Walking with Plato (13 page)

The ten-mile walk to Carlops took us across the Pentland Hills, which lie southwest of Edinburgh. It was a pleasant stroll through upland pastures and heather-clad moors. And, although we were never more than ten miles from the city centre, the hills were so empty and quiet that we might have been a hundred miles from anywhere.

On such a short, easy walk, there was no point hurrying. So we spent the day ambling rather than hiking, and stopped frequently to enjoy the scenery. I spent a lot of time listening to music as I walked, and supplemented traditional Scottish songs with rock-and-roll hits of the fifties and sixties. It was fabulous.

Walking, and having nothing to do except walk, and having nothing to distract me and pull me out of the moment as I walked, enabled me to listen to music the way I listened to it as a teenager: with complete and unforced attention.

Certain songs moved me deeply, especially, I noticed, those that expressed simple heartfelt emotions. For example, The Teddy Bears’ 1958 hit ‘To Know Him is to Love Him’, The Dixie Cups’ 1964 hit ‘Chapel of Love’, and the 1964 hit ‘Soldier Boy’ by The Shirelles.

Those songs rekindled the feeling I had when I was in my late teens and suddenly realized that life and happiness were simple matters after all: love this girl . . . win this girl . . . and, in the words of The Dixie Cups, ‘never be lonely any more’.

This is the essence of romantic love, which Schopenhauer describes so accurately and so pithily as ‘this longing that closely associates the notion of an endless bliss with the possession of a definite woman, and an unutterable pain with the thought that this possession is not available’.

Most of us have felt like this at some period of our lives. And few of us have not since learned that life and love are never quite so simple. But those sentimental old songs with their naive optimism take us back to those wonderful times – which is, I guess, why we love them so much.

And the interesting thing about them, artistically speaking, is the emotional punch they pack into a few simple words.

It doesn’t take a genius, of course, to understand that simple words can be an effective medium for expressing uncomplicated emotions. But knowing precisely which words to use, and in what order to put them – that’s the tricky bit. That’s where the artistry comes in.

Take some of those early Beatles songs for example: ‘Love me Do’, ‘Ask Me Why’, ‘From Me to You’, and so on. They use simple words to express uncomplicated emotions, but, even though they’re great songs, they pack no emotional punch. It’s hard to imagine anyone ever getting misty-eyed over ‘Love Me Do’.

Now, by way of contrast, consider ‘To Know Him is to Love Him’.

The first verse uses just fourteen different words, thirteen of them polysyllabic, but it captures perfectly – and I mean
perfectly
 – the tenderness and innocence of early-stage romantic love.

So what’s so special about
those
words in
that
order? And how does the songwriter choose them?

I spent a long time, as I ambled across the Pentland Hills, musing upon this. When, for example, Phil Spector wrote the magical first line of ‘To Know Him is to Love Him’ was it poetic inspiration? Or did he just get lucky?

Ditto for the equally simple-yet-poignant lyrics of ‘Chapel of Love’ and ‘Soldier Boy’. Did the songwriters lovingly craft those words, knowing that they perfectly express the excitement and unalloyed joy of young love? Or did they just stumble upon them?

In my normal, distracted, overstimulated frame of mind, I don’t suppose I would have made much progress on those questions. But in my walking-induced, meditative frame of mind, I felt that I had the time, the energy, and the clarity of mind to pursue them.

I came to the conclusion that moments of perfection in song-writing occur when the artist is completely attuned with both subject and medium.

When I say that the songwriter must be attuned with her subject, I mean that she must have a profound insight into the aspect of experience that she wants to share. There’s a parallel, here, with
kado
, the Japanese art of flower-arranging.

In his splendid book
The Japanese Way of the Artist
, the calligrapher and martial-artist H.E. Davey says of the kado-­practitioner: ‘If she perceives the rhythm and alternation of the
ki
[life-force] of plants and blossoms – their growth, decline and death, how they change in form and feeling with the seasons – then she can successfully arrange flowers.’

And that’s precisely how it is with the songwriter. If she’s attuned to the rhythm and alternation of the
ki
, the life-force, of romantic love – its growth, decline, and death, and how it changes in form and feeling with the seasons – then she can successfully write a love song.

The song may ostensibly be about just one phase of love, perhaps its beginning or its end. But in the listener it will awaken thoughts and feelings about love’s entire course.

This means that a truly great song about the joy and innocence of early-stage love will evoke subtle feelings of sadness for love’s decline, and a truly great song about the heartbreak of declining love will evoke subtle feelings of joy for love’s arising.

When I say that the artist must be attuned with her medium, I mean that she must be skilled in using the tools and techniques of her craft.

Again, in
The Japanese Way of the Artist
, Davey recounts how he once watched his
shodo
[Japanese calligraphy] teacher execute, many times, without the slightest hesitation, a beautiful and evocative brush-stroke. He says, ‘To a casual observer it might have seemed to be nothing more than a quick flick of the brush; but to me, someone who had many times tried to produce this particular and powerful brush stroke, it was much more.’

Similarly, when a songwriter creates a lyrical and musical phrase that perfectly captures some aspect of experience, it may appear nothing to the casual observer. But to me, someone who has tried many times to capture the essence of a thought, an idea, or an experience in words, it’s much more. It’s a triumph of craft, experience, and skill.

The first verse of The Shirelles’ ‘Soldier Boy’ is a prime example. They’re just a few simple brush-strokes, but they’re perfectly executed. They make no attempt to
describe
the naive ecstasy of young love, but they
suggest
it. They awaken many thoughts and feelings – sad as well as sweet.

And just as you could look for hours at a piece of Japanese calligraphy – perhaps a single
kanji
executed from a few swift brush-strokes – and find nothing in it that could be improved, so you could sit for hours and ponder those lyrics, and find not a syllable that could be altered for the better.

And then, of course, there’s the music. Without it, the lyrics of most pop songs are sterile. Silly even.

So what’s the magic of music? What gives certain sequences of notes (mere vibrations in the air) the power to bring words to life, and to move us so deeply?

That’s quite a question.

I remember, as a child, waking up one summer morning to the sound of music.

I shared a bedroom wall with the little girl next door. She’d received a Bontempi organ for her birthday, and was practising her first tune, the opening to ‘Morning Mood’ from Grieg’s
Peer Gynt Suite
.

For a long time, I lay in bed listening as she repeated the same notes over and over and over again: C-A-G-F-GA C-A-G-F-GAGA . . . (pause) . . . C-A-G-F-GA C-A-G-F-GAGA.

It was the loveliest thing I’d ever heard.

I knew nothing about classical music. I’d never heard of Grieg, and wouldn’t have known
Peer Gynt
from
Carmen
. But those notes, badly played, with one finger, on a child’s plastic instrument, filled me with an exquisite longing that I’d never known before.

I didn’t realize it then, but it was my first encounter with Beauty.

When the music stopped, I lay puzzling over what had happened. Those notes had set me longing for something. Something other-worldly. Something intangible. But what?

Little did I realize that, forty-odd years later, I’d still be grappling with the same question.

Plato grappled with it too.

Plato is probably the greatest, most influential philosopher ever to have lived. In fact, the twentieth-century English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once summed up the entire European philosophical tradition as ‘a series of footnotes to Plato’.

Clearly, then, Plato had a lot of important and interesting stuff to say about a lot of important and interesting stuff. But, for my money, the most important and interesting stuff he ever said was about Beauty.

He too had encountered Beauty, in its various guises, and he too struggled – though admittedly with more success than me – to understand it.

One of his early dialogues,
Hippias Major
, is entirely devoted to the question ‘What is Beauty?’ In it, two characters, Socrates and Hippias, thrash out the question together, and come up with six increasingly sophisticated attempted definitions, beginning with ‘a beautiful maiden is beautiful’ and ending with ‘the beautiful is that which is pleasing through hearing and sight’. But none of these definitions proves satisfactory. None of them gets to the heart of what Beauty is.

Plato continued to wrestle with the same question throughout his life, and came up with ever more sophisticated – and, some would say, ever more fanciful – answers.

Eventually, he decided that, in addition to all of the individual beautiful things in the world – all of the beautiful faces, flowers, sunsets, landscapes, poems, and melodies – there had to be something more. There had to be Beauty Itself.

Beauty Itself is divine. It is perfect and eternal. It exists outside the physical world, beyond space and time. It is the source of all earthly beauty, and of all that is good and right and true. It is invisible to the senses, but known, albeit imperfectly, to the soul.

According to Plato, every fleeting experience of beauty we have in this world is a pointer to Beauty Itself. Whenever we gaze upon a rose, or into the eyes of a lover, or up into the starry sky, our souls are being drawn to it.

It sounds fanciful. Ridiculous even. But there’s something about it that
feels
right. Because, whether it exists or not, Beauty Itself is precisely what I was grasping for, as a child, when I heard that melody from
Peer Gynt
. And Beauty Itself is what I was grasping at when, as I teenager, I fell in love. And it is something I’m still grasping after today.

Wendy and I arrived, late in the afternoon, at our pub-hotel in Carlops, and spent the evening relaxing hard in preparation for a long walk to Innerleithen.

The following morning, we woke early, washed and dressed, packed our rucksacks, and hurried down to breakfast.

Except that there was no breakfast. Nor any sign of life.

The restaurant and bar were in half-darkness and eerily silent. There were no breakfast places set. No enticing smells wafting in from the kitchen. No pleasant clatter of crockery and pans.

There was no landlord. No waiter. No chef.

Nobody.