The Plague of Plato’s Ghost (I)

She woke up this morning to find Plato was living inside her head. She asked him what he was doing there but he just looked at her and said: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

Not that it was anything unusual.

It was like this every single morning.

And more recently every morning she’d get angry. Rebellious. Start arguing: “You’d think after living in my head for so long at the very least you’d try to get to know me. If you did you’d know that compassion is my default position. Kindness is the lens through which I see the world. Jesus Christ, what oh what do you do between these injunctions” These flat-line announcements that drone through the waiting room of what is the airport that is my life?”

No response.

She never got any response.

Just the morning ritual of an impartial enjoinder.

They began on the 26th of June 2001 when she was finishing her anchovy toast and tea and had started thinking about brushing her teeth.

There was no trumpet call. No arrival of a flock of circling birds. No lightning in the sky. No declarative signal summonsing attention. Just the statement uttered in third person. In a voice distinctively apart from her own or any that she recognised. A strange voice that over the months and years had become all too familiar.

She remembered that first missive well. Seven words. Simple words. Not one of them longer than two beats.

Noun. Verb. Adjective. Pronoun. Adverb. Preposition. Noun.

The sentence began and ended with the name of a thing. Two things that stood in stark contrast to each other: Courage. Fear.

She remembered well what he had said in her head. It was such a significant event that those words carried weight. May have well been engraved on her bones:

“Courage is knowing what not to fear.”

At first those words became her religion. She wrote them down in note books. On serviettes in restaurants. On wallpaper; and shelving paper; and on the slim edges of newspaper in pencil. On beautiful parchment with an ink bleeding nib that tore into the paper with such passion that she missed the whisper of the next day, and the next day, and the next day.

So obsessed was she with those seven words that everything else became oblivious to her as she scrambled for etymological dictionaries, encyclopaedias, biographies and other important books with some strange understanding that she needed knowledge, more and more knowledge to deconstruct those seven simple words in order to find meaning.

She missed a month of Plato’s missives in her search.

And then the meaning came to her.

And the meaning was clear.

And it was straightforward.

It was:

“Courage is knowing what not to fear.”

(To be continued).