I heard this idea - aporia - literally, in the Greek, “without a way” around the oval table that I now associate exclusively with philosophy. I am sure it’s seen any number of other seminars. Maybe its surface is filled with the echoes of equations in notebooks, logic, history, love notes passed among bored students. I can’t imagine. It holds my echoes, too, echoes of ideas I had about what philosophy was and all the notes I scribbled trying to wrap my hands around the world.
Socrates is known to us almost only in the stories about him. We have colorful sketches of a man who walks around without a coat because he is unmoved by the weather. I hope this is not a requirement of good philosophy - my mother just mailed me the ski coat I first bought in high school because a few days at 20 degrees has rendered me helpless. Socrates, unmoved by cold, wandering through the streets, lurking in the doorways or on the porches of the parties where he would, reluctantly, recline on couches and render everyone helpless and often furious with his questions. Socrates, the man who knew he knew nothing. The man who knew his soul was the most vital thing - perhaps that’s why he could withstand the weather?
What did he love but the moment of aporia? This was the hope of all philosophy for him. I’ve told you this before, haven’t I? My words trip over themselves in my eagerness and my inability to really explain what I feel in these days of dark winter. The word I find surfacing is this aporia. I am without a way. I am the ship at sea where the first wind has stilled and the next wind (the fairer wind, we hope) has not yet blown across my sails.
It is perhaps not unlike the hibernation I wrote to you about before. But perhaps last week I was gentler with the idea, and this week, as I look to the horizon and realize I have no wind, the gentleness fades. I do not want to sit in aporia, I do not want to wait for a wind I do not control to bring me somewhere new. Why must we begin in the place where things have been emptied? Why can’t we just go from fullness to fullness? Why must things die and fall into the ground for some future springing forth? It might be the way of nature, it might be the way of philosophy, but today, here, in this moment, I struggle to fall in love with it again, to feel anything like acceptance.
I want a world where we do not always find ourselves falling back, falling down, stalling out, setting sail only to be stuck waiting. I know the verses of waiting upon the Lord and the rejoicing that can accompany such waiting but have you ever wondered if those words were preached to selves who weren’t, themselves, right then, rejoicing? Socrates can love aporia because he is the leader of others into it. We, the led, must be allowed to love it less.
So here I am, halfway through the first month of the year, and I am windless and anxious for a new direction, for progress. In my Saturday ride I rode a 16 meter circle for fifty minutes and it resembled more closely than I want to admit a ship circling itself before the wind arrives. My trainer kept me on this circle because on this circle is where I will fight for things that it seems strange to fight for (and fight is probably the wrong word): for softness in the horse’s jaw, for the neck to drop, for self-carriage in me and in his trot, for what she calls the “waterfall” where he comes down to meet me in the bridle. I am in aporia on this 16 meter circle. I am in aporia in the dark winter. I am one week a preacher of waiting and one week a rebellious runner from the very same thing.
If you live on the 16 meter circle or are far out to sea with no wind, if you fight with softness and release, if you fight with yourself, and this week you love it all so little you might hate it -
Socrates told his enraged companions that this was where it began. Philosophy, the love of wisdom, wisdom, the love of our souls. Us, I suppose. This is a place where we begin.
Next week perhaps I will believe him. For now I ride the circle at sea and shout for the wind.