Empedocles:
You will learn remedies for ills and help against old age, since for you alone shall I accomplish all these things. You will check the force of tireless winds, which sweep over land and destroy fields with their blasts; and again, if you wish, you will restore compensating breezes. After black rain you will bring dry weather in season, and after summer dryness you will bring tree-nourishing showers. You will lead from Hades the life-force of a dead man.

So come, hear my words.
There was, there will be, only a Rounded Sphere, rejoicing in eternal stillness.
This is, was, will be Love, total Aphrodite,
A Humpty with no smile, a cosmic egg.

Two branches do not spring from its back, it has no feet, no swift knees, no genitals, - oh oh you moan, but you are not -
you can not, did not neither resist reduction to this same, this same sphere, gods cannot, long-lived and highest in honour.
It is equal to itself in every direction, without any beginning or end, a rounded sphere, rejoicing in encircling stillness.

Love wins,
Aphrodite is not different,
Love is no difference, oh no no no no no.
In this way it is held fast in the close covering of harmony, a rounded sphere, rejoicing.
There the shining form of the sun is not shown, oh no, nor the shaggy might of earth, nor sea.
The sphere has no memory.

One by one by one by one, all the parts of the god begin to tremble.
Strife whispers
A tiny winnowing
It wrinkles ... fluctuates
The beginning of turbulence
A still small flapping
Traces appear
A certain shimmying among the elements
A phenomenon leaves the noise, a phenomenon pokes through
A signal in the hubbub, tohu bohu.
Let Strife be shepherd of multiplicity!
Suddenly there are circumstances. Archives, narratives, capacity. Fury, surge, forest.
Be skilled in the winds, now, and you will come to know chance.

So. The sphere will crumble, the centre cannot hold, roots and rhizomes,
The four elements fall apart,
Life must be mixed just at the edge of chaos.
All that we see became distinct - earth and swelling sea, moist air, and Titan sky, whose circle binds all things.

Copyright John Sutton 1999.

TOP OF PAGE

back to Empedocles: Love and Strife.