[Image: “Untitled (History Painting)” (2013), by Korakrit Arunanondchai. For his “History Painting” series, says the Nasher Museum of Art’s Web site, “Arunanondchai bleached scraps of denim and set them on fire. The flames were then photographed, printed and placed behind the burnt areas of the fabric, giving the illusion of a continuous, live burn. As documentation of the flames, the photographs function to capture a moment in the denim’s history. They also serve to mend the very holes caused by the fire.” The image shown here — a photograph of a photographic (etc.) mixed-media work — doesn’t begin to capture the impact of the work itself… which really does appear to be burning.]
There’s a trick to genuinely knowing yourself, I think — a trick of balancing: balancing on a knife edge between seeing yourself (and your effects, your influence) everywhere, and seeing yourself (and your effects, your influence) not at all. I don’t know that I’ll ever master the trick (I stand, wobbling, on that blade, certain that only with very great luck will I never slip and fall astraddle it (yeesh)). But, yeah, I’m aware of the trick. And I sometimes have to remind myself of it, especially when I encounter philosophical statements which seem to encourage me to disappear, to let myself be absorbed into the cosmos, carrying or expressing no self at all.
All of which came to mind as I read this selection from whiskey river (which quoted the last stanza alone):
Another Night in the Ruins
1
In the evening
haze darkening on the hills,
purple of the eternal,
a last bird crosses over,
‘flop flop,’ adoring
only the instant.2
Nine years ago,
in a plane that rumbled all night
above the Atlantic,
I could see, lit up
by lightning bolts jumping out of it,
a thunderhead formed like the face
of my brother, looking down
on blue,
lightning-flashed moments of the Atlantic.3
He used to tell me,
“What good is the day?
On some hill of despair
the bonfire
you kindle can light the great sky—
though it’s true, of course, to make it burn
you have to throw yourself in…”4
Wind tears itself hollow
in the eaves of these ruins, ghost-flute
of snowdrifts
that build out there in the dark:
upside-down ravines
into which night sweeps
our cast wings, our ink-spattered feathers.5
I listen.
I hear nothing. Only
the cow, the cow of such
hollowness, mooing
down the bones.6
Is that a
rooster? He
thrashes in the snow
for a grain. Finds
it. Rips
it into
flames. Flaps. Crows.
Flames
bursting out of his brow.7
How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?
(Galway Kinnell [source])
And then I read this passage in Diane Ackerman’s Deep Play (not, of course, from whiskey river):
Once, at an artists’ colony on a Florida estuary, thirty of us gathered to celebrate the summer solstice with song and ritual. In stilted-up cottages connected by raised walkways, we lived along the estuary like a troupe of wild macaques nestled among the green bosoms of the trees, high above a dense forest floor that leprosy-prone armadillos shared with wild pigs, raccoons, foxes, and pine snakes. Spanish moss hung everywhere like scribbles of DNA. Gathering outside my house to celebrate summer solstice, we each wrote a wish on a small pennant of paper, and tossed the chits into the fire, where they burst into flames and danced on hot vapors into the night. Like fireflies, our unspoken hopes flashed toward heaven. Seated at that solstice campfire, I watched each paper wish tremble into flame for a moment and kite higher and higher until it joined the others in a bouquet of sparks, then mingled with the constellations and vanished into night.
(Diane Ackerman [source])
Fire carries such powerful metaphorical weight: safety (in the form of light and warmth) from the outside world, danger, power, the flickering transience of life… Maybe we need to give fire a rest, instead of requiring it to carry our selves as well as a symbol of so much else.
