sequel-7

THE SEQUEL

Chapter 7--Socrates

      Late in the run of The Tempest, Christine began to talk to Jack, and Charlie, about what they'd be doing next. After two exhausting months alternating between Ariel and Miranda in dealing with Prospero and Ferdinand on stage she was now very comfortable talking to them. They frequently wound up drinking beer and telling stories in the same little bar in which her mother had told Christine the story about being held up in Oklahoma City back when she was pregnant with her, that evening Christine was so elated after her great success as Titania in her very first play.
     Jack thought of how awed she'd been of her mother, of Jordan, and even of Ben back then, but it was a much more confident Christine who suddenly said, "Now let's do Hamlet! That's what Jordan wanted to do next--always wanted to do next, he said--ever since the bad experience he'd had with it in Connecticut. He talked about it a lot. He'd wanted Mother to play Ophelia, of course, but Mother definitely didn't want to. Well, I do--like Miranda, for Jordan. I'm ready to play Ophelia, and would like to before I go on to other things. Then perhaps another of Shakespeare's young heroines . . . Isabella in Measure for Measure, which Jordan said he looked forward to doing with me."
     "It's true, Betty never wanted to do Ophelia," Jack said.
     "I know why--because Ophelia's weak, and finally commits suicide--not an image Mother embraced. But her love is true. She's vulnerable because she's such a sensitive young woman. I know that I'm ready for her, but what I want to hear from you, Charlie, is that you think you're ready to play Hamlet . . . and that you think he is, Dad. That's the much greater challenge, of course--Jordan's role, like you doing Prospero. But that's worked out pretty well, hasn't it?"
     Jack just smiled, but Charlie seemed shocked by the idea. "I've never even thought of playing Hamlet. Why don't we wait a year . . . at least a year," he said, thinking of Henry's

comment on the middle game in chess. "I've done two relatively minor roles in Shakespeare, and Hamlet seems enormous. In the meantime, I can do other things with the company--things already in the repertory--if they're willing and I work at it. I don't even feel that I know Hamlet well enough to be committed to the part, the way you say Jordan was." He shook his head. "Maybe Arthur is ready to do it . . . if Lieutenant Carlson will let him alone long enough."
     "I don't want to do it with Arthur," Christine said, frowning. "Let Arthur play Claudius--he likes to play the villain--like Caliban, type casting. But I'd like to see Laura play Gertrude. I'd like to be on stage with her."
     "That would be good," said Charlie. "But I'll tell you what. As the first thing I did with this company, I read Jean in a staged reading of Miss Julie, a year ago. I like that play. That would be a challenging role for me--if not as challenging as Hamlet, with its 1400 lines. I don't know if I can even memorize that many lines--I've never done half that much. In film work you don't have to memorize a part all at once. I feel that I understand Jean pretty well. Miss Julie would be an excellent role for you, of course--as I understand it was for your mother. Better than Ophelia. We could do that here with relatively little preparation--by next month."
     Jack looked at them for a moment, basking in the enthusiasm of these young people--with such challenging futures to look forward to, but so different--then said, "I think you're both right, that you, Christine, are ready to do Ophelia, and that you, Charlie, are not yet ready to do Hamlet--which is not so surprising. I'm closer to you in this experience, Charlie. I've now directed two Shakespeare plays, and played a major role in this last one. But I felt that I understood what was going on in both. I'm not sure that I do with Hamlet--that I'm ready to direct the big one"
     "You'd learn while you were doing it," Christine said.

     "We might bring in both a director and an actor from England to do Hamlet, if that's what you want. We could perhaps entice London theatre people with the likelihood of a film version the following year of the play we do here. I don't have the contacts to negotiate this, but Henry does, or he and Randall do. The rest of the cast might be drawn from the Players, and I could encourage Laura to at least think about Gertrude. She might do it. It shouldn't be hard to get someone from England who has already done Hamlet." He smiled. "It would be nice to get Olivier, wouldn't it? But I don't imagine he'd be available. I don't suppose we're in that league yet--but we can dream."
     Christine said, "I don't know what to think about that, Dad. But why not explore it. In the meantime we'll do other things. What do you think of doing Miss Julie"
     Jack said, "Much simpler . . . and why not? I've always been fond of that play. I did Jean in an abridged production in an acting class I took with Dr. Newfield at KU the first semester I was back from the Air Force." He stared off in space. "Just to fill a requirement, and it was the best thing I did that semester--one of the best things I've ever done as an actor. Dr. Newfield said I was a natural for the part."
     Charlie said, "I'd like to do it, Chris. I think it'd be an even bigger challenge for you than Ophelia. And Miss Julie has been traditional for this company. Your mother and Jordan did it more than once I understand. I think I would be a good Jean, and you'd be a perfect Miss Julie.   What else do we need? Your dad to direct it . . . what do you think?"
     "It's even more traditional than you know, if we count the countess as in our tradition," Jack said. "She said she did it in Germany with Max Reinhart, when she was a young woman. Then she came with him to this country--that was how she made first contact with the film community. Thomas could probably tell you about that. She loved the play."

     "Then we could do your Scarlet Letter, Dad, as Hester and Dimmesdale . . . if you think you'd be ready for that," Christine said, looking at Charlie.
     "And get Arthur to do Chillingworth?"
     Christine frowned. "I'm not too anxious to include Arthur in our plans. Let's hold auditions."
     "I wonder if I could get Dan Parker to come to New York and play Chillingworth, as he did when Jordan and your mother first did the play--back at KU before you were born," Jack mused. "I think he'd love to, if I can find him and he could make the arrangements, and I'd love working with him again, after all this time. He was an excellent Chillingworth."
     So, after The Tempest closed, they did do Miss Julie--with Marcella again playing Kristin--while other members of the company were doing other things, like a set of plays in local high schools, Christine's idea, to get wider exposure for the company. She said, "I'd like to see the Players Company continue to be active without me, if I decide to do something in London next year, for example." She smiled.
     Christine's relationship to Charlie hadn't changed that much since they'd come back to New York. There was no antagonism, since each thought for a time he was covering for the other in not saying any more than he had to, to anyone, about the night of Ben's death. But then it began to look like Lieutenant Carlson was looking for a third person, someone who'd been in the bedroom while Christine argued with Ben--then could have shot Ben--and he seemed to be focusing in on Arthur. Then Christine got so caught up in doing Ariel as well as Miranda in The Tempest that working with Charlie as Ferdinand was almost peripheral. She seemed able to ignore him for days at a time, as she had as Mercutio.
     This had often thrown Charlie together with Marcella Martin, as they'd watch Christine and Jack on stage, or play chess, or discuss Plato. One reason Charlie had suggested

Miss Julie was that he knew Marcella already had played the part of Kristin, with Betty, and so would be the obvious one to cast, and he enjoyed working with her.
     One day, after The Tempest had closed, more of Henry's readers than usual were gathered at the lake. Sitting in the pleasant afternoon sunshine on the patio by the cabin, watching Laura and Christine try to water ski off-season, were Jack and Henry and Charlie and Thomas, while Shoko was nearby playing with Hajime.   They had been talking about Mishima's novellas, particularly The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, which had been made into a British film Jack was telling them about, then the significance of the way Mishima had died, in a double seppuku with Morita, in keeping with their homosexual relationship. Picking up on this, Charlie remarked that he'd found one of the most interesting things about Plato's Symposium the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades developed at the end. He asked Henry how true to history he thought that was.
     Henry said, "probably pretty true, at least from Plato's memory of it. He may always have been jealous of Alcibiades. But Jack might have the better sense of that, for he told me that he recently completed the blank-verse adaptation of the Symposium that he's been working on for years. What do you think, Jack?"
     "That dialogue is the only one I'd have considered doing this with. I think it was also a favorite for Plato, because it's so eminently dramatic. I had a dramatic version in prose that I worked on for years, basically just breaking up the long speeches with questions from other characters, and I just started putting it in blank verse to see how that would work, after I felt pretty good about having done The Scarlet Letter and Dido that way."
     "I remember taking part in a reading of that prose version long, long ago," Henry said.

     "At first the blank verse didn't seem to work too well, but I stayed with it, out of obstinacy, I suppose, and I just read the whole thing through the other day and now like it pretty well. Christine is talking about the possibility of going to England to find a Hamlet she can do Ophelia with, and/or to France to do Phadre, in French, and I'm thinking of doing my Symposium with the Players while she's gone. In fact I was quite serious when I said I've been thinking of asking you, Henry, whether you might be willing to play Socrates, in the old tradition when you did Samson with Betty and Tiresias with Jordan--though Socrates is not a blind man."
     "I'll have to think about that, Jack. That'd mean leaving the lake in pursuit of fame and fortune, and I like to think I'm above that now. But what about Charlie's question?"
     "I believe that all the characters in the Symposium were drawn from life, that it is unique among Plato's dialogues in the striking stylistic differences in the long speeches of the participants, so that each speaker does present his own theory of love, as Plato understood it, in language also adapted to the character, as well as that of Falstaff, Hotspur, and Prince Hal is in Shakespeare's I Henry IV--so I think Plato was presenting those who were there, as best he knew them."
     "So that you get to know every one of them as a believable individual . . . including Alcibiades," Henry said.
     "But you must remember that Plato himself was only a child at the time of Agathon's victory dinner, so could not have been there himself, and was still a young man at the time Apollodorus is telling the story to Glaucon, in the form he may have heard it, so is insisting upon a kind of justification of imaginative elaboration. Still, he knew these older men, variously, and I think both the story he put in the mouth of each and the tone in which he tells it are true to his knowledge and memory of the speaker--so drawn from life."
     "With Socrates and Alcibiades as well?" Charlie asked.

     "I think he does the best he knows with the temper of the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades, which is a generation, we might say, before his own relationship with Socrates, but using stories he has heard. Given the heroic stature of Alcibiades as Plato may have known him more personally later, he might well be jealous of his relationship with Socrates when they were both younger men. I would put it the way Henry did, that it is true to history, and quite open-minded, from Plato's point of view."
     "I like to ponder Socrates’ relationship to Diotima," said Thomas, "whom he presents as his great teacher of Love. Not only was the countess very fond of her definition of Love, but she seemed to embody her philosophy. Do you know anything of a historical character Diotima was based on?"
     "Not much," Jack said, "but I know that Taylor, in his book on Plato, concludes that Diotima, a priestess and prophetess of Mantinea, was in Athens when Socrates was about thirty, and that he may well have picked up the mystical strain in his speech in the Symposium--in his thought in general--from her, and that he knows it. It is interesting to contemplate Socrates' affirming her as his teacher, and his relationship to this wise woman, even if she is fictional, as Socrates is, after all, for us."
     "And, as I come back to the character of Socrates, it is this Socrates that I come back to," Henry said. "The Socrates we have come to know and admire in these early dialogues, as a character in the Meno, the Apology, and particularly the Symposium, and then facing death in the Crito and the Phaedo. It is that Socrates I have taken as a role model for my own old age."
     "It is a consistent character throughout those dialogues, I believe," Jack said, "and, while human enough to have its faults, and be a bit tedious, or pedantic, at times, it is admirable."

     "I am impressed by him generally," Henry said, "but the picture most indelible to my mind is perhaps that of Socrates standing in the doorway of the house next door, lost in thought, while the party had already begun in the Symposium. I also like to picture him, as we all do, walking barefoot in Athens, and then admire the temper of the imperturbable Socrates in the battle stories that Alcibiades tells in this dialogue, and that we see at the time of his death.
     "Jack, you should be able to appreciate this, since you write sonnets. I've even written a sonnet on this Socrates. I've tried to write sonnets before, but this is the first time I've completed one, to set the good example for Charlie as we are getting into editing Jordan's poetry."
     Jack said, "Well, recite it for us, Henry, if you have it by memory."
     Henry did:

I see him walking barefoot in the street,
Or standing in a doorway, lost in thought,
An older man, but one we've come to meet,
Among those younger men he often sought.
He'd talk about the prisoners in a cave
(Before they'd heard of movies and TV),
And of a lesson Diotima gave
On love--and seeking immortality.
We heard him talk to them the day he died
Dismissing the ephemerence of breath.
He still embraced philosophy, his guide,
Serene in his acceptance of his death.
He died two thousand years ago . . . and more,
But I still see him standing by that door.

Jack thought about it a while, then said, "I like the sense of how you, a blind man, can 'see' Socrates so strongly as the result of a literary experience."

     Henry said that, with Socrates as role model, he planned to go beyond the Platonic dialogues in his own old age.
     Shoko, who had been listening once they started talking about the Symposium, said, "You're not into your old age yet, not yet fifty. You should save this plan for a few years."
     Henry laughed, saying, "I'm probably as old as Socrates was at the time of the Symposium, older than he was when Diotima taught him about love, if he was thirty then, and the quest may well last until I'm as old as he was when he died. But I should start now.   First, I definitely plan to use Socrates as role model, for my old age, and for the temper of my own spirit in facing death, and life's other traumas. Then, I intend to pursue Platonic Ideas, particularly the Idea of the Good, into mysticism, in the later dialogues, accompanied by Thomas here if he'll take the journey with me, as, he tells me, the British author Iris Murdoch seems to be doing."
     Thomas gave a rare smile as he said, "I'd be pleased to."
     "Fine. I look forward to it as a great adventure. I intend to join the study of those late Platonic dialogues with a general study of abstraction in mathematics, particularly the theoretical grounding of algebra, geometry, and most especially calculus--with its focus on limits. Both Shoko and Thomas can help with that, since they both had Calculus in school--Shoko in Japan and Thomas in Germany, which demonstrates how mathematics transcends language."
     Shoko said, "Or is a language itself. We've already started, and find mathematical ideas interesting, as we begin to teach Hajime to count."
     "Then I plan to add the study of the Confucian classic, the I Ching."
      Jack said, "That seems a strange combination, though I know little about Calculus and nothing about the I Ching."
     "All three, as I see it at this point, are concerned with reconciling the sub-lunar world of constant change with the eternal verities of the larger universe, as Plato might have put it.   There are things which seem permanent in the world, of

which we're quite conscious. The stars remind us every night that, however much we think them in flux in their own solar systems, they're permanent in ours. And kinds of cycles impress us as permanent, like the cycle of the seasons--from spring, to summer, to fall, to winter--or the cycle of human life--Shakespeare's seven ages of man--the cycle of water--from the sea to the clouds, to rain, to rivers, to the sea--all this change without the loss, as I understand it, of any matter or energy. But we're also conscious of the random nature of chance, modifying all these things, of the differences in each mortal's experience, for example, and wish we had some control over, or a better understanding of, the daily flux of change. It is also true of the developments in physics in this century, where, in quantum theory the emphasis has been on the physical principles governing the sub-atomic, where the human senses can give us no evidence at all, where it's all theoretical and mathematical."
     "Perhaps we can get into some consideration of relativity theory as related to change," said Thomas.
     Henry smiled. "In any case, I expect these studies to come together in one great vision, when I look up and see the Idea of the Good, which Socrates posed as the ultimate goal for the philosopher in the Republic."
     "And which Iris Murdoch focuses on in her reading of Plato, part of what leads her into mysticism," Thomas said.
     "That should be an appropriate goal for a blind man," Henry added.   "I invite all of you to join me in this quest . . . but it begins to seem that the reading of the late dialogues is to be left for Thomas and me."
     Jack said, "But, as he's dying in the Phaedo, Socrates himself doesn't claim he's ever looked up and seen the Idea of the Good, does he?"
     "But he doesn't deny that it's possible, Jack. He hasn't lost his faith. And what higher goal is there?" Henry thought for a minute, then said, "Jack, I offer you the same definition

of wisdom I have before, 'the affirmation of high-potential illusion in full knowledge that it is illusion,' because that's the best we human beings have. The Idea of the Good may 'only be an idea,' but it is the idea at the center of a moral theory like the idea at the center of Einstein's Theory of Relativity may be said to be 'point of view.'   Einstein was sure to the day he died that the macrophysics of his thought could be reconciled with the sub-atomic theory of quantum physics, and, while he never achieved the reconciling Idea in his lifetime, there are still plenty of physicists trying. I see that as much the same thing."
     "But if you know that an idea is an illusion, why would you want to commit yourself to it?" Charlie asked.
     "Almost all human achievement involves commitment to a belief that leads to action--almost no one could be a star, in any field, if he didn't think he was greater than he was. Most celebrities, when disillusioned, fall into kinds of addiction that lead to unhappiness. If they could just accept the illusion for what it is, go with it, and relax back in that knowledge when it fails them, they might still lead tranquil lives into their old age. I consider Erasmus's In Praise of Folly perhaps the most philosophical book I know, where he demonstrates that folly, properly understood, is wisdom. If it's foolish to pursue the Idea of the Good, I say it's also wisdom, related to your concept of 'crossing the bridge of dreams,' Jack, as a kind of metaphor for the literary experience, but also as a way of transcending the mortality we know human beings can never transcend. That's one of the functions of calculus, to define human limits."
     "I've only met Calculus, briefly, in school, and know less of Chinese than Japanese literature. The I Ching is one of the Confucian classics, isn't it?"
     "It pre-dates Confucius. As an old man he is supposed to have said that if he could study the I Ching for another ten years he might become wise. Confucius died ten years before Socrates was born. Their thought has so much in common

that that was perhaps how long reincarnation took to travel from China to Greece in those days." Henry laughed. "I half believe that."
     "I like that concept, too," said Thomas.
     "If you help me with the Calculus and the I Ching, too," Henry said to Charlie, "I'll try to help you discover what they may contribute to your education as well as mine."
     Charlie said, "How can I can refuse an offer like that?"
     "There's no hurry, for it all lies out ahead. As Shoko suggests, I have miles to go before I'm ready to look up and see the Idea of the Good. And I think you may have the makings of a philosopher, but perhaps not before you're 30--can anyone younger than 30 be a philosopher? And we still have Mishima's Forbidden Colors to read."
     Jack said, "I'll be glad to share the reading of Forbidden Colors to Henry, and discuss what it has in common with Plato's Symposium with both of you, particularly if Henry will agree to play Socrates in my Symposium. For me Forbidden Colors is Mishima's Symposium--his theory of love--his greatest work."
     "That sounds fine," Charlie said. "Meantime, I'll read your play, to learn something more about Mishima."
     "And talk to Ralph," Jack said. "He was our Saigo Takamori, so came to know something of Mishima."
      "Meanwhile, as the blind detective, I'll try to solve the crime of the shooting of Ben, sitting in the boat here at the lake, while Shoko goes out and finds the clues."
      "How is that coming?" Jack asked. "Do you suspect anyone here?"
      "I'm not so sure none of you touched that gun . . . or saw Ben . . . that day. I do have suspects, but I'm not ready to reveal who they are yet."
      "When will you be?" Charlie asked.
      "Maybe never. There are many things in this life that are sought and never found." Henry smiled.