What The Fire Said: An Arrow already in Flight

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)

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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)

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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.

The 5th-century BCE philosopher Zeno of Elea devised engaging paradoxes whose logic seems flawless, but which defy our everyday experience. One of his better-known paradoxes claims that an arrow in flight cannot actually move, because it already is occupying the space where it is, so cannot progress towards the space where it is not, and it cannot move to where it is, because it is already there. Our practical experience tells us that the shaft will find its mark in spite of Zeno's whimsical reality-defying reasoning, which has the arrow frozen motionless both in time and in space.

From Ancient Greece to an Ancient Egypt shrouded in gods and myths, and the semi-mythical figure known to the Egyptians as Thoth, and to the Greek mystery schools as Hermes Trismegistus: Hermes the Thrice-great. One of the sayings attributed to Hermes is:

"Death is an arrow already in flight, and our life lasts only as long as it takes to reach us."

Expressing not so much a gloomy fatalism as more of a profound acceptance, embracing the truth of this statement can bring a sense of peace, and with it a simple consolation. At this lengthening-shadows time of my life, I find much peace in Hermes' statement. But I also have a sense of there being so much for me still to do, and a part of me kind of hopes that Zeno's charmingly whimsical logic might stay the arrow long enough for me to complete what I feel is needed of me.

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