Looking for Theophrastus (eBook)

I

The Man

If it happened, then someone must have seen it. A fisherman coming home across an evening sea, one early star burning on the horizon and the sky still light. There, ahead of him, something bobbing on the water – the head, a little pale balloon with its ribbon of blood unwinding behind it all the way to the horizon.

Or maybe it wasn’t like that. Maybe the fisherman heard it before he saw it; first thinking it a seagull’s cry, but then thinking, no – it isn’t that, someone is singing. So he looked around to see where it came from, this strong, unearthly song. Could it be coming from there, that little collection of flotsam? It is likely that there was other detritus from the murder. The flesh and bones, the coils of things normally hidden and now spilled out, floating on the sea’s surface, rising and falling with the swell. There, in the middle of it all, would have been the head, singing. Because that is the important point – not the murder, not the women tearing him apart with maddened hands, but the fact that the song refused to die. It went on unchanged, pouring out of the dismembered man’s mouth as if nothing had happened, on and on, all the way down the Hebros river and out across the sea, until the head landed, still singing, on a beach on the island of Lesbos. That was the greatest outrage, that one human being’s song could do that, cheat time – that Orpheus’ music was so free it was death-proof.

*

It is evening, October and windy; I’m standing at the rail of a ship, a ferry, waiting to leave Piraeus for Lesbos, where the head of Orpheus came to rest. Below me, on the empty quayside, one or two cars are parked, men are set up for fishing over propped rods. The dark is fast coming down. Somewhere there is music playing – Greek music, with its strange running and halting rhythms. I lean and listen to the tune, now fast, now slow, now fast again, on its endless, trance-inducing round.

At the dock’s abrupt edge, a family, with a set of white plastic tables and chairs, dines quietly, as if they were in their own home. The music is coming from the open window of their parked car, as they pass each other salads in little Tupperware dishes. Above them, the ferry – which is in proportion to the sea not the land – bulks gigantic against the dock. It is not human in scale, so what on earth kind of journey are you taking, I find myself thinking, if this is your vehicle of choice?

I’m going a long way – much further than the 143 or so nautical miles between Athens and Lesbos. I’m going back about 2,400 years to find someone, a philosopher whose work once burned itself across the sky of Western thought, and then somehow fell into darkness and was gone.

A forgotten philosopher? Why on earth would we need one of those, let alone one from so impenetrably far back in human history? Well, because this one is different: less titanic perhaps but more modern in his thinking, more recognizable and therefore more relevant to now. For a start, he comes not from the grandeur and confidence of classical Greece, but from the moment of muddle and compromise just after it, when Athens’ grip on its own world was slipping and the dream of democracy was dying.

I was familiar enough with classical Greece, with its myths and its poetry, its confident statues and its architecturally astonishing temples. I knew it first, as a child, in its mythic mode, as a place of slippage – a Narnia for grown-ups, whose woods were full of centaurs and whose people turned into trees, or stones. Then, later, I knew it in its heroic and tragic mode, as a place of grandeur and clanging bronze, governed by fate and made of gold, very, very far back in time and unassailable in its almost perfection. What it never was, or what I could never see, was its ordinary mode, its day to day.

Then, about ten years ago, I came across something else, something very unexpected. It was a little green book of character sketches and the sketches were of ordinary people – people like the Chatterbox, who sits next to a stranger he’s never met before and first launches into singing his own wife’s praises, then recounts the dream he had last night, then describes in every detail what he had for dinner. Then, as no one has managed to stop him, he carries right on saying things like, ‘People nowadays are far less well-behaved than in the olden days… The city is crammed with foreigners. A little more rain would be good for the crops.’

These people were out and about in the marketplace, in and out of each other’s houses for dinner. They were gossips and flatterers, and farmers, and city boys, all talking in their own ordinary voices, in their ordinary clothes, among the clutter of their ordinary possessions.

How could something so long ago feel so immediately present? It was as if all the previously invisible, unmentioned and unimaginable humdrum of unassailable Athens had catapulted itself suddenly into my writing room. I didn’t know what to make of it. Where, in the canon, did it fit? It was so different. It read like something out of a novel but it was two thousand years too early. I looked again at the name on the cover: Theophrastus. It wasn’t like anything else I’d ever read. I sat holding the book in my hands and wondering about its author.

How do you know how to do this, Theophrastus? What is this? I’ve been reading for years and I’ve never even heard of you. Who exactly are you?

Very little has survived to answer my questions but I started to see what I could find. I picked through the fragments and soon, like catching sight of someone out of the corner of your eye, always just as they disappear, I began to glimpse a man who seemed always intent, who looked at everything with focused attention, no matter how big or small. Someone who asked, in between his researches into metaphysics, philosophy, law and logic, what are these tiny creatures? What are these flowers at my feet, up again out of the dead ground? What are these stones, these storms, these winds that walk in on us out of the horizon with such devastating authority? He was one of the first to hold conversation with the world and, with no instruments to help him other than his own mind, to try to write down how it works, how it started.

‘Theophrastus who?’ people say, when I mention him. ‘Never heard of him,’ and ‘Bless you!’ one person says, thinking his name is the sound of a sneeze.

So I’m going to fetch him and bring him back. I’m going to the place where he’s still dimly present, living out a shadow-life in the monochrome underworld of written memory – hence Orpheus. The point about Orpheus is that he doesn’t just look nostalgically back to a better time – he goes and fetches the past, with his music, and brings it forwards; and that, to me, has always seemed a more useful direction. I will need a song, perhaps, like the one playing below me, or something else from Orpheus’ armoury. Either way, I’m going to look for Theophrastus in all the places where he lived and then lead him forwards into the present, so that his life can run again across our own time, if only for a moment.

Below me, on the dock, the family’s quickening music mixes with the sound of the sea – the changing rhythms of a Greek dance, which, in its circularity, is another thing that is unending. And that would be another way to enter the Underworld: dancing. That would be a good way to bring someone back from the dead. I’ve seen the Greeks on ancient pots, even before Theophrastus’ time, dancing just the same as they do now, with their arms round each other’s shoulders, circling and circling as if, between then and now, the running, halting rhythms continually unwind and check and change but never stop. That’s all I need, something to hold time up for long enough to get there, and then to get back, something to change time’s insistent linearity, its always forward motion, something to hold it in place.

Out beyond the harbour, the sea has turned heaving and poisonous, although the crew don’t seem to have noticed. Have they not seen? Because already the gangplank is lifting. Up and down its rising incline the men in boilersuits run reckless, while the walkie-talkies in their pockets crackle like fireworks. I look at the land behind; the little lights coming on in the houses. I’ve changed my mind. I want to get off. But the ropes are flung back to the loosened ship and already the anchor chain runs rattling home. It is too late. I am committed. Above me the foghorn sounds twice and, in a foulness of fuel and churning water, the ferry eases back, and abandons itself to the sea and the coming dark.

Behind us as we slide away, the few people on the shore stand motionless and only half watching. With unfocused eyes, they witness the ferry dwindle until it’s just a chock rolling in a waste of waters.

An hour or so later, it is fully dark when I look through the porthole. Black mountains of water heap and slide. Anything could be happening out there. Somewhere on the same waterway – but in a smaller vessel, one that bucks in the waves like a pony – Theophrastus crosses and re-crosses, still passing swiftly by, now on the landward side, now on the seaward. Or he chases behind us, on one of his journeys, making for Athens, or Lesbos, or Anatolia – perhaps the first time he made the journey to Athens, impatient, on his way to Plato’s Academy, leaning his body into the wind in...