Panta Rhei
The eerie gray light of the baby monitor recalls a very old TV recording, the top edge of the crib glowing brilliantly while everything else – including my baby, the supposed focus – melts in gray. The days dissolve to gray in quarantine, the dark slate gray of the curious river outside, wondering why it is that no one comes to pester the ducks anymore, or to conduct surreptitious weed deals along its shoreline. Heraclitus claims that not even Titus Creek is the same from day to day, but who asked him? In Castellammare di Stabia there is a clothing store named “Panta Rhei,” which is a tough sell for rigid denim but might work all right for silky fabrics. My favorite “Panta Rhei” is a bar, which seems more in keeping with the spirit of the original. (It would also be a good name for a diaper brand.)
On my desk is a piece I snipped out of my son’s hair, held together awkwardly by a little velvet hair clip of my own. In another century I would have saved it in a locket, but this is not a locket century, and because I have no place to put the lock, it sits on my desk slowly collecting dust. Hair itself is one of the great generators of dust. And yet it also preserves remarkably well; hair often survives on skeletons when all the flesh is gone, and stray hair is frequently encountered, if you know how to look for it, at archaeological sites.
Panta rhei, as Heraclitus said while pouring me another drink tonight. Your body replaces most of its cells over time, so the thing you have now is not just an older version of what you owned five years ago, but something new and strange. Of course, the thoughts that animate that thing have also been replaced. I guess you could claim that the thinker is the same, but people have tried that argument and gotten shot down before; well, go for it anyway, if you want; I hope you’re feeling confident.
And as for the river of memory, don’t even start; we all know how radically our personal stories change; and then too there’s the bigger picture, the tales we used to tell about the “Greek miracle,” the white marble, the paintless Cycladic figurines, the unblemished purity of something that happened in Athens once, and, well, you see where I’m going with this. Now we know it isn’t quite like that, we know that nothing exists in isolation, that without Egyptian Thebes you wouldn’t have Boeotian Thebes, that the temples were Crayola-colored, that the democracies were empires. But where are we supposed to go from there?
The baby monitor at least is a lighthouse, shining out an image of my child, which is not my child, but provides something to worship that is more comprehensible than my child. We all wind up making our gods, and then turning into our gods, and then the other way around again, ad infinitum. In what corner of the dark can we hide from our desire to find our actual gods? Off-screen somewhere, my child is really there. His image glows. He swims his flowing dreams.
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The ancient Greek Pantarei or Panta Rhei are translated as “everything flows.”