Fire: 22 de julio de 2015
Fire licks, slurps, and crackles happily, depending on the type of wood. I want a bonfire to swallow my night whole, stars and moon and wine and words. I think of Sam McGee. I think of his mystery bestowed upon me as a white-haired child, sitting upon someone’s knee. I edge away from the powerful, burning heat.
The wood that burns now has many holes and compartments and spaces filled with air. Earlier the parrots and doves and tiny, unidentified, colorful, sparrow-like birds feasted upon beetles and worms and other bugs from the very same crevices that now leak with fire. Orange embers break apart, almost meltingly, and the wood cracks and creaks and falls, becomes smaller, adjusting itself according to the laws of gravity and physics.
Fire is magic, a transformer of energy. It eats and eats and eats, gorging itself, growing heavier, brighter. But where does its food go? It wisps and smokes away into the night, no longer of the same form or element. We never see wood changing into anything else but wood, just shrinking into itself, covered by blue-yellow flames. Flames devouring, conquering, piling embers upon embers, growing until the inevitable shifting fall. My fire is always hungry for more, my wood always too fragile to sustain it.
We stare intently into the fire, dreaming of lost possibilities, of past goals and desires now irrelevant for the ever-turning wheel of time, of planets circling the sun, of me loving you. Maybe we could say that smoke is that half-glance between worlds, you’ll never hold it the way you used to hold her. You’ll never capture it the way you have captured your prey, your enemies, your own weaknesses brought into the light, unnoticed by others but glaringly obvious to you.
Humid wood curls as it is eaten by fire. It never just burns, it squeals and sizzles and bends. It changes color, resisting until the very end, where it is overcome by nature and succumbs to something greater. Have you, in the past, ever felt yourself melting, succumbing to something greater? Greater, not better. Have you ever shriveled into yourself after hearing the condescending words of your elders? Have you ever burnt yourself with boiling water? Or shrieked and jumped at the sight of a spider scuttling across your skin? What can we learn about those moments? What can we say about ourselves, having lived through such experiences?
For me it is a game of energy, always energy, and it will never cease to be so. Fire is a formidable energy source. Haven’t you ever felt that frustration of not being able to light or build a fire? There you have the yin and the yang, all the contradictions of the universe highlighted in one simple example.
1. get hella blunted
2. build a fire
3. stare into the flames and watch the whole world move
And when there are no more flames, but only embers brightening in any breeze, you blow on them and ashes fly away like startled birds, revealing orange and red-hot coal, and maybe a new flame enlivened by your breath.
Now is the time to add fuel to the fire. Now is the time to add more wine to your glass, to spurt out words previously unknown. Now is the time to search for light in the darkest places.