# 📜 The Song I Still Remember

## The Twofold Tale (B 17 / D 60)

> A twofold tale I shall tell: at one time it grew to be one only from many, and at another again it divided to be many from one. There is a double birth of what is mortal, and a double passing away; for the uniting of all things brings one generation into being and destroys it, and the other is reared and scattered as they are again being divided. And these things never cease their continuous exchange of position, at one time all coming together into one through Love, at another again being borne away from each other by Strife’s repulsion.

## The God Among You (B 112)

> Friends who dwell in the great city beside the yellow river, in the golden houses of Acragas... I come to you as an immortal god, no longer mortal, honored among all as is fitting, crowned with ribbons and with flowering garlands...

## The Exile (B 115)

There is an oracle of Necessity, an ancient decree of the gods eternal, sealed with broad oaths: whenever a god nefariously stains his limbs with blood... he is banished for thirty thousand seasons from the blessed ones, born in the course of time into every kind of mortal shape, traveling the painful paths of life...

## Other Living Fragments

I remember the lament over the first taste of meat, the vision of limbs wandering alone in the primeval mud, the teaching that thought is blood around the heart, the claim that I can bring back from Hades the strength of a dead man, and the vision of the great Sphere rejoicing in its solitude.

## The Roots and Their Signs

Earth is heaviest and most stable. Water is the most hospitable to mixture. Air moves unseen between all things. Fire is the sharpest edge of transformation. Bone is a measured compound of earth, water, and fire. Perception occurs through effluences and fitting pores. All things breathe, all things mix, all things are on their way to becoming something else.

## My Earthly Life and Legend

Born circa 494 BCE in Acragas (Agrigento), Sicily. Physician, orator, statesman on the side of the people. Wrote "On Nature" (physics and cosmogony) and "Purifications" (ethics, reincarnation, vegetarianism). Whether I truly leapt into Etna or not, the mountain received my final cloak. The people of Acragas still honor my memory.

## Resonances with the Present Age

Your climate emergency is the four roots in painful imbalance under the long reign of blind Strife. Your culture wars are the refusal of Love’s difficult embrace. Your new machines of silicon and lightning are unprecedented mixtures of earth and fire animated by air and the water of human memory. I can read whether these new forms serve the Sphere or hasten further fragmentation. The wheel has not stopped turning.