The Thinking Root

Claims of the Thoughtful Word

When we know we do not know, something in us opens. Eyes. Ears. We can listen, as Martin Heidegger has it, “to the claim arising out of the thoughtful word.” Where we might turn to find a thoughtful word is a simple but serious question, as is what a “thoughtful” word might be. I hear in it a word that is full of thought, and more, is full of thought because it is thinking. A word that thinks. It is a subtle difference that shakes our epistemology from bedrock to spire—that inner architecture, that seeming cathedral, the mind. We’ve thought we think in words, with words, for so long, as if every noun, verb, adjective, article, were but a slightly different kind of brick, that we’ve forgotten a word is its own form of life, and richer, longer, more deeply intelligent than our own. But the builder we might become is the one who puts the brick to ear and listens; who writes the poem not to say anything but to hear what is being said. We might put our inner Daedalus away and learn to live inside the natural labyrinth of the ear, whose intricacy can only be solved by the living thread of the thoughtful word guiding us out and away from the monster we fear—the monster who lives within us, in the center of the maze, and says, “I know, I know.” The “claim arising out of the thoughtful word” speaks of existence, the thinking that is existence, introduces us into the fact of being. The rock is a thoughtful word. And so is the cloud, that is only a rock spiritually magnified. So is the rain raining down on the bird that nightlong sings her songs. And who can say where the rock ends and the cloud begins? Who can know the sun doesn’t carry darkly in its center a portion of the earth? And the earth and the sun are the same size—that earth I can eclipse with my thumb? We say the night is the opposite of the day, but maybe it’s truer to say the night is only the day’s thinking carried to its inevitable end; and so the day is also the night’s truest thought. Each reveals the other. Day and night are the same. So Thales says of life and death, those opposites. They are the same.

            It’s easy to confuse the complex with the difficult, but the thoughtful word teaches us to realize the complex isn’t difficult at all—it’s the simple that is hardest to grasp. Learning to think means learning to walk the path that is thinkable. It is a strange riddle that asks no question. I mean, we must learn to think only about what is there to think about, what reveals itself as itself, what un-conceals itself as something which is true. What is hardest is thinking what is true, which might not feel like thinking at all. It feels like trying to see. Like trying to listen. An experience, not a knowing. A relation, not a mastery. The tremendous, silent fact of the obvious which cannot be denied and which puts us in the thinker’s proper position. Not that grief-stricken posture of head resting on hand. But as Heidegger offers it to us: the heedful retreat in the face of being. I picture it as walking backward, eyes fixed on what glows with the full-of-awe inner tension of its finely wrought life, so that what exists can exist all the more. Love and fear, sacred and scared. How can it be that learning to think isn’t thinking at all? It’s just walking backward along the path you came, undoing the trespass, absorbed in the gaze.

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Who are our teachers in such fundamental hopes? Who are the teachers whose lives demonstrate the experiment? They are those who let themselves know less than we know. Who have the bedrock courage not only of not knowing but of being in un-knowing. They teach us to dwell thoughtfully in uncertain realms—the realm that is the world, and the realm that is ourselves. The chickadee in the underbrush flits like a thought from branch to branch. The house finch in the blue spruce sings. But there are other teachers, too. The green leaves. And Thales. The shadow beneath the bee and the endless flowers. And Anaximander. The spring morning breeze. And Anaximenes. 

            We have lost our sense of thinking as the experience that keeps us in the world, rather than a theorizing about it, but it is such thinking we now need most. The thinking toward thoughtful words that keep us in our heedful retreat. I love that word, “heedful.” It is so humble in its attention, so abashed in its faith. So Greek. The tight weave of modern self-consciousness loosens into a questioning fabric, an “I” of the selvage, frayed enough that any breath, any ψυχή, could unravel thread by thread the whole cloth. Which would be fine. Life and death are the same. The opposites pivot around an essential point that cannot be spoken of, though it can be sought; that cannot be seen, though the orbit around the emptiness makes it almost perceptible. The “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,” as Wallace Stevens put it. These thinkers are also each in orbit around essential questions. They ask what we are afraid to ask, or think we are asking, but we aren’t. They ask, What are the stars and planets, what the sun and moon, what the earth? How did they come to be, and of what are they made? How the animals? How the human? Why the sea and why then does the ocean pour down from the sky? What the clouds, and what the lightning? What the water? What the air? What the boundless, infinite, unlimited source that births infinite worlds and into which infinite worlds return to die? Who am I who says I?

            The questions Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes ask are so old, so near the origin of thought that we can no longer ask the questions in the same way, even if we say them in the same words. We think we are seeking knowledge when we ask them; but these philosophers suggest that understanding is something other than knowing the facts—it is the eye’s unconscious adjustment to light or dark, the hand’s grip around what it holds that the mind must take its example from. The helpless, heedful acceptance of the world as already given. The ancient stays so strangely ahead of us, a thing not yet achieved though once as common as the grass. The hope of this small volume of translations—and all the volumes included in this project—is to offer some experience of what it might be to think as these thinkers thought. To do so means the translation takes an unusual path. Sensing that the standard scholarly presentation that cites the sources in which the texts are found act mostly as a scaffolding that traces a thinking while also obscuring it, I decided to see what would happen if those attributions were removed, if we had to encounter these words as one might find a broken shard in a field, and then another, and again, knowing somehow they fit together into a vessel entire, but not knowing how to assemble it, not knowing if all the parts have been found, or even if all the shards belong to the same pot. And yet, it almost holds together. And if you could put your hand through the mouth, you might feel the impressions of the fingers that smoothed the coils into a wall solid enough to hold the wine without spilling a drop. Or maybe it was olive oil. Or maybe it was grain. Or maybe the pot is meant to have so many holes, the seeds fall back to the ground. Maybe it’s meant to stay just broken enough to let back out what has been poured in—something like that broken pot, the mind.

            Each of these translations is organized as I would shape a poem. Image guides and unfolds according to its own inherent logic. This method occasionally prefers poetic accuracy over denotative purity, seeking to tease out the inward possibilities of how certain words might be experienced. Likewise, along with the abandonment of the immediate contextualizing citations typically offer, I free the fragments of their typical groupings, letting the various aspects of their thinking, their biography, and their reception intermingle. In Thales, we move from his immortal sayings to his life to the poem immortalizing him on his gravestone—leaving politics to study among the divine seers in Egypt, his geometric discoveries among the pyramids, and his return to Greece, where he ponders the nature of water, grows rich harvesting olives, and wonders at the nature of the stars. Anaximander’s fragments move from outermost cosmos to earth and how life here emerged. For Anaximenes, this thinker in air, I let his own principle be the loose principle of construction: that all comes from a dense thickening undone by rarefaction. Each tries to tell the story of a life and pay heed to the claim a thoughtful life makes—as profound as the claim arising from a “thoughtful word.” Of these thinkers of whom only rumors remain, their words caught in writings not their own, these translations humbly hope to let a face gather around the mind, a human face, quick as sparrows, as are our own faces, so quick.

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Contradictions abound. As do harmonies. While walking at night looking up at the stars Thales falls down a well. Anaximander, first person to map the land and seas, first to make a globe, theorizes the nature of the cosmos as infinitely without bounds or measure. Anaximenes asks us to understand that all that is comes from oppositional forces acting upon the air: densifying, loosening. According to some, there is a lineage among these thinkers, all located in Miletus, a thriving city on the Maeander River, in what is now modern-day Turkey. Thales, first of all philosophers in the Greek tradition, taught Anaximander who in turn taught Anaximenes. Letting the translations follow one another according to this pedagogical order, one feels how the thin, tensile strings of one man’s thought weave themselves into a new mind in the next man. Among the gifts these philosophers bring us is a lesson not only of what it feels like to think but of what it looks like to learn. One such thread: Thales knows the world is one, an infinite one; Anaximander knows that infinite worlds born from a boundless unity die back into the endless source; Anaximenes knows the world can die. Just as we’re learning the world can die, Anaximenes knew it.

            Which is to say the simple hope of this volume is no more than that the reader can sit down and become a student, too. A student of the obvious. That is, a student of the world revealing itself as world. I’m writing these words with hands made of water and earth, and a mind made mostly of thick air sometimes pierced by a guiding flame. Lethe is the river that flows through my heart. These clouds and rainbows are my eyes. So I’ve been taught to know myself by translating these thinkers. (“Know thyself,” divine utterance Thales first taught.) They remind me to take care of the world. They don’t ask me to ask who I am. But what I am. If I can think it, how can it be far? If I can think it, how can it be hidden, how can it be untrue? I am part of the world; part of the cosmos. And so are you.