No Man can step into the same river twice |
Issue 11
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πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει [...] δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης.
Ἡράκλειτος Everything is motion. As Heraclitus says. Furthermore, we could attempt to say that the constant motion of consciousness is always a perfect reflection of the constant motion of the world around it. But we, great apes, tend to perceive it as fixed, once and for all, either within our single or collective memory. Using another metaphor, it could be pictured like, for instance, the moving leaves of a branch on a tree under a gust of wind. These leaves are at the same time visibly in motion, but by nature indeed not. The leaves can only move when pushed by the invisible hand of the wind, and solely at this occasion. The wind being itself the true force that seems to give the impression of life to them. This gust of wind is actually in its turn merely air driven around the surface of the globe primarily by its rotation, and its magnetic force. It always keeps changing direction and strength, driven by those multiple and complex factors. But on its own, sheer air couldn't get in motion too, it is driven by another force even more secretive, but constant by essence, as mentioned before, the geophysic energy of the Globe. The river, which Heraclitus uses in his metaphor, was and will never be crossed actually, and it can not be. The crossing of the river participates in the Invention of Reality by the brain of great apes that we are, it is an illustration of all those ceaseless moments that can not be truly captured. The cognitive activity of the mind being, within the brain, the same kind of secretive force that gives motion to the wind, and thus to the leaves of the tree. One will never go back to that precise moment crossed once and for all, like the stream of a flowing river could be. Even though the active cognitive process of the memory remembers it still, as one could say, just to clearly identify it inside Reality, once again at its occurrence. It therefore unravels the process of any given moment or condition set inside a common and identified pattern, but which can be actually experienced only once in a lifetime by any of us. Aging is the process of what we great apes call Death at its termination. While on a daily basis, we go on living from one moment to another, just wasting time, this for the best possible use we can make of it in our eyes. This action being the sole possible motion of being alive. Fate could be witnessed also here as a decisive and apex moment, within a span of a lifetime, with Death set as its symbolic limitation. It is defined in general as the an encompassing reason or explanation of Reality itself, that is to say the Universe around us. It could obviously here be argued that nothing ever dies totally, but always turns into something else in the end. It’s a scientifically proven fact. Here, what we could call the Invention of Death, is precisely what brings to any given mind the delusion that we, great apes, all live our lives in a linear form. The crossing of the same river, over and over, could be interpreted at contrario to be working like a circle. A circle in which, somehow like trapped inside a cage, the mind seeking for a rational conclusion to its existence, would be continuously spinning without purpose upon itself. The target of the Invention of Death and thus of Fate, is to give to the human mind the illusion of being a single original entity, standing alone in this Universe, identified by an original given name for instance. This individual soul is thus set within this definition of itself as separated from what surrounds it. It is usually seen as ontological and stable, in opposition to an ever changing reality revolving around it. The recollection of a given moment while experiencing another one, often tends to give to the great apes that we are, the feeling of having already lived through a given situation somehow remembered by us, as out of some previous life for instance. This event could be interpreted as the coming and going of the prescience of death, on tiptoes, within our brain cells. This is what we commonly call the Human Mind, acting through the recollection of previous encounters, it quite frequently gives us the illusion of some sort a logic to Life, where there is possibly none to be found. Like the wind moving the leaves of a tree by a window on a summer day, this force, being invisible in our eyes, brings us back to an isolated moment, far away entrenched in our past, that actually can never be lived twice within a lifetime, as it is fantastically depicted here in Heraclitus’ metaphor. |
IVAN DE MONBRISON
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