from Not reading Herakleitos
10 is it a poem / is it a prose
is it a writing / it it a saying
‘Most ancient Greek texts were composed for an audience of hearers, not readers. As a result, the writing of Greek historically functioned as a recording system of the human voice than a written system independent of speaking.’ Wilfred E Major & Michael Laughy1
‘Semantic-based writing systems are rooted in data transmission; their primary purpose is to convey information. Phonetic-based writing systems are rooted in oral communication; their primary purpose is to convey a record of a “text” as spoken – with all those factors that serve to identify that specific text as itself and no other’ Rochelle Altman2
[] Eva Brann’s ‘prose that could contend with poetry’3 has all sorts of ripple effects when talking about Herakleitos – part of his text proposes that all things are in contention : ‘all things come about by strife’ (Loney citing Robinson translating Aristotle citing Herakleitos) – what if Herakleitos was not much impressed either with the poetry or the prose of his day, and Brann’s note that he was the ‘inventor of the first of philosophical genres, the thought-compacted aphorism’ is an important guide to whatever it might have been that Herakleitos ‘wrote’ – he certainly was familiar with other ‘writers’ : he mentions many, including Homer, Hesiod, Archilochos, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Hekataios, poets & prosists alike, and all in order to condemn them – present-day authors tend to see these dismissals as dismissals of their ‘theories’, but what if there is something in the ways the ancients actually constructed their works (‘poetry’ and ‘prose’) that he objected to – in our own time, the Language Poets objected to exactly that, that the normal practices of making a poem & constructing a prose were both to be questioned and bypassed to reflect a need to write in forms very different from them both, precisely because they saw that the social, political, & philosophical assumptions embedded in those writing practices were to be rejected – a similar impulse in Herakleitos might be why he went for the ‘thought-compacted aphorism’ which was neither poetry nor prose – or, what if his own sayings come about by the strife between poetry & prose which engenders a ‘third term’, the ‘thought-compacted aphorism’, which can only be heard as an oral- or phonetic-based utterance, and which tends to defy the extended commentaries that can be expressed ‘in other words’ – the prospect is not without parallels : poet Ron Silliman4 identified and propounded a new kind of ‘sentence’ in contemporary writing in which the very values of tradition and power were questioned & replaced with other possibilities : in Robert Bringhurst’s essay ‘Raven’s Wine Cup’5 he writes of the 6th century CE Chinese poets, saying ‘With them, the escape from narrative is complete’ : in Ezra Pound’s Canto LXXXI he writes, ‘(to break the pentameter, that was the first heave)’ – one such ‘heave’ was that of Gerard Manley Hopkins and his sprung rhythms, or Walt Whitman with his speech rhythms having nothing to do with iambic pentameter at all – but the point is the same : writers have often sought to run counter to prevailing modes of composition in order to realise their own potential, their own works, their own writing – it is easy for me to accept that Herakleitos could have been in contention with the compositional conventions of his time – on another hand, it must be acknowledged that not all the sayings of Herakleitos that we have are strictly phonetic-based – many are clearly in the semantic-based writing of the sources –
what if, then, Herakleitos wrote at least some of the time in a phonetic-based writing system, and the entire modern history of philosophy treats him as if he wrote only in a semantic-based writing system – one way of looking at it is that, in a semantic-base, the phrase ‘in other words’ can have genuine operative power – in a phonetic-base, the phrase ‘in other words’ can have no place at all – yet another way is to say that semantic-based statements are paraphraseable, and phonetic-based statements are not, as they rely on the exact words in their sequence & arrangement (like poems) for their total communicative effect
Wittgenstein : Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.
[] was Herakleitos literate – did he write in his own hand – or did he have a slave or scribe to do the manual writing for him – there are plenty of accounts of people, including slaves, dictating letters & other material to a scribe who wrote them down – in discussing the unusual rhythms & syntax of the sayings of Herakleitos, Eric Havelock6 has proposed that ‘statements of this type were framed not to be read but to be heard and memorized’ – he goes on : ‘The fact that other kinds of rhythm are substituted [i.e. for those of traditional poetries] should not obscure the essential point, that these rhythms are less regular, or more precisely that the pattern within any given statement is unique. One line in this style is not a variant of any other. The hexameter flow has been broken…. Each statement therefore ends up as self-contained and autonomous. You cannot add to it or subtract from it’. Havelock’s case is that the sayings of Herakleitos are oral ones, to be verbally delivered to an audience rather than written or published for a readership – looking at the internal evidence of the texts, there is only one fragment that appears to refer to ‘writing’ (ie γράφω, which refers to graving on stone as much as to writing on papyrus – ‘(1) To scratch, cut into, incise… (2) To form by scratching or incision’ – from Cunliffe’s A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect, new ed. 1963) : γραφέων ὁδὸς εὐθεῖα καὶ σκολιή – ‘the way of writing is straight and crooked’ (trans Robinson) – where one only has to look at the Greek alphabet, all in capitals at that time, to see the straightness & crookedness of the actual marks on the page or stone or pot – R P Austin7 pointed out (1938) that in the Attic alphabet in the late 6th century BCE (when Herakleitos was born) were ‘fifteen letters which contained as part of their forms the vertical stroke or its near neighbour the slightly oblique stroke’ – apart from Θ, Ο, Φ, Ω, and the sign for koppa, all the inscriptional letters of ancient Greek were angular, straight & crooked, with just five letters with rounded forms out of approximately 24 letters – for the rest, there are 13 fragments, about 10% of the total number, which explicitly refer to hearing and listening as a means whereby the λόγος can be perceived or understood – (in Robinson they are fragments 1, 19, 34, 50, 55, 74, 79, 87, 92, 101a, 104, 107, 108) – the words of Herakleitos may be thus understood to be sayings rather than writings –
again, Havelock is sharp and down to earth in these matters : ‘Out of a total of some hundred and thirty sayings, no less than forty-four, or thirty-four per cent, are preoccupied with the necessity to find a new and better language, or a new and more correct mode of experience, or are obsessed with the rejection of current methods of communication and current experience.’8 – he then lists all 44 of them, and says 11 more ‘could be added… if viewed in the same light’9 – Robinson’s Fragment 101a is hoisted into view : ‘Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears’, and Havelock comments: ‘… if the advantage of eyes over ears then be taken to refer to reading (his sayings) as against listening to a recital’ – what I hear here is that the communication of ‘text’ is still an oral matter within the culture, while Herakleitos is acutely aware of the capacity to think more clearly if one can have the words in front of you – listening is what everyone has available to them, but reading allows a more accurate attention to those texts – in our own time, Charles Olson put it beautifully : ‘The advantage of literacy is that words can be on the page’10
[] to return for a moment to the questions of hearing and listening, here’s Robinson in his commentary to Fragment 50 : ‘one does not ‘listen to’ patterns, or structures… one listens to persons, and the things they say’ (p114) – but Robinson himself notes puns thruout Herakleitos – to which Havelock adds (tho long before Robinson) ‘repetition, assonance, antithesis, and symmetry’ – all of which affect deeply the sheer sound that the texts of Herakleitos make when one reads the words aloud – when we say that much is lost in translation, we do not usually detail exactly what is lost outside of questions of nuances of meaning, but it is clear to me that part of what is lost is the actual noise the saying makes in the original language, which cannot be replicated in the language of translation – and for this poet, it is part of the sensible universe that the sound that words make is part of their total communicative function and effect – Louis Zukofsky tackled this question head on in his work Catullus, when he attempted an English translation that mirrored the sounds of Catullus’s Latin – and if that were not so, why on earth would poetry have developed in the first place, where part of the precise purpose & pleasure of the poem is (back to Robinson again) to ‘listen to patterns or structures’ – the English sonnet e.g. is an almost fixed structure, where both poet and reader/listener know where the lines end and the whole poem itself ends – not only do we hear the rhymed line-endings, we anticipate them, and we sense/know when the last or even second-last line of the poem is arrived at – classicists have told me that the same applies to how they read/hear archaic hexameters : give them a part, and they hear the rhythm of the rest of the line – New Zealand poet C K Stead once wrote about how readily he was able to think in the sonnet’s 14-line chunks once he embarked upon a long sequence of them – we do listen to & for patterns, and Havelock makes a case I think for these patterns being critical for Herakleitos when he abandons the usual compositional structures of the writing of his day
notes
This piece is a slightly revised section from Not reading Herakleitos, with a Foreword by Edward Jenner, re.press books, Melbourne 2021. Poetry Remake wishes to thank publishers Paul Ashton & Justin Clemens at re.press books in Melbourne for their kind permission to reprint this section – https://re-press.org/books/not-reading-herakleitos/
1. Wilfred E Major & Michael Laughy, Ancient Greek for Everyone, online course at https://ancientgreek.pressbooks.com/front-matter/introduction/
2. Rochelle Altman, Absent Voices : the story of writing systems in the West, New Castle, Oak Knoll Press 2004, 5-8.
3. Eva Brann, The Logos of Heraclitus, Philadelphia, Paul Dry Books 2011, 4.
4. Ron Silliman, The New Sentence, New York, Roof Books 4th printing 2003.
5. Robert Bringhurst, ‘Raven’s Wine Cup’ in Carving the Elements, Berkeley, Editions Koch 2004, 136.
6. Eric A Havelock, ‘Pre-literacy and the Pre-Socratics’ in Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Vol 13, Issue 1, December 1966, 55.
7. R P Austin, The Stoichedon Style in Greek Inscriptions, New York, Arno Press 1973, 18.
8. Eric A Havelock, ibid, 57.
9. Ibid, 66.
10. Charles Olson, ‘The Advantage of Literacy is That Words Can Be on the Page’ in Collected Prose, eds Donald Allen & Benjamin Friedlander, California, University of California Press 1997, 353.