A man zigzags back and forth on the subway platform, looking at the puddles at his feet, the drips from the ceiling. He is short and disheveled, white-haired, maybe forty-five or fifty, his voice piping like a boy's but worn at the edges.
"It's a rattrap! A rattrap! A goddamn rattrap! Can you believe it? It's unreal! They've got us in a goddamn rattrap!"
Speaking intensely to no one in particular in the way of the marginal who are desperate for notice but also fearful of it.
The station is more than a hundred years old and the man with the raw skin and degenerate boy's voice, the man in the frayed Boston Red Sox hat and the baggy jeans and the backpack hanging off one shoulder, all also like a boy's, is disturbed by the decay, by the flaking paint and the veins of rust and the dark puddles lapping at his scuffed white sneakers. He has the pinhole pupils of an opiate user in pale grey eyes.
His problem at this moment is that, like a child, he expects things to be perfect and to last forever. Like Plato, he is unable to come to terms with ephemeral nature of things, with their shoddiness, with entropy and rot.
Plato said that the world we see could only be a bad copy, like a child's clay sculpture which no one could tell if it was supposed to be Heraclitus or Damocles or Athena or a Centaur or whatever the fuck. He could never bring himself to praise a child's clumsy efforts, and he looked at the world about him and seeing in it just a succession of such badly made things, concluding that the what we see and touch and smell are just rough imitations of perfect, pure but unseen things, and that it is these distant casters of shadows that constitute truth.
Because it would be terrible for this world to be real given its myriad imperfections. It is after all a world of roughly fucked slave-boys, soiled togas and solecisms, of fist fights at dance clubs, shootings at strip clubs, vomit outside Irish pubs like a minor but unpleasant plague blighting every city in every nation on earth, of heroin smoking crust-punks with tattooed faces who love only their vicious dogs and those incompetently, a world of bathrooms used roughly by homeless people, crumpled wrappers from fast food chains, a world which contains the poignantly or just embarrassingly dated social media profiles of the dead, like a mockery of the ghosts in which we can no longer bring ourselves to believe, of mothers that cannot kiss their children for fear of transmitting herpes, and subway stations that fill with cold puddles when it rains: everything base and breaking...
Which is to say that Plato, like many to follow, took a look at reality, pronounced it a goddamn rattrap, and based his metaphysics on denying the veracity of its existence in favor of comforting abstraction (though he probably did all this in a deep and powerful voice rather than a high piping one, because Plato was a large man known for his impressive physique).
Because it would be terrible for this world to be real given its myriad imperfections. It is after all a world of roughly fucked slave-boys, soiled togas and solecisms, of fist fights at dance clubs, shootings at strip clubs, vomit outside Irish pubs like a minor but unpleasant plague blighting every city in every nation on earth, of heroin smoking crust-punks with tattooed faces who love only their vicious dogs and those incompetently, a world of bathrooms used roughly by homeless people, crumpled wrappers from fast food chains, a world which contains the poignantly or just embarrassingly dated social media profiles of the dead, like a mockery of the ghosts in which we can no longer bring ourselves to believe, of mothers that cannot kiss their children for fear of transmitting herpes, and subway stations that fill with cold puddles when it rains: everything base and breaking...
Which is to say that Plato, like many to follow, took a look at reality, pronounced it a goddamn rattrap, and based his metaphysics on denying the veracity of its existence in favor of comforting abstraction (though he probably did all this in a deep and powerful voice rather than a high piping one, because Plato was a large man known for his impressive physique).
