Three poetic variations on Heraclitus: MacNeice, Collier, and Pacheco
The second-century poet Lucian depicted Heraclitus of Ephesus1 as a paradox monger who wept
when he considered that nothing abides and all will end in conflagration.2 Despite scholarly doubts
about the accuracy of Lucian’s portrait, its main elements have served to define Heraclitean thought
from antiquity down to the modern era.3 In the early decades of the 19th century Alfred Lord Tennyson
wrote “Hoi rheontes” (“The flowing ones”) to deplore what he took to be the relativism and
subjectivism inherent in the doctrine of universal change. Near the end of the century Gerard Manley
Hopkins challenged what he took to be Heraclitus’ dark vision of human history in “That Nature is a
Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection.”4 T. S. Eliot incorporated Heraclitean materials
in his Four Quartets and The Cocktail Party as did Robinson Jeffers in The Double Axe and Jorge Luis
Borges in poems written in various periods of his life. Here I consider three contrasting 20th-century
responses to the ‘Heraclitean’ doctrine of universal change by Louis MacNeice, Michael Collier, and
José Emilio Pacheco.
1
The precise dates of Heraclitus’ birth and death are unknown, but two ancient sources place him in the
69th Olympiad (504-501 BCE). The standard modern edition of Heraclitus’ writings is Hermann Diels
and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th edition (Berlin: Weidmann, 1952). References
to this work will be to the A (testimonia or ancient reports) and B (fragments) sections.
2
[Lucian’s Heraclitus:] “I am considering the human situation, my friend. It calls for tears and
lamentation; we are doomed from the start. Wherefore I pity man and mourn for him. Of the present I
take no account, but what will be hereafter is grief unmitigated; I mean conflagration and universal
disaster. For this I sorrow and because nothing abides” (from The Sale of Philosophers in J. Saunders,
ed., Greek and Roman Philosophy after Aristotle (New York: Free Press, 1966), p. 189.)
3
The image of the weeping Heraclitus stemmed from a misunderstanding of Theophrastus’ attribution
of melancholia (a term which covers both “melancholy” and “irritability”). Many scholars now believe
that the doctrine of flux or universal change was Plato’s invention. The idea of a worldwide
conflagration appears to have been an idea introduced by Heraclitus’ Stoics admirers.
4
Another well-known 19th-century mention of Heraclius occurs in William Cory Johnson’s “Heraclitus”
(Ionica 1858, 7), but the Greek original of Johnson’s poem was an elegy by Callimachus addressed to
Heraclitus of Halicarnassus, an elegiac poet of the 3rd century BCE.
2
I
Louis MacNeice, “Variation on Heraclitus”
Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, studied Classics and
Philosophy at Merton College, Oxford, and taught for a time at Birmingham University, Bedford
College London, and Cornell University. In 1941 he began a second career as a writer and producer for
the BBC. Many of his poems and essays reflect a detailed familiarity with classical languages and texts,
including his “Variation on Heraclitus”, published in 1961:
Even the walls are flowing, even the ceiling,
Nor only in terms of physics; the pictures
Bob on each picture rail like floats on a line
While the books on the shelves keep reeling
Their titles out into space and the carpet
Keeps flying away to Arabia nor can this be where I stood -Where I shot the rapids I mean -- when I signed
On a line that rippled away with a pen that melted
Nor can this now be the chair -- the chairoplane of a chair -That I sat in the day that I thought I had made up my mind
And as for that standard lamp it too keeps waltzing away
Down an unbridgeable Ganges where nothing is standard
And lights are but lit to be drowned in honour and spite of some dark
And vanishing goddess. No, whatever you say,
Reappearance presumes disappearance, it may not be nice
Or proper or easily analysed not to be static
But none of your slide snide rules can catch what is sliding so fast
3
And, all you advisers on this by the time it is that,
I just do not want your advice
Nor need you be troubled to pin me down in my room
Since the room and I will escape for I tell you flat:
One cannot live in the same room twice.5
The mention of Heraclitus in the title alerts us to the various river allusions that follow:
“flowing”, “floats”, “rapids”, “rippled”, “Ganges”, “drowned”, and “cannot…in the same…twice.” This
last phrase evokes Plato’s restatement of Heraclitus’ doctrine of universal change (Cratylus 402a):
Heraclitus says somewhere that all things give way and nothing remains, and likening existing
things to the flow of a river, he says that you cannot step twice into the same river.
The two periodic sentences that make up MacNeice’s poem themselves flow on for twenty-two lines,
with frequent use of enjambment.6 In the process, MacNeice conveys two basic ideas: that change is
endemic—to walls, ceiling, pictures, books, carpet, a signature on a page, a pen, chair, lamp, lights, and
the room itself; and, second, that the poet also refuses to stay still long enough to be analyzed and
advised by others.7
5
Solstices (Faber and Faber: London, 1961), p. 60.
Edna Longley notes “MacNeice’s skill in adapting the period, the sentence with multiple clauses, to a
metrical flow” (from Louis MacNeice: A critical study (Faber and Faber: London, 1988), p. 128.)
7
Longley suggests a context for the remark: “MacNeice recoiled from procrustean thinkers, be they
communist slogan-poets, dogmatic Irish nationalists and unionists, the BBC managers who blighted his
last years as a radio producer in London, or poetry critics who thought they had him sussed [figured
out]” (from “Going with MacNeice’s flow,” accessed on 10/30/11 from
http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SeamusHeaneyCentreforPoetry/LMN. The phrase “Reappearance
presumes disappearance” invites the conjecture that MacNeice was prompted to write “Variation” in
response to a critic’s comment on his “recent reappearance.” MacNeice elsewhere commented: “Poets
are always being required—by the critics and by themselves—to ‘develop’” (The Poetry Book Society
Bulletin No. 28, February, 1961).
6
4
It is not clear, however, precisely how radical a view of change MacNeice wished to embrace.
Are the references to “melting pens” (reminiscent of Salvador Dali’s melting clocks), the “chairoplane”
of a chair, and the “unbridgeable Ganges” intended to remind us merely of how rapidly physical objects
take on and shed their properties, or are they meant to support the more radical thesis that the
fundamental realities are processes, and physical objects only their occasional by-products? We know
that MacNeice learned of Heraclitus’ teachings while still a schoolboy8, and that on his first day in
Oxford he encountered the phrase panta rhei kai ouden menei (“Everything flows and nothing remains”)
inscribed on the wall in a men’s room (Strings, p. 231). But by the time of his senior year, MacNeice
had come to regard “the flux” as a matter of some importance:
Having no sex-life I was building myself an eclectic mythology. Peopled with the Disappointed,
Orpheus and Persephone and Lancelot and Picasso’s earlier harlequins. This world was girdered
with odd pieces from the more heterodox Greek philosophers, especially Heraclitus and
Democritus, For Heraclitus recognized the flux—and one has to do that in order to be modern…
(Strings, p. 109)9
MacNeice’s own metaphysical position appears to have fluctuated between an ontology of
objects and one of processes. He explains how he found monistic systems “hopelessly static, discounting
Becoming as mere illusion and hamstringing human action”, and that he turned to Aristotle because his
8
MacNeice writes: “I was reading a book on Greek philosophy in order to prepare for a scholarship
examination at Oxford and was swept away by Heraclitus, by the thesis that everything is in flux and
fire is the primary principle” (The Strings are False: An Unfinished Autobiography, ed. E. R. Dodds
(Faber and Faber: London, 1965), p. 96.)
9
MacNeice and his friends also expressed admiration for three contemporary novelists on Heraclitean
grounds: “Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, who give you the flux but serve it on golden
platters. We considered them good because they were acolytes of Flux, but it was the gold and the ritual
that fetched us” (Strings, pp. 118-19)
5
concept of energeia (activity) seemed to him to offer “an antidote to the static and self-contained heaven
of Plato’s transcendent forms” (p. 125). But even Aristotle fell short:
…when you looked into him you find he does not go far enough: reality, rescued from the One,
is traced back to the infima species but not to the individual unit, while his distinction between
energeia (significant and absolute movement) and kinesis (which is merely relative [movement])
restores the Platonic gulf that he has just been trying to fill in. Or so I thought. Aristotle allows
that what is energeia from one angle may be kinesis from another; but in that case, I thought,
kinesis should also be a permanent principle, whereas Aristotle supposes a highest grade in
which mind thinks only itself and this he exempts from kinesis. Complete fusion of subject and
object; a full stop; death. (Strings, pp. 125-26).
MacNeice’s disappointment with Aristotle’s focus on infima species suggests that he took individual
objects and persons to be the primary realities, while his endorsement of Aristotelian energeia as an
antidote to a static Platonism points toward a view of processes as primary.
If MacNeice displayed some ambivalence on this question, it seems only fair to acknowledge
that interpretations of Heraclitus often divide along the thing-process fault line. The flowing river (B 12,
49a, and 91b), the ever-living fire (B 30), the fire that is exchanged for all things (B 90), the barley drink
that survives only by being stirred (B 125), and the identification of sea, earth, and “fire-wind” as all
“turnings of fire” (B 31a) inevitably invite the conclusion that what Heraclitus believed to exist was not
a set of discrete physical objects, but rather a single basic process.10 On the other hand, in B 1 Heraclitus
claims to “distinguish each thing according to its nature and explain how it exists” (not obviously
10
Cf. Nicholas Rescher: “Heraclitus…is universally recognized as the founder of the process
approach…The fundamental "stuff" of the world is not a material substance of some sort but a natural
process, namely "fire," and all things are products of its workings (puros tropai)” (from
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy, accessed on 11/1/11).
6
process-talk), and in fragments B 76a-c he explains how fire, air, earth, and water all come into being
and pass away from each other rather than from some enduring substratum. It is not obvious that there is
a way of representing Heraclitus’ metaphysical views that is both internally consistent and faithful to all
the surviving fragments.11
II
Michael Collier, “In May”
Michael Collier (1953- ) is Professor of English at the University of Maryland, a Guggenheim
Fellow, and former Poet Laureate of the State of Maryland. Collier’s “In May” offers an unusual
perspective on Heraclitus’ attitude toward experience:
In May the paths into the dunes
are roped off from foot traffic
because the birds amass to breed.
You can watch them through binoculars
from the edge of a parking lot,
white invisible deltas that drop
and glint, cataractous floaters
against the sun, rising from the sea
11
In a recent study, for example, Daniel Graham claims that, for Heraclitus, what exists at bottom are
the four elements and the relationships of exchange that hold among them, and that fire is “merely
symbolic.” But Graham also maintains that we must “abandon a crude substance theory and create a
sophisticated process philosophy. What is ultimately real is not a substance…but process itself, and the
law that governs the process” (from Explaining the Cosmos: The Ionian Tradition of Scientific
Philosophy (Princeton U. P., 2006, p. 144).
7
or fluttering midday from nests
spiked inside the broken clumps
of compass grass. Or on a plaque
read about a lighthouse stretched
like bones beneath the waves.
When Heraclitus observed,
“You can’t step into the same river twice,”
did he mean you couldn’t trust
experience or thought to illustrate
how “nature loves to hide” beneath
its own swift surface? Did he mean
there’s pleasure in deception,
not despair, delight when we recognize
a tern’s or plover’s flash and glitter,
silhouettes that navigate thermal rivers,
declare themselves like scraps of paper,
then disappear?12
These lines, Collier once explained13, were inspired by a trip to the Delaware beaches. Each year in
early May the National Park Service cordons off a stretch of beach just north of the town of Rehobeth
12
13
From Dark Wild Realm (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), pp. 53-54.
In an e-mail to the author.
8
Beach, Delaware, to protect the sea birds that arrive there each spring to build nests and raise their
young. The same stretch of beach features a pair of World War II watchtowers and the remains of a
wooden pier which stretches out into the Atlantic, looking rather like the spine of some half-buried giant
(the physical reference point for Collier’s “lighthouse stretched like bones beneath the waves”).
Collier expresses the pleasure he felt when watching terns and plovers rise and fall in the sky:
“white invisible deltas [i.e. triangles] that drop and glint”, “cataractous floaters14 against the sun”, shapes
that “flash and glitter”, “silhouettes that navigate thermal rivers”, and “scraps of paper” that reveal their
presence then disappear. The line “You can watch them…from the edge of a parking lot” serves as a
reminder that the ordinary and extraordinary often lie close together. Collier then poses two questions
relating to Heraclitus’ philosophy: (1) When Heraclitus declared that you cannot step twice into the
same river, did he mean to impugn sense experience or merely to remind us “how nature loves to hide
beneath its own swift surface?” and (2) Did Heraclitus mean that we can have pleasure in deception,
rather than despair, when we recognize the realities? Both questions merit discussion.
We should admit, to begin with, that Heraclitus did sometimes denigrate the senses:
Bad witnesses for men are eyes and ears of those with uncomprehending souls. (B 107)
Sextus Empiricus, to whom we are indebted for the quotation, drew what he thought was the logical
conclusion:
[Heraclitus held] that of these two organs [viz. sensation and reason] sensation is untrustworthy,
and he posited reason as the standard of judgment. The claim of sensation he expressly refutes
14
I take this to be a reference to the “floaters” that appear in one’s visual field as a consequence of a
disturbance in the vitreous fluid in the eyeball. Collier’s point would appear to be that, like those eyefloaters, the birds are no sooner spotted than they change direction and disappear from view.
9
with the words “Bad witnesses, etc.” which is equivalent to saying “To trust in the non-rational
senses is a mark of uncomprehending souls.”
Fortunately, Sextus quotes enough of Heraclitus’ words for us to be able to see that Sextus got it wrong.
Heraclitus’ indictment of “eyes and ears” is conditional: “Bad witnesses are eyes and ears for those with
barbarian or uncomprehending souls” (barbarous psuchas echontôn). How good or bad the testimony of
the senses might be for those with non-barbarian souls Heraclitus does not say. But there is no reason to
think that the senses would be equally “bad witnesses” for those who understand the logos (Heraclitus’
term for both his “word” or “message” and the “plan” or “rational structure” that can be seen to be at
work in the cosmos as a whole). In fact, B 55 strikes a more positive note:
The things of which there is seeing, hearing, and learning (alternatively: the things of which the
seeing and hearing is learning), these I prefer.
It is also at least suggested by B 93 that the real nature of things does not lie entirely hidden from us:
The lord [Apollo] whose oracle is in Delphi neither indicates clearly nor conceals, but gives a sign.
It would be a mistake, then, to infer from Heraclitus’ assertion that “nature loves to hide” that we are
inevitably deceived, i.e. that the real nature of things must forever escape human understanding. Rather,
as Charles Kahn put it, “The world order speaks to men as a kind of language they must learn to
comprehend.”15
Collier’s second question, “Did Heraclitus mean that there can be pleasure in deception when we
recognize the realities?” gains at least a partial answer from a pair of Heraclitean comments on natural
beauty:
What opposes unites and the most beautiful arrangement comes from things bearing in opposite
15
Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge U. P., 1979), p. 107.
10
directions. (B 8)
To god all things are beautiful and just whereas human beings suppose that some things are unjust,
other things just. (B 102)
The idea of the beauty of nature is also implicit in Heraclitus’ references to the physical universe as a
kosmos (in B 30 and 124).16 We can get some sense of the aesthetic connotations of the Greek kosmos
from a passage in Homer’s Iliad IV (145) where an artfully crafted horse’s bridle is described as “an
ornament (kosmos) and treasure fit for a king”, as well as from Iliad XIV (187) when the goddess Hera
is said to have decked herself out “with all manner of adornment” (panta…kosmon). Heraclitus’ kosmos,
then, is not just a “world” and not even just an “ordered world”; it is rather an “elegant or beautifully
ordered world.” Heraclitus’ B 54 points in the same direction: “an unapparent attunement (harmoniê) is
stronger or better (kreittôn) than an obvious one.” Thus we also have reason to respond affirmatively to
Collier’s second question: Heraclitus probably did think that the things we encounter in nature can
afford pleasure, at least to those of us who can understand the larger scheme within which these
individual parts play essential roles. As Aristotle will later put it (in the De Partibus Animalium I, 5,
645a) when he tells the story of the visitors who encountered Heraclitus warming himself by the oven:
“nature affords immense pleasures to those who can recognize the causes of things and are naturally
inclined toward philosophy.”
III
José Emilio Pacheco, “Gift of Heraclitus”
José Emilio Pacheco (1939-2014) was one of the leading Mexican poets of the second half of the
20th century. His poems and short stories gained him the Cervantes, Garcia Lorca, and Octavio Paz
16
Heraclitus also observed that: “The most beautiful order (kosmos) is a heap of sweepings, piled up at
random” (B 124). But this is probably best understood (as in B 107): for those who fail to grasp the
logos the “beautiful order” will appear to be “a mere heap of sweepings.”
11
prizes, among other honors. His poem “Don de Heráclito”/”Gift of Heraclitus” is an extended
celebration of Heraclitean ideas:
Porque el agua recorre los cristales musgosamente:
ignora que se altera lejos del sueño todo lo existente.
Because the water runs down the windows like moss:
It doesn’t know that everything changes outside the dream.
Y el reposo del fuego es tomar forma
con su pleno poder de transformarse.
Fuego del aire y soledad del fuego
al incendiar el aire que es de fuego.
Fuego es el mundo que se extingue y prende
para durar (fue siempre) eternamente.
And the repose of the fire is to take a form
With its full power of transforming itself.
Fire of the air and the solitude of fire
To ignite the air that is of fire.
Fire is the world that is extinguished and kindled
In order to last (it was always so) forever.
Todo lo ayer disperso hoy se reúne.
Todo lo unido se has apartade ahora.
12
Everything scattered yesterday today comes together.
Everything united has now been divided.
Soy y no soy aquel que te ha esperado
en el parque desierto una mañana
junto al río irrepetible adonde entraba
(y no lo hará jamás, nunca dos veces)
la luz de octubre rota en la espesura.
I am and am not the one who waited for you
One morning in the deserted park
Near the river that never returns, where entered
October’s light destroyed in the thicket
(and it will never happen again, never twice).
Y fue el olor del mar. Una paloma
como un arco de sal ardió en el aire.
And there was the smell of ocean. A dove
Like an arc of salt burning in the air.
No estabas, no estarás.
Pero el oleaje
de una espuma remota se apagaba
sobre mis actos y entre mis palabras
13
(únicas mías porque son ajenas):
You weren’t there, you won’t be.
But the wave of a distant foam was extinguished
On my deeds and among my words.
(only mine because they are another’s):
El mar que es agua pura ante los peces
jamás ha de saciar la sed humana.
The sea that is pure water for fish
Will never satisfy human thirst.17
I count a dozen identifiable Heraclitean echoes—from the “water that runs down” in line one
down to “the sea which is pure water to the fish” in the penultimate line.18 From these Heraclitean
elements Pacheco fashions what might fairly be termed an existential reflection on the human condition:
unlike natural substances with their fixed essential natures, devoid of any potential for self-reflection
and fundamental change, human existence is characterized by contradiction, change, a sense of loss, and
unfulfilled desire. In short, we human beings defy essentialist definition, or as Sartre once put it: man is
not what he is, but is rather what he is not (or in more Pacheco-like language): “Man is… a project
which possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss...”19
17
From El Reposo del Fuego (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1966), pp. 30-31, translation mine.
Specifically: B 1, 10, 12, 30, 31a, 49a, 61, 76a, 76b, 76c, 90, and 91a.
19
From Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism” in W. Kaufman, Existentialism from
Dostoevsky to Sartre (Penguin Books: New York, 1956). I suspect that Pacheco acquired his
existentialism not from Sartre but from Ortega y Gasset (see the latter’s “Man has no nature” in Toward
a Philosophy of History (University of Illinois Press, 2002), and Pacheco’s “José Ortega y Gasset
contempla la viento” (in Don’t Ask Me How the Time Goes By (Columbia U. P., 1978), pp. 118-21).
18
14
Pacheco develops the natural-human contrast over the course of seven stanzas. In the first, water
unthinkingly follows its natural downward path; in the second, fire endures through a series of
transformations (its permanence emphasized through the tripling of temporal markers—“to last”, “it was
always so”, and “forever”: para durar (fue siempre) eternamente. The third stanza reminds us of the
cycles of unification and dissolution. But from the fourth to the seventh stanza we have a first-person
expression of a sense of conflict, absence, and longing: “I am and I am not the one who waited for you.”
In contrast with the enduring natures of water and fire, the river by which the speaker stands is ever
changing and unrepeatable. Here, personal experience becomes chaotic and fragmentary—a shaft of
sunlight, the smell of ocean, the glimpse of a dove’s flight, and words from an ancient source (perhaps
Heraclitus’ words).20 Pacheco emphasizes the theme of unfulfilled desire when he replaces Heraclitus’
conclusion “sea water is undrinkable and deadly for human beings” (B 61) with his: “will never satisfy
human thirst.” The “gift” of Heraclitus, in short, is the recognition that, for better or for worse, we
human beings are never fully and permanently what we are at any given moment.21
Is there some basis in the surviving Heraclitus fragments for Pacheco’ existentialist perspective? I
believe there was indeed a Heraclitean ethic that has some affinities with Pacheco’s point of view. It is
true that in most of the surviving fragments Heraclitus is concerned with more cosmic matters, seeking
to explain, through a series of paradoxical aphorisms, the nature of “all things”—specifically, how “all
20
These lines appear to be autobiographical. George McWhirter comments: “[Pacheco] writes frequently
and powerfully of the sea at Veracruz where he spent a large part of his childhood. This sense of the
ocean breaking inland makes his poetry unique, and his anxiety, or terrible glory, is created by this sense
of himself at the center of seismic forces of earth and water” (José Emilio Pacheco: Selected Poems
(New York: New Directions, 1987), p. viii).
21
A darker reading of Pacheco’s poem is defended in Lewis H. Rubman, “A Sample of José Emilio
Pacheco: young Mexican Poet,” Romance Notes, Vol. 13 (1972), pp. 432-440.
15
things happen in accordance with the logos” (B 1), how “all things come about through strife” (B 8 and
80), “how all things are steered through all” (B 41), and “how all things are one” (B 50). But on three
occasions Heraclitus requires not only that his listeners comprehend his (or the) logos, but also act in
accordance with that insight: B 1 alludes to the ‘words and deeds such as I set forth,’ B 73 proclaims
that “we should not speak and act like people who are asleep,” and B 112 affirms that “wisdom consists
in saying what is true and acting while paying attention to nature.”
Two conditions seem relevant to this achievement. First, we must grasp the principles that hold
sway throughout the cosmos. So much is evident from B 41; “Wisdom is one thing: mastering the
intelligence by which all things are steered through all” and B 114: “Those who would speak with
intelligence must base themselves firmly on that which is common to all, as a city does upon its law.”
Second, we must act so as to protect and enhance the well being of our soul. This would appear to
require, at a minimum: (a) avoiding drunkenness (B117) “Whenever a man is drunk, he is led along,
stumbling, by a beardless boy; he does not perceive where he is going, because his soul is wet”; (b)
minimizing our expenditure of emotion: (B 85) “It is difficult to fight against passion, for whatever it
wishes it buys at the cost of soul”; and (c) “keeping a dry soul”: (B 36) “For souls it is death to become
water…” (B 118): “a flash of light is a dry soul, wisest and best.” Since the drying agent par excellence
is fire, Heraclitus’ point would appear to be that we will not improve the condition of our soul until we
bring our thoughts into alignment with the intelligent fiery power that orders the cosmos. Finally, in two
cryptic remarks Heraclitus assigns a special nature to soul: (B 45): “One could never discover the limits
of soul, should one traverse every road, so deep a logos does it possess” and (B 115) “Soul possesses a
logos which increases itself.”
16
One reasonable interpretation of these remarks is that Heraclitus held that living well required
aligning one’s thinking with the wise, Zeus-like power that oversees the operations of the cosmos, and
acting in accordance with that understanding. And he at least suggests that we are able to achieve this
good result because the human soul has the capacity to expand its powers of understanding, “to increase
its logos.” In one respect, there is nothing especially existential about this view; indeed, unlike Sartre
and some other existentialist thinkers, Heraclitus does not hesitate to identify a way of life that is best
for all human beings. But in his conviction that human beings possess a capacity for self-direction and
improved understanding, Heraclitus provides a model for Pacheco’s contrast between the fixity of
natural substances and the open and undefined character of human existence.
Despite the differences between the three poems under discussion, they collectively explore a
common theme—how in the midst of constant change it is possible to have some sense of an enduring
entity, or in Heraclitean terms: how what is different can also be the same. Collier’s “In May” poses the
epistemological question in general terms: how can a series of instantaneous and fragmentary
perceptions supply us with knowledge of an enduring reality—how do our perceptions of “the swift
surface” of things permit us to “recognize a tern’s or plover’s flash and glitter”? Both MacNeice and
Pacheco move quickly from talking about ever-changing rivers to reflecting on the identity of the
persons standing within or beside those rivers: how does a series of disparate personal experiences yield
knowledge of a single enduring self? Or as MacNeice would ask: How can “your slide snide rules catch
what is sliding so fast”? Pacheco presents the problem as one of irresolvable ambiguity: “I am and am
not the one who waited for you/One morning in the deserted park.”
17
It is not certain that Heraclitus intended for his remark about flowing rivers to give rise to a
related concern about personal identity. Plutarch, however, appears to have understood him in this way
when he took his remarks about rivers as the basis for a claim about the nature of our “mortal substance”
(thnêtês ousias):
For, according to Heraclitus, it is not possible to step twice into the same river, nor is it possible
to touch a mortal substance twice in so far as its state is concerned…(B 91)
In his New Refutation of Time Jorge Luis Borges made it clear that he believed that Heraclitus intended
for his audiences to move from reflecting on change in rivers to reflecting on change in themselves:
... each time I recollect Fragment 91 of Heraclitus, “you never go down to
the same stream twice,” I admire his dialectical skill, for the facility
with which we accept the first meaning ("The stream is another")
clandestinely imposes upon us the second meaning ("I am another") and
grants us the illusion of having invented it …22
Whether or not Heraclitus himself intended for the doctrine of universal change to be extended in this
direction (or indeed, whether or not he held such a doctrine to begin with), many later writers have
found it useful to formulate the problem of personal identity in Heraclitean terms.23
22
From Nueva refutacion del tiempo (Buenos Aires: Oportet & Haereses, 1947).
I am grateful to Aileen Das, Laura Rosella-Schluderer, and Eleanor Rutledge for their comments on an
earlier version of this paper. I am also grateful to the participants in the 2011 UNC-Chapel Hill
Workshop in Ancient Philosophy, especially Daniel Ferguson and Adam Johnson.
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