Fire.
Fire is my new concept-obssession.
Everything is fire now.
Fire, heat, the movement of magma are the measures.
Fire is another word for vitality, my companion of two years. But with an edge of danger.
It forces the recognition that life includes and happens through violence, destruction, transformation. It includes death.
There are things in me I want to die.
Which is to say there is an I that I want to die so another thing can take over.
(Maybe that's why I like playing tug-of-war with the I-concept; fuck the self.)(In São Paulo I watched a performance called Foda-se eu, Fuck me, or Fuck the self, wishing for this discussion to be everywhere right now).
I've been tending to the fire.
My vitality quest became a cultivation of fire. The original question was "what affects me", and now that I could identify one thing or another that gets me aroused
(arousal as engagement of the senses pointing toward a desire, which then opens the subjective & physiological systems for exchange),
it becomes a quest for maintaining, tending, feeding, nourishing the fire. For noticing what its light makes appear, what its smoke drives away, what its heat attracts, and at what point it burns what has gathered close.
Too close.
I bite.
Schopenhauer's hedgehog dilemma was a Big Deal for me when I first encountered it. It goes something like this: in the winter, the hedgehogs need to cuddle up to survive, they need the shared heat of their bodies, but when they get close they prickle each other. So, what is the distance that allows for survival with minimum damage?
I later learned Schopenhauer was kind of an ass, an ironically passionate ass, only passionate for dread, and no longer wish to associate with him (plus, my therapist is team Spinoza and I'm there with him since the first session).
Fire re-purposes the same dilemma, right?
I've been thinking how to tend to my fire without burning those close. And I've been thinking there are definitely bridges I want to burn. And I've been thinking, I'm thinking now as I type, that if vitality is fire then there are several fires running around, feeding and mixing each other; making each other great or quickly fizzing out, and that the danger is perhaps not to burn, but to consume: a fire so bright you can't see anything else; a fire so hot that it all becomes one and the same. And of course, there are fires weak and wispy that struggles to stay lit, embers demanding care.
Susana, I want to share the poem you shared, because this, too, is fuel and light:
A man of the Neguá people, on the coast of Colombia, was able to climb to the high heaven. On his return, he told a story. He said he had contemplated, from above, human life. And said that we are a sea of little fires.
The world is that — he revealed — a cluster of people, a sea of little fires.
Each person shines with their own light among all others. No two fires are alike. There are large fires and small fires and fires of all kinds and colors. There are people of serene fire, unaware of the existence of wind, and people of crazy fire, who fill the air with sparks. Some fires, foolish fires, do not shine or burn; but others burn life so heartily you cannot observe them without stopping to blink, and whoever gets close, flares up.
Despite its tameness, the candle's flame contains all that is necessary to cause a disaster. Even a meek thing can be afraid of its own power.
So it becomes a quest of directing, discerning. How to choose what to burn, and why. How to burn carefully, attentively. Burn so the ashes enrich the soil. Burn so the heat continues to generate movement.
Fire is also an expression of heat: it only happens out there consuming oxygen, in friction,, dancing with an external world, a social world. So, not the internal flame you might have been imagining, but fire as the outward result of handling vitality. As speed and movement and interaction.
It becomes a quest of how to share fire, feed fire, amplify each other's fire. Agitation, keep it up.
Fire is the sun and the magma, it is gravity and magnetism. One day I want to make a sanguine dance in an ode to all forms of searing heat. Here, let me write a dance:
Magma moving. Steady. Magma continuous burning of a surface. Burning erasing.
Magma, first. Then blood. Warmth breaking skin. Heavy, not slow. Nourishment requires time, nothing is immediate.
Fire. A flash, a sudden sharp light: that's the definition of a lightning bolt. Isn't it? Bursts. Quick bursts of white, a white blinding flash tells you how hot it is.
A sensuous dance. Libido, it's all the same: anger and pain and eagerness and joy and extremes of sweet and sour and what if tiredness is just a quality? Don't think about it terms of quantity, think about qualities: summer after tiredness and then the spring of decomposition.
Traversing lava, consistency. Heavy and warm and breathy. Heavy but still fast. More than a sauna, less than a burning sun. More like a sun. Gravity. Gravity and spin, hum and roar. Agitated particles burning breaking skin. A wave comes furious and unforgiving, masking as a surface ripple: take distance, see how it changes. The anger is still there. Lava washing, lava lava, washes: lavando lavar leve levar: take away it all, wash and push, to the other side, better put it there. A washing that cauterizes. Steam.
Steam lost in a mirror.
The blue flames are safe. It looks like it is over, it isn't. Raising intensity, piercing gaze, palpable tension. Tongue out, face stretched, menacing. The menace is desire.
Melting. Melting is delicious, sliding pieces of the most tender meat. Loose blood irrigating it all. There's a moaning that opens space, a yawning that forgets what needs to be forgotten. The trail of pleasure makes formalities irredeemable. Soft flames of a radiating ember. So dense and so hot like the sun, precisely as hot as it could be, but now contained, circled, contoured. Now hard, brittle. Now about to explode, and it doesn't. Lava into crust, no fissures anymore. Constant humming. Infuriating. Constant humming. Infuriating. Humming core. Movement conquered. This intensity is asking something of you.
Acute burst. Acute shift. Sudden transformation. There's no death, death is ongoing. Burning sensations.
And then take it all away.
Starting today, every edition of Betraying Gestures will feature a recommended cultural artifact. To kick it off, I would like to put forward my enthusiasm for the brilliance of the Heavyweight podcast.
We all have our share of unresolved stories, emotions, stories of emotions --- and in Heavyweight Johnathan Goldstein fashions himself into an unlikely "investigative therapist", shamelessly seeking to re-connect each episode's protagonists to the missing pieces of their personal narratives. It is a testament to the transformative power of curiosity, generosity and commitment to the affections that inhabit us, and the power of acknowledging our entanglements --- however painful, little hedgehog, it might prove to be. The courage and sensibility of this project make it my favorite english-language podcast, and I've never seen or heard any piece of media quite like it.