Heroes Not Zombies

Today’s woodprint is another Hokusai. It shows a group of five hunters warming themselves in front of a roaring fire in the middle of winter.
I think anyone looking at this will be struck by the vivid representation of the fire. The flames and smoke, maybe even the heat (because you can see heat sometimes, can’t you?” leap up as tall as the men and flow, driven by the wind, towards the mountains and the sky.
I then looked at the hunters. A curious group! Why is one of them actually sitting on the snow? Is he drunk? And another one, apparently determined to warm up his bum! Maybe he’d also been sitting on the snow and was now trying to dry his breeks! Then one of them who is warming his hands is obviously finding the fire so hot that while trying to get his hands as close as he can to the fire, he is simultaneously trying to get his face and his body away from it!
They do look a lively bunch, and I suppose my first thought was about human beings inventing fire and how much that had changed the course of history. Our ability to start fires and generate heat enables us to survive cold conditions, explore places we’d previously been unable to explore, as well as warding off wild animals, and greatly diversifying our diet once we applied fire as a method of food preparation (otherwise known as cooking!) – which reminds me about the Netflix series, “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” and, their, Cooked  by Michael Pollan. I’m a big fan of Michael Pollan, and often recall his fabulous, seven word best diet recommendation – “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much”

But then my mind flipped to the more symbolic level and I saw in the woodcut two of the four great elements – fire and water. Fire in the hunter’s bonfire, and water in the form of snow and ice surrounding them.
Flames always reach upwards, don’t they? Which is probably partly why the alchemical symbol for fire is an upward pointing triangle. Traditionally, both, the fire and the upward pointing triangle, are associated with the male principle.

I’m not talking gender here, but the centuries old understanding of male and female principles as symbolic forces. The Sun, a fiery ball, is often associated with the male principle, while the Moon, with the female.

In the Tarot, The Emperor and the Empress make a similar pair.

In the yin yang symbol, which powerfully conveys the concepts of dynamism and wholeness, the feminine, yin, and the masculine, yang, are shown as equals.

Maybe it’s because my train of thought went off down that track of the unions of these forces, of the power of such coupling, but the next thing I noticed were the two trees on the right hand side of the image. The one, nested into the forked branches of the other. Am I just imagining something here? Or was Hokusai showing us something very important…..how reality is created by connections, by the embrace of fundamental principles or forces. That reminded me of Carlos Rovelli’s beautiful phrase where he explains why we should think in terms of events instead of objects –

The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events. The difference between things and events is that things persist in time, events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical “thing”: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not stones.
(from “Reality is Not What it Seems”)

I’ve written more about that idea in my book, “Unique in All the World”.