“War is the father of all and the king of all.”

“. . . all things come into being and pass away through strife.”

“The bow is called life but its work is death.”

Heraclitus

            ~ • ~

The dispositions of our thinking have a similarly acute tendency towards settled states as all the energy swarming throughout the known universe. To be plain: we want for clear answers, for stationary groundworks upon which to plant our ideating feet. What color is the sky? Blue. That’s the way we like it. Naturally then, when we encounter a figure of thought like a paradox, we tend to feel a tinge of unease. We turn paradoxical statements around in our minds in order to tease some “sense” from them; we can barely help but synonymize “paradox” and “problem”; they both seem like things which ought to be solved. But paradoxes are figures which contain both the soundest logic and its complete collapse in equal measure. They provide no terminal answers, no still ground. They form a field of interdependent, quaking oppositions and vibrate endlessly within them. If any one element of a paradox were to triumph over any other, the paradox itself would simply cease to exist. They are, in a sense, like sounds which sustain themselves indefinitely.

Despite their reputation as ideas fallen from any useful sense, I would like to propose that paradoxes—or rather the oppositions which beget and maintain them—are instead analogous to the fundamental dynamics which underpin all forms and all phenomena. They are the conceptual objects most akin to the physics which make any existence whatsoever possible.  

Heraclitus, the biographically mysterious oracle of “the thought by which all things are steered through all things,” grounded his wisdom in fields of opposition. Opposition is, for Heraclitus, the primary truth, and War, Strife, and that ultimate work, Death, appear in his writings as the paramount states of existence. And looming over the heap of aphoristic fragments which constitute his surviving corpus is the attendant specter of Fire: the figure of burning sparked by the litany of opposing forces which constantly rub against each other—an ontological, cosmological ignition as the fundamental principle of being. We can understand Heraclitean “War” and “Strife” and “Death” through this lens of friction: war, as any two forces set in opposition; strife, as the physics of those forces brought to bear on one another; and death as the overtaking of any one force by another (even if only momentarily, as some new counterforce will inevitably overtake it). Each and every form is thus oriented for Heraclitus towards a heated, evaporative end. Despite this seemingly austere march toward conflagration, hidden in his writing is another suggestion: that of a tension which can be maintained as tension itself: the physics of the String, anchored and stretched to a tautness which never fully gives itself over to any anchor-pole; not a “name of life” nor a “work of death,” but another state Heraclitus intuits in his own words as “an attunement of opposite tensions.” When filtered through a vision of tuning operations, Heraclitus’ invocation of “war” and “strife” ring with a different timbre. The inescapable forces of opposition evident everywhere can be thought of as, first and foremost, sustaining. The ground upon which we stand ceases to feel inescapably embattled if our interpretive focus turns away from an obsession with the fact that the forces observably in play are oppositional and instead towards the sum of those forces’ effects—effects of generation and perpetual change. This is not to deny the obvious truth that things burn up, that things die. It is rather to direct one’s focus towards another aspect of the equation: that each death, each outmatching of one force by another, each snap of a string leads to a transfer of energy—from one tuning frame into another—even if that new frame happens to be invisible to us. As long as tension exists (meaning, as long as energy exists) there is nothing but a perpetual return of generative potential underlying the evolution of all forms. This is, in essence, the first law of thermodynamics transposed into a disposition of attention.

Charles Olson intuited this same dynamic in his 1950 essay “Projective Verse,” when he spoke of “the kinetics of the thing” as one of the basic characteristics of his “composition by field.” This is the very first principle Olson lists as a basic tenet for what he called an “open” poetics:

“A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge. So: how is the poet to accomplish same energy, how is he, what is the process by which a poet gets in, at all points energy at least the equivalent of the energy which propelled him in the first place, yet an energy which is peculiar to verse alone and which will be, obviously, also different from the energy which the reader, because he is the third term, will take away?”

How “the poet is to accomplish same energy” is a thermodynamic concern. Olson felt a poet ought to craft their work against what we might now call, in information technology terms, an encroaching “lossiness”—the compression of data and the subsequent degradation of its quality for the sake of greater storage space and ease of transmission. For Olson, the form and language of a poem must provide a certain thrust in order to return to the poem’s perceptions energy which has been dampened or lost to the inertia of its translation and transfer. A crucial part of Olson’s kinetic conception is also the primacy of speed: “at all points (even, I should say, of our management of daily reality as of the daily work) get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen.” This is, in one sense, an idiosyncratic rendering of a familiar writing adage: “keep the pen moving.” But what interests me there, much more so than speed as a guiding principle of writing, is the force which underpins that notion of speed. It is a force perceivable even in Olson’s stumbling syntax alone: the tension necessary to produce any speed whatsoever. Energy, its transfer, and tension are inseparable; the tenser the drawstring of a bow, the faster an arrow will fly.  

In his 1968 essay “Man’s Fulfillment in War and Strife,” Robert Duncan writes of Heraclitus’ image of “the bend of the bow” as a way to render his sense of a fundamental destructive force—what he calls the “attack on the potential intellect of Man.” Duncan briefly seizes on the violent potential in the image of the taut bow to clarify the nature of “agonies” he observed around him: militaristic and psychic war; the “perversion” of governmental structures; that our very “manner of speaking” had perhaps become a “cover” for myriad violences; and what he describes as an assault “made in every generation of Man,” which has repeatedly, across history, brought us to a destructive “brink.” If we were to stop reading there, we might feel left in a pessimistic mire of Heraclitean “War and Strife.” But Duncan goes further in his reading of the bend, to a place where he also sees the tension of the bow as the potential for a World conception that does away with a synonymity between “agony” and “opposites.” Duncan describes the effort to accept into oneself the “multiplicity of actualizations beyond one’s vision” – by which I believe he means the diversity of conceptions of  “God” across human cultures—as an operation which “enlarges the language of unity and intent.” The stretch and pull between those differing divine actualizations—the tension between them—begets a set of harmonic relations which, as the attentive reader threads them together, make available a wider language within which unity can be sensed. Ultimately, Duncan concludes: “The word ‘God’ becomes necessary where there is an intense feeling of presence and oneness in opposites, an awe that cannot let go of contradictory elements, of an otherness in which I am more truly ‘I’.” The work of poetry is in part to urge our thinking away from paradigms within which “oppositions are in agony,” and towards those that perceive the tension between oppositions as constitutive of the ground of all things and their interrelations. 

Put another way, we might imagine poetry as a method of “listening to the tensions” instead of working to unwind them. In our gnarled and turbulent surround we are pulled in all conceivable directions—sometimes constructively, sometimes destructively—but the “ear” of poetry can act as a variable foothold, as a pathfinder amidst the tangle. In a small space like a shower, you can sing to find the resonant frequency of the room; if you slowly vary the pitch of your voice across your range, you will eventually find a note that vibrates your bones and the air and the walls together more intensely than any other. Poetry is like this—it offers a sweep of attention within which you can discover available resonances. Take this small example: as I indulged in my usual haphazard reading habits while working on this text, I stumbled upon another unlikely voicing of the difference between embattled opposition and generative tensions which I have pointed towards here. In Robert Kelly’s 1971 book, In Time, in a poem which comments on the transformation of the “traditional sciences” into the disparaged category of the “occult,” he offers two opposing definitions of “city.” The first (presumably the original) is a “cosmically-oriented” city, designed in accordance with nature, while the other denies “as extensively as it can” the “natural order of things” in its construction. In a fascinating parenthetical insight into the latter type, Kelly writes: “Republican Rome, that misunderstood the Etruscan mundus, or ditch, around the city, falsely apprehended it to be a mode of excluding the outside, rather than a mode of harmonizing the ground of the city with the forces of nature & the cosmological realities that ancient people seemed to have grasped.” The Roman interpretation of this circular ditch as an exclusionary distinction cemented this part of the city in a symbolic relation of oppositional strife with the worlds beyond the ditch’s bounds. Kelly’s “harmonizing” reading instead sees the ditch as an act of unitary engineering: a demarcation indeed, but one intended as an architecture of synthesis. To my ear, those two interpretations of the mundus stand in parallel to my two readings of fundamental opposition in Heraclitus: one pessimistic and strife-ridden, the other harmonically tensed. 

I feel pressed, in the world as it stands, to differentiate between a conception of oppositional forces that takes the very fact of their being in opposition as evidence for a human condition that is primarily conflictual, and another that instead sees opposition as the very groundwork of harmoniousness. Poetry has always been a dependable torchbearer for the latter, as well as an active, malleable field within which a practice based on its presumptions might be crafted. Poetry often takes on as its most visible face, its most audible voice, the oppositions forwarded naturally by language use and its varied forms. The line break—that most common poetic device—is a simple example, capable of disjunction and synthesis in equal measure. 

Countless writers before me have laid out similar ideas. I simply wish to state it for myself in order to join the chorus of cross-chronological voices that have desired to express their sense of a radiant “Order” (to use Duncan’s word), an order that animates us all and is available as a primary sustenance for the development of understanding, for living. Age after age some mysterious force compels us to speak of it. I feel it as an inevitability in a universe whose primary form is tensed—is tension.

It is the fundamental sound that springs forth when the String is struck.