Heraclitus was nicknamed “the Riddler” and, later, “the Obscure.” The murkiness of life and its extraordinary contradictions seem to spill into and permeate his writings. His work marks the beginning of difficult literature, where the reader must make an effort to wrest meaning from the words. Heraclitus is the father of Proust, with his labyrinthine sentences full of twists and turns; of Faulkner, with his disorienting, often disjointed monologues; and of Joyce, who gives the impression in Finnegans Wake that he is writing in several languages — some of his own invention —all at once. This isn’t to say they’re related due to similar styles. In fact, we have only a handful of Heraclitus’s brief, enigmatic, powerful maxims. What they actually have in common is their attitude to words: if the world is cryptic, then the appropriate language to represent it should be dense, mysterious, and difficult to decipher.
Heraclitus believed reality could be explained as permanent tension. He called it “war,” or a struggle between opposites. Day and night, wakefulness and sleep, life and death: all these become each other and can only exist in opposition; they are fundamentally two sides of the same coin. “It is sickness that makes health good and pleasant; hunger, plenty; hard work, rest…the immortals mortal, the mortals immortal, living the death of others and the life of others while they fade.”“
— Irene Vallejo, Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World
for my best friend, my first love, someone i don’t know anymore
crush, richard siken / history of my brief body, billy-ray belcourt / the old aquarium, holly warburton / manta rays, chloe moriondo / baggage, trista mateer / my own private idaho (1991) / for m, mikko harvey / war of the foxes, richard siken
emily skaja “elegy with sympathy” / bon iver “holocene” / michael carson “untitled” / kaveh akbar “i won’t lie this plague of gratitude” / franny choi “look” / aj hamilton “don’t shoot the messenger”
“Loss can be so encompassing—it’s a job where the hours are all hours, every day. We talk of grief in stages—denial, bargaining, acceptance, and so on. But for me, at least, grief is a series of tightly packed circles that fade over many years, like ink exposed to light.”
