Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain and Heraclitus Fragments 124, 48, 51

(See also my post on Chapter Titles in Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain)

Heraclitus 124: σάρμα εἰκῇ κεχυμένον ὁ κάλλιστος, φησὶν Ἡράκλειτος, [ὁ] κόσμος.

    Balis’ translation: “The comeliest order on earth is but a heap of random sweepings.” (p.18)

What is odd about Balis’ translation of the Greek is that there is no evidence for the word ‘but’ in the original Greek.  (See ADDENDUM below). Here is a literal translation in the order of the actual Greek:

    Sweepings at random piled up the most beautiful, says Heraclitus, (the) kosmos.

'Kosmos' in Greek has a variety of meanings: order, arrangement, universe. A more graceful rendering of the original Greek:

    The most beautiful kosmos, says Heraclitus, is sweepings piled up at random.

By leaving out the ‘but’ a jarringly different meaning emerges. Things swept up at random somehow present an ‘arrangement’ that is most beautiful to behold. Frazier in Cold Mountain does begin with the pejorative meaning that the ‘but’ implies, but ends with something surprisingly more positive and more faithful to the original Greek. Here is Inman’s last vision:

When she reached the place, the boy had already gathered up the horses and gone. She went to the men     on the ground and looked at them, and she found Inman apart from them. She sat and held him in her lap. He tried to talk, but she hushed him. He drifted in and out and dreamed a bright dream of a home. It had coldwater spring rising out of rock, black dirt fields, old trees. In his dream the year seemed to be happening all at one time, all the seasons blending together. Apple trees hanging heavy with fruit but yet unaccountably blossoming, ice rimming the spring, okra plans blooming yellow and maroon, maple leaves red as October, corn tops tasseling, a stuffed chair pulled up to the glowing parlor hearth, pumpkins shining in the fields, laurels blooming on the hillsides, ditch banks full of orange jewelweed, white blossoms on dogwood, purple on redbud. Everything coming around at once. And there were white oaks, and a great number of crows, or at least the spirits of crows, dancing and singing in the upper limbs. There was something he wanted to say. (p. 353)

We do not know what Inman wanted to say. We are left with "everything coming around at once': "a home", a kosmos, a beautiful arrangement of things all out of order. Disorder order, order disorder. The way things are and are not.

ADDENDA:

1. Charles H. Kahn, a highly respected scholar and authority on the Prescoratics, translates this fragment as follows:

     The fairest order in the world ("the most beautiful kosmos), says Heraclitus, is a heap of random sweepings. 

There is no 'but' in Kahn's translation. He adds this further note to his translation: "The implied production of the fairest celestial arrangement from a random assortment of refuse would be a striking illustration of the paradoxical connection of opposites."  

 Kahn continues: "My best guess at Heraclitus' point is that the structure of the universal system . . . is so strict and and so all-pervasive that chance and providence must coincide: any random arrangement of material, any arbitrary sample of human life or evidence from nature must exhibit the same pattern and illustrate the same plan."

                             Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, page 287. 

2. It is possible that the gratuitous 'but' of Balis' translation, interpreted as pejorative above, may be read as intensifying the oppositon between order and disorder, creating thereby the exteme tension of a bow or lyre, i.e. life itself.  

    Fragment 48: τῷ οὖν τόξῳ ὄνομα βίος, ἔργον δὲ θάνατος. 

                    The name for the bow is life, its work death. 

    Fragment 51: οὐ ξυνιᾶσιν ὅκως διαφερόμενον ἑωυτῷ ὁμολογέει· παλίντροπος ἁρμονίη ὅκωσπερ τόξου καὶ λύρης. 

                     They do not understand how a thing at variance agrees with itself. It is a backward-turning harmony much like that of a bow or a lyre. 

It thus appears that Inman has discovered within his own experience the heraclitean harmony and completes his journey from apparent chaos to kosmos.  Only by enduring the one extreme was he able to discover for himself the most beautiful arrangement of things.

                  

Comments

[Gary Melnyk]

This saying cannot be understood unless it is thought of as high poetry. “What is within is without”. We all know what is without, “it comes of itself”, but hardly anyone knows what is within, because it requires some sort of work that no one can outline. Aristotle said the best metaphors can only be created by the best minds. The minds that have “searched themselves”. Heraclitus does not describe that work but those things he finds as his work proceeds. He finds, perhaps better than anyone ever, the “what is without” that is perfectly “similar” to “that which is within”. These are words to the wise. But as Emily Dickinson famously said: “If you know not the names, it were useless to tell”.