Alone Bad Friend Good

 Why is fire so engaging? I can stare at it for hours. Provided it’s in a pit, or a fireplace and not burning a forest down. Maybe because it’s rare to see energy and nothing is as fascinating as energy, which is normally invisible, because it has no mass, which makes it a very pure thing, or non thing.

“It is so well defined that it has become banal to say, ‘We love to see a log fire burning in the fireplace,’” writes Gaston Bachelard. “In this case it is a question of the quiet, regular, controlled fire that is seen when the great log emits tiny flames as it burns. It is a phenomenon both monotonous and brilliant, a really total phenomenon: it speaks and soars, and it sings. The fire confined to the fireplace was no doubt for man the first object of reverie, the symbol of repose, the invitation to repose. One can hardly conceive of a philosophy of repose that would not include a reverie before a flaming log fire.”

Heraclitus saw fire as the fundamental element giving rise to all the other elements. We are holy because we are warm. Warmth emanates from our bodies. Ergo, fire is divine.

The world is an ever-living fire kindling in measures and being extinguished in measures. Light bursting out of a blackened log. Then gone. Then back again. The big tease. The universe winking at you. I exist. I don’t exist. I’m here. Now I’m not. And there is no I. Unless that one tiny letter is diffused throughout the cosmos. An all-encompassing I, pronoun of pronouns. Amazing how much meaning you can squeeze into a single letter. Looks like a steel beam standing upright. But it’s really just an eye. Eye see eyes. Eyes afire on Shelley’s pyre.

Each individual organism is the universe contemplating itself, & is filled with an inner fire.

In the Pythagorean view, the universe expands outward around a central point, which is its heart, or hearth, and is a fire.

In alchemic tradition, metals are incubated by fire in the womb of the earth. And it’s gold. Gold and red and shades in between, especially those places where it glows and winks out occasionally, or cracks, pops, and a fountain of sparks whirl upward.

There’s something essentially sociable about fire, it wants to be your friend, but there’s always the danger that it’ll get carried away, lose control and destroy everything in sight, like that scene in The Bride of Frankenstein when the monster, played by Boris Karloff, is warmly invited into the house of the blind violinist (played by Australian actor O.P. Heggie) and becomes confused and elated with the tenderness and comfort he’s given. He warms to the violinist and evinces joy and gratitude at the wine and music he’s given. But you don’t know how long this is going to last. The monster has no filter, and feels things with great intensity. There’s that tension, that underlying fear that things could go south very quickly, joy convert instantly to rage.

This is the behavior of fire. Which the monster hates. It’s the one thing he fears most, other than angry villagers. Fire is both bad and good. It contradicts itself, which makes it volatile, highly erratic. You’ve got to keep an eye on it. Drunks, too. You never know what a drunk is going to do. They’re puppets of impulse. All id, no restraint. A mutation of promethean willfulness coupled with the intoxications of raw, unadulterated life. A monster in a blind man’s house. The monster’s pain is largely that of a tortured soul. A soul burning inside like an inflammation, the wound of existence, a miscellany of parts gathered from graves and medical schools sparked into being by a bolt of lightning, the fecundity of chaos. He is a renegade to nature, an unholy alliance between science and spirituality. And as we see him stumble through the forest, wounded and alone, the sound of a violin played by a blind man living in bitter solitude elicits a strange vocalization from the monster, a sound of mingled joy and pain, an exquisite confusion.  

The violinist hears the monster’s vocalizations and goes to investigate, blindly, but with great sensitivity and an open heart. The Frankenstein monster is greeted at the violinist’s door with tender care and loving enthusiasm, which initially perplexes him, and he growls with unabashed hostility. Oh no, you think, this poor man is about to get creamed. But the monster refrains from acting violently. He is invited to be the violinist’s guest and the two get along famously. Seated happily at the table across from his generous host, the monster puffs repeatedly on a big cigar, smiling robustly. In a mournful tone of voice, the violinist confesses to the monster “before you came, I was all alone; it is bad to be alone.” “Alone bad, friend good,” the monster replies in a growl of shared and genuine feeling. A deep connection is made. Rapport is a development of heat and smoke. Fire is a fruit of sympathy and friction. The inner rubbing of warring aporias.

Outside the fantasies of the cinema, in a world where science and technology reign supreme, and the human population is still reeling from a poorly managed pandemic, one most likely caused by a virus leaking from a biolab in Wuhan, China, my wife and I live in a small apartment with no fireplace. Ergo, I have to create one myself, through the exercise of my imagination. I know there are videos of cozy hearthside log fires on YouTube, but the imagination has greater power to invoke the vividness and reality of things. The skull as fireplace. The mind as fire.

Words are the logs that feed the fire. Hence, logos. Logos prophorikos (“the uttered word”) and the logos endiathetos (“the word remaining within”). Crackle of rhetoric. Ribbons of reverie.

Of course, if I were truly cold and needed a fire, imagining a fire wouldn’t help much. The imagination is boundless, but it’s of little practical use in the real world. “Oh, who can hold a fire in his hand / By thinking on the frosty Caucasus,” asks Henry Bolingbroke shortly after being exiled by Richard II.

There are, fortunately, substitutes for a fireplace. Baseboard heaters that spew heat as soon as I twist the thermostat up. A small apartment heats fast. There’s not much poetry to it, but the luxury of getting warm so effortlessly allows me to sit back in comfort with an imaginary fire on my mind and an infinite number of words to keep feeding it, and a wife and a cat for company.

And, too, I’m being a little too literal when it comes to fire. If I throw enough words on the fire, the imaginary fire, the fire of the mind in its hearth of bone, the fire will extend its metaphorical heat and radiate the room with multiple enthusiasms. “Everything that suddenly lights up,” writes James Hillman, “draws our joy, flares with beauty – each bush a god burning: this is the alchemical sulfur, the flammable face of the world, its phlogiston, its aureole of desire, enthymesis everywhere. That fat of goodness we reach toward as consumers is the active image in each thing, the active imagination of the anima mundi that fires the heart and provokes it out.”