Not Reading Herakleitos

Alan Loney

The Ancient Greek philosopher Herakleitos wasn’t called obscure for no reason. Allegedly Socrates himself read the manuscript and said you’d need to be a professional pearl diver to get to the bottom of it. And he had the whole book and spoke the same language as Herakleitos, something you can 100% rely on not happening these days. Evidently that’s not stopped anybody from making the attempt, however – even if they don’t all end up clutching their pearls. That’s where Alan Loney comes in. What he has done in this book is to attend, in an utterly unique fashion, to the materiality of this situation from the pure position of a poet and a printer.