Fire
As the yearly heat begins again, the city comes to life. With lockdown eased, the roads pulsate with cars, and the terraces of bars are brimming with drinkers and diners. Those eerie days of March, of emptiness and birdsong-haunted avenues, have started to recede. Perhaps all this will be a memory soon. How much normality will be restored, if any?
To celebrate the easing of the quarantine, I get up early in the mornings, and visit Barcelonetta, for a morning dip in the ocean. On the beach, there’s a festive atmosphere, a tongue-in-cheek game of cat-and-mouse with the police. Officially, nobody’s allowed to sunbathe, only swim and sport. The various groups sprawling on the sand shift into yoga poses and lackadaisical workouts whenever officers come near, reverting to supine once the danger’s passed.
At night I keep the windows open, despite the rowdy neighbours, to feel a flow of cold wind on my face. The luxury won’t last forever. Soon the fires of day will simmer through the night. Barcelona summers are sweltering.
Astrology denotes three kinds of fire. At a basic level, the fire of action, of Aires, the sexual fire that warms our wants and dreams: a moody Mars chasing after Venus. Then there is the artistic fire of self-expression, of Leo and the ego, of performance and drama and drama-queens. Above them all, the philosophical fire of Sagittarius, the sacred, seeker’s fire that expands our minds and pushes us toward higher knowledge.
The Seeker, Varanasi, 2007. Thomas Helm.
Jorge Luis Borges once suggested that universal history is nothing more than the history of the various intonations of a few metaphors. His comment seems particularly pertinent when we consider the innumerable manifestations of Sagittarian fire. God famously talks to Moses from a burning bush. The Gnostics and the Orphics speak of the spirit as a divine spark within. Modern physicists conceive of the universe in terms of energy. In René Char’s Fureur et Mystère, there’s a hint of a more secular divine:
On ne se bat bien que pour les causes qu'on modèle soi-même et avec lesquelles on se brûle en s'identifiant.
(We only fight for causes that serve as models for the self and with which we burn in identification.)
The idea of “burning in identification” evokes the intensity of contact with higher knowledge.
A sense of danger, or brokenness, often accompanies the fires of wisdom. We get to where we are only because of suffering. As Oscar Wilde once said, experience is simply the name we give to mistakes. In a later aphorism, Char remarks: la lucidité est la blessure la plus reprochée du soleil. (Lucidity is the sun’s most reproachable wound). The words lucidity (from Latin, lux), enlightenment and illumination suggest that wisdom, or knowledge, is inseparable from light. And light is only possible with fire.
One of the clearest intonations of the wisdom-suffering paradigm is the Catholic doctrine of felix culpa or the “happy fall”. The glory of reunion with God and the Garden of Eden exceeds and exonerates the horror of the fall. Interestingly enough, Wilde converted to catholicism on his deathbed. In one of his essays he speaks admiringly of felix culpa. Beneath the mask of a charming dilettante, one suspects that Wilde was actually a deeply-souled man whose art for art’s sake was merely one of many postures.
I digress. One could fill pages with examples of divine fire. I haven’t even mentioned the Zoroastrians and their temples whose candles are never allowed to go out.
During lockdown, the labyrinths of the world were mostly out of service. In that hiatus, I composed a song about the agonies of earthly fire. Its hero is a morbid, mournful type, disdainful of his own wants, longing for a purer reality (or perhaps just a different kind of fire.)
I called the song Valhalla as a homage to the legendary guitarist John Fahey:
I’ll try to explain
My love was not in vain
Though sunken in a dream
Wisdom sees with painI wandered all this earth
Hungry for glory
To fill the space she left
And win my name and fameThis hero’s not for me
All men desire the same
They howl and beat their fist
For scraps of destinyI’d rather a kiss
From my love who was kind
She vanished in the spring
No glory makes her mineSee me on the night train
To Valhalla
Searching for sun again
In ValhallaIf I try to atone
For errors of my past
There are not worlds to fill
The dreams that drag my heartI wandered all this earth
Hungry for glory
Showed the wind my sword
A fire of many flamesThis hero’s not for me
All men desire the same
They howl and beat their fist
For scraps of destinyI’d rather a kiss
From my love who was kind
She vanished in the spring
No glory makes her mineSee me on the night train
To Valhalla
Searching for sun again
In Valhalla
A raw, sexual fire has a potential to wreak havoc in this world. The Jesuit priest Ippolito Desideri describes the fires of hell as “boundless, shoreless and bottomless”. The ego’s fire out of control, perhaps? Recent forest fires in Australia and California double as symbols of climate change. Irresponsible greed hastens the arrival of hell on earth. If capitalist economies don’t stop burning fossil fuels soon, our planet could become a giant furnace.
In the Greek tradition, it is fire and not fruit that represents forbidden knowledge. While the devil descends to hell, Prometheus is bound by chains in the abyss for his gift of fire to mankind. The firebombs of Dresden, the napalm of Vietnam, the nuclear explosions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with global warming, seem to suggest that mankind is mostly incapable of power.
Paradoxically, unimaginable destruction is also a source of life. On the cosmic level, our solar system was formed when a star exploded billions of years ago. The subsequent dust and debris created a solar nursery in which new stars and planets were born. The laws of energy conservation insist that nothing is ever created or destroyed, only transferred between forms. Our bodies, the earth, the solar system, are forged from the dead embers of ancient fires.
We are, quite literally, the stuff that stars are made of.