I had been sitting in front of the computer for more than half an hour with no usable idea. So I let the next song in my headphones title the page. My brain had not fully woken up. In that state, where the subconscious still has the floor, the song’s name produced a strange, abstract image in my head.
I used to keep a record of my dreams, which is why I can say with some confidence that fire almost never appears in them. The only time it did was a dream about heretics, and I was not the one tied to the stake.
As a child I secretly played with fire at home. I arranged a pile of matches into something like the frame of a house and lit it. I loved the sharp crack at the moment a match catches and the smell left after it is put out—sulfur, or sulfur dioxide, depending on who is naming it. When I finally tried to extinguish the little fire, I poured a cup of water over it. A mass of flame rushed up past my head. I frightened myself badly enough that I mentally played out the whole plot: the house burned to nothing, and we had nowhere left to live. Then the flames slowly died down, and I understood something less neat than water simply defeating fire. Fire and water do not obey a one-way logic of opposition.
After that I stopped playing with fire, and I barely bothered with firecrackers at New Year. Looking back at the childhood scare as an adult, I do not think it became fear. If it had, I would expect fire to return as a nightmare image. It almost never does. It is closer to awe—a recognition of fire’s more abstract authority. Another sign: I still like the smell of sulfur, phosphorus, and their compounds. Hot springs, matches, even gunpowder. I have gone looking for perfumes that advertised a gunpowder smell. The ones I found mostly smelled like gunpowder before it burns—wood and dust. They had skipped the part that causes destruction and fear.
In some clinical psychology, fire and water are treated as opposed elements. A person who washes their hands constantly, who cannot touch objects without wiping them down, may look like a case of cleanliness, but the underlying theme can be sexual repression. Someone drawn to watching things burn, or who reaches for fire first when dealing with ordinary mess, can be mapped onto sexual expansion. The interesting question is which one has the higher libido, or a more uncontainable pursuit of sex. It seems obvious: repression. They are using the ritual to suppress their own desire, and that does not make the desire disappear. It is the cup of water thrown onto a burning fire. The water flashes into steam and lifts more burning material outward; the fire finds a larger field.
Of course, clinical psychology has to be approached with real circumstances and individual histories. Not every person who cleans is repressed, and not everyone who likes watching a flame is expanding. The mapping is not a diagnosis.
I once told a story under the old saying that the good swimmer drowns. It is the closest I know to a death caused by fire, though strictly speaking electricity belongs to metal in the five elements. I only knew the death through neighbors’ gossip; I heard words like charred and electrocuted, so I filed it under fire.
In college I rented in an old building. The flat still used an old fuse box and fuse wire. In winter, when the load was high, the fuse would burn out. In that flat, the only person who knew how to replace it was me, a humanities student. Each time I changed the fuse, the older students held flashlights and told me to be careful. I wanted to laugh. If I really did get shocked, they would immediately grab me to pull me away, and then one humanities student and two science students with no practical sense would all die in a dark winter night.
While I twisted the fuse wire, I did think of a charred body. I never saw the neighbor who died, but the adults’ descriptions gave me a picture. It was a forced desensitization: if electricity scares you, look at every fear electricity can produce; then you learn awe. News images did the same—a fisherman whose rod touched a high-voltage line, his organs blown out of his body in an instant. When the fuse was fixed, the death images vanished as if they had never appeared. Light drives out darkness; courage drives out fear. But the fuse still sizzled sometimes, reminding me that next time I would have to face those images and the real current again.
Eventually I told the landlord to help with the breaker. Her husband came, looked at how the fuse was fixed, and asked if we had hired someone to repair it. I shrugged and said I had changed it. He looked puzzled. I could read the paradox on his face: my appearance and my major did not match the person who replaces fuses. I wanted to tell him that every time I changed one, I had already died once, in a series of electrocution images, and time stopped while I slowly twisted the wire into something that looked like an electrician’s work. He would have thought I was ill.
My last fire scene is from high school. The building across from ours, on the same floor, caught fire. I called 119 calmly, then sat on the bay window and watched. In my head I built the progress of destruction inside the flames.
Glass bottles burst; whatever liquid they held might be useless or fuel. A cat hides inside the sofa in terror, but the fire has already reached the upholstery. A child home alone doing homework hides in a wardrobe. I can only pray he passes out from lack of oxygen before the fire reaches him; at least that would be an easier death. A woman is with her lover while her husband is at work. When the fire rises, she may think their death is the cruelest joke in the world—two bodies still tangled in bed, everyone believing her husband died in the flames too. At that point, would the husband want to survive carrying that public shame? A depressed man tried to kill himself with charcoal, not wanting to be a burden. He sees the fire spread to the floor above and to neighbors. The ending is the opposite of what he wanted. Does he want to live now, or does he want to die notorious?
Fire and death, burning and destruction, ruin and rebirth: a cruel and contradictory philosophy.
Life doesn’t mean a thing We will all burn to the ground We will all burn to the ground Love is the only thing We will all burn to the ground We will all burn to the ground
— “We All Burn To The Ground,” MISSIO