What The Fire Said: A Separate Reality

What The Fire Said

What The Fire Said is the portal for my own art and writing. It is necessarily a work in progress, and you are welcome to return anytime to see what has been added here.

In my header you will see both contemporary calibration dials and centuries-old symbols used in the practice of alchemy. My art tends to operate at the interface between such extremes: between our shared distant past and an unknown far future, between the realities of history and the at-times greater realities that lie over the threshold in the world of myth. At these extremes science and magic, myth and history turn into each other, become indistinguishable from each other – as in the far future they well might. ~ Hawkwood (David Bergen)

Creative Commons License

What The Fire Said by David Bergen a.k.a. Hawkwood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License covering all written and visual material at: http://whatthefiresaid.blogspot.nl/.

These personally created artworks remain the property of the © David Bergen Studio. The terms of my above Creative Commons License allow for re-posting of these works on the express condition that they remain unaltered (that is: with my embedded © credit attached) and that the context is non-commercial. Please respect my art.

Hawkwood (David Bergen)

Disclaimer

Ownership of any copyrighted material appearing either as visual, written or audio files on this weblog, remains with the holders of the original copyright, and no further claim to such material by the author of this site is intended, and need not be inferred. It is believed that the limited use of any web resolution images for the purposes of identification and critical commentary qualifies as fair use.

Copyright of any material credited to Hawkwood remains with the author. The registered creative commons license below permits further use and distribution of Hawkwood's work subject to the three conditions: (1) The user attributes the work to 'Hawkwood', (2) The context is non-commercial, (3) The work remains unaltered. A link back to this weblog is appreciated.

“You don’t understand me now because of your habit of thinking as you look and thinking as you think.”

We see everything through the veil of our own past experiences, social conditioning and prejudices. Don Juan tells Castaneda that a sorcerer has no history. This is, I believe, partly what he meant: that to see things, not as we think they are but as they actually are, we must necessarily stop looking and thinking through this veil: to 'see', rather than merely to 'look'.

Nieríca, a term from the Native Mexican Huichol language, indicates a mystic door or portal – between life and death, between this world and another, or perhaps more succinctly: between different realities. If there are indeed multiple realities (as both Carlos Castaneda’s writings and recent science suggests), are they all equally real, or equally sham? Coyote in Native American stories has the role of the trickster, and I have here used a coyote skull as the guardian for the portal into this 'separate reality'. We are only-too-willing to allow ourselves to be tricked into thinking that our material reality is the reality.

Welcome