Fire
If we put the two most common associations with fire together, we get an interesting idea. On the one hand, fire means destruction. We think of wildfires and grand scale destruction. Even on the micro level, we recognize that fire requires fuel: that nothing we give to fire survives. On the other hand, fire has been a precious protector of humankind. It warms us, enables us to cook, and gives us light. It is often a sign of hope.
Our understanding of fire is not only dual, but holistic, in the sense that we believe it to contain or be opposites. This is mirrored in its etymological roots: Proto-Indo-European has two roots for fire: one that means “inanimate” and one that means “animate.” In fact, fire has popped up all over the linguistic map: we say “where’s the fire?”, “play with fire,” and “my heart’s on fire,” so frequently that we’ve come to recognize these phrases as units of meaning separate from the presence of a word that technically describes a natural phenomenon of atoms heating up to the point at which they break free as volatile gases.
In each of these phrases, the commonality is intensity. “Where’s the fire?” has to do with haste, “play with fire” has to do with danger, and “my heart’s on fire” has to do with passion. What can we deduce from these linguistic embodiments of fire?
That fire is quick and all consuming—that the stakes are high. But also that we are drawn to it. There is a reason we cannot help passing our finger back and forth through a candle’s flame, why we are mesmerized watching fire. Research has shown that we are fixated by watching fire because our brains can’t find a pattern: every moment is completely original.
I also have a sneaking suspicion that we are drawn to fire because of the simplicity of its needs, and its un-self-conscious vacillation in form and magnitude based on what it is given. A single candle flame peacefully burns for as long as the wax remains, and then sputters out. The spark from a campfire ignites a small brush pile, and then a tree, and then tens of thousands, if not a million acres. Fire has a linear relationship between its needs and the results.
We as humans, on the other hand, aren’t quite so neat. We try to minimize what we appear to need while simultaneously stockpiling as much as we can. We are wedded to a constant quest of appearing self sufficient, when really what we feel is lack, or that we are on the brink of lack. When more is poured into us—whether it is success, praise, and security, or the inverse of pain, humiliation, failure—we don’t tend to respond in proportional ways. We either over-emphasize or minimize. Perhaps this is where the notion of a ‘naked flame’ comes from: our intuitive sense that fire is somehow more honest than we are, and therefore more embodied.
Returning to the root dualism of fire as “inanimate” and “animate,” this envy, wonder, and awe we hold begins to make more sense. Fire is profoundly other to us, and yet it is easy to anthropomorphize because of the way it moves. Sure, we think, it’s not us, it’s not living as we are, and yet it is difficult to think of fire as ‘dead’ or inanimate. How could something in-animate (lacking spirit) dance like that, feed like that, have such a strong, definitive relationship to other living things?
Ultimately, it seems that a western binary of animate and inanimate is the wrong framework to reconcile this question. Interpretations of the natural world that are cyclical, or that understand opposites to feed directly back into each other, offer a much better way of comprehending the holistic polarity of fire. Fire devours and kills, and it is also a bringer and protector of life.
If we examine our lives closely, we are likely to find far more instances of this cyclical polarity than we might guess. It is easier for opposites to stay, well, opposite, then to accept that, as my uncle once put it, “anything pushed far enough, long enough, becomes its opposite.”
Words - Finnegan Shepard www.finneganshepard.com
Photography - Mischa de Stroumillo www.mischadestroumillo.com