My Fire Fixation
I never feel as alive or as contemplative as when staring into and stoking flames
With both hands I seize a hunk of wood the size of a footstool, and fling it in the fire. Which roars in delight at this new offering, swallows it down into its flaming maw, leaps higher, eager for more. We prance about the pyre like fevered dervishes, zealous acolytes in thrall to our new god.
Fuelled in part by beer, for sure. But mainly something more primeval. The human love of fire itself. Our ancestral saviour and protector in the lonely darkness.
The scene plays out on a small plot of woodland owned by a friend’s father in the countryside of Kent, in southeast England. We’ve been invited to spend the weekend at what is, according to the local planning laws, supposed to be a trailer. Good luck towing that bloated behemoth down the winding track that leads here. It’s more like some vast Scandinavian log cabin — it’s even got a sauna for fuck’s sake!
But the real appeal of the setting, the memory that still burns bright within me, is the chance to indulge in some primitive slash-and-burn revelry. The forest, or rather wood, or rather copse, needs thinning. One more skilled in tree husbandry than us wannabe savages has marked a few trunks for the slaughter. Destined to die, that their brethren might live more fully.
We grab some axes, get the chainsaws growling, and delightedly oblige.
To complete the rite and close the circle, the wood must be devoured that night. Not by ourselves, of course. We are replete with an outstanding sausage casserole courtesy of our host, and several crates of potent French beers shipped over from an hypermarché in another friend’s van.
The timber will instead be consumed by the living effigy we are to build in homage to human heritage, to our species of nomadic campfire dwellers. Wherever we light our kindling, that’s our home.
This is what the act of making fire means to me. And to all of us, I believe. Not that a fire is made, as such. It is instead coaxed and conjured into existence, and must then be tended to, petted and caressed. It is a fickle and demanding djinn. But it is in the need for that relationship to be nurtured that its true value lies.
It grants us time and space to be ourselves, stripped back to what we once were. Before we were even born. The flame of our ancestors reflects in our jaded eyeballs, breathing and willing them back into a lust for life.
Whether dancing Dionysian dithyrambs around a communal blaze, or sat cross-legged on a beach beside a lonely bivouac, poking at a driftwood hearth, the inner meaning is the same.
I have relived that ritual countless times, and countless more await. Around country cottage fireplaces, backyard braziers, festive bonfires. I gaze into the flames, and they most certainly gaze back into me. The same magic pulses in the complex rhythms of the embers at any time of year.
But it is in winter that its touch is keenest.
The time has come. The nights draw in. The wolven wind worries at the window frames. We need a fire!
The house I now call home is a solid, stone affair, a century old or more. We had its peeling walls and cracked tiles renovated to habitability when we moved in. One element, though, remains untouched — the brick-built fireplace. It is old and grimy, a toothless peasant mouth agape amid our newly painted and upholstered living room.
But it is beautiful to me.
Just as fire itself calls me back to an age before my birth, allows me to commune with my long-lost ascendants, so the untouched hearth serves as a link to the generations who once dwelled in the home that for the moment is entrusted to our custody. The wrought iron grate harks back to village smithies, the heat-cracked bricks to kilns of yore.
And as I squat before it, shifting logs just so, to tempt the flames to lick and tickle that far corner into life, I slip out of time. I meditate. I commune. I am serene, at peace. And yet imbued with an ancestral, vital urge. My poker is a sword with which I forge my destiny. I am become fire.
I will one day be interrupted from my reverie. My hearth has lasted long — but soon will itself be consumed in our planet’s raging fires. A letter from the government or local council will doubtless instruct me to remove my antiquated and anti-ecological monstrosity.
No matter that our solar panels produce almost all the energy our entire household requires. That the fire is simply a middle-aged man’s last plaything, a reminder of his days gone by and revival of an age long past. Such fanciful and sentimental arguments will hold no sway.
I understand. I will comply. There will be no need for them to pull the poker from my cold, dead hand. But my heart will feel a little colder, deader, if I cannot commune with fire of a windy winter’s evening.
I yearn for fire to warm my soul.