Heraclitus. Me.

Heraclitus and I have a lot in common. Not much is known about either of us and most of what is known is made up. It is not certain, either, that the word “consistency” would come to mind when contemplating our surviving scribbles. More likely, one would be tempted to write “disconnected,” “random,” and “epigrammatic” in the margins of Heraclitus, and, demanding less ink, simply “disconnected” and “random” in mine. We are half-started or half-finished, and independent only to the degree that we don’t belong (or like to think we don’t). Above all, we survive in fragments. That said, his fragments are better than mine. Or are they?

Take the famous waterway footfall: “You can’t step in the same river twice.” Fair enough. There is good reason this is known to the whole of humanity above the age of eight, encouraging, as it does, newly flexible minds to alternate between the inevitable changes in both the river and that “you.” In its simple emphasis on the essential and ambiguous flux of life, it is almost up there in its early lesson of mortality with the death of the pet dog. Brooks Haxton does Heraclitus a considerable disservice in a recent translation, therefore, by trying “to clear away distractingly familiar language from a startling thought” by presenting the epigram (at Fragment 41) in the following distracting, non-startling form: “The river/ where you set/ your foot just now/ is gone -/ those waters/ giving way to this,/now this.” But Heraclitus, too, over-explaining, perhaps, or simply trying to replicate what may have been a big hit in its day, soon tried out (at 81) another version himself: “Just as the river where I step/is not the same, and is,/so I am and I am not.” We get the point, and hope, as we turn the pages, that no further violence is visited upon this dying horse (“Just as the river and I/are not the same/neither is the foot/with one ingrown toenail/ after another,” perhaps).

There are other gems unrecycled (“The waking have one world/ in common. Sleepers/ meanwhile turn aside, each/ into a darkness of his own” (95)), as well as a relatively undamaged rendering of what remains of Heraclitus’ influential view of nature and the universe: constant change, flux, the underlying order or ‘logos‘ for this change, the coincidence of opposites – “Therefore, good and ill are one“ (57); “[t]he way up is the way back” (69); “[t]he beginning is the end” (70). But Heraclitus has a way of testing the principles of logic as one attempts to reconcile these one-liners with other fragments. “Without injustices,/ the name of justice/ would mean what?” (60) Well, nothing much, you might say, if the two are one and the same. Equally difficult to reconcile are Fragments 35 and 36: “Many who have learned/ from Hesiod the countless names/ of gods and monsters/ never understand/ that night and day are one,” he says in the first, only to find that “By cosmic rule,/ as day yields night,/ so winter summer …” in the other. Well, which is it? Clearer still, perhaps, “Always having what we want,/ may not be good fortune./ Health seems sweetest/ after sickness, food/ in hunger, goodness/ in the wake of evil, and at the end /of daylong labor sleep” (104) doesn’t make a great deal of sense if, as noted above, good and ill are one and there is no daylight between health and sickness, hunger and fullness, labor and sleep.

The loss of almost all of Heraclitus’ work (and, with it, context) is compounded, one quickly suspects, by his translator, who is allowed by his friends at Viking Penguin to condense upwards of two dozen heavily packed Greek words to say (at 78): “Only the living may be dead,/ the waking sleep,/ the young be old.” Haxton is also content to print in its entirety, and without notation, the following microcosm of wisdom: “Silence, healing” (130). But even a good translator might have problems doing very much with “Goat cheese melted/ in warm wine congeals/ if not well stirred” (84), and “Hunger, even/ in the elements,/ and insolence” (24) is beyond redemption. Of the latter, Haxton unhelpfully notes: “The usual translation of koros, as satiety, gives the literal meaning, but loses the strong connotation of insolence, important to the personifying logic of this and many other fragments.” I’m glad that’s cleared up, then.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Heraclitus “has been variously judged by ancient and modern commentators to be a material monist or a process philosopher; a scientific cosmologist, a metaphysician, or a mainly religious thinker; an empiricist, a rationalist, or a mystic; a conventional thinker or a revolutionary; a developer of logic or one who denied the law of non-contradiction; the first genuine philosopher or an anti-intellectual obscurantist.” Which leaves out few possibilities other than stand-up comedian. Or, the thought reluctantly crosses one’s mind, that Heraclitus was that guy at the bar.

That said,/looking back over years/ of commonplace books; toiling/ over fragments not lost to illegibility/ or dulled by repetition;/ wondering daylong/ over endlessly cryptic notes;/ reviewing several unwritten books/ the drinker had imagined/ in a darkness of his own,/ with synopses half-drafted and blurbs at the ready;/ puzzling over arbitrary rows/ of words and phrases/ made more mysterious by exclamation points and question marks,/ forgotten reasons to pause or inquire …/ Returning to all this/ as an already-older self might return/ to a remembered river,/ that guy at the bar,/ that wasn’t Heraclitus./ That was me.