Before I begin, let me be honest with you — I haven’t yet read the Mueller Report. I’ve had quizzes to grade and Latin verbs that take the dative to re-memorize, and, frankly, if I’m going to read anything that doesn’t involve an emotionally compromised detective or an untrustworthy lady narrator, it’s going to be that article on the concept of truth in Homer that I’ve been meaning to get to for months.

But what I have found time to read is the unending stream of internet chatter informing me that I should be reading the Mueller Report. I’ve also been reading and listening to various tweeters and pundits and podcasters who themselves claim to have read the report and are thereby in a position to interpret its meaning. The first and most enigmatic of these reports came from Attorney General William Barr himself; the most recent and entertaining has come from the Indochino-wearing, Zip-Recruiting wunderkinder of “Pod Save America.” There are in addition countless other ostensible Mueller readers and interpreters, rising up to assert their mastery of the document to such an extent that I wonder who is left to buy enough copies of the physical book to make it a best-seller.

Despite the fact that everyone (except me) is reading the same document, readers of the Mueller Report are divided as to its meaning. What continues to be of interest is how many people are supporting their arguments by claiming they are informed by an actual reading of the Mueller Report. Barr, of course, was its original reader; it was only through his access to the text that he could release his letter claiming the Mueller Report exonerated the president. The “Pod Save America” hosts made reference to their reading of the report multiple times via Twitter and on the podcast and used their reading as the basis for their claims that not only did the report not exonerate Mr. Trump, but provided the grounds for impeachment. Every other possible interpretation that lies between these two poles can be found by doing a search of the phrase “read the damn report” on Twitter; whereas most of the damn report readers are using their interpretation of the text to condemn the president, there remain an adamant few who find in the text grounds for an even more fervent admiration of the Certainly-Not-A-Colluder-in-Chief.

The reasons for this continued polarization are surely numerous and many can be attributed to the same divisive issues that led to the election of Mr. Trump in the first place. One might dare to suggest that some of those claiming to have read the text never truly did so (or, as I myself have done with many 400+-page books that I was supposed to have read, simply skimmed it). If one does give these readers the benefit of the doubt, one might turn to semantics and find that one group is understanding words like “collusion” and “exoneration” and “I love it, especially later in the summer” differently than the other. The more daring or French of us might look to Derrida to explain how every writer includes in her work a sub-text that ultimately contradicts the message of the text.

I would argue, however, that the best explanation for these various interpretations of the Mueller Report can be found in Plato and his criticisms of all reports, or anything at all that has been committed to writing.

At the end of his Phaedrus, a dialogue that first describes how love makes the feathers of our soul sprout before turning to a detailed exploration of contemporary trends in rhetoric, Plato includes a criticism of writing that seems quite out of place for a man whose legacy was vouchsafed by the amount of written text he created. I myself could write a whole dissertation exploring the circumstances and consequences of this critique, but, in the interest of space, please allow me to convey a sort of William Barr-esque version. In short, Plato did not trust the written text to aptly communicate either the specific message of its author or any sort of truth in general (Phaedrus 275d7-e2. All translations by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff):

You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it.

A written text is hardly different from a naive child of a creative parent, one able to speak but completely unable to defend itself from criticism or even answer the most simple question posed by its readers. Furthermore, it cannot choose its audience — it uses the same words to deliver a message to groups of people who necessarily require different rhetoric to understand the same message. In so doing, it cannot help but sow confusion and discord. Thus, the written text should not be entrusted to act as an effective messenger, but rather should be a “garden of letters,” one whose fruits serve as reminders for the author and, more enigmatically, “for everyone who wants to follow in his footsteps” (276d1–4). Though the meaning of this last bit is unclear, it is certain that Plato meant to portray a text as more of a map to meaning than something endowed with meaning itself.

Through this lens, we can better recognize the problems the Mueller Report is encountering and creating as it wends its way through the public debate. It is very possible that Mr. Mueller intended this report to deliver one clear message. But as the written object tries to deliver that message to different audiences with the same unchanging words, it is inevitably subject to misinterpretation. Moreover, when any audience attempts to ask questions of a report as a way of clarifying its meaning, the interrogator is confronted with the silence of an object that is in no way capable of responding, regardless of whether the question is posed by a human voice, a Fox News chyron, or a blue-checked tweet.

Furthermore, as is evidenced by the myriad people demanding that we “read the damn report” in lieu of providing a cogent argument themselves, many readers are brandishing the Mueller Report as if it provides direct access to some sort of truth. Plato, who called writing the “appearance of wisdom, not its reality” (275a8–10) would identify the search for truth in a written text as the height of folly. The written word may guide an appropriate and understanding reader towards something true, but it can never ignite the spark of truth within the human soul.

This is the case for a text written in any genre. One might argue that a modern “report” drafted by a man of Mr. Mueller’s gravitas surely possesses more truth than does, say, an ancient dialogue dedicated to the Muses. But Mr. Mueller’s report is just as mute in the presence of questions as is one of Plato’s dialogues; Mr. Mueller’s summaries and conclusions are just as ill-equipped to adapt themselves to various audiences as are Plato’s metaphors and myths. As long as both texts are committed to the fundamentally soul-less written sign, neither can claim to be legitimate vessels of truth. The fact that the Mueller Report has provided so many different forms of “truth” to so many different forms of readers does not necessarily suggest a persistent benightedness in one audience or another (though it certainly does not forbid that possibility), but rather demonstrates the validity of Plato’s claim that no text can ever effectively convey an immutable truth.

Yet this weakness of a written object does not entirely sever the relationship between a text and truth — provided that the creator of the text is present to defend her creation. “And when it [a text] is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support” (275e5–7). In order to guide its reader to a truth, a text needs its creator nearby to act as an interpreter. This presents a quite obvious problem for those of us who would use ancient texts with long-dead authors to make a point (though it does also allow us to continue to argue that the Phaedrus is really an elaborate homage to Sappho rather than a tool for philosophers to use against rhetoricians, which is a pursuit with its own unique rewards). But in this case of the Mueller Report, we are able to — and should — take Plato’s advice at face value. We will only ever be able to get to the truth towards which his report is leading by asking Robert Mueller himself to come to the aid of his written text.

While discussing the possibility of Mr. Mueller testifying before Congress in the “Pod Save America” episode mentioned above, Jon Favreau seemed legitimately curious as to what his testimony could possibly add to his report. Tommy Vietor apologized for his cynicism as he pointed out that Mr. Mueller’s presence before Congress would be an effective bit of political theater; Jon Lovett added that Mr. Mueller could supplement the report with findings that had lain outside of the scope of the investigation.

These and others are surely valid points, but I (and, I believe, Plato) would argue that the most fundamental reason for Mr. Mueller to testify is so he can come to the aid of his text. It is only with his support of his report that we might reach some shared understanding of the truth of his findings. Mr. Mueller is the one who can answer the question of whether the report indicates that Mr. Trump was exonerated, Mr. Mueller himself is the one who can say if Donald Trump, Jr., shouldn’t be so proud of the fact that his own foolishness rendered him unfit for collusion, Mr. Mueller may also be able to add more details about what Melania was doing this whole time. It may very well be the case that the truth Mueller reveals is displeasing to one or both sides. It will nevertheless be an agreed-upon truth, and will therefore be the only thing that can render the Mueller Report useful.

Of course, it may be stubbornly Pollyanna-esque to think that Mr. Mueller can help us himself, or that there will ever again be the sort of truth that will unify a country so riven with partisan strife. Yet even here Plato offers some hope. He himself was witness when Socrates, a revered mentor, was executed by a political system that was undermined and corrupted by ideologies and demagogues more treacherous and venal and (worst of all) effective than those whom we are currently witnessing. He nevertheless maintained a faith in and commitment to a belief that truth and justice were possible, provided that a community places its faith and dialogue in the right things. Plato’s optimism should therefore encourage us to strive for a shared understanding and respect for truth and public debate (provided that such a debate does not occur solely on Twitter).

Plato ends his Phaedrus by dividing those who commit their thoughts to writing into two groups (278b9-d5). Those who base their written composition on the truth and are able to defend what they have composed with spoken arguments can count themselves among the august ranks of the lovers of wisdom (which is to say, among philosophers). Those who cannot transcend the written sign and who get lost in revision of their texts rather than using spoken arguments to supplement them — alas, those in this neurotic group can only be called poets or law-makers.

The implications of this stratification for one who never answers her phone nor has ever considered an essay or an email truly complete are not quite clear. For the purposes of this exploration, however, Plato’s distinction may prove useful. We are all now looking to Mr. Mueller not for poetry or for even for laws, but for some meaningful and true message regarding the actions and fitness of our president. It is only by defending his written work by speaking before Congress that Mr. Mueller will be able to fulfill that task and provide us with the wisdom for which we’ve been hoping.

Kourtney Murray is a lecturer in Latin and a library metadata specialist at the University of California, San Diego, as well as a fierce advocate for poets in the ancient war between poets and philosophers. She’s also an avid reader of Michael Connelly novels, the latest of which has kept her from the Mueller Report, and a writer of a dissertation about the critique of writing in the Phaedrus.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phaedrus

Plato: Don’t Read the Damn Report was originally published in EIDOLON on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Lord, those who die still live in Your presence,

their lives change but do not end.

— Catholic Prayer for the Dead

Let me include here a spoiler alert — not so much for the latest film version of Pet Semetary, but for pretty much all of the earlier expressions.

Given my own recent stint as dead cat custodian, of course I was enticed by the commercials for the new film version of Stephen King’s feline-focused Pet Semetary. If nothing else, the mangy and demented cat snarling through the ad offers definitive proof that there are worse cat-tenders out there than me; moreover, as an occasional crafter, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by the construction of the creepy animal masks worn by the kids parading through the trailer. It seems like those masks incorporate papier mache, and that is just some next-level creepy craftiness. And who wouldn’t relish the opportunity to see another movie in which John Lithgow is tramping about in mysterious woods? How great would it be if Harry of the Hendersons fame popped up in some quirky post-credits clip?

Every repeated viewing of the trailer encouraged my desire to see the film (and because it often popped up as a commercial for my re-watching of the first season of “The Exorcist” on Hulu[do you all know how great Geena Davis is in that show?], I saw it almost as many times as I saw heads rotating way too far around necks). But while my enthusiasm for witnessing the adventure of a family that clearly had moved into a house way too close to a freeway gathered strength, some misgivings began to claw their way out of the tomb of my youth. Indeed, by the thirteenth or fourteenth time the white-bearded Mr. Lithgow reminded me that sometimes dead is better, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to truly enjoy the movie version of Pet Semetary until I addressed my issues with the book version of Pet Semetary.

I read the book as a teenager, or maybe even a pre-teen, back in the early nineties. Indeed, Stephen King had functioned as my own personal literary Charon, escorting me from the bright and sunny and (strawberry-)blonde world of Nancy Drew and Sweet Valley High to the realms of Dolores Claiborne and Thomas Ewen Consolidated High School, murky and dank places in which one was never safe from buckets of pig’s blood falling from the rafters. But unlike some LA Gear-shod Eurydice striving to get back to fresh air and a blue Mustang, I chose to settle into the nooks, caskets, and Plymouth Furies of the Kingaverse.

In exchange for my residency, I gained the sort of knowledge that allowed me to avoid becoming a vampire or some truly unhappy high school student. The Shining, for instance, confirmed the validity of my innate aversion to snow and topiaries while allowing me to appreciate the occasional usefulness of my mother’s anxiety. To this day, I turn to The Stand as a guide for surviving the flu season (usually it’s just rest and lots of fluids, but if things get apocalyptic, the best course of action will be to get pregnant with a metaphor for the tenacity of the human race, convince two separate men with valuable and unique skill-sets to fall in love with me, and, if I have time, to work out lingering issues with my mother before the flu gets her). From poor Carrie I got many valuable tips, among them how to shower in a public setting, how to never trust a guy asking me to a dance, and how best to approach the topic of menstruation when talking with my mother. Oh, and Misery — can we ever really thank that book enough for facilitating the ascent of Kathy Bates into public consciousness and also for showing us how to hobble someone if necessary? I don’t think so.

But when it came to Pet Semetary, my dislike was like a sister with spinal meningitis who continued to haunt me long after she had choked to death on her own vomit. When I first realized that the book wasn’t for me, I didn’t give it much thought, but just skimmed to the end of the book and moved on, consoling myself with the fact that at least I came away from the experience with a healthy fear of toddlers wielding scalpels too close to my Achilles’ tendons. It is only recently and with the benefit of way too many courses in literary theory that I felt capable of and interested in unearthing the oranges of my dislike. More specifically, I had begun to wonder if my disappointment with the book was its insufficient exploration of the intimacy between pets and death, a relationship that would have been particularly potent and interesting to one just beginning to feel her way out of the mystery of childhood (impressive, right?).

To be fair, Pet Semetary does include a recognition that pets evoke a particular chthonic fascination and horror in the children around them, but Mr. King too quickly passes over that particular cairn in favor of exploring the more adult fears associated with the death of a child. As a doting aunt of young children, I can appreciate how this plot development is effective; when I was a teenager to whom the death of another child as incomprehensible as the meaning of the word “housecoat”, it was less so. (Yes! “Housecoat” is something a woman wears in Pet Sematary! While she is still alive!!) What I could appreciate as a kid was the vague recognition that pets inhabit a realm that shares almost as much territory with the underworld as it does with the backyard.

Whether it be by an accident in the road, by an “old age” that could arrive within the span of a child’s life, or by feline serial killing (which is how I chose to think of the times in which my parents had to take kittens to the animal shelter after failing to find them good homes with our neighbors or their co-workers or the readers of the PennySaver — RIP, old friends), pets always just seem one bad day away from shedding their mortal coil. Even in birth, pets were near death, as anyone who has ever witnessed a cat birthing a litter in her parents’ bedroom closet knows (or anyone who has heard this amazing work by David Sedaris). Given all this, perhaps it’s not too outrageous to suppose that children in general — and sensitive, moody, and bookish kids in particular — experienced every moment with a pet as one unavoidably close to death. Pet Semetary initially promised a sort of map of that realm, but ultimately was content with stating “Thar Be Dragons That Are Furry and Often Adorable.”

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk! I do also realize that it could simply be the case that by the time I read Pet Sematary, I was entering my literary snob period (ask me about my sophomore year crush on Joseph Conrad!); I also read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History at about this point and realized I had found the blueprint for creating a life devoted to important scholarly work on the ancient world. Whatever the reason, Pet Semetary marked the beginning of an almost fifteen year King hiatus in which I turned to basic cable for monsters, premium cable for middle-aged male angst, and Comedy Central for reminders of the general state of emergency all mortals were trapped in.

It wasn’t until I was an almost thirty-year-old graduate student and Duma Key offered me a balmy Florida vacation from the hellscape of my qualifying exams that I picked up another King-penned escape. That book not only taught me how much more pleasurable it was to read about fictional head injuries when one was supposed to be reading about almost anything else, but also thoroughly rekindled my appreciation for Mr. King and the worlds he created. Since then, my appreciation has grown with each new work (though, man, Revival? — the ending on that one continues to haunt me some two years after I’ve finished it).

But as this re-kindled respect was growing, my recollection of Pet Sematary was limping behind it, tracking in a mildly distasteful odor if not necessarily a dead raven whose eyes it would eventually eat. As the release of the new movie version approached, it became clear that the only way to deal properly with this unwanted furball of a memory was to re-read the book with the wiser and better contact-lensed eyes of an older woman who hasn’t lived in a house with a pet in decades.

This task was initially made quite difficult by the fact that I hadn’t kept my old copy of Pet Sematary. By the time I went looking for one, library copies were in short supply and Amazon and other online retailers, acting as if the book were a recent Oprah pick or insulin, had inflated the price of the e-book and made finding a cheap paperback copy too many clicks away. And, sure, as a person who spends an absurd amount of money of avocados that insist on rotting as soon as I get them into my kitchen, I probably could have afforded one of those copies — but my teenage self resisted. This was the very self I was trying to negate through the reading of the book, but I still couldn’t take all her eye-rolling at the thought of spending more than the cost of two bags of avocados on a book I wouldn’t feel comfortable reading in the bath.

After two weeks or so of searching, I finally tracked down a library copy. It was a more modern edition than the eighties-ish one I’d read, with a cover meant to appeal to comic book readers and an ominously broken binding (say what you will about zombie cats, but are they more scary than pages wafting out of a paperback library book after they’ve escaped their bad binding? O.k., yeah, now that I’ve typed that out, yes, zombie cats are more scary, but you’ll admit that the wafting pages are, at the very least, morbid.) Despite its faults, the well-used book was imbued with the promise of a revelation or, short of that, a meaningful reunion with an old friend. One whom you sort of remember as annoying but who you now realize was actually just fine and the reason you thought she was annoying really had more to do with your own stuff rather than anything she actually did. I really did feel that I was now finally ready to appreciate the richness of the journey through Pet Sematary — a journey embodied by a cat that was hit by a truck, was buried in a sacred Native American burial ground, who dug its way out of a plastic bag, and ultimately dragged his damaged body home…only to be basically rejected by all the people who once claimed to have loved him. And also whatever happened with the dead kids.

Alas, I have come here today not to praise Pet Semetary, but to bury it. To bury it, moreover, in some sort of Protestant cemetery or one of those new-fangled green burial spots for Millennials who don’t want to be embalmed — anywhere, really, where it won’t be brought back to life by enchanted soil or a wendigo. But before I get to that, let me quickly point out that if you try to text someone the title Pet Semetary, your phone’s auto-correct may change it to “Pet Seminary.” Would that our phones could make that textual suggestion an actual movie! It could be set in some East Coast academic setting in which dogs make their way through the dusk arguing about the ontological difference between pilots and co-pilots. Or perhaps in some Hogwarts-esque setting a bunch of cats wearing heavy eyeliner could map the parallels between the ancient Egyptian underworld and the modern covens of witches. In any environment, at the end of the day all of the pets would gather at the local pub, knocking back craft beers and arguing about whether Jesus would have been more of a dog or a donkey person. Pet Seminary — Now Accepting A -PAW-cations!

I’m so sorry. So where was I? Oh, yes. I think it’s worth pointing out that I did find many things in Pet Semetary to appreciate. There was a whole Oedipus sort of deal that I completely missed the first time around, and there were some scenes that managed to combine horror and poignance in a way one rarely sees outside of a King-imagined situation. But despite this recognition, my dislike of the book wasn’t ever reduced; if anything, it was refined.

I stand by the arguments I made above as reasons why the book wouldn’t have appealed to a YA reader, but my second reading also uncovered a sort of low-key grumpiness that might be particularly obvious to someone who has, by now, spent way too much time in traffic or waiting in lines or trying to figure out where to report her (very miniscule) capital gains on the ever-changing 1040 form. This miasma of irritation is present on the very first page of the book, in which Louis, our protagonist, fantasizes about “driv[ing] away [from his family] without a look back.” It’s present when Louis, our hero, “was always annoyed” at joggers and bicyclists on a college campus. It’s present when Louis, the guy who never makes clear if the reader should pronounce his name “Lewis” or “Louie”, gets inexplicably angry with his wife for bringing home too many clothes for their kids. These things are horrifying only because they show how quickly our petty gripes make us unlikable. More scarily, they demonstrate that none of us should consider ourselves a hero as long as we’re irritated with the sound of our loved ones chewing.

Perhaps this conclusion is in no way unique or revelatory. In fact, it’s sort of consistent with the themes of Pet Sematary itself. The hope that I would find something new and pleasurable when I returned to the book was the same deluded emotion that guided poor Louis had when he buried his cat, and then his child, and ultimately his wife in the wendigo-haunted soil. How foolish to think I would have uncovered something delightful! I should probably be relieved that the book didn’t kill my neighbors while I was trying to get reacquainted with it. But while it is true that I disliked the book just much as an adult as I did as a kid, I did come away from my re-read with more than just a renewed commitment to keeping scalpels out of the hands of toddlers. But before I can really end this thing on a high note, I hope you’ll join me for a moment in some truly Elizabeth Gilbert-esque territory.

As I intimated above, my return to Pet Sematary was caused by a general feeling that there was some profound difference between the person I am today and the girl I was when I first read it. Perhaps that feeling arose from society’s undeniable adoration for the aging woman and the many fine qualities that distinguish her from her younger counterparts. I may have picked it up from one of the growing number of podcasts that purport to use Buddhism to cure road rage and so slip in some discussion of the non-existence of an enduring self (don’t be mad that some bozo cut you off — there never was a YOU to cut off in the first place!). Maybe it was just my growing love of the ugly but really comfortable clog.

Whatever the specific combination of causes, I came to view my middle-age as an existence completely severed from that of my youth. If asked, I probably would have identified myself as a lightly zombified version of what had come before, one losing hair and always hungry for flesh (of the avocado, but still) and occasionally reeking of the grave. It was as if the trek through my twenties and thirties was tantamount to walking with poor Mr. Lithgow through a Micmac burial ground: what emerged at the end of that hike had little in common with what started it. I felt battered and bruised, I was constantly bumping my stiff hindquarters against things in way that was always more awkward than appealing, and I was developing a completely bizarre fascination with birds.

This view not only informed my understanding of my older self but tainted my recollection of my younger self. The grumpy and achy woman I’d become no longer trusted the Dr. Pepper-addicted and mildly less sweaty girl I’d once been. In some of the most memorable scenes in Pet Sematary, Louis repeatedly imagines how he would save his son Gage from death if given the opportunity to roll back the clock. Similarly, I had begun developing elaborate fantasies about how I could rescue the earlier me from her future. Louis saw himself running fast enough to catch up to Gage before the toddler reached the street. I would stop my fourteen-year-old self from drinking so much high fructose corn syrup and thereby keep most of my teeth well into adulthood. Louis wished his screaming would have somehow caused Gage to stumble. I would have forced my teenage self to learn, like, Hebrew, or physics, in order to increase my chances of getting a tenure-track position at a college in a town with a Trader Joe’s. Louis’s fingertips would have caught Gage’s coat before the truck could. I myself couldn’t stop thinking about how much better my yoga practice would be today if, just once or twice, I’d taken some time in P.E. to do some hip-openers rather than…god, what else did we do in P.E.? All I can remember is the color of the shorts, and listening to Vanilla Ice on Walkmans.

Louis’s fantasies may have been more heart-wrenching than mine, but both were fueled by the profound disconnect between ourselves and those we wanted to save. Yet when my return to Pet Sematary uncovered a thread of completely valid dislike that tied the middle-aged reader to the younger one, it was as if Louis, Gage, the housecoat-wearing wife, the dead cat, John Lithgow’s character, and all the other myriad figures and facets of the book had accomplished what I alone could not. By allowing me to see that I was the heir of the some of the best features of my teenage self, the book saved both of me(s).

Sure, in the years between my Pet Sematary visits I’d gone to college and made some weird choices regarding majors and nicotine, but that wasn’t quite the same as being flattened by a semi and dragged a hundred feet while my father ran behind the semi screaming my name and picking up all the articles of clothing the big tires had knocked off my body. Sure, I’d spent much of my twenties testing out a life of domesticity and co-habitation that was completely inappropriate for an untidy loner, but that wasn’t quite the same as being knocked off a bike and thown into a tree and having my brains drip down my face in front of two nursing students on their first day of school. Sure, the clogs…well, one cannot deny that the gait of one walking in clogs isn’t too dissimilar from the shuffle of the undead.

Even with my feet so enclogged, I certainly was shuffling in the land of the living (though I’m beginning to think the road to hell is one you share with people on those rented scooters). More importantly, I’m walking on a road first begun by a person I’m just beginning to remember accurately. And — at the risk of really getting into the territory of poets whose whimsically-fonted books are sold at Target — I’ve found that being able to trust my former self is the source of an utterly unexpected joy. In respecting my teenage choices, I can better understand why I am where I am; in using my teenage eyes to see where I have arrived, I can better appreciate how hard I’ve worked for this view. Except, of course, when I look at my clog collection. The teenage version of me would hate those so much, especially now that Doc Marten Mary Janes are a thing again.

At last, we’ve made it to my happy ending. In conclusion, I’d like to say that my re-reading of Pet Sematary allowed me to see that while I had been relating to the poor dead cat, I had become the flawed but very much alive person who never should have tried so hard to bring that cat back to life. The happy reward of such a discovery is being able now to take my rightful place in a rocking chair on a porch next to Louis and Mr. Lithgow, where we can talk about all the times we made bad decisions regarding our pets before going to sleep before, like, 9:15 — even if it’s a Friday night. Perhaps some might not consider an ideal ending to be one in which I accept that the character in a book to whom I most relate is a grumpy man who probably should’ve been a bit less hasty when it came to gardening with his family. But, hey — it sure beats seeing the world through the eyes of a resurrected cat. Plus, maybe, if I sit here long enough, I’ll get to hear some cool stories about Harry and the Hendersons.

1. Every cat-sitting job I take is penance for a cat-sitting assignment gone wrong back in the early 1990’s. I can’t remember what year it was, exactly, but it was a year in which I was convinced that if I practiced hitting a tennis ball against my garage door enough, I could somehow help Martina Navratilova stage a Wimbledon comeback. So it was also summertime, and I was about to start the seventh or eighth grade, and I certainly had only a tenuous understanding of the relationship between my actions and the fate of those around me. I can’t remember the name of the family whose cats I was watching or even the name of any of the cats, but every time I agree to take responsibility for the lives of any cats now, I think of my first charges and how profoundly I let them down.
2. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t kill any cats that summer. This isn’t my version of I Know What You Did That Summer Twenty-seven Years Ago (you killed a cat whose name you then forgot). In fact, looking at them thirty years later, one might call my sins childlike — some mild neglect, some emotional distance, some guilt I couldn’t assuage with overdue ear-scratching. Nevertheless, the whole situation continues to have a real Flowers in the Attic vibe. Not because of any incest or even any twins, but more because part of my responsibility was to keep the cats locked away in a room not unlike an attic, and maybe I was supposed to water the flowers?
3. I know for a fact that the room was attic-like but not an actual attic because the house of the unnameable neighbors was a mirror of my own, as houses in the suburbs tend to be. Now that alone seems like a subject worthy of exploration, either by some psychologist or horror novelist — is it not a weird and uncanny thing that so many people are living separate lives and pursuing separate dreams and dealing with separate emotional issues in houses that are distinguished only by the most minor of variations? What sort impact must it have on kids every time they walk into their own house, but occupied by a different family…is this not just exposing young minds to cognitive dissonance and a realization of their own insignificant place in a carnivalesque world of copies in a way that cannot be anything but tediously traumatic? You know, from that perspective, it’s really no wonder I never wanted to go trap those poor cats in the attic-like room of the mirror house of my neighbors. (Plus, not to be a huge jerk, but that house smelled weird.)
4. Surely that first cat-sitting gig lasted only a week or two, unlike my recent stints, which often stretch on so long that I develop some real fondness for the cats and occasionally a reliable memory of their names. As we all know, though, time moves differently for pre-teens, or any group of people who have three months off for summer and are waiting to get their periods, so that first ambit into pet-caring territory felt like it lasted for months. Months in which I would not go and visit the house I was meant to, but would feel the need to visit every day — sometimes every hour of every day. Why I didn’t go when I was supposed to but rather let the shame of not going eat me alive is a mystery I can’t resolve for you, but…well, I mean, that’s still something each of us now does every day, right? Are you trying to tell me that you don’t have an unanswered email that you started to feel bad about not getting around to three months ago? So, really, who am I to try to solve one of the biggest problems of the human condition? But, also, I suspect my reluctance to diligently discharge my adolescent cat-sitting responsibilities could just be blamed on sub-par kitty litter technology
5. Seriously, I wonder how much people appreciate that — how much kitty-litter has evolved in a mere thirty or so years. Today, there is odor-eating litter, there is clumping litter that turns cat waste into a post-modern sculpture making a statement about ownership and freedom, and there is litter made from recycled newspapers in which front pages that once reported Trump’s victory are now being shit on. This litter inspires in the cat-tender a truly unique feeling that combines the pride of taking care of the environment with a hubris engendered by masking the foul odors of the natural world. But the litter of the early nineties? That was just this plain dusty white stuff that my father used to soak up the oil our cars leaked on the driveway and that turned cat excrement into shit covered in sand.
6. Oh, but, sand — that is one thing that encourages me now in my cat-sitting, since I’m usually watching the pets of people much wealthier than me and thus within walking distance of the ocean. Recently I not only walked to the ocean, but walked into it, and found the reports of the unusually warm water to be no way exaggerated, and only creepy and portentous if one ruminated on it too much (or saw any of the little dead fish that would float temporarily to the shore before being sucked back in by the super-heated waves that killed them). The house for which I first cat-sat had no such draw. I couldn’t see the ocean when I saw the cats, but rather only a different view of my own house. That was creepy and portentous at all times (I was, after all, on the brink of a gothic teenagedom).
7. As a teenager, I can’t recall pet-sitting at all, and I even ultimately stopped babysitting (a much higher-paying and more dignified occupation). I had college applications to think about and was also quite occupied with the marching band (it was cool at my school, we said). Or, perhaps, word got around of how I neglected the cats of my first cat-sitting gig. Like I said, none of them died, but there may have been severe emotional scarring, and plenty of sand-covered shit in places there shouldn’t have been.
8. It would be remiss of me to neglect mentioning that one cat did, in fact, die on my watch, but that was at a much different time and in another country. Well, county, anyway. And in fairness to me, the cat was quite old. It’s hard to know where to begin the story, except to say that it was toward the end of a longish cat-sitting gig I took just recently, one in which I really did make every effort to keep the cat alive, including giving him medicine every morning and being around to sleep near him every night. The Wednesday before the Friday he was scheduled to reunite with its owners, the poor old cat either suffered a stroke or was internally decapitated (a real thing, I’ve read) by his fellow cat, a much younger creature who really was capable of inflicting great damage with excessive friskiness. When I arrived home that night, I found the cat under a desk in a dark room, and while he looked like he’d just casually draped his body over a powerstrip bristling with electrical cords, my long cat-sitting experience quickly told me that the cat’s inability to move himself off the power strip was a sign of a major problem. Nevertheless, I couldn’t let go of the hope that this cat was suddenly just too tired to use his back legs, which was why they dragged so piteously on the ground when I attempted to revive the creature by bringing him to his food.
9. The cat wouldn’t eat, of course, but I what I will not soon forget is that he would still purr. I heard this purring after I gave up on feeding him and settled on trying to arrange him on my bed in what seemed like a natural and comfortable position (I would see later that one of his poor paws was bent under his body in a way even the most narcoleptic cat would never have endured). I heard the purring as I stroked his head and tried to persuade him to remain alive for a mere forty-eight more hours. I heard the purring as I took a video of him with the thought that I would later send it to the owners to determine if perhaps momentary bouts of paralysis were normal for this particular cat. Twenty minutes after making the video, when the purring had stopped and the cat was dead, I realized I had a snuff film on my hands. Well, something sort of snuff-film-adjacent. The cat didn’t die while I was filming him, but rather while I was lying next to him, petting him, and wondering what this cat had done to so piss off the other one that the other one internally decapitated it. I nevertheless deleted the video before showing it to anyone.
10. This was all happening in the middle of what I was beginning to think of as my plague year. Despite the amazing advances in flea-eradication technology, it increasingly felt as if all around me the people I loved were dying, coming down with cancer, or taking extended leaves of absence to figure out how to live in a world in which criminals were reigning and all the dead fish were being ignored. To some, I know, such an onslaught of loss after decades of abundance would not seem a plague so much as the normal fever of the human condition — yet even that awareness of my former good fortune felt like a source of disease. As one worst-case scenario after the next was realized and I spent more nights sleeping on couches in hospital rooms than I had slept on pull-out beds near cats, I had the persistent impression that some cosmic scales were finally being balanced. It is no comfort to know that one’s pain is paying a long overdue debt, and it is an almost unspeakable and selfish fear that causes one to wonder if there will be no more good days.
11. Towards the end of this cursed year, I myself came down with an almost literal plague, or what the nurse-practitioner at the local Urgent Care called “probably not the flu” despite the fact that it caused fevers in the afternoon and made it impossible for me to laugh for a month (both because I was sad to be sick and because every time I thought about laughing, I wound up coughing in a distinctly un-funny way). This was my first real illness as a middle-aged woman, and one that came to feel not so much like an ailment with biological causes but rather a spiritual malaise in which everything bad I had ever done was trying to sneak out from where it was buried in my subconscious via phlegm. There were times, late into evenings in which my coughing kept me from sleeping, that I wondered if my bone-deep fatigue was the beginning of a state of paralysis that soon would deprive me of my legs and leave me lying over a power cord.
12. Not to be too dramatic or anything. I mean, things were rough, but I often found myself vacillating between being burdened by the sudden heaviness of the mortal coil and being elated by a recognition of how absurd and temporary the whole condition of being alive actually was. The vertigo of it all eventually dropped me into the chair of a counselor who assured me that every death — no matter how small the thing deprived of life — should engender the sort of existential angst that inspires a woman to revisit her childhood experiences via a list on Medium.
13. And it was surely because the death of the cat (see 8 above) was coming at the end of the middle of this plague year and because, by that point, I had come to realize how important it was to rely on those around me for guidance that I had the presence of mind to Google “what to do with dead cat” in order to determine what to do with the dead cat that was on a bed I was meant to sleep on. Though many bad things happened during the plague year, one of the moments I will look back upon with pride was when I had the temerity to follow those internet instructions, including finding plastic to wrap the cat in and then putting that plastic-wrapped cat into a cooler. Some might consider this insensitive and morbid, but I see in these actions the sort of responsibility and care-giving that distinguishes an adept cat-sitter from a mere child feeding cats.
14. Of course, ultimately, I half-Googled/half was dragged out of the plague year. One day a scan for cancer came back clear, another day someone whom I thought was gone forever returned only slightly more worse for wear, and one delightful afternoon I stopped wondering what penance I would have to pay for a temporary pleasure. Still, though, I now bring a certain anxiety to any cat-sitting gig, a realization that no matter how much I care for a thing, I can come home one day just in time to see it slip away. I’m not sure if this makes me a better cat-sitter or person in general, but I have been reading a lot of poetry in an effort to figure it out. I’ve also been looking back with a lot more forgiveness at that poor girl who neglected those cats while practicing sympathetic magic decades ago.
15. Oh, and before you ask if I can also water any sort of foliage or tree that somehow thrives indoors, I should probably tell you that I have a really complicated relationship with plants.

On the spectrum of things we currently know about life for ancient Greek women, the rite of the Thesmophoria in Athens falls somewhere between the current poles of mind-bogglingly obscure and only mildly shrouded in mystery. We know, for instance, that it was a three-day ritual associated with Demeter and Persephone and was meant to vouchsafe the success of the region’s crops. It was an event in which only women participated, and those women must have been “citizens” (which is to say, of course, a wife or daughter of a male Athenian citizen). Some light-hearted and foul-mouthed aischrologia most probably occurred at some point during the event, which may have involved not only speaking nastily to one another but also could have included playful exposure of the participants’ genitals.

Most mysteriously, we have evidence that the sacrifice of piglets somehow was incorporated into the proceedings. Aristophanes also gives us some insight into what may have occurred during the Thesmophoria in his play Thesmophoriazusae, set during the ritual itself, but for every insight he offers (including a description of dancing that is almost sweat-inducing in its accuracy) he further shrouds his subject in comic hyperbole (though, given the modern habit of sneaking wine into theaters, perhaps his description of women disguising bags of wine as swaddled babies is not as outrageous as it once was considered to be).

From this evidence, scholars have felt at least somewhat empowered to draw conclusions not only about what this ritual reveals concerning Athenian society in general, but what insight it might offer into that most persistent of ancient Greek mysteries: the perspective of Greek women. Recently, and surely under the influence of Aristophanes, one such thinker speculated that women must have looked forward to events such as the Thesmophoria as a “real night out with the girls.” For at least one female classicist and occasional attender of a “girl’s night out,” such a characterization is profoundly unsatisfying, and not simply because it strikes her as patronizing.

To liken the rituals which were believed responsible for securing the very existence of the Greek polis to a modern event in which women seek some brief, often intoxicated respite from the modern-day patriarchy ultimately seems to deprive the ancient activities of their profound connection to both the personal and the public lives of their participants. I would therefore suggest a different activity with which one might begin a more edifying exploration of “women-only festivals” and, in particular, the Athenian Thesmophoria. If anything truly captures the spirit of this enigmatic ritual, I believe it has to be the coming together of (primarily) women for a modern-day spin class.

Some might argue, of course, that a spin class is, if not a girl’s night out per se, at least girl’s-night-out adjacent. This argumentative bunch may include outsiders whose only experience of a spin class is an old Gawker article or a problematic Amy Schumer movie, but it also could include spin initiates who’ve seen the many tank tops emblazoned with some paean to rosé worn by their fellow riders.

I would also be remiss were I not to admit here that my experience of the spin community is limited to a year’s worth of classes taken at a San Diego-based spin studio called SparkCycle, which must be distinguished from the ur-spin experience provided by SoulCycle and the many other progeny of that spin goliath. These classes are open to women and men alike — even men who aren’t forced by Euripides to assume the persona of a woman and who can enter a class without any worry of being ripped apart by wild animals should their masculinity be detected.

Nevertheless, there is much to recommend my approach. It is encouraged first of all by no less august an authority than Walter Burkert, a man who literally wrote the book(s) on Greek religion. He states that “Rhythmically repeated movement, directed to no end and performed together as a group, is, as it were, ritual crystallized in its purest form.” Given that even the most generic spin class can be described as rhythmically repeated movement performed together as group, it is clear that underneath its apparently wine-promoting exterior, a spin class constitutes a fundamental sort of ritual.

This ritual is used in service of the creation of a unique sort of community, one that bears many similarities to the group identity and squad goals established in the Thesmophoria. Placing these two occasions of shared movement together yields greater insight. I therefore invite you to lock your feet into some pedals, sit your booty back on your saddle (being careful to engage your core), and start with me on our right foot as we move into this exploration. It may occasionally be challenging, but it will definitely take fewer than three days, and no piglets will be harmed during our journey.

In recognition of the cyclical nature of both fertility rites and spinning class, it seems appropriate to begin this exploration at both the beginning and the end. Though the evidence for what specifically occurred during the first and last days of the Thesmophoria is scant, it is nevertheless sufficient for establishing a meaningful comparison with a spin class. Specifically, we can observe that the ritual not only creates a transitory community, but also mobilizes the energy of that community to give rise to a more lasting sort of communal endurance.

This process begins when the participants of the Thesmophoria come together on a day called Anodos (a title that may refer to the path women had to ascend to the site of the Thesmophoria or to the symbolic journey made by Persephone out of the Underworld). Women left the private sphere to which they were most often relegated, gathered in a space sanctified by secrecy, and worked together in the building of huts and the execution of a sacrifice.

The day’s events also most probably included a group dance of the sort depicted by Aristophanes, in which the women formed a circle, joined hands, and synchronized increasingly complex movements. Freed from the constraints of everyday life, in the company of peers with whom they otherwise had little contact, and endowed with the responsibility to use their harmonized movement to please two potentially moody goddesses, the women were empowered to form a community that was as powerful as it was temporary.

The activities of the third and final day of the Thesmophoria attest to the power of that community. This was the day of the Kalligeneia, or the beautiful birth. The beauty of this birth, however, existed primarily on a symbolic level, insofar as it evoked the return of Persephone from Hades and the fecundity of the crops that accompanied her. Practically speaking, the midwifery involved in this birth was of the most gritty kind, for it was on this day that the Thesmophoria participants banded together to transfer the remains of sacrificed piglets and other sorts of debris from pits dug deep into the earth to altars established in the above-ground space of the ritual.

The exact mechanisms of this process are not known, but Eva Stehle’s suggestion that the women formed a sort of bucket brigade to move the humus is a compelling one. It is precisely because this process was so arduous and sweaty that it serves as compelling evidence for the nonce-community that, at the very least, bore witness to it and, most probably, physically participated in it in some way. In banding together to exhume what had been sacrificed, the women transferred the burden of the work from any particular individual to the group as a whole. Such unified movement might not have offered the same joy as did their earlier dancing, but it most probably provided a feeling of communal satisfaction in their accomplishment.

Such joy, such satisfaction, even a sort of misery — all of these are present to some extent in your average spin class, and are similarly accompanied, created, and alleviated by the community created in the course of that class. Though even the most walking-averse spinner would be reluctant to compare the trek across the spin studio to the journey made by the average Thesmophoria attendee from her home to some point on the Acropolis, anyone who has ever tried walking on a regular floor while wearing shoes meant to be locked into bike pedals knows that the spin studio path is not without its own struggles.

Upon getting into the room and figuring out how to arrange herself on a bike (a solitary rite that an ancient Greek woman should consider herself lucky to have missed), a spin participant finds herself in a sort of circle created by bikes placed in a semi-circle facing a wall of mirrors. It is within this arrangement that community begins to form. The beginning of the class is heralded by its own sort of priest, also known as a spin instructor, who provides a brief introduction to the mechanics of the bike and the tone of the class. She then turns down the lights, turns up the music, and invites all in the circle to synchronize their movements.

Riders first attempt to harmonize the legs with which they are pedaling; as each individual grows more comfortable and the community grows stronger, more elaborate moves (including the infamous tap-back) are added. Ultimately, the thrill one feels upon losing herself in that juggernaut of coordinated movement is not (I’m coming to believe) simply the relief of a fundamentally klutzy individual finally catching up to the smooth-riding initiates, but is rather a sort of joy arising from the momentary obliteration of self in favor of community.

It is worth acknowledging that this community of spinners never finds itself disposing of the remains of sacrificed animals (though one might perhaps wonder if the weary deposit of sweat-soaked towels into hampers at the end of class echoes the more ancient practice). Yet there are some more subtle indications that the power of the community of a spin class is used in service of a shared purpose.

In addition to a class’s coordinated activity, for example, there are stretches of movement so intense and difficult that it often is only the desire not to drag down those around her with her own laziness that motivates a person to continue moving her legs (or so I’ve heard). Additionally, the existence of a communal feeling of shared exertion empowers the instructor to encourage riders to channel the shared energy as a form of sustenance. Finally, the mere fact that people opt to attend a spin class rather than, say, go for a solitary bike ride, must in part be due to the way the presence of a group both helps her shoulder her suffering and provides a literal and figurative mirror of her enthusiasm.

One could counter these arguments by claiming that such a building of community—albeit extraordinary for ancient Greek women—is not particularly unique to a modern spin class. One might, indeed, find such shared feeling during a girl’s night out, or a game of basketball, or even watching any sort of game involving any sort of ball. Recently, a researcher from Harvard Divinity School has even argued that the community built in spin classes is comparable to that found in a CrossFit gym(and that both fill the need for community that used to be met by organized religion).

Such observations are valid and even compelling, but my own experience suggests that there is some quality of a spin class community which distinguishes this activity from yoga or knitting circles or other forms of group fitness. I am not alone in this observation. But I may be among a smaller group that is convinced that we can best understand what sets a spin class apart from other forms of group movement through an exploration of the second day of the Thesmophoria.

Before returning to the ancient ritual, it is worth focusing for a moment on the phenomenon of what I will be calling “My Ride,” a song-length event that occurs towards the end of any SparkCycle class (and which in other studios, a brief internet survey suggests, are described as “internal moments” or “cool downs”). At this point in the class, the room is cast in a darkness that allows each rider the space to move at whatever pace and in whatever manner she prefers. The instructor ceases to be a focal point towards which one might devote her attention, and each rider is encouraged to use that time individually to confront whatever emotion or thought or cramp arises.

This movement of attention inward can occur at any point in the class, of course, as was thoughtfully pointed out by Kellie Sullivan, SparkCyclist extraordinaire and technical consultant for this piece. But it is during My Ride in particular that one is encouraged to focus on herself while she is bolstered at the same time by an awareness that she is surrounded by people in a similarly introspective posture. This particular utilization of community is both unique to a spin class and is better understood by observing how a similar phenomenon occurs during the second day of the Thesmophoria.

On this second day, known as the Nesteia, the women fasted; they may have spent at least part of this fast sitting separately on mats made of plants thought to repress sexual desire. Here again, Stehle’s description of the day is useful:

Perhaps the women spent the first period of their fast … in silent mourning like Demeter … or perhaps they lamented together. Either way, their posture was different from that appropriate to sacrificial ritual … the women seem to be spread across the sanctuary in a pattern of diffused attention. There was no single vector of attention directed at the location of the god … Each woman acts as if she is Demeter. At the same time, she is surrounded by other women also performing mourning to form an imaginative community mourning with Demeter.

In sum, Stehle describes women sitting on libido-suppressing mats imitating a mother mourning the loss of a daughter kidnapped by the god of the underworld. Lest the similarities between this event and My Ride not immediately be apparent, let me emphasize them here: in the middle of a ritual in which women came together into a community and used the emotional bond of that community to sustain them through strenuous physical activity, they take time to disconnect from the action of the community, turn their attention inward, and focus on their own powerful emotion. Were Nesteia not such an appropriate name for a day that included fasting, “My Thesmophoria” would certainly be a fitting name for this moment.

Stehle concludes that a feeling of oneness with the group comes from the “collective tapping” of individual emotion that takes place during the Nesteia. Because we cannot gain access to the personal experience of Nesteia participants, this community-focused interpretation of the events of that day will have to satisfy us. Moreover, understanding how the individual action of the Nesteia supports the overall community of the Thesmophoria in turn sheds light on how My Ride plays a similar role in creating a feeling of solidarity among spinners that makes it a particularly compelling form of group fitness.

However, given that it is possible to document the personal experience of My Ride initiates, it is worth noting that this phenomenon works not only in service of the community, but very potently in service of the individual. By giving a participant the opportunity to address her inner experience within a structured ritual, My Ride promotes a sort of internal movement that might otherwise be impossible to begin. The community thus supports the growth of the individual while at the same time being supported by individuals growing stronger.

This correlation between group activity and individual well-being is one of the conclusions that drew me to this project. Though it would be hubris of the most Trumpian kind to conclude that my own experience of the spin community gives me insight into the individual experience of Thesmophoria participants, I do not think it is unfair to use something such as a spin class as a starting point for exploring an aspect of ancient thought which has too long been neglected, which is to say, the relationship between communal movement and inner harmony.

This is a topic broached by no less a philosopher than Plato, who used his Laws in part to outline a theory of how movement — such as the sort of dancing performed by women in the Thesmophoria — could promote mental soundness. His exploration has since been buried by two millennia of scholarship focused on the aesthetics of movement and that of male bodies in particular. Perhaps the growing recognition of the importance of group movement and its relation to the happiness and success of women is the impetus necessary to return to the exploration Plato started.

Finally, I believe there is value in demonstrating that communal activity performed by women, such as that we see in spin classes, is linked to a tradition of community building and individual improvement that began in the ancient world. We can therein begin the work of restoring to such activities the sort of respect worthy of any institution whose value has been confirmed by the willing participation of groups spanning continents and centuries.

At a time in which traditional sports (and all their agonistic and male associations) are demonstrably making us less happy while also providing grist for the culture wars, it is worth exploring what larger role activities such as spin might play in promoting a more cohesive and successful community at large. The Thesmophoria was an event considered necessary for the continued growth of the larger and more permanent community of the polis. Should we not now begin to look to its spiritual heir for some similar sort of civic rejuvenation?

Kourtney Murray received her PhD in Classics from the University of California, Irvine in 2012. Since then, she’s been splitting her time between the library and the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego. When not library-ing or teaching Greek and Latin, she’s been on a quest to find out how much she can import her innate laziness into various fitness-related activities, including spinning, yoga, and the New York Times crossword puzzle.

Diseasing the Female

Spinning Out of Hades was originally published in EIDOLON on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.