Luigi Giannachi: Beyond Socrates’ Dia-Logos

Luigi Giannachi

Beyond Socrates’ Dia-Logos

The locations of mind

Original title: Oltre il Dia-logos di Socrates

Translated by: Francesca Tramontana

Publisher: Tektime

In the time crystal, by which our present existence is characterized, where each of us tends to draw on knowledge through inner reflections and light refraction around us, in a society where real and virtual boundaries are continually lost and confused, it’s on you, my dear reader, to establish how false or true is the document signed by the great Socrates that my friend Ghìgnos Kairòn sent me with his memories and his philosophical scenes. I, for one, merely wrote the letter for him, which you’ll find at the end of philosophical scenes, right after index.

“You and I believe that knowledge belongs to everybody, irrespective of race, color or creed. Plato does not address himself to one ethnic group alone, nor does Shakespeare appeal to one religion only. The teachings of Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. do not apply just to Indians or African-Americans. Like cognitive science, theoretical physics or algebra, the creations and philosophical ideas of the ages are part of our collective heritage and human memory. We all learn from the same masters.” (E.Wiesel)

I don’t exist...

I realized, sailing up the time, what you could do without your body. Nevertheless, I don’t want to say that the spirit can live in a vacuum, standing on ideas fantasies, without any toil of everyday living. It might look good, but it isn’t feasible.

I can do without my body’s needs...

The endless passing of time could suggest that body’s needs tend to run out with age, but it isn’t. Until the last moment of our existence, we strive to satisfy even the smallest desire appeared in our mind trails (htor), not to say in our entrails (htron). There must be some kind of connection between these two body parts. Whenever our ego requires attention and concentration, for an act of will (thumòs) dictated by thought (fren) to mind (noos), is necessary an act of inner purification, which involves every part of our body. Thereby, frenes can contain emotions, the kradie can give them its rhythm and the thumòs can give the required energy to flow freely, without leaving anything to chance. Even the waste disposal from our body seems a precondition to idea formation in our mind. Over and over, I consider how the body’s needs should be combined with soul, before I joined a banquet to which I was invited, so that the needs didn’t confuse soul in its flourishing.

I can distract my personal need to give myself to other’s fulfilment...

… for other I mean who is beside me in silence, or who is going to confront myself with dialogue, or even a community of people looking for a way to coexist without stepping on anybody's toes. Such research can only rely on a solid base, stronger than the base of a column, the truth.

SOCRATES

Dear friend,

You passed near my small town lying on sea in 1980. You maybe wouldn’t even had slept over for a week in my town if you only had known what would be happened during your stay, but fate wouldn’t have had it any other way. Is fate perhaps the king of the world, the god of all time? I sometimes think so, but I know that this goes beyond your rational thought.

However, you and your family slept over in my house. You were about to finish classical studies, which allowed you to know classical Greek, my ancestors language. Your curiosity for any archaeological finding, though small and futile, was unlimited, so I was happy to guide you in Olympia archaeological site. For me, it was the home where my ancestors have celebrated competitions between the most important athletes and poets of the time. Do you remember? I pointed out to you, how that was a place where not only bodies’ strength and agility to win a competition were celebrated, but even musicians’ memory and art in creating and reviving emotions.

We talked in English between us, because school taught us this language to speak with strangers. After all, we were nothing more than strangers when we met, before started playing beach soccer. English was the language that allowed us to communicate without gesticulating. You were disappointed to see your knowledge of Greek vanished when you discovered that the language spoken now is very different to that of Homer! On your visit to the museum, you were still looking for any trace of a distant meaning or any particular sign to connect with the myth. Just you, coming from another country, wondered how philosophy was born among the temples of Acropolis and the Ionian colonies, among oracles places and competitions in the name of the gods, among Delphi, Olympia, Miletus and Athens.

I must admit, your questions seemed to me meaningless in those days. I don’t know what happened since then. I had a family, as everyone else, I had children, a beautiful wife, a job that gave everything for my family. Those questions were still unanswered. Technology has made huge footsteps since then, so that I don’t know how those gadgets, with which children and grandchildren spend most of their time without a moment of respite, work. Ten years ago, I started looking for some of those answers on Internet, but, to my surprise, there wasn’t solution to those questions.

Will you ask why ten years ago?

Perhaps, you remember that while we were playing soccer in our home yard, at some point you smashed a column chalk base belonged to my family from many generations. That episode was a cataclysm for our families’ relations, because within 24 hours everyone ended up arguing, my parents with yours, your parents’ friends with mine, even my older brothers argued among themselves because they blamed on who had allowed us to play in the backyard, where even they never could play. Only we were be able to say goodbye as friends. Actually, we have been able to keep an epistolary relationship over the years, sometimes without writing for a long time.

Everyone had sent the episode into time oblivion, not time of eternity, Plotinus’ Aiòn so to speak, not the time of opportunity, the Kairòn of my name, but rather in Xronos, the time that leaves inexorably without memories.

Instead, the fate has played another dirty trick on us. Ten years ago, someone from the cemetery called me to let me know that, within a few days, should destroyed the grave of my distant ancestor. I started to ask various cousins who was this distant relative, whose existence I didn’t even remember. At last, my fourth degree cousin let me know, after discussing with her still-living grandmother, that the ancestor had been present in the works on Acropolis made by British people during Turkish rule, when they had stolen a caryatid from Erechtheum with some parts of Parthenon’s pediments. In the end, it seems that he had taken as dowry the chalk base for the participation in those works, which he had then lodged in his home yard. Of course, it can’t be said that the base was there in accordance with the law, but maybe was it right that parts of our old constructions would come out of Greece? According to my ancestor obviously no. Therefore, that self-commissioned theft was an act of protest towards who was heading the works.

This is where you come in. Yes, because you destroyed with a ball, like Franco Causio1, that chalk base which was in our backyard, in a kind of remembrance of yesteryear. Do you remember? We had given you that nickname while playing beach soccer in front of the sea at sunset, when the heat gave us a break. Only that we wanted to keep doing our goal kicks even when the game on beach was finished. The base was just one of the goal posts in our two players’ game. What we ever care about what could have represented that copy exported from Acropolis at night time by an ancestor who, moreover, I haven’t even had the pleasure of meeting? However, he was one of my distant relatives, part of the family. You know how much is sacred the family for us.