13: Fire

Read the introduction to this series.

When I was a student, Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space was our bible. It never occurred to me to look for other things he wrote and it turns out that he wrote an entire book on the psychoanalysis of fire.

Which he called a “privileged phenomenon which can explain anything”. 

At one end of Bachelard’s observation lies the contemplative reverie that comes from gazing at flames. At the other, the tragic consequence of playing with fire … and getting burned.

Fire, Bachelard proposes, is fascinating precisely because it is such a study in contradictions, at once intimate and universal.  

“It lives in our heart. It lives in the sky”, he writes. 

“It shines in paradise. It burns in hell.”

Today I am splitting my time between the studio and the greenhouse, where we are installing irrigation that requires something called a solenoid valve. I want the word solenoid to mean something related to the sun, but it’s just a coil of wire. 

Wire coils make me think of mortal coils. When he originated this phrase, William Shakespeare (in Hamlet, Act III, Scene I) was referring to nothing less than human suffering. 

I am again reminded of how universal the Icarus myth has become. Honoring an electrical worker who died many years ago while servicing a power line in China, the poet Robert Masterson writes: