Debase the Currency - Whether Coin or Clout - Show Who Rules Them - And Set Yourself Free - Go East Old Man - To Learn Something New - Make Peace With Darkness - And Shine Your Light - Witness Inaction In Action - Before the Great Game - Of Two Competing Conceits - Leaving a Strange Legacy
11
353 B.C.
After spitting in the Academy doorman’s face, as was his custom, the Dog waved a stack of papers in the air. “What the Hades is this supposed to be, Plato? This is trash, even for you! Trash itself!”
Plato looked up from naked boys wrestling and sighed. He couldn’t catch a break. Everything seemed to be falling apart. A philosopher couldn’t watch ten-year-olds doused in olive oil grunt and grapple at each other without interruption anymore. Society had grown too decadent.
“What are you barking about, Dog?” He rasped tiredly, resigned to another boring argument with the public pervert. He wasn’t a young man anymore. At seventy-five years old, he couldn’t get it up to fight like he used to.
“This stupid letter,” Dog began, brandishing the object of ire in a gnarled fist before noticing the naked boys rolling around. “No wonder the Catholic Church is going to love you. This letter is stupid.” As a cliff note, Catholic means universal.
“What?” Plato was genuinely confused. “Catholic Church? Never heard of it. Would never endorse it. It sounds new. Universals aren't new. They never change. Change is bad. No sir, I won't like it.”
“Jesus,” Dog cursed before his time. “You and your universals.”
“Leave the gardener out of it.”
“Carpenter,” he corrected. “One of your brass souls, you twit. Only good for making cabinets and bongs according to your philosophy. He'll change the world. But that doesn’t matter yet.”
“You always spew such nonsense,” Plato complained. “What do you want, Dog? You’re interrupting Oiled Boy Day.”
“This stupid letter,” he repeated, stumbling a bit on the damp floor. “Is stupid!”
“You keep saying that. What letter? Was today's letter on the street the letter ‘S’ or something, Mr. The Grouch? Is some clown screaming somewhere every time you say ‘stupid?’ I don’t even know what the letter S is. I don’t speak Latin.”
“This thing,” Dog shook his fist again, slipping on the granite floor with a yelp. “You and your disciples destroyed Syracuse with your utopian trash. And your defense is to blame it on the youth?! And how is a letter seventy-three pages?”
“I’m cultivating wisdom. Philosopher-kings aren’t the problem. Philosopher-kings have never been tried. Euphraeus did his best Macedon, but the clay was no good. Their race is stupid. Same with Italians and Russians. They’ll never have a philosopher-king.”
“Bruh,” Dog cursed as he slipped a step on the floor again. “At least put up a Wet Floor sign in here. This is ridiculous. Why is it wet?”
"Why didn’t you ever go see Perdiccas?” Plato asked. It was his disciple’s idea, advising the last king to invite the Dog to chat. If Diogenes had ever opened his mouth around him, he’d be a now-dead dog. Tragic it never happened.
“Kings are boring,” the fool whined like an unsexy ten-year-old. “I ignore them until someone comes along and kills them. Especially that family. Too many wives, too much murder, too much inbreeding. Your niece shouldn't be your wife, like… ever.”
“Gold souls shouldn't breed with anything but gold. That means family. Your real problem is history will choose me. Not you.” Plato rhetorically kicked the goal posts out of the Academy. Figuratively, of course. He was too old to even be the President.
“What is history, Plato?” Dog stepped gingerly onto a rug near a bookshelf marked ‘Sappho' with a crunch and a shudder. Rugs shouldn't crunch, but at least it wasn't wet. Not recently.
“What I say it is,” Plato replied. “The truth of universals. Ideas are unchanging, eternal, more real than your beloved drinking bowl. Its truth is its bowlness. Its form is just a shadow it casts. I’m the idea, history is the shadow. And you’re just a cunt.”
“Gods, you're such a syphilisopher. And you know I hate that word. How can you be so sure history will love you forever? Historians have already proven to be bigger liars than you are.” He did seem intent on yet another ill-advised philosophical dialog in a humor story.
“You put too much faith in honesty and not enough in vanity. I will be the myth they believe. Anyone who needs things to be orderly will kneel to me. My intellectual leadership.”
“It will take a long time, but people will wake from your dark and when they do, it's going to get interesting. The poor think, too. The rabble. The brass souls. They are motion, they have no choice. You are death. That change can't come soon enough.”
“You sound like Aristotle,” Plato complained. “The traitor. Enamored with change. With that stupid lisp.”
“I was going for Socrates,” Dog managed to sound hurt. Never be an Aristotle when a Socrates is an option.
“Yes. Socrates gone mad. A blood-mad dog savaging reason in its teeth. You're dangerous. There's no order to you. No discipline. You just lay around, begging for money, spitting on your betters like this was Twitter. I don't like you.”
“I only spit on your gatekeepers. I thought that was obvious by now.”
Plato sighed. He had missed that detail. “You really are the worst.”
“That's fine,” he replied. “I don't like you either. Your advice is poison. It puts itself above Nature. You can see Nature. You can touch it. You can’t touch ideas. One is real. The other is bollocks.”
“There's no poetry to you. So literal and crass.”
The Dog laughed and spit some rhymes. “There once was a pederast from Athens. Who couldn't tell his ass from his assness. He diddled little boys, their butts made great toys, while he justified pre-conceited classes.”
”Garbage,” Plato said. He hadn't authorized self-expression from this hobo. “Did you write that?”
“No,” Dog admitted proudly. “Nervous, brass souled orphans did.”
“Why do you care, Dog? These are just stupid human tricks to you. Games. You call kings slaves and slaves friends. You cavort with orphans, and not to bugger them. You hate convention just because. The world is your punchline, not your concern.”
“Ideas over Nature means people die,” Dog retorted. “Everyone the idealist can't think of.”
Plato smugged. “You're just mad people know who I am and not you.”
“I... yeah, maybe. But I'm the one closer to Nature. Millions of people will be me without ever hearing about me. They don't need this story. This idea. We exist and always will, long after your name and totalitarian trash is gone.”
“Quit dragging me into the story then. I doubt readers enjoy these fights of ours.”
“I can't!” The Dog screamed over the crunch of a rug. “In my nightmares I see us fighting forever. I see myself pleading with people to think for themselves. But they outsource it to you, instead. They erect a totem to vanity and call it education.”
“And what do I do in your petty psychodrama, Dog?” Nobody enjoyed hearing about Plato half as much as Plato enjoyed hearing about Plato and the Dog seemed to be suffering. The fool was shaking with anger while Plato suppressed laughter.
“You demand a total ordering of what can’t be ordered. I see only blood and soil in your soaring systems. Classes. Massacres. Rigid hierarchy. I see fanatics wallowing in delusion, killing those who don’t. I see your boot stomping on a human face forever.”
“You're just ripping off Orwell, you hack.”
“Everyone should! He's one of me! Just tragically British.”
“This is tiresome. You're just a puffed-up contrarian,” Plato wheezed. “You have no doctrine. No mind to make one. Just dick and fart jokes lobbed at your superiors. Debase the currency? How does that help society? You’re just a horny crook.”
“I've written books on my philosophy! At least five I can remember! And one I can’t!”
“They won’t survive. My children will see to it,” Plato promised. “If they can't answer them, they'll burn them. They'll argue essence like good little boys. They'll make up stories about what you really want. What is that, by the way?”
“Freedom,” the Dog whispered. “Absolute freedom.”
“Freedom?!” Plato chuckled. “Outdated. Bollocks leftover from the fight with Persia. Useful only as a tool of the powerful to subject the weak. There is no freedom. Only those who obey and those who should be obeyed, you classless lout.”
The Dog whined the whine of the dissatisfied. “You don’t understand my philosophy.”
“Of course I don't. You don’t have one. No system. No code. No rules. Your precious freedom isn't a product of philosophy, it’s an illusion produced by conceit.”
“But your philosophy is a product of freedom.”
“Oh, good one,” Plato drolled. “Really made me think.”
“I know I can’t make you think when you insist on doing it backwards.”
“Whatever you say,” Plato dismissed. “Don’t you need to be jerking off in public somewhere?”
“I tell people what they need to hear, and my crudity gives them the freedom to ignore it if they choose. But you. Is there a city or kingdom your disciples haven't destroyed recently? I save the Olympics.”
“Just a clown then,” Plato replied. “There is only control and what can’t be controlled must be destroyed. You have no mind to see freedom is an illusion. A shadow of control. You can’t even see the cupness in the cup. They're all circular! They share properties!”
“I have a mind. Just a different mind than yours. The kind your progeny will put in prison and file into execution chambers for not fitting the bed just right. Your pretenders will have their bloody days, but the last laugh will always be mine!”
“Well,” Plato said, echoing his old-frenemy Antisthenes. “I suppose we will see.” He regretted it instantly. He’d decided long ago Antisthenes would always be wrong.
“No,” the Dog shouted as he stomped the rug with a crunch crunch crunch. “We won't! We'll be dead! But whoever lived closest to Nature will last longest! I don't need a grand architect! Just humanity! You require everything but that! You demand vanity!”
“Is your humanity stomping my rug, Dog? That was a gift from Dion.”
“I'm stomping your vanity, Plato!”
“With what?” Plato calmly inquired. “Your own vanity?”
For once, the Dog was speechless. He just stared with his stupid mouth hanging wide while Plato laughed and laughed. The sound echoed in the hall as a fart in a sauna, spanning centuries, and sounding vaguely like Wagner. Whatever that was.
Debase the Currency - Whether Coin or Clout - Show Who Rules Them - And Set Yourself Free - Go East Old Man - To Learn Something New - Make Peace With Darkness - And Shine Your Light - Witness Inaction In Action - Before the Great Game - Of Two Competing Conceits - Leaving a Strange Legacy
bravo! The vanity of freedom is priceless if not useless.
My life seems even less meaningful after reading this. lol. Thank you! At least I can exist as a useless insect on this orb. And travel!