Poems in Heraclitus

PalmHeraclitus is present in Catalan literature through Joan Brossa and especially Josep Palau i Fabre, an admirer of the Ephesian philosopher and his doctrine of fire and the eternally burning flame. His interest resulted in the book The clarity of Heraclitus (Accent, 2007), a highly personal, speculative, and extra-academic interpretation of the preserved fragments, which seeks to provide a unified meaning and avoids strict historical verisimilitude. Palau i Fabre's Heraclitus is solitary, distrustful of his contemporaries, religious, aristocratic, and proud, confident in his logos, convinced of the superiority of death and destruction over life, and of the constant action of violence as the law of the universe.

Brossa's poem In Heraclitus It goes like this: "I grow strong on the ground and know no limits / of thought. I don't know who the rocks are. / I whistle the flowers on the other side of the limits / and hang my lantern, weary of rocks. / Movement stirs certain limits; / nightfall sets crystal on some rocks. / The horizon takes refuge in four limits. I advance and undress myself from the flames / of the fire that now screams over the water. / A stout oak lifts the Earth.

Ontological Vision

In the poem, Brossa plays with elements that correspond to Heraclitus' ontological vision of reality as a struggle of opposites. Thus, the rocks represent the immutable, while water is a symbol of change. Air and fire mingled. From the poetic perspective, it can be interpreted as an attempt to explore the limits of thought, understood as open barriers; and in a more general sense, it represents the tension between the need to give meaning and impose order on nature and the uncertainty and provisionality of human knowledge, which disappears as soon as it is expressed in writing, erased by the action of water.

Within the Catalan literary sphere, the essay titled The clarity of Heraclitus (Accent, 2007), by the poet Josep Palau i Fabre. This work is an incursion into the realm of ancient philosophy, consisting of a unique exercise in replacing the philosopher's obscure language with the poet's clarity. This is achieved through the formulation of questions that he imagines precede each of the surviving fragments of the pre-Socratic philosopher, and which he believes provide answers. Furthermore, the poet offers his own interpretation of the fragments in the form of brief commentaries. Thus, the essay's structure invites the reader to engage in a three-tiered reading: from the questions to the answers (the fragments) and then to the commentaries.

Palau i Fabre's interest in the pre-Socratics, and Heraclitus in particular, stems from Professor Zubiri's lectures at the University of Barcelona. The poet presents us with a Heraclitus skeptical of the official religion of the Ephesians, who renounces membership in the priestly caste that directs the Eleusinian cult and ceremonies in honor of Demeter, to which he is entitled by birth, and chooses instead to venerate other gods associated with the oracle of Delphi. This defection allows him to speculate that it may stem from the contempt he feels for his fellow Ephesians due to their ignorance and vulgarity.

Palau i Fabre's Heraclitus actively acts as an oracle, sees himself as an intermediary of the gods, enthusiastically assumes this role, and gives enigmatic answers to the questions of those who address him, because, as he himself says in one of the fragments: "The god who has the no." According to this interpretation, Heraclitus's fragments become oracular responses, and the questions formulated by Palau i Fabre are consistent with this spirit and encompass issues concerning nature, cults and religion, cosmology, human knowledge, the ethics of happiness, justice, and politics. He also values ​​wisdom, philosophy, and poetry.

Of all the Heraclitean fragments commented on by Palau i Fabre, I have selected only those in which he speaks of poetry and the poets Hesiod, Homer, and Archilochus, which are fragments 25, 45, 7, and 5 Kranz.

Palau i Fabre takes fragment 25 of Heraclitus, which states: "The greater the dead, the greater the fates they attain," as the answer to a question about the fate of warriors killed in battle. In his commentary, he cannot help but think of the Iliad and the Homeric heroes, presenting them as warriors who seek a glorious death that will allow them to live on in the memory of their people, aspiring to increase their greatness beyond fame in life. Palau i Fabre's interpretation could be completed by adding that the conduct of the Homeric warriors represents an ethical model to follow.

In fragment 40, Heraclitus says that "learning a lot does not instruct the intellect. Otherwise, it would have instructed Hesiod as much as Pythagoras; Xenophanes as much as Hecataeus." From this statement, Palau i Fabre questions whether study is linked to wisdom. According to the Catalan poet, Heraclitus is distinguishing between the learned or learned, those who have accumulated a great deal of knowledge, and the wise, those who have been able to develop their intellect. It seems as if he wanted to amend Heraclitus's classification and establish a boundary between the four, and readmit, from a modern perspective, Pythagoras and Xenophanes among the sages.

Repugnance for poets

If anyone doubts Heraclitus's contempt for poetry and poets, they should read his proposal to marginalize and physically mistreat Homer and Archilochus: "Homer deserves to be expelled from the games and beaten; and Archilochus, too" (fragment 42). For Palau i Fabre, this is the answer to the question, "Should we not consider and venerate the great Homer as one of our sages?" One need not read the commentary to understand the repugnance he felt for poets and his disdain for them as the antithesis of sages.

Indeed, one of the main criticisms Heraclitus levels against Homer (fragment 56) is that taking his poetry seriously is ignorant, because it deceives like the senses, since even naive children could have fooled him. With this view, he contradicts the Greeks' veneration of Homer, whom they considered a sage. In the following fragment, number 57, he extends the same accusation to Hesiod, "a man who could not distinguish day from night."

It is worth reflecting on the fact that Heraclitus's opinions on poetry are diametrically opposed to contemporary readings that portray him as a philosopher who expresses himself poetically, due to his style and manner of speaking, and thus we would have to consider the philosopher Heraclitus a renegade from poetry.

Ultimately, Palau i Fabre's highly personal interpretation, derived from a method of reverse reconstruction, clashes head-on with the thesis of the Spanish philosopher Agustín García Calvo, according to whom the textual fragments of Heraclitus formed part of a lost book, which, according to the witness, was divided into parts: the first was a treatise on things; the second dealt with politics; and the third concerned religious matters. García Calvo's counterpoint does not detract from or diminish the merit of Palau i Fabre's intuitive approach, as it should be understood as a literary and hermeneutical experiment.