WEBVTT

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.770 align:middle line:90%


00:00:03.770 --> 00:00:08.638 align:middle line:84%
So while I was writing this
book over several years

00:00:08.638 --> 00:00:11.180 align:middle line:84%
and I realized there are several
poems in here that reference

00:00:11.180 --> 00:00:17.790 align:middle line:84%
Socrates, who I compare to my
father not because he's wise,

00:00:17.790 --> 00:00:21.290 align:middle line:90%
but because he talks a lot--

00:00:21.290 --> 00:00:23.270 align:middle line:90%
that's another conversation.

00:00:23.270 --> 00:00:24.510 align:middle line:90%
Come see me later.

00:00:24.510 --> 00:00:29.120 align:middle line:84%
But I was trying to write about
Socrates' wife, Xanthippe,

00:00:29.120 --> 00:00:33.500 align:middle line:84%
who was only mentioned once
in all the Socratic dialogues,

00:00:33.500 --> 00:00:35.600 align:middle line:90%
and not even in Plato's.

00:00:35.600 --> 00:00:40.350 align:middle line:84%
And I just couldn't get it
right for the longest time.

00:00:40.350 --> 00:00:45.380 align:middle line:84%
And so this ended up being the
very, very last poem I wrote.

00:00:45.380 --> 00:00:47.545 align:middle line:90%
I wrote fresh for the book.

00:00:47.545 --> 00:00:50.940 align:middle line:90%


00:00:50.940 --> 00:00:53.280 align:middle line:90%
Xanthippe pops up out of it.

00:00:53.280 --> 00:00:57.320 align:middle line:84%
But there's very
little known about her.

00:00:57.320 --> 00:01:02.000 align:middle line:84%
And everything that I could
research and find out about her

00:01:02.000 --> 00:01:07.390 align:middle line:84%
is in this poem,
which is in this book.

00:01:07.390 --> 00:01:11.930 align:middle line:90%
And I quote from Plato's Phaedo.

00:01:11.930 --> 00:01:12.440 align:middle line:90%
Phaedo.

00:01:12.440 --> 00:01:13.040 align:middle line:90%
"Fido."

00:01:13.040 --> 00:01:15.225 align:middle line:84%
I've heard different
pronunciations of it.

00:01:15.225 --> 00:01:19.360 align:middle line:90%


00:01:19.360 --> 00:01:20.880 align:middle line:84%
Yeah, that's all
you need to know.

00:01:20.880 --> 00:01:25.580 align:middle line:90%


00:01:25.580 --> 00:01:27.880 align:middle line:90%
"On the soul.

00:01:27.880 --> 00:01:31.820 align:middle line:84%
Older now, I open the
book without fear.

00:01:31.820 --> 00:01:36.580 align:middle line:84%
My father in the other room
restarts the electric kettle.

00:01:36.580 --> 00:01:38.630 align:middle line:90%
And what is there to fear?

00:01:38.630 --> 00:01:41.380 align:middle line:84%
Sudden temper, a
kind of brute exhale

00:01:41.380 --> 00:01:46.550 align:middle line:84%
that could belong to anything,
anyone, until the water boils.

00:01:46.550 --> 00:01:50.840 align:middle line:84%
It boils as a soft can
overheating in talk.

00:01:50.840 --> 00:01:54.310 align:middle line:84%
In the prison, an old man
awaits the poison that

00:01:54.310 --> 00:01:58.180 align:middle line:84%
will end his life by reminding
the listening crowd that

00:01:58.180 --> 00:02:02.590 align:middle line:84%
to practice philosophy is
to practice death, reasoning

00:02:02.590 --> 00:02:05.800 align:middle line:84%
that he has always
been already dying.

00:02:05.800 --> 00:02:10.470 align:middle line:84%
The soul's incipient recipient
flights aloft in syntax.

00:02:10.470 --> 00:02:11.770 align:middle line:90%
No tea for me.

00:02:11.770 --> 00:02:12.270 align:middle line:90%
Thanks.

00:02:12.270 --> 00:02:13.790 align:middle line:90%
I call out to a voice.

00:02:13.790 --> 00:02:16.140 align:middle line:90%
I still struggle to describe--

00:02:16.140 --> 00:02:20.180 align:middle line:84%
quixotic, rash,
different every time.

00:02:20.180 --> 00:02:23.760 align:middle line:84%
In anger, my
mother's name becomes

00:02:23.760 --> 00:02:26.790 align:middle line:90%
two huffs of air beseeching.

00:02:26.790 --> 00:02:31.730 align:middle line:84%
His voice whines, deflating
like a piteous balloon.

00:02:31.730 --> 00:02:35.130 align:middle line:84%
Today, I look for
mention of the wife.

00:02:35.130 --> 00:02:39.870 align:middle line:84%
Xanthippe-- you know her-- the
sole mention in all of Plato.

00:02:39.870 --> 00:02:42.830 align:middle line:84%
And then she's led
away, lamenting,

00:02:42.830 --> 00:02:44.790 align:middle line:90%
and beating her breast.

00:02:44.790 --> 00:02:49.950 align:middle line:84%
Little is known beyond her
name, yellow horses at root,

00:02:49.950 --> 00:02:51.830 align:middle line:90%
and her reputation.

00:02:51.830 --> 00:02:55.020 align:middle line:84%
Centuries later, she's
still beating her chest,

00:02:55.020 --> 00:02:58.610 align:middle line:84%
a figure of comparison for
Shakespeare's Katherine, who's

00:02:58.610 --> 00:03:01.430 align:middle line:84%
cursed and shrewd as
Socrates's Xanthippe,

00:03:01.430 --> 00:03:05.240 align:middle line:84%
or spelled erroneously
with a Z by Poe.

00:03:05.240 --> 00:03:08.420 align:middle line:84%
Perhaps the wife of
any notorious man

00:03:08.420 --> 00:03:10.950 align:middle line:90%
is always merely a rumor.

00:03:10.950 --> 00:03:15.280 align:middle line:84%
And here she is,
counterpoint to reason.

00:03:15.280 --> 00:03:19.850 align:middle line:84%
Arguing with her, Socrates
claimed, sharpened his mind,

00:03:19.850 --> 00:03:24.470 align:middle line:84%
made him more nimble with the
most ill-tempered among us.

00:03:24.470 --> 00:03:27.580 align:middle line:90%
She was good for philosophy.

00:03:27.580 --> 00:03:32.320 align:middle line:84%
So a bad wife prepares
one for a good death.

00:03:32.320 --> 00:03:34.750 align:middle line:90%
What about a bad husband?

00:03:34.750 --> 00:03:38.830 align:middle line:84%
Alive, my father is drinking
steam out of a blue mug.

00:03:38.830 --> 00:03:41.860 align:middle line:84%
Alive, he asks me
what I'm reading:

00:03:41.860 --> 00:03:44.270 align:middle line:90%
an old book from school.

00:03:44.270 --> 00:03:50.290 align:middle line:84%
He laughs and with his free hand
slaps away the air between us.

00:03:50.290 --> 00:03:53.170 align:middle line:90%
It's the week before spring.

00:03:53.170 --> 00:03:55.010 align:middle line:84%
What do you call
those purple things?

00:03:55.010 --> 00:03:56.410 align:middle line:90%
he asks.

00:03:56.410 --> 00:04:01.490 align:middle line:84%
Crocuses, I say, an early
sign the year's turning again.

00:04:01.490 --> 00:04:03.550 align:middle line:90%
How to spell?

00:04:03.550 --> 00:04:06.620 align:middle line:84%
Crocuses don't grow
where I live now,

00:04:06.620 --> 00:04:11.360 align:middle line:84%
far from my father and my mother
who no longer live together.

00:04:11.360 --> 00:04:14.110 align:middle line:84%
Alive, he is a
chain of questions,

00:04:14.110 --> 00:04:17.269 align:middle line:84%
a deluge of questions,
a flotilla, a flock,

00:04:17.269 --> 00:04:19.890 align:middle line:90%
a flutter with questions.

00:04:19.890 --> 00:04:23.180 align:middle line:90%
Outside, it begins to snow.

00:04:23.180 --> 00:04:28.470 align:middle line:84%
Miles away, my mother abides
the endless rooms of winter.

00:04:28.470 --> 00:04:31.040 align:middle line:84%
She has never been
cold and has much

00:04:31.040 --> 00:04:34.940 align:middle line:84%
to say about the current
state of the world.

00:04:34.940 --> 00:04:38.990 align:middle line:84%
Like the snow, she
chooses to stay quiet.

00:04:38.990 --> 00:04:44.220 align:middle line:84%
To live in constant quarrel
is one way to write poems,

00:04:44.220 --> 00:04:48.690 align:middle line:84%
or it's one way marriage
becomes hearth to rhetoric.

00:04:48.690 --> 00:04:52.910 align:middle line:84%
But what words, what
fractious discourse unabated

00:04:52.910 --> 00:04:58.490 align:middle line:84%
made his mind a kind of pain
to odd and cloudless light?

00:04:58.490 --> 00:05:01.500 align:middle line:84%
I'm not interested
in union, exactly.

00:05:01.500 --> 00:05:04.220 align:middle line:84%
But why we think we
know what we know,

00:05:04.220 --> 00:05:07.530 align:middle line:84%
why we make law of
what we deem reason.

00:05:07.530 --> 00:05:09.530 align:middle line:90%
Whose reason?

00:05:09.530 --> 00:05:12.210 align:middle line:84%
My father has lost
his phone again,

00:05:12.210 --> 00:05:14.840 align:middle line:84%
and I can hear him
opening and closing doors

00:05:14.840 --> 00:05:17.060 align:middle line:90%
around his small house--

00:05:17.060 --> 00:05:21.260 align:middle line:84%
where he lives alone, where
the snow grows so quiet.

00:05:21.260 --> 00:05:25.150 align:middle line:84%
My mother is no
longer even possible.

00:05:25.150 --> 00:05:28.780 align:middle line:84%
In the story she tells,
he was the last young man

00:05:28.780 --> 00:05:30.740 align:middle line:90%
left in Taipei.

00:05:30.740 --> 00:05:35.815 align:middle line:84%
In the story he tells, she
laughed at whatever he'd say.

00:05:35.815 --> 00:05:40.120 align:middle line:84%
For now, he cannot call her,
though he wants her back.

00:05:40.120 --> 00:05:44.230 align:middle line:84%
Somewhere I remember reading
that in David's great painting

00:05:44.230 --> 00:05:47.710 align:middle line:84%
of that scene, he began
a sketch of her weeping

00:05:47.710 --> 00:05:51.100 align:middle line:84%
at the top of the stairs,
leaving her husband behind

00:05:51.100 --> 00:05:56.150 align:middle line:84%
with his cup of hemlock, and
then with a few pale strokes

00:05:56.150 --> 00:05:58.210 align:middle line:90%
blotted her out again.

00:05:58.210 --> 00:06:01.940 align:middle line:84%
When I look at reproductions
of the death of Socrates,

00:06:01.940 --> 00:06:06.590 align:middle line:84%
I look at that empty spot and
think I see a trace of her,

00:06:06.590 --> 00:06:11.800 align:middle line:84%
a history kept at home,
flightless, obdurate, not

00:06:11.800 --> 00:06:15.220 align:middle line:90%
a soul, and yet not the soul.

00:06:15.220 --> 00:06:19.250 align:middle line:84%
She is there perhaps,
if what I read was true,

00:06:19.250 --> 00:06:22.500 align:middle line:90%
if indeed I read it at all."

00:06:22.500 --> 00:06:23.000 align:middle line:90%