'' hissed the Professor of
Philosophy. Like acid. ``We are here to learn what Aristotle thinks!''
Straight in the face. ``When we wish to learn what you think we will assign
a course in the subject!''

Silence. The student is stunned. So is everyone else.

But the Professor of Philosophy is not done. He points his finger at the
student and demands, ``According to Aristotle: What are the three kinds of
particular rhetoric according to subject matter discussed?''

More silence. The student doesn't know. ``Then you haven't read it, have
you?''

And now, with a gleam that indicates he has intended this all along, the
Professor of Philosophy swings his finger around and points it at Phædrus.

``You, sir, what are the three kinds of particular rhetoric according to
subject matter discussed?''

But Phædrus is prepared. ``Forensic, deliberative and epideictic,'' he
answers calmly.

``What are the epideictic techniques?''

``The technique of identifying likenesses, the technique of praise, that of
encomium and that of amplification.''

``Yaaas -- '' says the Professor of Philosophy slowly. Then all is silent.

The other students looked shocked. They wonder what has happened. Only
Phædrus knows, and perhaps the Professor of Philosophy. An innocent student
has caught blows intended for him.

Now everyone's face becomes carefully composed in defense against more of
this sort of questioning. The Professor of Philosophy has made a mistake.
He's wasted his disciplinary authority on an innocent student while
Phædrus, the guilty one, the hostile one, is still at large. And getting
larger and larger. Since he has asked no questions there is now no way to
cut him down. And now that he sees how the questions will be answered he's
certainly not about to ask them.

The innocent student stares down at the table, face red, hands shrouding
his eyes. His shame becomes Phædrus' anger. In all his classes he never
once talked to a student like that. So that's how they teach classics at
the University of Chicago. Phædrus knows the Professor of Philosophy now.
But the Professor of Philosophy doesn't know Phædrus.

The grey rainy skies and sign-strewn road descend to Crescent City,
California, grey and cold and wet, and Chris and I look and see the water,
the ocean, in the distance beyond piers and grey buildings. I remember this
was our great goal all these days. We enter a restaurant with a fancy red
carpet and fancy menus with extremely high prices. We are the only people
here. We eat silently, pay and are on the road again, south now, cold and
misty.

In the next sessions the shamed student is no longer present. No surprise.
The class is completely frozen, as is inevitable when an incident like that
has taken place. Each session, just one person does all the talking, the
Professor of Philosophy, and he talks and talks and talks to faces that
have turned into masks of neutrality.

The Professor of Philosophy seems quite aware of what has happened. His
previous little eye-flick of malice toward Phædrus has turned to a little
eye-flick of fear. He seems to understand that within the present classroom
situation, when the time comes, he can get exactly the same treatment he
gave, and there will be no sympathy from any of the faces before him. He's
thrown away his right to courtesy. There's no way to prevent retaliation
now except to keep covered.

But to keep covered he must work hard, and say things exactly right.
Phædrus understands this too. By remaining silent he can now learn under
what are very advantageous circumstances.

Phædrus studied hard during this period, and learned extremely fast, and
kept his mouth shut, but it would be wrong to give the least impression
that he was any sort of good student. A good student seeks knowledge fairly
and impartially. Phædrus did not. He had an axe to grind and all he sought
were those things that helped him grind it, and the means of knocking down
anything which prevented him from grinding it. He had no time for or
interest in other people's Great Books. He was there solely to write a
Great Book of his own. His attitude toward Aristotle was grossly unfair for
the same reason Aristotle was unfair to his predecessors. They fouled up
what he wanted to say.

Aristotle fouled up what Phædrus wanted to say by placing rhetoric in an
outrageously minor category in his hierarchic order of things. It was a
branch of Practical Science, a kind of shirttail relation to the other
category, Theoretical Science, which Aristotle was mainly involved in. As a
branch of Practical Science it was isolated from any concern with Truth or
Good or Beauty, except as devices to throw into an argument. Thus Quality,
in Aristotle's system, is totally divorced from rhetoric. This contempt for
rhetoric, combined with Aristotle's own atrocious quality of rhetoric, so
completely alienated Phædrus he couldn't read anything Aristotle said
without seeking ways to despise it and attack it.

This was no problem. Aristotle has always been eminently attackable and
eminently attacked throughout history, and shooting down Aristotle's patent
absurdities, like shooting fish in a barrel, didn't afford much
satisfaction. If he hadn't been so partial Phædrus might have learned some
valuable Aristotelian techniques of bootstrapping oneself into new areas of
knowledge, which was what the committee was really set up for. But if he
hadn't been so partial in his search for a place to launch his work on
Quality, he wouldn't have been there in the first place, so it really
didn't have any chance to work out at all.

The Professor of Philosophy lectured, and Phædrus listened to both the
classic form and romantic surface of what was said. The Professor of
Philosophy seemed most ill at ease on the subject of ``dialectic.''
Although Phædrus couldn't figure out why in terms of classic form, his
growing romantic sensitivity told him he was on the scent of something...a
quarry.

Dialectic, eh?

Aristotle's book had begun with it, in a most mystifying way. Rhetoric is a
counterpart of dialectic, it had said, as if this were of the greatest
importance, yet why this was so important was never explained. It was
followed with a number of other disjointed statements, which gave the
impression that a great deal had been left out, or the material had been
assembled wrongly, or the printer had left something out, because no matter
how many times he read it nothing jelled. The only thing that was clear was
that Aristotle was very much concerned about the relation of rhetoric to
dialectic. To Phædrus' ear, the same ill ease he had observed in the
Professor of Philosophy appeared here.

The Professor of Philosophy had defined dialectic, and Phædrus had listened
carefully, but it was in one ear and out the other, a characteristic that
philosophic statements often have when something is left out. In a later
class another student who seemed to be having the same trouble asked the
Professor of Philosophy to redefine dialectic and this time the Professor
had glanced at Phædrus with another quick flicker of fear and become very
edgy. Phædrus began to wonder if ``dialectic'' had some special meaning
that made it a fulcrum word...one that can shift the balance of an
argument, depending on how it's placed. It was.

Dialectic generally means ``of the nature of the dialogue,'' which is a
conversation between two persons. Nowadays it means logical argumentation.
It involves a technique of cross-examination, by which truth is arrived at.
It's the mode of discourse of Socrates in the Dialogues of Plato. Plato
believed the dialectic was the sole method by which the truth was arrived
at. The only one.

That's why it's a fulcrum word. Aristotle attacked this belief, saying that
the dialectic was only suitable for some purposes...to enquire into men's
beliefs, to arrive at truths about eternal forms of things, known as Ideas,
which were fixed and unchanging and constituted reality for Plato.
Aristotle said there is also the method of science, or ``physical'' method,
which observes physical facts and arrives at truths about substances, which
undergo change. This duality of form and substance and the scientific
method of arriving at facts about substances were central to Aristotle's
philosophy. Thus the dethronement of dialectic from what Socrates and Plato
held it to be was absolutely essential for Aristotle, and ``dialectic'' was
and still is a fulcrum word.

Phædrus guessed that Aristotle's diminution of dialectic, from Plato's sole
method of arriving at truth to a ``counterpart of rhetoric,'' might be as
infuriating to modern Platonists as it would have been to Plato. Since the
Professor of Philosophy didn't know what Phædrus' ``position'' was, this
was what was making him edgy. He might be afraid that Phædrus the Platonist
was going to jump him. If so, he certainly had nothing to worry about.
Phædrus wasn't insulted that dialectic had been brought down to the level
of rhetoric. He was outraged that rhetoric had been brought down to the
level of dialectic. Such was the confusion at the time.

The person to clear all this up, of course, was Plato, and fortunately he
was the next to appear at the round table with the crack running across the
middle in the dim dreary room across from the hospital building in South
Chicago.

We follow the coast now, cold, wet and depressed. The rain has let up,
temporarily, but the sky shows no hope. At one point I see a beach and some
people walking on it in the wet sand. I'm tired and so I stop.

As he gets off, Chris says, ``What are we stopping for?''

``I'm tired,'' I say. The wind blows cold off the ocean and where it has
formed dunes, now wet and dark from the rain that must just have ended
here, I find a place to lie down, and this makes me a little warmer.

I don't sleep though. A little girl appears over the top of the dune
looking as though she wants me to come and play. After a while she goes
away.

In time Chris comes back and wants to go. He says he has found some funny
plants out on the rocks that have feelers which pull in when you touch
them. I go with him and see between rises of waves on the rocks that they
are sea anemones, which are not plants but animals. I tell him the
tentacles can paralyze small fish. The tide must be all the way out or we
wouldn't see these, I say. From the corner of my eye I see the little girl
on the other side of the rocks has picked up a starfish. Her parents are
carrying some starfish too.

We get on the motorcycle and move south. Sometimes the rain gets heavy and
I snap on the bubble so it doesn't sting my face, but I don't like this and
take it off when the rain dies away. We should reach Arcata before dark but
I don't want to go too fast on this wet road.

I think it was Coleridge who said everyone is either a Platonist or an
Aristotelian. People who can't stand Aristotle's endless specificity of
detail are natural lovers of Plato's soaring generalities. People who can't
stand the eternal lofty idealism of Plato welcome the down-to-earth facts
of Aristotle. Plato is the essential Buddha-seeker who appears again and
again in each generation, moving onward and upward toward the ``one.''
Aristotle is the eternal motorcycle mechanic who prefers the ``many.'' I
myself am pretty much Aristotelian in this sense, preferring to find the
Buddha in the quality of the facts around me, but Phædrus was clearly a
Platonist by temperament and when the classes shifted to Plato he was
greatly relieved. His Quality and Plato's Good were so similar that if it
hadn't been for some notes Phædrus left I might have thought they were
identical. But he denied it, and in time I came to see how important this
denial was.

The course in the Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods was not concerned
with Plato's notion of the Good, however; it was concerned with Plato's
notion of rhetoric. Rhetoric, Plato spells out very clearly, is in no way
connected with the Good; rhetoric is ``the Bad.'' The people Plato hates
most, next to tyrants, are rhetoricians.

The first of the Platonic Dialogues assigned is the Gorgias, and Phædrus
has a sense of having arrived. This at last is where he wants to be.

All along he has had a feeling of being swept forward by forces he doesn't
understand...Messianic forces. October has come and gone. Days have become
phantasmal and incoherent, except in terms of Quality. Nothing matters
except that he has a new and shattering and world-shaking truth about to be
born, and like it or not, the world is morally obligated to accept it.

In the dialogue, Gorgias is the name of a Sophist whom Socrates
cross-examines. Socrates knows very well what Gorgias does for a living and
how he does it, but he starts his Twenty Questions dialectic by asking
Gorgias with what rhetoric is concerned. Gorgias answers that it is
concerned with discourse. In answer to another question he says that its
end is to persuade. In answer to another question he says its place is in
the law courts and other assemblies. And in answer to still another
question he says its subject is the just and the unjust. All this, which is
simply Gorgias' description of what people called Sophists have tended to
do, now becomes subtly rendered by Socrates' dialectic into something else.
Rhetoric has become an object, and as an object has parts. And the parts
have relationships to one another and these relations are immutable. One
sees quite clearly in this dialogue how the analytic knife of Socrates
hacks Gorgias' art into pieces. What is even more important, one sees that
the pieces are the basis of Aristotle's art of rhetoric.

Socrates had been one of Phædrus' childhood heroes and it shocked and
angered him to see this dialogue taking place. He filled the margins of the
text with answers of his own. These must have frustrated him greatly,
because there was no way of knowing how the dialogue would have gone if
these answers had been made. At one place Socrates asks to what class of
things do the words which Rhetoric uses relate. Gorgias answers, ``The
Greatest and the Best.'' Phædrus, no doubt recognizing Quality in this
answer, has written ``True!'' in the margin. But Socrates responds that
this answer is ambiguous. He is still in the dark. ``Liar!'' writes Phædrus
in the margin, and he cross-references a page in another dialogue where
Socrates makes it clear he could not have been ``in the dark.''

Socrates is not using dialectic to understand rhetoric, he is using it to
destroy it, or at least to bring it into disrepute, and so his questions
are not real questions at all...they are just word-traps which Gorgias and
his fellow rhetoricians fall into. Phædrus is quite incensed by all this
and wishes he were there.

In class, the Professor of Philosophy, noting Phædrus' apparent good
behavior and diligence, has decided he may not be such a bad student after
all. This is a second mistake. He has decided to play a little game with
Phædrus by asking him what he thinks of cookery. Socrates has demonstrated
to Gorgias that both rhetoric and cooking are branches of
pandering...pimping...because they appeal to the emotions rather than true
knowledge.

In response to the Professor's question, Phædrus gives Socrates' answer
that cookery is a branch of pandering.

There's a titter from one of the women in the class which displeases
Phædrus because he knows the Professor is trying for a dialectical hold on
him similar to the kind Socrates gets on his opponents, and his answer is
not intended to be funny but simply to throw off the dialectical hold the
Professor is trying to get. Phædrus is quite ready to recite in detail the
exact arguments Socrates uses to establish this view.

But that isn't what the Professor wants. He wants to have a dialectical
discussion in class in which he, Phædrus, is the rhetorician and is thrown
by the force of dialectic. The Professor frowns and tries again. ``No. I
mean, do you really think that a well-cooked meal served in the best of
restaurants is really something that we should turn down?''

Phædrus asks, ``You mean my personal opinion?'' For months now, since the
innocent student disappeared, there have been no personal opinions ventured
in this class.

``Yaaas,'' the Professor says.

Phædrus is silent and tries to work out an answer. Everyone is waiting. His
thoughts move up to lightning speed, winnowing through the dialectic,
playing one argumentative chess opening after another, seeing that each one
loses, and moving to the next one, faster and faster...but all the class
witnesses is silence. Finally, in embarrassment, the Professor drops the
question and begins the lecture.

But Phædrus doesn't hear the lecture. His mind races on and on, through the
permutations of the dialectic, on and on, hitting things, finding new
branches and sub-branches, exploding with anger at each new discovery of
the viciousness and meanness and lowness of this ``art'' called dialectic.
The Professor, looking at his expression, becomes quite alarmed, and
continues the lecture in a kind of panic. Phædrus' mind races on and on and
then on further, seeing now at last a kind of evil thing, an evil deeply
entrenched in himself, which pretends to try to understand love and beauty
and truth and wisdom but whose real purpose is never to understand them,
whose real purpose is always to usurp them and enthrone itself.
Dialectic...the usurper. That is what he sees. The parvenu, muscling in on
all that is Good and seeking to contain it and control it. Evil. The
Professor calls the lecture to an early end and leaves the room hurriedly.

After the students have filed out silently Phædrus sits alone at the huge
round table until the sun through the sooty air beyond the window
disappears and the room becomes grey and then dark.

The next day he is at the library waiting for it to open and when it does
he begins to read furiously, back behind Plato for the first time, into
what little is known of those rhetoricians he so despised. And what he
discovers begins to confirm what he has already intuited from his thoughts
the evening before.

Plato's condemnation of the Sophists is one which many scholars have
already taken with great misgivings. The Chairman of the committee himself
has suggested that critics who are not certain what Plato meant should be
equally uncertain of what Socrates' antagonists in the dialogues meant.
When it is known that Plato put his own words in Socrates' mouth (Aristotle
says this) there should be no reason to doubt that he could have put his
own words into other mouths too.

Fragments by other ancients seemed to lead to other evaluations of the
Sophists. Many of the older Sophists were selected as ``ambassadors'' of
their cities, certainly no office of disrespect. The name Sophist was even
applied without disparagement to Socrates and Plato themselves. It has even
been suggested by some later historians that the reason Plato hated the
Sophists so was that they could not compare with his master, Socrates, who
was in actuality the greatest Sophist of them all. This last explanation is
interesting, Phædrus thinks, but unsatisfactory. You don't abhor a school
of which your master is a member. What was Plato's real purpose in this?
Phædrus reads further and further into pre-Socratic Greek thought to find
out, and eventually comes to the view that Plato's hatred of the
rhetoricians was part of a much larger struggle in which the reality of the
Good, represented by the Sophists, and the reality of the True, represented
by the dialecticians, were engaged in a huge struggle for the future mind
of man. Truth won, the Good lost, and that is why today we have so little
difficulty accepting the reality of truth and so much difficulty accepting
the reality of Quality, even though there is no more agreement in one area
than in the other.

To understand how Phædrus arrives at this requires some explanation:

One must first get over the idea that the time span between the last
caveman and the first Greek philosophers was short. The absence of any
history for this period sometimes gives this illusion. But before the Greek
philosophers arrived on the scene, for a period of at least five times all
our recorded history since the Greek philosophers, there existed
civilizations in an advanced state of development. They had villages and
cities, vehicles, houses, marketplaces, bounded fields, agricultural
implements and domestic animals, and led a life quite as rich and varied as
that in most rural areas of the world today. And like people in those areas
today they saw no reason to write it all down, or if they did, they wrote
it on materials that have never been found. Thus we know nothing about
them. The ``Dark Ages'' were merely the resumption of a natural way of life
that had been momentarily interrupted by the Greeks.

Early Greek philosophy represented the first conscious search for what was
imperishable in the affairs of men. Up to then what was imperishable was
within the domain of the Gods, the myths. But now, as a result of the
growing impartiality of the Greeks to the world around them, there was an
increasing power of abstraction which permitted them to regard the old
Greek mythos not as revealed truth but as imaginative creations of art.
This consciousness, which had never existed anywhere before in the world,
spelled a whole new level of transcendence for the Greek civilization.

But the mythos goes on, and that which destroys the old mythos becomes the
new mythos, and the new mythos under the first Ionian philosophers became
transmuted into philosophy, which enshrined permanence in a new way.
Permanence was no longer the exclusive domain of the Immortal Gods. It was
also to be found within Immortal Principles, of which our current law of
gravity has become one.

The Immortal Principle was first called water by Thales. Anaximenes called
it air. The Pythagoreans called it number and were thus the first to see
the Immortal Principle as something nonmaterial. Heraclitus called the
Immortal Principle fire and introduced change as part of the Principle. He
said the world exists as a conflict and tension of opposites. He said there
is a One and there is a Many and the One is the universal law which is
immanent in all things. Anaxagoras was the first to identify the One as
nous, meaning ``mind.''

Parmenides made it clear for the first time that the Immortal Principle,
the One, Truth, God, is separate from appearance and from opinion, and the
importance of this separation and its effect upon subsequent history cannot
be overstated. It's here that the classic mind, for the first time, took
leave of its romantic origins and said, ``The Good and the True are not
necessarily the same,'' and goes its separate way. Anaxagoras and
Parmenides had a listener named Socrates who carried their ideas into full
fruition.

What is essential to understand at this point is that until now there was
no such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and substance.
Those divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later. The modern
mind sometimes tends to balk at the thought of these dichotomies being
inventions and says, ``Well, the divisions were there for the Greeks to
discover,'' and you have to say, ``Where were they? Point to them!'' And
the modern mind gets a little confused and wonders what this is all about
anyway, and still believes the divisions were there.

But they weren't, as Phædrus said. They are just ghosts, immortal gods of
the modern mythos which appear to us to be real because we are in that
mythos. But in reality they are just as much an artistic creation as the
anthropomorphic Gods they replaced.

The pre-Socratic philosophers mentioned so far all sought to establish a
universal Immortal Principle in the external world they found around them.
Their common effort united them into a group that may be called
Cosmologists. They all agreed that such a principle existed but their
disagreements as to what it was seemed irresolvable. The followers of
Heraclitus insisted the Immortal Principle was change and motion. But
Parmenides' disciple, Zeno, proved through a series of paradoxes that any
perception of motion and change is illusory. Reality had to be motionless.

The resolution of the arguments of the Cosmologists came from a new
direction entirely, from a group Phædrus seemed to feel were early
humanists. They were teachers, but what they sought to teach was not
principles, but beliefs of men. Their object was not any single absolute
truth, but the improvement of men. All principles, all truths, are
relative, they said. ``Man is the measure of all things.'' These were the
famous teachers of ``wisdom,'' the Sophists of ancient Greece.

To Phædrus, this backlight from the conflict between the Sophists and the
Cosmologists adds an entirely new dimension to the Dialogues of Plato.
Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the
middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who
think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has.
The Sophists are the enemy.

Now Plato's hatred of the Sophists makes sense. He and Socrates are
defending the Immortal Principle of the Cosmologists against what they
consider to be the decadence of the Sophists. Truth. Knowledge. That which
is independent of what anyone thinks about it. The ideal that Socrates died
for. The ideal that Greece alone possesses for the first time in the
history of the world. It is still a very fragile thing. It can disappear
completely. Plato abhors and damns the Sophists without restraint, not
because they are low and immoral people...there are obviously much lower
and more immoral people in Greece he completely ignores. He damns them
because they threaten mankind's first beginning grasp of the idea of truth.
That's what it is all about.

The results of Socrates' martyrdom and Plato's unexcelled prose that
followed are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as we know
it. If the idea of truth had been allowed to perish unrediscovered by the
Renaissance it's unlikely that we would be much beyond the level of
prehistoric man today. The ideas of science and technology and other
systematically organized efforts of man are dead-centered on it. It is the
nucleus of it all.

And yet, Phædrus understands, what he is saying about Quality is somehow
opposed to all this. It seems to agree much more closely with the Sophists.

``Man is the measure of all things.'' Yes, that's what he is saying about
Quality. Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists
would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective
idealists and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world
emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a
participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things...it
fits. And they taught rhetoric...that fits.

The one thing that doesn't fit what he says and what Plato said about the
Sophists is their profession of teaching virtue. All accounts indicate this
was absolutely central to their teaching, but how are you going to teach
virtue if you teach the relativity of all ethical ideas? Virtue, if it
implies anything at all, implies an ethical absolute. A person whose idea
of what is proper varies from day to day can be admired for his
broadmindedness, but not for his virtue. Not, at least, as Phædrus
understands the word. And how could they get virtue out of rhetoric? This
is never explained anywhere. Something is missing.

His search for it takes him through a number of histories of ancient
Greece, which as usual he reads detective style, looking only for facts
that may help him and discarding all those that don't fit. And he is
reading H. D. F. Kitto's The Greeks, a blue and white paperback which he
has bought for fifty cents, and he has reached a passage that describes
``the very soul of the Homeric hero,'' the legendary figure of predecadent,
pre-Socratic Greece. The flash of illumination that follows these pages is
so intense the heroes are never erased and I can see them with little
effort of recall.

The Iliad is the story of the siege of Troy, which will fall in the dust,
and of its defenders who will be killed in battle. The wife of Hector, the
leader, says to him: ``Your strength will be your destruction; and you have
no pity either for your infant son or for your unhappy wife who will soon
be your widow. For soon the Acheans will set upon you and kill you; and if
I lose you it would be better for me to die.''

Her husband replies:

``Well do I know this, and I am sure of it: that day is coming when the
holy city of Troy will perish, and Priam and the people of wealthy Priam.
But my grief is not so much for the Trojans, nor for Hecuba herself, nor
for Priam the King, nor for my many noble brothers, who will be slain by
the foe and will lie in the dust, as for you, when one of the bronze-clad
Acheans will carry you away in tears and end your days of freedom. Then you
may live in Argos, and work at the loom in another woman's house, or
perhaps carry water for a woman of Messene or Hyperia, sore against your
will: but hard compulsion will lie upon you. And then a man will say as he
sees you weeping, `This was the wife of Hector, who was the noblest in
battle of the horse-taming Trojans, when they were fighting around Ilion.'
This is what they will say: and it will be fresh grief for you, to fight
against slavery bereft of a husband like that. But may I be dead, may the
earth be heaped over my grave before I hear your cries, and of the violence
done to you.''

So spake shining Hector and held out his arms to his son. But the child
screamed and shrank back into the bosom of the well-girdled nurse, for he
took fright at the sight of his dear father...at the bronze and the crest
of the horsehair which he saw swaying terribly from the top of the helmet.
His father laughed aloud, and his lady mother too. At once shining Hector
took the helmet off his head and laid it on the ground, and when he had
kissed his dear son and dandled him in his arms, he prayed to Zeus and to
the other Gods: Zeus and ye other Gods, grant that this my son may be, as I
am, most glorious among the Trojans and a man of might, and greatly rule in
Ilion. And may they say, as he returns from war, `He is far better than his
father.'

``What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism,'' Kitto comments, ``is
not a sense of duty as we understand it...duty towards others: it is rather
duty towards himself. He strives after that which we translate `virtue' but
is in Greek aretΘ, `excellence' -- we shall have much to say about aretΘ.
It runs through Greek life.''

There, Phædrus thinks, is a definition of Quality that had existed a
thousand years before the dialecticians ever thought to put it to
word-traps. Anyone who cannot understand this meaning without logical
definiens and definendum and differentia is either lying or so out of touch
with the common lot of humanity as to be unworthy of receiving any reply
whatsoever. Phædrus is fascinated too by the description of the motive of
``duty toward self '' which is an almost exact translation of the Sanskrit
word dharma, sometimes described as the ``one'' of the Hindus. Can the
dharma of the Hindus and the ``virtue'' of the ancient Greeks be identical?

Then Phædrus feels a tugging to read the passage again, and he does so and
then -- what's this?! -- ``That which we translate `virtue ' but is in
Greek `excellence.'''

Lightning hits!

Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not
ethical relativism. Not pristine ``virtue.'' But aretΘ. Excellence. Dharma!
Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and
matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first
teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they
had chosen was that of rhetoric. He has been doing it right all along.

The rain has lifted enough so that we can see the horizon now, a sharp line
demarking the light grey of the sky and the darker grey of the water.

Kitto had more to say about this aretΘ of the ancient Greeks. ``When we
meet aretΘ in Plato,'' he said, ``we translate it `virtue' and consequently
miss all the flavour of it. `Virtue,' at least in modern English, is almost
entirely a moral word; aretΘ, on the other hand, is used indifferently in
all the categories, and simply means excellence.''

Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready
speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must
endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both
build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young
braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Pheacian youthat boxing,
wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to
tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing
aretΘ.

AretΘ implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a
consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for
efficiency...or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency
which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.

Phædrus remembered a line from Thoreau: ``You never gain something but that
you lose something.'' And now he began to see for the first time the
unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and
rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires
of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into
enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth...but for
this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an
understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of
it.

One can acquire some peace of mind from just watching that horizon. It's a
geometer's line -- completely flat, steady and known. Perhaps it's the
original line that gave rise to Euclid's understanding of lineness; a
reference line from which was derived the original calculations of the
first astronomers that charted the stars.

Phædrus knew, with the same mathematical assurance PoincarΘ had felt when
he resolved the Fuchsian equations, that this Greek aretΘ was the missing
piece that completed the pattern, but he read on now for completion.

The halo around the heads of Plato and Socrates is now gone. He sees that
they consistently are doing exactly that which they accuse the Sophists of
doing...using emotionally persuasive language for the ulterior purpose of
making the weaker argument, the case for dialectic, appear the stronger. We
always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in
ourselves.

But why? Phædrus wondered. Why destroy aretΘ? And no sooner had he asked
the question than the answer came to him. Plato hadn't tried to destroy
aretΘ. He had encapsulated it; made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had
converted it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made aretΘ the Good,
the highest form, the highest Idea of all. It was subordinate only to Truth
itself, in a synthesis of all that had gone before.

That was why the Quality that Phædrus had arrived at in the classroom had
seemed so close to Plato's Good. Plato's Good was taken from the
rhetoricians. Phædrus searched, but could find no previous cosmologists who
had talked about the Good. That was from the Sophists. The difference was
that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for
the rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. The Good was not a form of
reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any
kind of fixed, rigid way.

Why had Plato done this? Phædrus saw Plato's philosophy as a result of two
syntheses.

The first synthesis tried to resolve differences between the Heraclitans
and the followers of Parmenides. Both Cosmological schools upheld Immortal
Truth. In order to win the battle for Truth in which aretΘ is subordinate,
against his enemies who would teach aretΘ in which truth is subordinate,
Plato must first resolve the internal conflict among the Truth-believers.
To do this he says that Immortal Truth is not just change, as the followers
of Heraclitus said. It is not just changeless being, as the followers of
Parmenides said. Both these Immortal Truths coexist as Ideas, which are
changeless, and Appearance, which changes. This is why Plato finds it
necessary to separate, for example, ``horseness'' from ``horse'' and say
that horseness is real and fixed and true and unmoving, while the horse is
a mere, unimportant, transitory phenomenon. Horseness is pure Idea. The
horse that one sees is a collection of changing Appearances, a horse that
can flux and move around all it wants to and even die on the spot without
disturbing horseness, which is the Immortal Principle and can go on forever
in the path of the Gods of old.

Plato's second synthesis is the incorporation of the Sophists' aretΘ into
this dichotomy of Ideas and Appearance. He gives it the position of highest
honor, subordinate only to Truth itself and the method by which Truth is
arrived at, the dialectic. But in his attempt to unite the Good and the
True by making the Good the highest Idea of all, Plato is nevertheless
usurping aretΘ's place with dialectically determined truth. Once the Good
has been contained as a dialectical idea it is no trouble for another
philosopher to come along and show by dialectical methods that aretΘ, the
Good, can be more advantageously demoted to a lower position within a
``true'' order of things, more compatible with the inner workings of
dialectic. Such a philosopher was not long in coming. His name was
Aristotle.

Aristotle felt that the mortal horse of Appearance which ate grass and took
people places and gave birth to little horses deserved far more attention
than Plato was giving it. He said that the horse is not mere Appearance.
The Appearances cling to something which is independent of them and which,
like Ideas, is unchanging. The ``something'' that Appearances cling to he
named ``substance.'' And at that moment, and not until that moment, our
modern scientific understanding of reality was born.

Under Aristotle the ``Reader,'' whose knowledge of Trojan aretΘ seems
conspicuously absent, forms and substances dominate all. The Good is a
relatively minor branch of knowledge called ethics; reason, logic,
knowledge are his primary concerns. AretΘ is dead and science, logic and
the University as we know it today have been given their founding charter:
to find and invent an endless proliferation of forms about the substantive
elements of the world and call these forms knowledge, and transmit these
forms to future generations. As ``the system.''

And rhetoric. Poor rhetoric, once ``learning'' itself, now becomes reduced
to the teaching of mannerisms and forms, Aristotelian forms, for writing,
as if these mattered. Five spelling errors, Phædrus remembered, or one
error of sentence completeness, or three misplaced modifiers, or -- it went
on and on. Any of these was sufficient to inform a student that he did not
know rhetoric. After all, that's what rhetoric is, isn't it? Of course
there's ``empty rhetoric,'' that is, rhetoric that has emotional appeal
without proper subservience to dialectical truth, but we don't want any of
that, do we? That would make us like those liars and cheats and defilers of
ancient Greece, the Sophists...remember them? We'll learn the Truth in our
other academic courses, and then learn a little rhetoric so that we can
write it nicely and impress our bosses who will advance us to higher
positions.

Forms and mannerisms...hated by the best, loved by the worst. Year after
year, decade after decade of little front-row ``readers,'' mimics with
pretty smiles and neat pens, out to get their Aristotelian A's while those
who possess the real aretΘ sit silently in back of them wondering what is
wrong with themselves that they cannot like this subject.

And today in those few Universities that bother to teach classic ethics
anymore, students, following the lead of Aristotle and Plato, endlessly
play around with the question that in ancient Greece never needed to be
asked: ``What is the Good? And how do we define it? Since different people
have defined it differently, how can we know there is any good? Some say
the good is found in happiness, but how do we know what happiness is? And
how can happiness be defined? Happiness and good are not objective terms.
We cannot deal with them scientifically. And since they aren't objective
they just exist in your mind. So if you want to be happy just change your
mind. Ha-ha, ha-ha.''

Aristotelian ethics, Aristotelian definitions, Aristotelian logic,
Aristotelian forms, Aristotelian substances, Aristotelian rhetoric,
Aristotelian laughter -- ha-ha, ha-ha.

And the bones of the Sophists long ago turned to dust and what they said
turned to dust with them and the dust was buried under the rubble of
declining Athens through its fall and Macedonia through its decline and
fall. Through the decline and death of ancient Rome and Byzantium and the
Ottoman Empire and the modern states...buried so deep and with such
ceremoniousness and such unction and such evil that only a madman centuries
later could discover the clues needed to uncover them, and see with horror
what had been done. --

The road has become so dark I have to turn on my headlight now to follow it
through these mists and rain.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

30

At Arcata we enter a small diner, cold and wet, and eat chili and beans and
drink coffee.

Then we are back on the road again, freeway now, fast and wet. We'll go to
within an easy day's distance from San Francisco and then stop.

The freeway picks up strange reflections in the rain from oncoming lights
across the median. The rain hits like pellets against the bubble, which
refracts the lights in strange circular and then semicircular waves as they
go by. Twentieth century. It's all around us now, this twentieth century.
Time to finish this twentieth-century odyssey of Phædrus and be done with
it.

The next time the class in Ideas and Methods 251, Rhetoric, met at the
large round table in South Chicago, a department secretary announced that
the Professor of Philosophy was ill. The following week he was still ill.
The somewhat bewildered remnants of the class, which had dwindled to a
third of its size, went on their own across the street for coffee.

At the coffee table a student whom Phædrus had marked as bright but
intellectually snobbish said, ``I consider this one of the most unpleasant
classes I have ever been in.'' He seemed to look down on Phædrus with
womanish peevishness as a spoiler of what should have been a nice
experience.

``I thoroughly agree,'' Phædrus said. He waited for some sort of attack,
but it didn't come.

The other students seemed to sense that Phædrus was the cause of all this
but they had nothing to go on. Then an older woman at the other end of the
coffee table asked why he was attending the class.

``I'm in the process of trying to discover that,'' Phædrus said.

``Do you attend full-time?'' she asked.

``No, I teach full-time at Navy Pier.''

``What do you teach?''

``Rhetoric.''

She stopped talking and everyone at the table looked at him and became
silent.

November wore on. The leaves, which had turned a beautiful sunlit orange in
October, fell from the trees, leaving barren branches to meet the cold
winds from the north. A first snow fell, then melted, and a drab city
waited for winter to come.

In the Professor of Philosophy's absence, another Platonic dialogue had
been assigned. Its title was Phædrus, which meant nothing to our Phædrus
since he didn't call himself by that name. The Greek Phædrus is not a
Sophist but a young orator who is a foil for Socrates in this dialogue,
which is about the nature of love and the possibility of philosophic
rhetoric. Phædrus doesn't appear to be very bright, and has an awful sense
of rhetorical quality, since he quotes from memory a really bad speech by
the orator Lysias. But one soon learns that this bad speech is simply a
setup, an easy act for Socrates to follow with a much better speech of his
own, and following that with a still better speech, one of the finest in
all the Dialogues of Plato.

Beyond that, the only remarkable thing about Phædrus is his personality.
Plato often names Socrates' foils for characteristics of their personality.
A young, overtalkative, innocent and good-natured foil in the Gorgias is
named Polus, which is Greek for ``colt.'' Phædrus' personality is different
from this. He is unallied to any particular group. He prefers the solitude
of the country to the city. He is aggressive to the point of being
dangerous. At one point he threatens Socrates with violence. Phædrus, in
Greek, means ``wolf.'' In this dialogue he is carried away by Socrates'
discourse on love and is tamed.

Our Phædrus reads the dialogue and is tremendously impressed by the
magnificent poetic imagery. But he's not tamed by it because he also smells
in it a faint odor of hypocrisy. The speech is not an end in itself, but is
being used to condemn that same affective domain of understanding it makes
its rhetorical appeal to. The passions are characterized as the destroyer
of understanding, and Phædrus wonders if this is where the condemnation of
the passions so deeply buried in Western thought got its start. Probably
not. The tension between ancient Greek thought and emotion is described
elsewhere as basic to Greek makeup and culture. Interesting though.

The next week the Professor of Philosophy again does not appear, and
Phædrus uses the time to catch up on his work at the University of
Illinois.

The next week, in the University of Chicago bookstore across the street
from where he is about to attend class, Phædrus sees two dark eyes that
stare at him steadily through a shelf of books. When the face appears he
recognizes it as the face of the innocent student who had been verbally
beaten up earlier in the quarter and had disappeared. The face looks as
though the student knows something Phædrus doesn't know. Phædrus walks over
to talk, but the face retreats and goes out the door, leaving Phædrus
puzzled. And on edge. Perhaps he's just fatigued and jumpy. The exhaustion
of teaching at Navy Pier on top of the effort to outflank the whole body of
Western academic thought at the University of Chicago is forcing him to
work and study twenty hours a day with inadequate attention to food or
exercise. It could be just fatigue that makes him think something is odd
about that face.

But when he walks across the street to the class, the face follows about
twenty paces behind. Something is up.

Phædrus enters the classroom and waits. Soon, there comes the student
again, back into the room after all these weeks. He can't expect to get
credit now. The student looks at Phædrus with a half-smile. He's smiling at
something, all right.

At the doorway there are some footsteps, and then Phædrus suddenly
knows...and his legs turn rubbery and his hands start to shake. Smiling
benignly in the doorway, stands none other than the Chairman for the
Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods at the University of
Chicago. He is taking over the class.

This is it. This is where they throw Phædrus out the front door.

Courtly, grand, with imperial magnanimity the Chairman stands in the
doorway for a moment, then talks to a student who seems to know him. He
smiles, while looking away from the student, around the classroom, as if to
find another face that is familiar to him, nods and then chuckles a little,
waiting for the bell to ring.

That's why that kid is here. They've explained to him why they accidentally
beat him up, and just to show what good guys they are they're going to let
him have a ringside seat while they beat up Phædrus.

How are they going to do it? Phædrus already knows. First they are going to
destroy his status dialectically in front of the class by showing how
little he knows about Plato and Aristotle. That won't be any trouble.
Obviously they know a hundred times more about Plato and Aristotle than he
ever will. They've been at it all their lives.

Then, when they have thoroughly cut him up dialectically, they will suggest
that he either shape up or get out. Then they are going to ask some more
questions, and he won't know the answers to those either. Then they are
going to suggest that his performance is so abominable that he not bother
to attend, but leave the class right now. There are variations possible but
this is the basic format. It's so easy.

Well, he has learned a lot, which is what he has come for. He can do his
thesis in some other way. With that thought the rubbery feeling leaves him
and he calms down.

Phædrus has grown a beard since the Chairman last saw him, and so is still
unidentified. No long advantage. The Chairman will locate him soon enough.

The Chairman lays his coat down carefully, takes a chair on the opposite
side of the large round table, sits, and then brings out an old pipe and
stuffs it for what must be nearly a half a minute. One can see he has done
this many times before.

In a moment of attention to the class he studies faces with a smiling
hypnotic gaze, sensing the mood, but feeling it is not just right. He
stuffs the pipe some more, but without hurry.

Soon the moment arrives, he lights the pipe, and before long there is in
the classroom an odor of smoke.

At last he speaks:

``It is my understanding,'' he says, ``that today we are to begin
discussion of the immortal Phædrus.'' He looks at each student separately.
``Is that correct?''

Members of the class assure him timidly that it is. His persona is
overwhelming.

The Chairman then apologizes for the absence of the previous Professor, and
describes the format of what will follow. Since he already knows the
dialogue himself he will elicit from the class answers that will show how
well they have studied it.

That's the best way to do it, Phædrus thinks. That way one can learn to
know the individual students. Fortunately Phædrus has studied the dialogue
so carefully it is almost memorized.

The Chairman is right. It is an immortal dialogue, strange and puzzling at
first, but then hitting you harder and harder, like truth itself. What
Phædrus has been talking about as Quality, Socrates appears to have
described as the soul, self-moving, the source of all things. There is no
contradiction. There never really can be between the core terms of monistic
philosophies. The One in India has got to be the same as the One in Greece.
If it's not, you've got two. The only disagreements among the monists
concern the attributes of the One, not the One itself. Since the One is the
source of all things and includes all things in it, it cannot be defined in
terms of those things, since no matter what thing you use to define it, the
thing will always describe something less than the One itself. The One can
only be described allegorically, through the use of analogy, of figures of
imagination and speech. Socrates chooses a heaven-and-earth analogy,
showing how individuals are drawn toward the One by a chariot drawn by two
horses. --

But the Chairman now directs a question to the student next to Phædrus. He
is baiting him a little, provoking him to attack.

The student, whose identity is mistaken, doesn't attack, and the Chairman
with great disgust and frustration finally dismisses him with a rebuke that
he should have read the material better.

Phædrus' turn. He has calmed down tremendously. He must now explain the
dialogue.

``If I may be permitted to begin again in my own way,'' he says, partly to
conceal the fact that he didn't hear what the previous student said.

The Chairman, seeing this as a further rebuke to the student next to him,
smiles and says contemptuously it is certainly a good idea.

Phædrus proceeds. ``I believe that in this dialogue the person of Phædrus
is characterized as a wolf. ''

He has delivered this quite loudly, with a flash of anger, and the Chairman
almost jumps. Score!

``Yes,'' the Chairman says, and a gleam in his eye shows he now recognizes
who his bearded assailant is. ``Phædrus in Greek does mean `wolf.' That's a
very acute observation.'' He begins to recover his composure. ``Proceed.''

``Phædrus meets Socrates, who knows only the ways of the city, and leads
him into the country, whereupon he begins to recite a speech of the orator,
Lysias, whom he admires. Socrates asks him to read it and Phædrus does.''

``Stop!'' says the Chairman, who has now completely recovered his
composure. ``You are giving us the plot, not the dialogue.'' He calls on
the next student.

None of the students seems to know to the Chairman's satisfaction what the
dialogue is about. And so with mock sadness he says they must all read more
thoroughly but this time he will help them by taking on the burden of
explaining the dialogue himself. This provides an overwhelming relief to
the tension he has so carefully built up and the entire class is in the
palm of his hand.

The Chairman proceeds to reveal the meaning of the dialogue with complete
attention. Phædrus listens with deep engagement.

After a time something begins to disengage him a little. A false note of
some kind has crept in. At first he doesn't see what it is, but then he
becomes aware that the Chairman has completely bypassed Socrates'
description of the One and has jumped ahead to the allegory of the chariot
and the horses.

In this allegory the seeker, trying to reach the One,

is drawn by two horses, one white and noble and temperate, and the other
surly, stubborn, passionate and black. The one is forever aiding him in his
upward journey to the portals of heaven, the other is forever confounding
him. The Chairman has not stated it yet, but he is at the point at which he
must now announce that the white horse is temperate reason, the black horse
is dark passion, emotion. He is at the point at which these must be
described, but the false note suddenly becomes a chorus.

He backs up and restates that ``Now Socrates has sworn to the Gods that he
is telling the Truth. He has taken an oath to speak the Truth, and if what
follows is not the Truth he has forfeited his own soul.''

TRAP! He's using the dialogue to prove the holiness of reason! Once that's
established he can move down into enquiries of what reason is, and then, lo
and behold, there we are in Aristotle's domain again!

Phædrus raises his hand, palm flat out, elbow on the table. Where before
this hand was shaking, it is now deadly calm. Phædrus senses that he now is
formally signing his own death warrant here, but knows he will sign another
kind of death warrant if he takes his hand down.

The Chairman sees the hand, is surprised and disturbed by it, but
acknowledges it. Then the message is delivered.

Phædrus says, ``All this is just an analogy.''

Silence. And then confusion appears on the Chairman's face. ``What?'' he
says. The spell of his performance is broken.

``This entire description of the chariot and horses is just an analogy.''

``What?'' he says again, then loudly, ``It is the truth! Socrates has sworn
to the Gods that it is the truth!''

Phædrus replies, ``Socrates himself says it is an analogy.''

``If you will read the dialogue you will find that Socrates specifically
states it is the Truth!''

``Yes, but prior to that -- in, I believe, two paragraphs -- he has stated
that it is an analogy.''

The text is on the table to consult but the Chairman has enough sense not
to consult it. If he does and Phædrus is right, his classroom face is
completely demolished. He has told the class no one has read the book
thoroughly.

Rhetoric, 1; Dialectic, 0.

Fantastic, Phædrus thinks, that he should have remembered that. It just
demolishes the whole dialectical position. That may just be the whole show
right there. Of course it's an analogy. Everything is an analogy. But the
dialecticians don't know that. That's why the Chairman missed that
statement of Socrates. Phædrus has caught it and remembered it, because if
Socrates hadn't stated it he wouldn't have been telling the ``Truth.''

No one sees it yet, but they will soon enough. The Chairman of the
Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods has just been shot down
in his own classroom.

Now he is speechless. He can't think of a word to say. The silence which so
built his image at the beginning of the class is now destroying it. He
doesn't understand from where the shot has come. He has never confronted a
living Sophist. Only dead ones.

Now he tries to grasp onto something, but there is nothing to grasp onto.
His own momentum carries him forward into the abyss, and when he finally
finds words they are the words of another kind of person; a schoolboy who
has forgotten his lesson, has gotten it wrong, but would like our
indulgence anyway.

He tries to bluff the class with the statement he made before that no one
has studied very well, but the student to Phædrus' right shakes his head at
him. Obviously someone has.

The Chairman falters and hesitates, acts afraid of his class and does not
really engage them. Phædrus wonders what the consequences of this will be.

Then he sees a bad thing happen. The beat-up innocent student who has
watched him earlier now is no longer so innocent. He is sneering at the
Chairman and asking him sarcastic and insinuating questions. The Chairman,
already crippled, is now being killed -- but then Phædrus realizes this was
what was intended for himself.

He can't feel sorry, just disgusted. When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf,
and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes.
The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have
forgotten.

A girl rescues the Chairman by asking easy questions. He receives the
questions with gratitude, answers each at great length and slowly recovers
himself.

Then the question is asked him, ``What is dialectic?''

He thinks about it, and then, by God, turns to Phædrus and asks if he would
care to answer.

``You mean my personal opinion?'' Phædrus asks.

``No -- let us say, Aristotle's opinion.''

No subtleties now. He is just going to get Phædrus on his own territory and
let him have it.

``As best I know -- '' Phædrus says, and pauses.

``Yes?'' The Chairman is all smiles. Everything is all set.

``As best I know, Aristotle's opinion is that dialectic comes before
everything else.''

The Chairman's expression goes from unction to shock to rage in one-half
second flat. It does! his face shouts, but he never says it. The trapper
trapped again. He can't kill Phædrus on a statement taken from his own
article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Rhetoric, 2; Dialectic, 0.

``And from the dialectic come the forms,'' Phædrus continues, ``and from.
-- '' But the Chairman cuts it off. He sees it cannot go his way and
dismisses it.

He shouldn't have cut it off, Phædrus thinks to himself. Were he a real
Truth-seeker and not a propagandist for a particular point of view he would
not. He might learn something. Once it's stated that ``the dialectic comes
before anything else,'' this statement itself becomes a dialectical entity,
subject to dialectical question.

Phædrus would have asked, What evidence do we have that the dialectical
question-and-answer method of arriving at truth comes before anything else?
We have none whatsoever. And when the statement is isolated and itself
subject to scrutiny it becomes patently ridiculous. Here is this dialectic,
like Newton's law of gravity, just sitting by itself in the middle of
nowhere, giving birth to the universe, hey? It's asinine.

Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric.
Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece.
That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense.
The poetry and the myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the
universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not
dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know.

The class ends, the Chairman stands by the door answering questions, and
Phædrus almost goes up to say something but does not. A lifetime of blows
tends to make a person unenthusiastic about any unnecessary interchange
that might lead to more. Nothing friendly has been said or even hinted at
and much hostility has been shown.

Phædrus the wolf. It fits. Walking back to his apartment with light steps
he sees it fits more and more. He wouldn't be happy if they were overjoyed
with the thesis. Hostility is really his element. It really is. Phædrus the
wolf, yes, down from the mountains to prey upon the poor innocent citizens
of this intellectual community. It fits all right.

The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on
individual strength but upon individual weakness. What's really demanded in
the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered
teachable. A truly able person is always a threat. Phædrus sees that he has
thrown away a chance to integrate himself into the organization by
submitting to whatever Aristotelian thing he is supposed to submit to. But
that kind of opportunity seems hardly worth the bowing and scraping and
intellectual prostration necessary to maintain it. It is a low-quality form
of life.

For him Quality is better seen up at the timberline than here obscured by
smoky windows and oceans of words, and he sees that what he is talking
about can never really be accepted here because to see it one has to be
free from social authority and this is an institution of social authority.
Quality for sheep is what the shepherd says. And if you take a sheep and
put it up at the timberline at night when the wind is roaring, that sheep
will be panicked half to death and will call and call until the shepherd
comes, or comes the wolf.

He makes one last attempt somehow to be nice at the next session of the
class but the Chairman isn't having any. Phædrus asks him to explain a
point, saying he hasn't been able to understand it. He has, but thinks it
would be nice to defer a little.

The answer is ``Maybe you got tired!'' delivered as scathingly as possible;
but it doesn't scathe. The Chairman is simply condemning in Phædrus that
which he most fears in himself. As the class goes on Phædrus sits staring
out the window feeling sorry for this old shepherd and his classroom sheep
and dogs and sorry for himself that he will never be one of them. Then,
when the bell rings, he leaves forever.

The classes at Navy Pier by contrast are going like wildfire, the students
now listening intently to this strange, bearded figure from the mountains
who is telling them there was such a thing as Quality in this universe and
they know what it is. They don't know what to make of it, are unsure, some
of them afraid of him. They can see he is somehow dangerous, but all are
fascinated and want to hear more.

But Phædrus is no shepherd either and the strain of behaving like one is
killing him. A strange thing that has always occurred in classes occurs
again, when the unruly and wild students in the back rows have always
empathized with him and been his favorites, while the more sheepish and
obedient students in the front rows have always been terrorized by him and
are because of this objects of his contempt, even though in the end the
sheep have passed and his unruly friends in the back rows have not. And
Phædrus sees, though he does not want to admit it to himself even now, he
sees intuitively nevertheless that his days as a shepherd are coming to an
end too. And he wonders more and more what is going to happen next.

He has always feared the silence in the classroom, the sort that has
destroyed the Chairman. It is not his nature to talk and talk and talk for
hours on end and it exhausts him to do this, and now, having nothing left
to turn upon, he turns upon this fear.

He comes to the classroom, the bell rings, and Phædrus sits there and does
not talk. For the entire hour he is silent. Some of the students challenge
him a little to wake him up, but then are silent. Others are going straight
out of their minds with internal panic. At the end of the hour the whole
class literally breaks and runs for the door. Then he goes to his next
class and the same thing happens. And the next class, and the next. Then
Phædrus goes home. And he wonders more and more what is going to happen
next.

Thanksgiving comes.

His four hours of sleep have dwindled down to two and then to nothing. It
is all over. He will not be going back to the study of Aristotelian
rhetoric. Neither will he return to the teaching of that subject. It is
over. He begins to walk the streets, his mind spinning.

The city closes in on him now, and in his strange perspective it becomes
the antithesis of what he believes. The citadel not of Quality, the citadel
of form and substance. Substance in the form of steel sheets and girders,
substance in the form of concrete piers and roads, in the form of brick, of
asphalt, of auto parts, old radios, and rails, dead carcasses of animals
that once grazed the prairies. Form and substance without Quality. That is
the soul of this place. Blind, huge, sinister and inhuman: seen by the
light of fire flaring upward in the night from the blast furnaces in the
south, through heavy coal smoke deeper and denser into the neon of BEER and
PIZZA and LAUNDROMAT signs and unknown and meaningless signs along
meaningless straight streets going off into other straight streets forever.

If it was all bricks and concrete, pure forms of substance, clearly and
openly, he might survive. It is the little, pathetic attempts at Quality
that kill. The plaster false fireplace in the apartment, shaped and waiting
to contain a flame that can never exist. Or the hedge in front of the
apartment building with a few square feet of grass behind it. A few square
feet of grass, after Montana. If they just left out the hedge and grass it
would be all right. Now it serves only to draw attention to what has been
lost.

Along the streets that lead away from the apartment he can never see
anything through the concrete and brick and neon but he knows that buried
within it are grotesque, twisted souls forever trying the manners that will
convince themselves they possess Quality, learning strange poses of style
and glamour vended by dream magazines and other mass media, and paid for by
the vendors of substance. He thinks of them at night alone with their
advertised glamorous shoes and stockings and underclothes off, staring
through the sooty windows at the grotesque shells revealed beyond them,
when the poses weaken and the truth creeps in, the only truth that exists
here, crying to heaven, God, there is nothing here but dead neon and cement
and brick.

His time consciousness begins to go. Sometimes his thoughts race on and on
at a speed seeming to approach that of light. But when he tries to make
decisions relating to his surroundings, it seems to take whole minutes for
a single thought to emerge. A single thought begins to grow in his mind,
extracted from something he read in the dialogue Phædrus.

``And what is written well and what is written badly...need we ask Lysias
or any other poet or orator who ever wrote or will write either a political
or other work, in meter or out of meter, poet or prose writer, to teach us
this?''

What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good...need we ask anyone to tell us
these things?

It is what he was saying months before in the classroom in Montana, a
message Plato and every dialectician since him had missed, since they all
sought to define the Good in its intellectual relation to things. But what
he sees now is how far he has come from that. He is doing the same bad
things himself. His original goal was to keep Quality undefined, but in the
process of battling against the dialecticians he has made statements, and
each statement has been a brick in a wall of definition he himself has been
building around Quality. Any attempt to develop an organized reason around
an undefined quality defeats its own purpose. The organization of the
reason itself defeats the quality. Everything he has been doing has been a
fool's mission to begin with.

On the third day he turns a corner at an intersection of unknown streets
and his vision blanks out. When it returns he is lying on the sidewalk,
people moving around him as if he were not there. He gets up wearily and
mercilessly drives his thoughts to remember the way back to the apartment.
They are slowing down. Slowing down. This is about the time he and Chris
try to find the sellers of bunk beds for the children to sleep in. After
that he does not leave the apartment.

He stares at the wall in a cross-legged position upon a quilted blanket on
the floor of a bedless bedroom. All bridges have been burned. There is no
way back. And now there is no way forward either.

For three days and three nights, Phædrus stares at the wall of the bedroom,
his thoughts moving neither forward nor backward, staying only at the
instant. His wife asks if he is sick, and he does not answer. His wife
becomes angry, but Phædrus listens without responding. He is aware of what
she says but is no longer able to feel any urgency about it. Not only are
his thoughts slowing down, but his desires too. And they slow and slow, as
if gaining an imponderable mass. So heavy, so tired, but no sleep comes. He
feels like a giant, a million miles tall. He feels himself extending into
the universe with no limit.

He begins to discard things, encumbrances that he has carried with him all
his life. He tells his wife to leave with the children, to consider
themselves separated. Fear of loathsomeness and shame disappear when his
urine flows not deliberately but naturally on the floor of the room. Fear
of pain, the pain of the martyrs is overcome when cigarettes burn not
deliberately but naturally down into his fingers until they are
extinguished by blisters formed by their own heat. His wife sees his
injured hands and the urine on the floor and calls for help.

But before help comes, slowly, imperceptibly at first, the entire
consciousness of Phædrus begins to come apart -- to dissolve and fade away.
Then gradually he no longer wonders what will happen next. He knows what
will happen next, and tears flow for his family and for himself and for
this world. A fragment comes and lingers from an old Christian hymn,
``You've got to cross that lonesome valley.'' It carries him forward.
``You've got to cross it by yourself.'' It seems a Western hymn that
belongs out in Montana.

``No one else can cross it for you,'' it says. It seems to suggest
something beyond. ``You've got to cross it by yourself.''

He crosses a lonesome valley, out of the mythos, and emerges as if from a
dream, seeing that his whole consciousness, the mythos, has been a dream
and no one's dream but his own, a dream he must now sustain of his own
efforts. Then even ``he'' disappears and only the dream of himself remains
with himself in it.

And the Quality, the aretΘ he has fought so hard for, has sacrificed for,
has never betrayed, but in all that time has never once understood, now
makes itself clear to him and his soul is at rest.

The cars are thinned out to almost none, and the road is so black it seems
as though the headlight can barely fight its way through the rain to reach
it. Murderous. Anything can happen...a sudden rut, an oil slick, a dead
animal. -- But if you go too slow they'll kill you from behind. I don't
know why we still go on in this. We should have stopped long ago. I don't
know what I'm doing anymore. I was looking for some sign of a motel, I
guess, but not thinking about it and missing them. If we keep on like this
they'll all close.

We take the next exit from the freeway, hoping it will lead somewhere, and
soon are on bumpy blacktop with ruts and loose gravel. I go slowly.
Streetlamps overhead throw swinging arcs of sodium light through the sheets
of rain. We pass from light into shadow into light into shadow again
without a single sign of welcome anywhere. A sign announces ``STOP'' to our
left, but does not tell which way to turn. One way looks as dark as the
other. We could go endlessly through these streets and not find anything,
and now not even find the freeway again.

``Where are we?'' Chris shouts.

``I don't know.'' My mind has become tired and slow. I can't seem to think
of the right answer -- or what to do next.

Now I see ahead a white glow and bright sign of a filling station far down
the street.

It's open. We pull up and go inside. The attendant, who looks Chris's age,
watches us strangely. He doesn't know of any motel. I go to the telephone
directory, find some and tell him the street addresses, and he tries to
give directions but they're poor. I call the motel he says is closest, make
a reservation and confirm the directions.

In the rain and the dark streets, even with directions, we almost miss it.
They have turned the light out, and when I register nothing is said.

The room is a remnant of the bleakness of the thirties, sordid, homemade by
a person who didn't know carpentry, but it's dry and has a heater and beds
and that's all we want. I turn on the heater and we sit before it and soon
the chills and shivers and damp start to leave our bones.

Chris doesn't look up, just stares into the grille of the wall heater.
Then, after a while, he says, ``When are we going back home?''

Failure.

``When we get to San Francisco,'' I say. ``Why?''

``I'm so tired of just sitting and -- '' His voice has trailed off.

``And what?''

``And -- I don't know. Just sitting -- like we're not really going
anyplace.''

``Where should we go?''

``I don't know. How should I know?''

``I don't know either,'' I say.

``Well, why don't you!'' he says. He begins to cry.

He doesn't answer. Then he puts his head in his hands and rocks back and
forth. The way he does it gives me an eerie feeling. After a while he stops
and says, ``When I was little it was different.''

``How?''

``I don't know. We always did things. That I wanted to do. Now I don't want
to do anything.''

He continues to rock back and forth in that eerie way, with his face in his
hands, and I don't know what to do. It's a strange, unworldly rocking
motion, a fetal self-enclosure that seems to shut me out, to shut
everything out. A return to somewhere that I don't know about -- the bottom
of the ocean.

Now I know where I have seen it before, on the floor of the hospital.

I don't know of anything to do.

After a while we get in our beds and I try to sleep.

Then I ask Chris, ``Was it better before we left Chicago?''

``Yes.''

``How? What do you remember?''

``That was fun.''

``Fun?''

``Yes,'' he says, and is quiet. Then he says, ``Remember the time we went
to look for beds?''

``That was fun? ''

``Sure,'' he says, and is quiet for a long time. Then he says, ``Don't you
remember? You made me find all the directions home. -- You used to play
games with us. You used to tell us all kinds of stories and we'd go on
rides to do things and now you don't do anything.''

``Yes, I do.''

``No, you don't! You just sit and stare and you don't do anything!'' I hear
him crying again.

Outside the rain comes in gusts against the window, and I feel a kind of
heavy pressure bear down on me. He's crying for him. It's him he misses.
That's what the dream is about. In the dream. --

For what seems like a long time I continue to listen to the cricking sound
of the wall heater and the wind and the rain against the roof and window.
Then the rain dies away and there is nothing left but a few drops of water
from the trees moving in an occasional gust of wind.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

31

In the morning I am stopped by the appearence of a green slug slug on the
ground. It's about six inches long, three-quarters inch wide and soft and
almost rubbery and covered with slime like some internal organ of an
animal.

All around me it's damp and wet and foggy and cold, but clear enough to see
that the motel we have stopped in is on a slope with apple trees down below
and grass and small weeds under them covered with dew or just rain that
hasn't run off. I see another slug and then another...my God, the place is
crawling with them.

When Chris comes out I show one to him. It moves slowly like a snail across
a leaf. He has no comment.

We leave and breakfast in a town off the road called Weott, where I see
he's still in a distant mood. It's a kind of looking-away mood and a
not-talking mood, and I leave him alone.

Farther on at Leggett we see a tourist duck pond and we buy Cracker Jacks
and throw them to the ducks and he does this in the most unhappy way I have
ever seen. Then we pass into some of the twisting coastal range road and
suddenly enter heavy fog. Then the temperature drops and I know we're back
at the ocean again.

When the fog lifts we can see the ocean from a high cliff, far out and so
blue and so distant. As we ride I become colder, deep cold.

We stop and I get out the jacket and put it on. I see Chris go very close
to the edge of the cliff. It's at least one hundred feet to the rocks
below. Way too close!

``CHRIS!'' I holler. He doesn't answer.

I go up, swiftly grab his shirt and pull him back. ``Don't do that,'' I
say.

He looks at me with a strange squint.

I get out extra clothes for him and hand them to him. He takes them but he
dawdles and doesn't put them on.

There's no sense hurrying him. In this mood if he wants to wait, he can.

He waits and waits. Ten minutes, then fifteen minutes pass.

We're going to have a waiting contest.

After thirty minutes of cold winds off the ocean he asks, ``Which way are
we going?''

``South, now, along the coast.''

``Let's go back.''

``Where?''

``To where it's warmer.''

That would add another hundred miles. ``We have to go south now,'' I say.

``Why?''

``Because it would add too many miles going back.''

``Let's go back.''

``No. Get your warm clothes on.''

He doesn't and just sits there on the ground.

After another fifteen minutes he says, ``Let's go back.''

``Chris, you're not running the cycle. I'm running it. We're going south.''

``Why?''

``Because it's too far and because I've said so.''

``Well, why don't we just go back?''

Anger reaches me. ``You don't really want to know, do you?''

``I want to go back. Just tell me why we can't go back.''

I'm hanging on to my temper now. ``What you really want isn't to go back.
What you really want is just to get me angry, Chris. If you keep it up
you'll succeed!''

Flash of fear. That's what he wanted. He wants to hate me. Because I'm not
him.

He looks down at the ground bitterly, and puts his warm clothes on. Then
we're back on the machine and moving down the coast again.

I can imitate the father he's supposed to have, but subconsciously, at the
Quality level, he sees through it and knows his real father isn't here. In
all this Chautauqua talk there's been more than a touch of hypocrisy.
Advice is given again and again to eliminate subject-object duality, when
the biggest duality of all, the duality between me and him, remains
unfaced. A mind divided against itself.

But who did it? I didn't do it. And there's no way now of undoing it. -- I
keep wondering how far it is to the bottom of that ocean out there. --

What I am is a heretic who's recanted, and thereby in everyone's eyes saved
his soul. Everyone's eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he
has saved is his skin.

I survive mainly by pleasing others. You do that to get out. To get out you
figure out what they want you to say and then you say it with as much skill
and originality as possible and then, if they're convinced, you get out. If
I hadn't turned on him I'd still be there, but he was true to what he
believed right to the end. That's the difference between us, and Chris
knows it. And that's the reason why sometimes I feel he's the reality and
I'm the ghost.

We're on the Mendocino County coast now, and it's all wild and beautiful
and open here. The hills are mostly but in the lee of rocks and folds in
the hills are strange flowing shrubs sculptured by the upsweep of winds
from the ocean. We pass some old wooden fences, weathered grey. In the
distance is an old weathered and grey farmhouse. How could anyone farm
here? The fence is broken in many places. Poor.

Where the road drops down from the high cliffs to the beach we stop to
rest. When I turn the engine off Chris says, ``What are we stopping here
for?''

``I'm tired.''

``Well, I'm not. Let's keep going.''

He's angry still. I'm angry too.

``Just go over on the beach there and run around in circles until I'm done
resting,'' I say.

``Let's keep going,'' he says, but I walk away and ignore it. He sits on
the curb by the motorcycle.

The ocean smell of rotting organic matter is heavy here and the cold wind
doesn't allow much rest. But I find a large cluster of grey rocks where the
wind is still and the heat of the sun can still be felt and enjoyed. I
concentrate on the warmth of the sunlight and am grateful for what little
there is.

We ride again and what comes to me now is the realization that he's another
Phædrus, thinking the way he used to and acting the same way he used to,
looking for trouble, being driven by forces he's only dimly aware of and
doesn't understand. The questions -- the same questions -- he's got to know
everything.

And if he doesn't get the answer he just drives and drives until he gets
one and that leads to another question and he drives and drives for the
answer to that -- endlessly pursuing questions, never seeing, never
understanding that the questions will never end. Something is missing and
he knows it and will kill himself trying to find it.

We round a sharp turn up an overhanging cliff. The ocean stretches forever,
cold and blue out there, and produces a strange sense of despair. Coastal
people never really know what the ocean symbolizes to landlocked inland
people...what a great distant dream it is, present but unseen in the
deepest levels of subconsciousness, and when they arrive at the ocean and
the conscious images are compared with the subconscious dream there is a
sense of defeat at having come so far to be so stopped by a mystery that
can never be fathomed. The source of it all.

A long time later we come to a town where a luminous haze which has seemed
so natural over the ocean is now seen in the streets of the town, giving
them a certain aura, a hazy sunny radiance that makes everything look
nostalgic, as if remembered from years before.

We stop in a crowded restaurant and find the last remaining empty table by
a window overlooking the radiant street. Chris looks down and doesn't talk.
Maybe, in some way, he senses that we haven't much farther to go.

``I'm not hungry,'' he says.

``You don't mind waiting while I eat?''

``Let's keep going. I'm not hungry.''

``Well, I am.''

``Well, I'm not. My stomach hurts.'' The old symptom.

I eat my lunch amid the conversation and clink of plates and spoons from
the other tables and out the window watch a bicycle and rider go by. I feel
like somehow we have arrived at the end of the world.

I look up and see Chris is crying.

``Now what?'' I say.

``My stomach. It's hurting.''

``Is that all?''

``No. I just hate everything -- I'm sorry I came -- I hate this trip -- I
thought this was going to be fun, and it isn't any fun -- I'm sorry I
came.'' He is a truth-teller, like Phædrus. And like Phædrus he looks at me
now with more and more hatred. The time has come.

``I've been thinking, Chris, of putting you on the bus here with a ticket
for home.''

His face has no expression on it, then surprise mixed with dismay.

I add, ``I'll go on myself with the motorcycle and see you in a week or
two. There's no sense forcing you to continue on a vacation you hate.''

Now it's my turn to be surprised. His expression isn't relieved at all. The
dismay gets worse and he looks down and says nothing.

He seems caught off balance now, and frightened.

He looks up. ``Where would I stay?''

``Well, you can't stay at our house now, because other people are there.
You can stay with Grandma and Grandpa.''

``I don't want to stay with them.''

``You can stay with your aunt.''

``She doesn't like me. I don't like her.''

``You can stay with your other grandma and grandpa.''

``I don't want to stay there either.''

I name some others but he shakes his head.

``Well, who then?''

``I don't know.''

``Chris, I think you can see for yourself what the problem is. You don't
want to be on this trip. You hate it. Yet you don't want to stay with
anyone or go anywhere else. All these people I've mentioned you either
don't like or they don't like you.''

He's silent but tears now form.

A woman at another table is looking at me angrily. She opens her mouth as
if about to say something. I turn a heavy gaze on her for a long time until
she closes her mouth and goes back to eating.

Now Chris is crying hard and others look over from the other tables.

``Let's go for a walk,'' I say, and get up without waiting for the check.

At the cash register the waitress says, ``I'm sorry the boy isn't feeling
good.'' I nod, pay, and we're outside.

I look for a bench somewhere in the luminous haze but there is none.
Instead we climb on the cycle and go slowly south looking for a restful
place to pull off.

The road leads out to the ocean again where it climbs to a high point that
apparently juts out into the ocean but now is surrounded by banks of fog.
For a moment I see a distant break in the fog where some people rest in the
sand, but soon the fog rolls in and the people are obscured.

I look at Chris and see a puzzled, empty look in his eyes, but as soon as I
ask him to sit down some of the anger and hatred of this morning reappear.

``Why?'' he asks.

``I think it's time we should talk.''

``Well, talk,'' he says. All the old belligerence is back. It's the ``kind
father'' image he can't stand. He knows the ``niceness'' is false.

``What about the future?'' I say. Stupid thing to ask.

``What about it?'' he says.

``I was going to ask what you planned to do about the future.''

``I'm going to let it be.'' Contempt shows now.

The fog opens for a moment, revealing the cliff we are on, then closes
again, and a sense of inevitability about what is happening comes over me.
I'm being pushed toward something and the objects in the corner of the eye
and the objects in the center of the vision are all of equal intensity now,
all together in one, and I say, ``Chris, I think it's time to talk about
some things you don't know about.''

He listens a little. He senses something is coming.

``Chris, you're looking at a father who was insane for a long time, and is
close to it again.''

And not just close anymore. It's here. The bottom of the ocean.

``I'm sending you home not because I'm angry with you but because I'm
afraid of what can happen if I continue to take responsibility for you.''

His face doesn't show any change of expression. He doesn't understand yet
what I'm saying.

``So this is going to be good-bye, Chris, and I'm not sure we'll see each
other anymore.''

That's it. It's done. And now the rest will follow naturally.

He looks at me so strangely. I think he still doesn't understand. That gaze
-- I've seen it somewhere -- somewhere -- somewhere. --

In the fog of an early morning in the marshes there was a small duck, a
teal that gazed like this. -- I'd winged it and now it couldn't fly and I'd
run up on it and seized it by the neck and before killing it had stopped
and from some sense of the mystery of the universe had stared into its
eyes, and they gazed like this -- so calm and uncomprehending -- and yet so
aware. Then I closed my hands around its eyes and twisted the neck until it
broke and I felt the snap between my fingers.

Then I opened my hand. The eyes still gazed at me but they stared into
nothing and no longer followed my movements.

``Chris, they're saying it about you.''

He gazes at me.

``That all these troubles are in your mind.''

He shakes his head no.

``They seem real and feel real but they aren't.''

His eyes become wide. He continues to shake his head no, but comprehension
overtakes him.

``Things have gone from bad to worse. Trouble in school, trouble with the
neighbors, trouble with your family, trouble with your friends -- trouble
everywhere you turn. Chris, I was the only one holding them all back,
saying, `He's all right,' and now there won't be anyone. Do you
understand?''

He stares stunned. His eyes still track but they begin to falter. I'm not
giving him strength. I never have been. I'm killing him.

``It's not your fault, Chris. It never has been. Please understand that.''

His gaze fails in a sudden inward flash. Then his eyes close and a strange
cry comes from his mouth, a wail like the sound of something far away. He
turns and stumbles on the ground then falls, doubles up and kneels and
rocks back and forth, head on the ground. A faint misty wind blows in the
grass around him. A seagull alights nearby.

Through the fog I hear the whine of gears of a truck and am terrified by
it.

``You have to get up, Chris.''

The wail is high-pitched and inhuman, like a siren in the distance.

``You must get up!''

He continues to rock and wail on the ground.

I don't know what to do now. I have no idea what to do. It's all over. I
want to run for the cliff, but fight that. I have to get him on the bus,
and then the cliff will be all right.

Everything is all right now, Chris.

That's not my voice.

l haven't forgotten you.

Chris's rocking stops.

How could I forget you?

Chris raises his head and looks at me. A film he has always looked through
at me disappears for a moment and then returns.

We'll be together now.

The whine of the truck is upon us.

Now get up!

Chris slowly sits up and stares at me. The truck arrives, stops, and the
driver looks out to see if we need a ride. I shake my head no and wave him
on. He nods, puts the truck in gear, and it whines off through the mist
again and there is only Chris and me.

I put my jacket around him. His head is buried again between his knees and
he cries now, but it is a low-pitched human wail, not the strange cry of
before. My hands are wet and I feel that my forehead is wet too.

After a while he wails, ``Why did you leave us?''

When?

``At the hospital!''

There was no choice. The police prevented it.

``Wouldn't they let you out?''

No.

``Well then, why wouldn't you open the door?''

What door?

``The glass door!''

A kind of slow electric shock passes through me. What glass door is he
talking about?

``Don't you remember?'' he says. ``We were standing on one side and you
were on the other side and Mom was crying.''

I've never told him about that dream. How could he know about that? Oh, no

We're in another dream. That's why my voice sounds so strange.

I couldn't open that door. They told me not to open it. I had to do
everything they said.

``I thought you didn't want to see us,'' Chris says. He looks down.

The looks of terror in his eyes all these years.

Now I see the door. It is in a hospital.

This is the last time I will see them. I am Phædrus, that is who I am, and
they are going to destroy me for speaking the Truth.

It has all come together.

Chris cries softly now. Cries and cries and cries. The wind from the ocean
blows through the tall stems of grass all around us and the fog begins to
lift.

``Don't cry, Chris. Crying is just for children.''

After a long time I give him a rag to wipe his face with. We gather up our
stuff and pack it on the motorcycle. Now the fog suddenly lifts and I see
the sun on his face makes his expression open in a way I've never seen it
before. He puts on his helmet, tightens the strap, then looks up.

``Were you really insane?''

Why should he ask that?

No!

Astonishment hits. But Chris's eyes sparkle.

``I knew it,'' he says.

Then he climbs on the cycle and we are off.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

32

As we ride now through coastal manzanita and waxen- leafed shrubs, Chris's
expression comes to mind. ``I knew it,'' he said.

The cycle swings into each curve effortlessly, banking so that our weight
is always down through the machine no matter what its angle is with the
ground. The way is full of flowers and surprise views, tight turns one
after another so that the whole world rolls and pirouettes and rises and
falls away.

``I knew it,'' he said. It comes back now as one of those little facts
tugging at the end of a line, saying it's not as small as I think it is.
It's been in his mind for a long time. Years. All the problems he's given
become more understandable. ``I knew it,'' he said.

He must have heard something long ago, and in his childish misunderstanding
gotten it all mixed up. That's what Phædrus always said...I always
said...years ago, and Chris must have believed it, and kept it hidden
inside ever since.

We're related to each other in ways we never fully understand, maybe hardly
understand at all. He was always the real reason for coming out of the
hospital. To have let him grow up alone would have been really wrong. In
the dream too he was the one who was always trying to open the door.

I haven't been carrying him at all. He's been carrying me!

``I knew it,'' he said. It keeps tugging on the line, saying my big problem
may not be as big as I think it is, because the answer is right in front of
me. For God's sake relieve him of his burden! Be one person again!

Rich air and strange perfumes from the flowers of the trees and shrubs
enshroud us. Inland now the chill is gone and the heat is upon us again. It
soaks through my jacket and clothes and dries out the dampness inside. The
gloves which have been dark-wet have started to turn light again. It seems
like I've been bone-chilled by that ocean damp for so long I've forgotten
what heat is like. I begin to feel drowsy and in a small ravine ahead I see
a turnoff and a picnic table. When we get to it I cut the engine and stop.

``I'm sleepy,'' I tell Chris. ``I'm going to take a nap.''

``Me too,'' he says.

We sleep and when we wake up I feel very rested, more rested than for a
long time. I take Chris's jacket and mine and tuck them under the elastic
cables holding down the pack on the cycle.

It's so hot I feel like leaving this helmet off. I remember that in this
state they're not required. I fasten it around one of the cables.

``Put mine there too,'' Chris says.

``You need it for safety.''

``You're not wearing yours.''

``All right,'' I agree, and stow his too.

The road continues to twist and wind through the trees. It upswings around
hairpins and glides into new scenes one after another around and through
brush and then out into open spaces where we can see canyons stretch away
below.

``Beautiful!'' I holler to Chris.

``You don't need to shout,'' he says.

``Oh,'' I say, and laugh. When the helmets are off you can talk in a
conversational voice. After all these days!

``Well, it's beautiful, anyway,'' I say.

More trees and shrubs and groves. It's getting warmer. Chris hangs onto my
shoulders now and I turn a little and see that he stands up on the foot
pegs.

``That's a little dangerous,'' I say.

``No, it isn't. I can tell.''

He probably can. ``Be careful anyway,'' I say.

After a while when we cut sharp into a hairpin under some overhanging trees
he says, ``Oh,'' and then later on, ``Ah,'' and then, ``Wow.'' Some of
these branches over the road are hanging so low they're going to conk him
on the head if he isn't careful

``What's the matter?'' I ask.

``It's so different.''

``What?''

``Everything. I never could see over your shoulders before.''

The sunlight makes strange and beautiful designs through the tree branches
on the road. It flits light and dark into my eyes. We swing into a curve
and then up into the open sunlight.

That's true. I never realized it. All this time he's been staring into my
back. ``What do you see?'' I ask.

``It's all different.''

We head into a grove again, and he says, ``Don't you get scared?''

``No, you get used to it.''

After a while he says, ``Can I have a motorcycle when I get old enough?''

``If you take care of it.''

``What do you have to do?''

``Lot's of things. You've been watching me.''

``Will you show me all of them?''

``Sure.''

``It is hard?''

``Not if you have the right attitudes. It's having the right attitudes
that's hard.''

``Oh.''

After a while I see he is sitting down again. Then he says, ``Dad?''

``What?''

``Will I have the right attitudes?''

``I think so,'' I say. ``I don't think that will be any problem at all.''

And so we ride on and on, down through Ukiah, and Hopland, and Cloverdale,
down into the wine country. The freeway miles seem so easy now. The engine
which has carried us halfway across a continent drones on and on in its
continuing oblivion to everything but its own internal forces. We pass
through Asti and Santa Rosa, and Petaluma and Novato, on the freeway that
grows wider and fuller now, swelling with cars and trucks and busses full
of people, and soon by the road are houses and boats and the water of the
Bay.

Trials never end, of course. Unhappiness and misfortune are bound to occur
as long as people live, but there is a feeling now, that was not here
before, and is not just on the surface of things, but penetrates all the
way through: We've won it. It's going to get better now. You can sort of
tell these things.