Lives Before Socrates
Joe Gonnella
©2020 Joe Gonnella JoeGonnella.com
Lives Before Socrates
Thales We are what water makes of us: a necessary substrate of thought. Descendant of sailors, he knew navigator’s tricks, & used them for his gain. In a fecund year, every press his own, he works the angles until he can squeeze no more advantage from the last olive. He can predict an eclipse, bridge an abyss, triangulate a tryst. Each solstice is variable but true. Each equinox is as he fixed them.
Gods dance in air. There’s something that will not die in him: a rose in the iron dust. The stone he holds has a soul. Amber breathes. He dries his eyes— aleph in Miletus— omega to come— scattered stars take shape. Observe this upright. Count your days. When a pyramid equals its shadow, a man & his shade will be one. Our lives are writ in water & are as false—was this what his mother wanted, this brooding mind, this hale technician?
He holds the chalice in his hands & drinks— only Myson wiser. Though he can’t see the pothole at his feet Thales measures unbound sky; cuts water with a sword to prove whatever we sever will be whole again.
Anaximander Take comfort from eons That precede & will follow Look beneath nature’s skirt to see the underside of opposites. From the bounty of the infinite I map a finite universe. From the bounty of the finite I map an infinity of worlds. This in which, that out of which & the into which are one. Life’s retribution, death’s promise; each to the other owes what’s due. A vortex spins inside an egg— a cell splits itself from itself. Fire flees from water. Cold flies from hot. Air extricates itself from earth. Earth folds back into earth. A sphere of fire forms like bark around its tree containing everything I am
or was ever meant to be. Heaven’s wheels are hollow & are full of flames that will flare from time to time through random holes to char the night sky blacker. Starlight pierces heaven as lightning cleaves a cloud. Held in equipoise in the empyrean like a glutton who cannot make a choice when food is ranged all ‘round him, the earth is indifferent to all in equal measure. I know where my feet are planted. Earth is the drum on which I beat like an angry child to make the thunder come.
Anaximenes Nurtured like a shark within his mother’s skin I slip from Anaximander’s harbor into an ocean all my own. I flourished when Sardis fell. Becoming folds in on itself; injustice turns to process. All that has been, all that is, all that will ever be, rises from determinate air. Transparent when equable, Substantial when perturbed, all things reflect absence or intensity. Dilated, air becomes fire; compressed, cloud becomes felt becomes earth becomes rock until the slab we live on skips across the infinite like a leaf across the sea.
Fiery moon & sun float on breezy night. Stars, like nails in a vault, crucify the constellations they define. Exhalations from these clods are what we see moving about our pole as a cap skews ‘round the head of a careless boy. The farther from the truth, the heavier the fruit. Forced breath blows cool; a sigh will warm a frigid digit. Burning water makes a rainbow. Lightning illuminates the sky as an oar’s blade sparks the sea. Moonbows come infrequently. As breath inhabits each of us, wind animates the world. The inner & the outer are as one.
Earth is the table on which I set full plates. From these rise nature’s abundant scents, like vapors rising from warm food until my offering satisfies a hungry god. All difference is due to measure. Therefore, never count your treasure for fear it will come up shorter than the one for which you hope to barter.
Pythagoras I Begin by counting pebbles then scratch the eyes on dice & throw for all you’re worth. Boundary stone by boundary stone knowledge grows until triangle builds right angle & gnomon constructs square & square becomes the base of pyramid that rises, in imagination, to a point that defines a cube from whose eight shoulders meridians hang to shape a sphere men can spin. Start with simple things: the square on the hypotenuse of a triangle equals the squares on the two right-angled sides but the square on the diagonal of a square is incommensurable to that from which it springs.
At the start harmony breeds dissonance. Even numbers cannot equal odd. I pluck my monochord— hang my hammers like bells to tell the intervals. Fire has a limit. Darkness is boundless. Stars are incandescent bubbles drowning angels blow into night’s overwhelming sea. The fourth, the fifth & the octave mark my sky ring by measured ring. I write nothing for men to misinterpret; they love me for the words I speak to them. Orpheus sings for me. I listen through these ears until his voice & mine are one. II What octave does a siren choose To steal what none should lose?
When soul leaves body it will flee To any animal about to be. Crawl through mud, swallow sea; ‘Til soul returns to body there is no me. The trip I take will never be complete. The fruit that falls is not the fruit I eat. By virtue of the limits I transcend Fresh fields open to measurements of men. III A whipped whelp howls with the voice of a long lost lover. Multiple selves in several places: Metapontum, Croton, Olympia: golden-thighed before the crowd, God speaks to me as I swim in his river— in Egypt I saw flocks of souls take flight. My soul is like the seed a pharaoh’s body becomes when planted in his tomb for the everlasting pleasure
of the crowds who love him & the bandits who will come. Apollo is my Zeus. Silence is better than words. Incisor overpowers fang. I illuminate no mirror. Whatever drops, I let lie. I caress no plume; shelter no starling; pluck no flower. I cut no loaf; bite no bread; gnaw no hearts. I eat only what makes me most myself. I walk no highway; accept no shortcut; leap no barrier; plunge no iron in the fire; leave no footprint in the ash. When I rise from where I rest, I erase the shadow self I leave behind.
Xenophanes I cast the dice of my own bones into cold water where eels, born hot, seethe & die. Shells migrate to mountaintops. Fish burrow into the hearts of stones. Land & sea embrace & contend. Tripped over, truth remains concealed. Punch drunk wisdom is worth no more than inviolate folly. First place in a foot race doesn’t make a city solvent. A beaten dog barks with the voice of a long-lost lover. Awestruck, God hears all, sees all, needs no friends— while a versatile horse will sculpt his god as a horse & an agile ox will paint his as an ox, the one God
is his own creation, waking into a body he shapes, wearing clothes we won’t recognize as clothes & speaking in a tongue we can’t comprehend. The sun we lose tonight Is born anew tomorrow. Stars don’t have faces. There is no man in the moon. Apollo is not our father. Earth is no mother. Is this a simple planet— rooted in infinity— where every pebble touches another pebble; where every grain of sand leads to another; where every atom is contiguous with some other atom, a different version of itself, one but not the same? Or is the world spherical— still as un-breathing stone—
equal in every way— no hist or whist— no hither or thither— immanence of an insentient, immobile God who conjugates chaos? Lost in the confines of this unity I see nothing clearly. A forger speaks the truth though the coin he hands you is a lie. In honey’s absence figs are sweeter. Stars are burning water— over an incendiary sea, a conflagration of cloud tangled in a ship’s mast— mist made luminous by motion. I am as close to what there is as I can be. Who knows best knows not at all. What God sees, men can only guess.
Alcmaeon Each star is a god to me. Each whisper of the wind, the sound of an angel’s voice. I speak of the unseen, the far side of the sky, the dark side of the moon, the roads where gods ride. I speak of living things: the suckling child, the sparrow singing to the sun, all men who toil, all women who labor. Someone above me may see everything clearly. I can only judge whatever from my vantage is observed by my own eyes. A god whose knowledge is universal may be certain. For a mortal like me,
whose sight is limited to available particulars, doubt is best. Opposites are endless & ever evidence themselves in the play of detail in the world I know. There is no underlying magic soup. There is no one answer to the vagaries of nature— abundance is self-renewing & everlasting, always an amplification of itself or a reduction as time & tide decree. Health is a balance struck by the powers. Disease is brought on by peace dethroned. We are what we experience. There is no single system to adopt, no secret to decipher.
A void inside each ear allows an echo in the mind to correspond to air’s movement. By force of breath each nostril extracts a scent for soul to contemplate. Mouth’s cauldron uses the poker of the tongue to prove the taste of what we eat is sour or sweet to a hungry brain. Touch is a mystery I can’t explain. A child is formed inside the womb headfirst. Thought is separate from sensation. Men are not animals.
Nerves’ network tethers the instruments of sense to the instrument of understanding as indicated by my dissection of what lies behind a dead man’s eye. Asleep I don’t bleed as fast as when awake for in the dark the brain banks its furnace & blood returns to the heart from whence it is dispatched back to my limbs when I wake. Daylight or starlight I never ask: which end— which beginning? There is no need for either when your journey is a circle. To the degree we mimic the movement
of the stars we are immortal. The soul has a circuit like the sun or like the moon. By that motion we are made divine. Self-moving things have no choice but to be everlasting. We carry heaven to our graves to transform ourselves to flame. By that immolation we reconcile creation. Find a familiar entrance implicit in each exit & shed the husk we thought we were as seed to stem returns to seed again.
Heraclitus Awake I know no more than any sleeper does. Behind myriad voices I hear the one word: frame & explanation. Flame takes on the flavor of the sacrifice; gold becomes the thing it purchases; supply & demand match perfectly. Moon owes a debt to sun. Daylight gambles against the dark. Fire is the currency of stars. Time is a child playing checkers. My hand reverses the flow of sand in an hourglass. Opposites renew their vows. Substance & void merge, contend & blend— things mix back into themselves.
For fish, the bitter sea is sweet. Pigs wallow themselves clean. Mules feast on trash. The dead embrace the living. Sleepers dream the waking. Old become young. Weariness’ reward is rest. Opposites are one & separate. God reconciles, Satan accentuates discrepancies. Common war is king. Engender requisite tension or embrace recidivist oblivion: spider goes where the web is weakest. Chattel or chief, seer or sorcerer, we are what nurturing strife makes of us: steps in a continuum, phases in a process. Threads combine to make a rope— plurality constellates to one sun—
from ridge-top road descends; from valley floor the same road rises. Opposites are one & separate. Whatever most needs knowing remains concealed. What appears most distinct is most the same. Wisdom seems like foolishness & fools are wise— symphony & sour notes harmonize. A single string bridges a bow’s arc & by that tension allows an archer to triangulate a path to a beast’s heart. Cradled in an encircling arm, lyre bends back on itself to permit the fingers of the other hand to pluck desired chords from strings tuned to the sky’s octave. Each opposite pays its mates penalty as is due in the fullness of time. Each foot steps into its own river:
a dispersal born of commingling, the same & different every time. Each of us bathes in consistent change. Something of the sun burns in you, just as in any grain of sand. Within body’s crucible soul is proven by a trial that has a single outcome. Character is fate. I am the demon I redeem. Freewill dictates my particular disaster as I navigate the herd. Lightning bolts lead me to a peace that never sleeps. Slag rises from the molten surface of a life well lived. Surgeons will charge a fee for what enemies will do for free. War metes out the justice we deserve. Words live when specific voices shape them. Things have ideas
of their own. Whether you listen to the chorus from the sky or the words of the sun or the whisper of the coals on your hearth, God speaks with fire’s tongue. Heart’s flame answers him. Leave for others the performance of empty ceremony. Translate straight truths into crooked script. Learn the language God speaks to make the world obey. Heaven & hell occupy the same space. The Devil & Dionysius are one. Suffer joy: suffer shame. Though I speak for a thousand years My simple unscented words Will bring neither laughter nor tears To those who cannot hear. By burning my eyes blind I came to see all begins & ends in divinity.
Parmenides As mist burns off of a morning— as smoke dissipates when wind blows— my words fade as you hear them. As truth dissolves into falsehood— as birdcalls vanish into night— these letters disappear as your eyes pass over them. My lungs release the atoms they’ve captured back to the stars that distilled them. I learn what ambiguity teaches. Some knots will not come undone. What I dream is not what I sense. What I sense is not what I think. Some thoughts are mine alone. Blindness comes from such staring at the sun. A budget of fallacies leads to an economy of loss even for those whose wealth is limitless.
Untie the knot of thought. Solve the puzzle of words. By that resolution to be born again & again & again in endless argument with a sun that comes up fresh each morning & disappears again each night. My words have teeth. My silences are full. My arguments are beautiful. My hand exists as a hand. My eye is as sharp as a hawk’s. I circle my prey & I dive to eat what is under my talons until what is not becomes me to be born anew by the name I give it as it dies inside me. My mares lead me where I most desire even to that point where Apollo cedes dominion to a refugee like me. My horses strain against their burden. I travel the road they’ve chosen preceded by guides the gods selected.
The axle of my chariot sings In its sockets as if at the heart of all that spinning a pipe is being blown by a shepherd. Casting aside earth’s veil the daughters of the sun lead me to daylight from night’s deep. At the crack of dark where dawn should be, at the crux of contradiction, all numbers contract to a singularity. Gates of stone— rock above, rock below— prodigious doors tower to vertiginous heights, concealing the kingdom I have come to map. Wherever I start won’t matter: for the man who turns on the pivot of what is every step is the same in a circle.
Words are the arrows by which I pin objects down into the field of what exists. A word which denotes nothing is as hollow as a bone from a creature never born. Those who walk the way of what is not are lost & will wander forever between confusion’s ceiling & a borderless floor. Unasked questions have no answers. Un-whispered secrets can never be revealed. Without puzzle there is no solution. A lie unuttered can’t be countered by orphaned truth. There is no other choice: what is, is & what is not, is not. All is a unity into which plurality folds like the wings of a hawk perched on a limb just before it hunts.
The doors of the kingdom of justice swing wide for me— this road was meant to bring me good fortune— as lonely as it is. All answers are mine for the asking. The merest wisp of passing opinion, the perfect sphere of fearless truth, everything is open to me: the ephemeral & the everlasting just the same. I smell the scent of truth on a wind rising from the east. I see the heart of dark in what comes later. I taste the brightness that falls around my shoulders. I still the rush of time by the movement of my limbs. I hear the sun’s chariot rolling in its track back to the dark I know will come. There are no beginnings. There are no endings. The world I name is the only world I know.
Zeno One can’t meet the next or is all a unity to him & what he postulates an irony to prove the point there is no many?
Melissus I Why white? Why black? Why iron? Why rust? Water or earth? Silver or gold? Living or dead? Everything is as it seems at first. What exists if it is true must be true to what it is. Sky’s blue is an unalterable blue. Everything is as it is despite frigid heat or seething cold. A worn door handle, a disappearing crown, a frayed hem, a shattered diadem, overtime my fingers smooth a jagged stone; everything that changes must atone to the one from which
all wonder comes. What exists can’t perish & what does not will never be. I am the man I’ve always been whomever disagrees is truth’s enemy. & will pay the price divisiveness demands. To anyone with eyes to see our universe is congruent uniformity. II Whatever ends has no beginning for if it ends it could never have been & therefore is not except as a figment in the mind of one who thought they had observed an end of something that never was.
III What is is not born & can’t die. What is is boundless, infinite in all dimensions. Since what is is limitless there is no other only the one of all there is. IV Immutable— imperishable— suffering nothing— neither diminishing nor increasing— it contains a plenum sans void, sans movement— at home where
it is— everywhere it is— exile unimaginable— satisfaction bred deep into bone beneath evanescent skin. V Extensible & Everlasting what was the perfect ground becomes divine surround— all else is apparition & leads one to perdition.
Empedocles Hear my words, Pausanius, if you wish for mortal wisdom: one grew out of many, then, from this one, many came again. Born to burn, our brief lives witness little. We are swift to fly, swift to die, swift to disappear like smoke from fire. While you are here, trust in eye as in ear; in ear, as in tongue. Reach out to each thing in its clarity. I am here to help you escape time, to evade old age, to remedy any ill, to calm savage winds that ravage green fields. I will help you bring back breezes; bring bright rain from black drought; welcome water wherever it’s wanted; bring back from hell the strength of a dead man’s hand to dispel all darkness. Four roots double-cross, twine then come undone. Birth doubled, doubles death. What’s nurtured is destroyed. What’s destroyed gives birth. Thing clings to thing
in incessant communion, attractive union. Integral love split by hateful strife’s spiteful knife. What changes can’t help but change. All is cycle. There is no stable life. One from many, many back to one, endlessly each crosses back & forth again & again; a two-fold tale re-told; left hand; right hand; charmed; chiral; asymmetric symmetry; burning Zeus; breathing Hera; buried Hades; weeping Nestis; from these roots our world blooms. My heart is voiceless. There are no births. There are no deaths, only a mingling of endings leading to beginnings & beginnings leading to endings & thing becoming thing. Component roots into unity. Unity into its roots. What comes into being is & will be. What disappears persists in what’s to come. Only fools think what is never was. Only fools think a thing dead is gone forever. Worlds precede & worlds abide beyond
the world we know. Hear my words. Listen to their echo: sound out of silence, silence out of sound, one alone out of many, many out of one. Pillars of fire, earth, water, immense column of air, fight one another. Anger is omnidirectional; love, coeval & commensurate. Sun’s exhalations, gods’ food, rains’ dream, earth’s nightmares; what strife splits, love binds; what love binds, strife splits. Trees are their seeds. Men & women become their children. Beasts, birds & fish, gods, demons, ghosts, for everything there is another it will become. Change will change us until we change with a constancy we can’t change. As a painter, cunning in his craft, frames from his primary colors a harmony of trees, men, women, beasts, birds, fish & gods on high, so life is composed. Don’t let the merely mortal deceive you. Listen to the words this God gives you. No legs, no arms, no knees, no eyes, the universe is equal to itself, at home
in what surrounds it & kept immobile by love itself until harmony submits. Just as a stretched string quivers when plucked, strife begins to sing his broken song & probes sameness with his many limbs until his whirlwind meets the stillness at the center of love’s vortex where mixed & un-mixed meet; where predator becomes prey &, prey, predator; where what runs away escapes; where what is pursued is captured; where ephemeral diversity eclipses back to original seed & seeds combine to burst into countless mortal things. What’s mortal learns immortality. Un-mixed remixes mixed. Wonder follows Wonder. Tribe begets tribe, until extinction begets genesis & genesis begets its end, only to begin again. First air, next fire, then earth, then from the spinning earth, an ocean. Wind is over water, stars, are above wind, sun, from fire, bodies, out of earth. First one loose limb then another, un-attached faces in need of necks, arms with no shoulders, isolated eyes
in search of sockets, from these fragments monsters come. Some, neutered at calamitous conjunction, others, worthy of procreation. Male & female mix indiscriminately. Random parts coalesce with random parts until each creature finds their form: ox becomes ox; leopard achieves leopard; men become men; women become women. Hair, leaves, feathers & scales become what they must be. Eggs are olives & olives are eggs. Broken back bones bend. Nothing moves except when love & strife contend, neither stronger than the other, neither weaker than they need be. The parts Aphrodite calls together, bond as intensely as those same parts contend when strife calls them apart. Stillness invites disturbance. Disturbance subsides to calm. Death welcomes birth & birth invites an end to its beginning. Shining sun sets only to rise. Fire welcomes Fire. Earth & air greet ocean. Alive & separate, hateful & whole, tumultuous & tethered, evil & alone, sacred & profane, blessÊd & bedeviled, unity contested, harmony divined, all inside anger’s anodyne.
Like to like, as eyes to fire, ear to sound, tongue to taste, touch to substance, scent to breath, thought to thought, puzzle piece to puzzle piece or else ignorance upon ignorance in misunderstood emptiness. Limbless mind alone inhabits with swift thought every corner of the cosmos. Burn no creatures’ flesh on course altars. Eat nothing consciousness haunts or man may become on his necessary journey. Earth yields to earth; water, to water; bright air, to bright air; fire, to all-consuming fire. Blood in balance balances the heart. Where thought resides wisdom matures in the moment our eyes open. To understand me stand still & empty your mind. Let the pure stream of my words wash over you as the muse accompanies us as we drive in her chariot, obedient to the reins, on our way to where we are bound. Keep my words deep inside you & contemplate them so you may grow as you were meant to grow into the God I am become.
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