Don't Need the World

One of my oldest unknown friends has dropped by. Famed pre-Socratic philosopher. A real fire-brand. Literally.

“I see nothing other than becoming,” writes Heraclitus.

The Sardine has been reading his work, fragments. For the last forty years. His influence over the thinkers like Jose Ortega y Gasset. Friedrich Nietzsche, and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy is profound.

Nietzsche writes in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks: “For the world forever needs truth, hence the world forever needs Heraclitus, though Heraclitus does not need the world.”

“All is fire,” Heraclitus sums it up. Constant change. Nothing standing still. How apt is that the mythical death of Heraclitus has him throwing himself into a live volcano.

As the Sardine feels the time coming, the end of the second Sardine non-book, he must throw his work into the fires of the publishing world, consumed like the first Sardine book was before few people could read it.

“The way up and the way down is the same.”

“For him,” Nietzsche writes, “all contradictions run into harmony, invisible to the common human eye.” (61)

“Honey is the same to me, bitter and sweet. The world itself is a mixed drink which must be constantly stirred.”

McNulty would agree about the “mixed drinks.”

“The strife of opposites,” adds Nietzsche, “gives birth to all that came to be.”

How long the Sardine struggled with the Newspaper-Reading and Logged-In Publics, and the rest of the crew who gathered in the Attic Bar. Yet, without them, there would have not been the resistance that inspired this column.

The Sardine pondered “the way up and down” nugget. Had the fifty-three pieces in the first book represented the way up, building toward some grand revelations, for instance, who was writer behind the Sardine persona, the goal of the Pellatier’s quest to find “The Man who is the Sardine.”

Now the second book, the “Unsequel,” called this because the Sardine, despite continuing the column, even with new members of the chorus of opposition, takes a path back through the Sardine world leading to the place from which the little fish emerged.

Or nearly that place.

The closer he came to the sardine can, he adjusted his leaving it with sight to a new mission, minus the company of fellow drinkers, and gather around a new set of friends and topics, still diligently avoiding the gehenna of daily news and trends.

At least that’s one of the Sardine’s plans. Will he have the nerve to abandon many who came to depend on him, seemingly filling their need to get “attention” from an inattentive world?

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Schopenhauer wrote him to give moral support: “Persistent matter must change its form.”

The Sardine isn’t looking for a change but sees that he’s changing. That’s why he had Pope Sixtus IV borrow the column intermittently. Sort of leasing it with an intent to sell. That’s the impression given but he doesn’t really want to give it up. Sixtus gave him time to think it over. The Sardine will remain on vacation. Just not in the same way.

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Leaping into the volcanic fires. Best way to discourage followers and disciples.

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“All is fire” signals danger for the makers of an orderly world. How can society survive without absolute values? This would be living a bit too dangerously. Is there no way to loosen our ties to Plantonic forms and being? Do we understand we cannot be forever on the same path or grid?

“Something is not understood unless it is first misunderstood,” writes Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, unknown to the world he most cared about and strove to improve. He continues: “I listen although I must be changed.”

The Sardine listened. He hoped his readers listened. Maybe first misunderstanding. Never tiring of their misunderstanding.