RAISING FLORA: (book II of the Life of Socrates): henology {ending of work}
henology: Life of Socrates (by Scott Shlomo Krane)
XXIX
I didn’t risk becoming a Christian, because the Helenistic thought of Plotinus predated the Nicene Creed by a century or more. I didn’t risk my soul morphing into that of a heretic of Yiddishkeit, because I was not violating the precepts of Avodah Zarah. If there was any ‘worship’ in Neoplatonism, it was of the ‘the one’ (the abstract Supreme Being) in those days before what the Gnostics called, ‘Gnosis’, the neoplatonists of Alexandria and the other new Churches, spiritually-cum-tradition[s], Helenistically-embracing; but this was more meditation than worship.
According to Avodah Zarah, it is prohibited for a Jew to enter a Christian church; but a mosque, that is permitted. Maimonides himself found this loophole, undoubtedly while giving medicasl treatment to the Egyptian Sultan. However, there must have been a minority of ancient harbingers among the neoplatonists and Greeks, who worshiped—perhaps in stealth—the Greco-Roman pantheon. Much to our fortune, the ones responsible for the medieval renaissance of Neoplatonic thought were also key voices of Abrahamic monotheism: the two more similar of such religions: Avicebron and Avicenna, the Latinized acronyms given to two religious men of this philosophical persuasion: Avicebron (Solomon ibn Gabirol) being a Humnanist-Jew, and Avicenna (Abu Ali Sina), a Muslim scholar of Persia and Arabia, alike; neither of whom worshiped idols.
Seeking, as I’ve explained, to geographically trace the roots of Neoplatonism, Socrates wanted to travel to Egypt, where he had actually once visited during a Passover vacation, while enrolled in a Zionism program on a kibbutz, Kibbutz Yagur, roughly northeast in Israel. He went with two peers, both had graduated college; Soc had not. They traveled by bus to the southernmost point of the country, the resort city of Eilat, and across the border into the desert of the Sinai Peninsula—between the Mediterranean and Red Sea—which serves, actually, as a land bridge between Africa and Asia—where we made an overnight trek to the peak of, what was advertised as the biblical Mount Sinai, or Jabal Musa in Arabic. (Consideration of irony in discrepancy, taken); today, there’s an Eastern Orthodox monastery built at the foot of the mountain. The Israeli army took the desert from Egypt, in a war of attrition, between the years 1956 and 1967. Between the years 1979 and 1989, the Jewish state ceded the land back to the Egyptians. It seems Golda Meir interpreted the Israelites wilderness sojourn with a different geography than the New Testament and Koran.
In January 2010, Muslim Egyptologists made a splash in the headlines on how there was new proof that Jews didn’t build the pyramids. They said they found the tombs of the paid Egyptian workers who were responsible for the construction. He didn't believe this. Socrates still hoped what he hoped, believed what he believed. Akhenatan was the name of the heretic pharaoh who believed in a monotheistic system of divinity. This is somewhat along the lines of Freud’s explanation.
Socrates’ wanting to visit Egypt despite there being a biblical decree never to ‘return or dwell in the land of Egypt’ (Deuteronomy 17:16) after the time He emancipated the Children of Israel.
I had no problem referring to myself as being Neoplatonic in nature. Like I said, I could still be a Jew, and this was crucial. But a philosophical conundrum I did run into was the attraction I also felt towards Epicureanism. After all, I highly valued my soul (‘psyche’) and my intellect (‘nous’). I wasn’t always necessarily determined to conquer them through ‘he<g>nosis’—unification with ‘the one’. I had no tolerance for pain of any kind: mental, physical; you name it, no tolerance at all.
Still, through Neoplatonism, I—Socrates Cooper-Cohen—at the same time as learning to fear death, also learned to not fear death; but in a healthy way. And I valued mental health, I really did. For let us ask the question, ‘what after all, is death, really?’ Isn’t it but an end to material existence as known to the human being? And what is to be found at the teleological finality (‘telos’) of material existence, but ‘the one’? And ‘the one’ is all that is good in the universe, at once united.
I came to Torah Judaism as an outsider. While studying and living at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, I was very lonely. At Hadar HaTorah Rabbinical Seminary in Brooklyn, I found myself on the ‘inside’ to be just another one of the ‘outsiders’ (it being a school for returnees to Orthodox Judaism, baalei teshuva, like me). At Hadar HaTorah, I was less lonely, but less hopeful, more emotionally exhausted. Much more so at Bar-Ilan University, at their Macon HaGavuah L’Torah, where I learned the Talmud, and on occasion the siddur, the Tanach, and a little Maimondes’ Mishneh Torah, for credits and even received a small stipend. When I prayed there, I couldn’t help but find myself being competitive with the church. By this, I mostly mean, the church back home in the United States. I wondered who was more effectively petitioning the creator, Christians or Jews; who was closer to divinity. (The Jewish prayer, Kaddesh, was written around the first century B.C.E.; around the time of the Lord’s Prayer). Coming from such an anti-religious background, as I did, I never learned that every soul possesses a divine spark. That all people have a little light they shine; cute little concepts such as these. I remember being in Church in New Congregation, a strictly Protestant Lutheran congregation which hid their true nature well, and the couple of Christian youth group retreats during my formative days.
At home, the presence wasn’t felt; there was no light, well, less of one. There was no religion at all, once I hit 13-years-old, and had a Bar Mitzvah. No thought of the soul, and nurturing it. It really is a wonder I never, ever, became a Christian. I also saw the benign glow of this spiritual light in live-music while under the influence of psychedelic drugs.
One day, at Bar-Ilan, specifically at the yeshiva (HaMacon HaGavuah L’Torah) I was disconcerted to learn that I had run out of funds. There was money in my bank account, but in order to get to the ATM, I’d have to take a bus from Ramat Gan, where the university is located to Petach Tikvah, where the bank was located. The problem was: I didn’t have enough money even for the bus. Right next to the pot of free fresh coffee in the yeshiva’s front foyer was a tzedakah dish. I decided I’d just borrow the money I was missing to buy a bus ticket from this source. I looked over my shoulder to make sure nobody saw, before putting my hand in the dish and scooping up just enough change for the bus fare. But someone saw me, an Israeli student.
‘Vus you t’do-eeng? You cannot to do that!’
Socrates froze. He didn’t know how to play it off, or really to explain in Hebrew, as this kid wasn’t interested in giving him a chance to explain. Suddenly, in walked my roommate from off-campus (this was before I had the studio down the street). I said to him in English, ‘I’m just borrowing enough for the bus so I can get to the bank in Petach Tikvah.’ My roommate smiled, he understood me, and explained to the angry Israeli kid, pacifying him and causing him to surrender. Socrates was off the hook.
I could not take any style or mode of self-expression (including religion), in its pure and unadulterated form. My religion—and I had invested much energy into Judaism—had to have some kind of a twist. Like the way I love Coca-Cola, but even more than the original, I love Vanilla Coke, Cherry Coke and Coke with a slice of lime when I go to a bar. In this case, as you will surely gather by now, I had become a practitioner of Neoplatonic spirituality: Neoplatonic Judaism: a religion of the past; this was my religion of the future. And the same went for my other modes of self-expression. To be more exact, the other areas of my studies. My studies, I had to turn into self-expression. Ethnically an Ashkenazi Jew (but Sephardic-appearing in physicality). The same went for other modes, other self-defining paths: music, literature, those things I was passionate about; urged me to create, to recreate, then to create again.
Another one of the reasons I was attracted to ‘the one’; unlike Elohim, who demands uncomfortable and unnatural laws and traditions be kept, a Temple be built for his dwelling (shechina) and especially that he receives various forms of offerings: ancient incense, wine and burnt animal sacrifices, and modern liturgical prayers, three times per day; festivals to honor him and a weekly day of rest to worship him on the seventh day more than other days of the week; tithes be set aside and contributed in his name; and the demands go beyond these! “Put ON the yoke,” the rabbis said.
‘The one’ in Neoplatonism, isn’t so much a ‘boss’, as it is merely a being that is ‘there for you’ if you need it; because it transcends all your ether and atoms and is not transient either. Since it is all-knowing, however, you cannot hide from ‘the one’. But not an angry god, it is important to realize. Elohim is angry. Just read through the writings of the Hebrew prophets, and you’ll see what I mean. He is always meting out sinister caveats to his own children. And what kind of father destroys his own children? Stenographer-cum-teacher and pupil, Porphyryr reports that Plotinus says, ‘[T]he Gods to-day must be happier than the old…’
I can recall studying at Bar-Ilan and breaking the laws of Shabbat just to work on a paper, or do some writing or research. I lost big, because of breaking an unspoken oath I took to keep the mitzvot: the oath of the baal-teshuva. (Orphan whose been kidnapped whose taken an oath). How could I now hop back on the bus and not risk losing everything by simply doing what is comfortable for me to do? It wasn’t my fault; I couldn’t keep kosher, couldn’t keep Shabbat by myself. I was what is called, a ‘kidnapped baby who takes an oath’ or, tinuk sh’nishba. Was there a way I could replace dogmatic subscription to the mitzvot with benevolent intellectual pursuits?
I don’t know what came first, my mental illness or my substance abuse. According to the DSM-5, ‘substance use disorder’ (SUD) is a mental illness. It is the result of the merging of ‘substance abuse’ with ‘substance dependence’. When the doctor diagnoses an SUD case, he uses 11 criteria to judge whether the case falls under ‘mild’, ‘moderate’ or ‘severe’. Then which mental illness inflicted me first? Let’s say that my diagnosis is accurate and I really have ‘bipolar disorder’. How long have I had it? Since I was 30? Or since I was 15? If the latter, we can trace the origin of the ‘substance use disorder’. It just started as a way to self-medicate. Or maybe it was the former, just since I was 30-years-old. (The average age for bipolar onset is 18-years-old, according to the DSM-5). This would mean I don’t have ‘substance use disorder’ as per what it says in the book, but I simply just love to get high on the side—as I had not been using anything while living and studying in Israel, and Israel is where I had my first nervous breakdown, where I first went psychotic. And all of this while I was sober. If I had had the diagnosis for ‘substance use disorder’ back then—and I don’t think it existed yet in the DSM—then how can the judge convict a homeless, 17-(not 19-)year-old moi of felony marijuana possession!
SUD is tricky. It’s hard to imagine that when they tell you ‘Just say no!’ in the D.A.R.E program in grade school, you are talking about—you might be entering the realm of mental illness.
I always felt the struggle in my mind; always felt different because of this. I always thought that people were reading my thoughts, and I theirs. I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) when I was about eight and given Ritalin since then. In my teenage years, I requested to be switched over to Adderall. My request was granted. I started abusing it as the amphetamine that it is. I used to crush it up and snort it. I became really addicted and when I got wired, I would write lyrics and music on the guitar. I prepared about two hours’ worth of original music and performed it with a band of my musician peers senior year of high school for an impressively large paying audience of dancing teens. I insisted that Mother and Abba couldn’t come, which, in later years, I regretted. Yes, the drug made me creative. It brought me up.
In therapy one day in the winter of 2020, we got on the topic of the DSM-5. Hungry to own one, I asked how much she thinks they cost, ‘30 bucks?’ She said, ‘no, much more than that.’ She told me she had one.
‘If you bring in a flash drive, I can give you a PDF.’
‘Why can’t you just email it to me?’
‘Because the file is too big,’ she said.
I never bought a flash drive. We went two whole weeks without meeting. Then when I was back in her office I said, ‘Can you just try emailing me the PDF? For better or for worse, we’ll see what happens.’
She said, ‘Okay, I’ll try.’
She tried, and it worked. I must say, I got a kick out of reading this thing. It hadn’t been updated since 2013, and that had me a bit concerned. What changes were they bound to make in their democratic, pseudo-medical processes and standards?
Having ‘bipolar disorder’ didn’t make me suicidal. No, it was not the cause. No, and it was starting to get easier to live. Could I find hope in the knowledge of my mental illness? Could my hobbies outdo my dread? I still wanted the act. But the act was not suicide; not anymore. The act was something beyond.
It’s important to know whether I always had ‘bipolar I with psychotic features’. It would explain so much: my behavior, growing up, towards Mom and Dad; my poor grades in school. Could it be that I had fallen through the cracks, and gone undiagnosed? If I had ‘bipolar I’ all along, then I would have been disabled. Because these days, they treat me like I have a disability. I have a reduced fare Metrocard for transportation, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for food stamp credit and Social Security Income (SSI) for a little cash assistance. And all this because a doctor writes the government a note saying I have ‘bipolar I with psychotic features’. I used to deny that I had a mental illness. These were the days before I knew I could get benefits. It is written in the DSM-5: ‘[b]ipolar disorder is more common in high-income than in low-income countries (1.4 vs. 0.7%).’ I once thought it was all bullshit. Only in high income countries, my left ass cheek! Like where there was a pharmaceutical business, they mean to say, where the people could afford insurance, therapy and medication; where they could make a remunerative industry of it. But now, I was convinced I was suffering from something that had a name. Maybe the playing field was not level for me growing up because of my undiagnosed mental illnesses. And there’s no way in life to make it up to myself. Things like this. The whole concept of the act exists for reasons such as this. But the act has changed. It can’t harm me anymore; it’s hardly a threat.
XXXI
It was always a little embarrassing when it happened, and it’s still embarrassing in retrospect: my Mother sent packages to my apartment in Brooklyn, from her house in Arizona. Usually they were filled with clothes. Once, she sent clothes and included a book about growing plants indoors. She knew that I had e rtaken this up as a hobby, and the book was old, had been on her bookshelf, collecting dust, for decades. I read a little bit of it, and it enlightened me, a little bit. I learned that there are three processes with which plants survive. They are: photosynthesis, respiration and transpiration. In photosynthesis—which of course is the most famous term, and something I could swear (though I don’t remember, or, I didn’t really know in the first place) I studied back in school—water, carbon dioxide and light combine to concoct ‘plant sugars’. These sugars are what feed the plant. With respiration, oxygen comes from the air to feed the plant and burns off the carbon dioxide as a byproduct. In the third process, transpiration, the plant’s leave’s moisture dries up. Transpiration can lead to the death of a plant. Setting house plants side-by-side creates a mini-humidifier for their survival, this can help circumvent transpiration, but the downside is it causes the plants to become susceptible to one another’s diseases.
On Cinco de Mayo, 2020, during the coronavirus, I bought some tulips I saw in their own special refrigerator at the grocery store. There were several on displays to choose from, and they were cheap. On one, most of the flowers had budded, on another, only one tulip had flowered, and on all the rest, they were still waiting to bud. I bought the one with the one visible, fully-budded tulip. It was the color of peach or better, butterscotch. I thought it would lighten things up. I thought it would only be a few days to wait for more buds to bud. Now, flowers were new to me. I didn’t know how to strike the right balance with watering and sun, with photosynthesis, respiration and transpiration of a flower, not a plant. I knew that flowers would be different. But I was looking for something new; the only plants of mine that were budding thus far were the Coleuses. I had thrown away two plants, and had not seen any action regarding the succulents. The Satin pothos looked strong, despite infrequent watering, but had not shown any colors other than its green and hints of white. Having flowers would announce the springtime; would announce new life; amongst all this death we’d been having what with COVID-19 and all. I took the flowers home. I didn’t need to water them the first week because the soil was so moist when I got it. But also in that first week, there was no blooming. I was hoping this would change. I was hoping for the flowers to arouse the feminine mystique within me, which I have never been ashamed of. After more than a week—about a week and a half, the soil became dry enough to water again.
I brought the flowers to the sink, from the ultra-sunny window with the succulents where I was keeping it up until this point, and I soaked it through with about two, maybe two and a half cups of water. I listened to the sucking sound, the slurping of the soil. I was warned by Mother not to give it direct sunlight. So while it had been in the sunniest window in the apartment formerly, I now moved it to the table next to my chair that I sit in while I use the computer or watch television. ‘There is enough light in the apartment. Now, it will feed the tulips,’ I thought. But another week passed. No action. Another two weeks, still no budding, no more flowering, just the withering flower that had already been born when I bought the thing. In time, one of the tulips sort of started to stick out, but it looked shriveled up and unhealthy. Then one or two more like so. But in time, without ever reaching any kind of level of aesthetic impressiveness, or any sort of even humble longevity of health and life, it died. The experience with the tulips was frustrating, disappointing. But it didn’t make me lose hope.
It was getting to be a long time since I had last contemplated the act, really contemplated the act, (‘action’). People perform a final act in their lives over matters much smaller and more mundane than the hand I was dealt, such as love and money. Of this, I can think of a few instances recently I read in the Post or saw on television. Were these people really weak for having committed the act, and I strong for withstanding the urge to do so? Were—as I once thought—these people strong for having committed the act, and I the weak one, for having chickened out, so to speak? I think that I feel that I had it right the first time. I’m the strong one in all this, and they are of the class of the weak souls. It took me years to reach this conclusion. Still, every time I hear about it happening—someone having committed a final act in their lives, I can’t help but feel fascinated. These days, I might smile to myself. I might taunt the spirits: ‘that’s not going to be me,’ I say. But I never do say that.
The dead tulips didn’t depress me. I was prepared for that when I bought them. I knew flowers don’t last long. Mother warned me too, ‘those won’t last long.’ I was just disappointed that I wasn’t able to nurture them enough to tease out a single new flower, other than the previously existing one. Dead flowers didn’t break me. It was hard to believe, but I was feeling strangely happy; looking forward to the future. I tried to tell my psychiatrist this, but I don’t think that she believed me. What was so hard to believe about me finally being happy? She kept on asking whether I was ‘doing okay’, like I was intoxicated or something. She wanted to know, ‘why is your head in your hands?’ I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what to tell her. Here I was studying, writing, Raising Flora; as a continuation of Life of Socrates. In the future, I dreamed of taking this life back to Israel. At least now there was a future for me; a future in my plans; a future in my eyesight. So what was wrong with that? I told her I had ‘plans for the future, whereas this time last year, I was thinking of ending it all.’ I know she heard me.
‘I didn’t hear you,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, confused.
‘You said something about how you were going to end it all.’
‘This time last year, I said. But now I’m making plans for the future,’ I said, ‘plans to live a long life.’
Eventually, in 2020, a couple of months into coronavirus quarantine, I experienced a slight renewal in spirituality. I bought a pair of tefillin, and met with an old friend in Israel, Ozer, and we learned the Talmud and the Tanya and the Kuzari (c. 1140) of Rabbi Judah HaLevy. I went to the store, on the eve of Shavuot, as the pandemic was just starting to lift, and even bought a prayer book. But with all of this investing (again) in Judaism, Neoplatonism wasn’t on my mind as much, but attempting to follow the Law as best as I could, (again). I felt closer than ever to my creator. I was less confused, less depressed, it felt right.