The Arrow

Laura Earle demands to be let out by climbing the door and sometimes swinging from the knob. I tried to capture her doing that but I kept getting blurry images. In this detail, however, her head looks like that of an arrow, which took me on a few roads of memory.

The arrow was once a new and innovative weapon, going beyond what the spear could do. To throw or thrust the spear was part of close, hand-to-hand combat, as Euripides wrote in Heracles,

But the man whose hands know how to aim the bow,
holds the one best weapon: a thousand arrows shot,
he still has more to guard himself from death.
He stands far off, shooting at foes who see
only the wound the unseen arrow plows,
while he himself, his body unexposed,
lies screened and safe. This is best in war:
to preserve yourself and to hurt your foe
unless he stands secure, beyond your range.

Another arrow/spear memory is from my boyhood. There was a meadow near my house where a certain species of spear grass grew. When it was ripe, or in the right season, we would pull the little spears from the top of the plant and throw them at each other. Those things hurt! Here is exactly what we did, but only the very beginning of the little video shows the grass itself. I am quite sure that this is the same type of spear grass as grew on that long-vanished field.