“a backward-turning harmony” (Herakleitos)

From a work-in-progress:

Herakleitos, Fragment 117:

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

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

____________

A bow or a lyre. Both are purposed with string, one to give music, the other to kill. Which is which? In a song is a death. Can that be true? I am swimming on my back, a backward-turning, a tuning, thinking about lyres. Tortoise shells for the bowl in ancient Greece, built up with bone, wood, bronze, strung with sheep gut. In 1823, Harry Burton discovered harps in the tombs at Thebes, still strung with gut. Imagine preparing the intestines for strings. Pulled fresh from the animal, cleaned of fat and soaked in water, removing membranes apart from muscle, salting and storing, and then making into strings by splitting the gut with horn, the resulting ribbons, smooth ones and rough ones, stretched for even tension. A backward-turning harmony, Herakleitos wrote, and swimming on my back, I think of the strings stretched between the bowl, with its skin belly, and the crossbar, supported by two arms. My arms reach up as I imagine the shape. Imagine the strings, 3 or 4 in Homer’s time and as many as 12 later on, though the classical number was 7.

I am swimming on my back, a backward-turning, thinking about bows. Imagine a single string twanging. In summer, I was learning archery with my grandchildren, their grandfather, a boy archer (though never a hunter), teaching us, beginning with the stringing of our recurve bows. We have 3 but the largest one, dating from the early 1960s, doesn’t have a string, the mice having eaten it one winter as it rested between rafters in the workshop. The bow that was Brendan’s in his childhood and the one I bought for the smaller children before their arrival in August: we took these out to a rough lane behind the vegetable garden. We learned to place the bow in front of our right ankle and behind our left calf, taking it from one curve to another, fitting the string onto the nock at each end. A backward-turning harmony, said Herakleitos. We learned to raise the limbs of the bow, where the energy is stored, learned to fit the arrow’s nock into the nocking point, and we learned how to pull back the string, find the anchor point on our faces (for me it was the corner of my lip), and then we learned how to sight as well as we could, aiming for the target positioned between two trees, a backdrop of old shower curtain and the paper target itself taped to a box filled with newspaper. (We have a target woven of sisal but John felt our arrows would go right through it without a proper backing.) Quick twang of the string. Thock as the arrow shot forth. Pock as it hit the box or, even luckier, the target itself.

The bow (βιός) is called life (βίος) but its work is death.