§0
“Lo que el hombre no sabe,
o no ha pensado,
vaga en la noche
por el laberinto de la mente”.
[“What man does not know,
or has not thought of,
wanders in the night
through the labyrinth of the mind.”]
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
§1
The kids who played with fire: Pyromania, play and knowledge
The drop in free fall, the flame. The smell of burning plastic and charred skin. The tiny scream of pain. The fear. Mom had strictly forbidden me to keep melting toys with matches. I was going to burn. She knew it.
The burning plastic, the smoldering secretion that fulfilled the prophecy. Hide the wound and the shame. Hide the half-burnt toy and the matches. Never again talk about my intimacy with fire. “Children who play with fire piss the bed.” The threat of wetting the bed wasn’t half as terrible as the pain of burning my skin alive. Still, the adult punishment and chastisement was the worst.
The accident closed the fascination and severed the link.
**
I look for my childhood in the smoke, among the crackling of burning matter. Among other children who, like me, played with fire.
The unstitched memories materialize. In the form of an echo, voices resound of other children who never lit a match. Much less set fire to a toy. Nor did they try to light the water heater. As a result, they didn’t experience how bright it is to watch an entire room flicker with flames.
Disobeying mom, disobeying dad, muting the voice of adults. The need to test one’s own body. Suspending the imperative from the oldest voice. The stories are born in the sentient body and are communicated through the voice. Children are feral phenomenology, reflection in action. Parents can embody violent domestication.
Put into discussion the issue of elementalities. Ask oneself how instead of why or what for. Read the exercises of sensitive reflection from various authors about water, air, earth. Doubt if what is attempted in them is to return to playful astonishment, a feral unfolding, whose time happens in childhood. Smile as I wonder about what I was trying to do when I played with fire as a child. Rest for a while in the impossible answer.
The question’s invocation opens the possibility: Do you want to play with fire again? A space opens up in the alma mater, a fissure for recovering what has been lost. The open call to students and professors is nothing more than an excuse to confer a state of contingency to the act of playing with that particular element. It is an exercise that fulfills the desire to form an apparatus in which my pre-school knowledge exercises recover some sense – in my opinion, hidden. To be able to reincarnate, even in a minimal way, what it meant to me to corporeally experience how fire transforms matter. To notice the trace it left on us, to witness how a solid object, when touched by the flame, could transmute into water and smoke at the same time.
The need to feel the fascinating terror of seeing things consume, deform, and change becomes tangible. Today fire claims a space of its own in my being. It protests unjust banishment.
**
Burning myself with the drop of burning plastic exposed others to a false fearful attitude towards the fire. But, on the contrary, our encounters developed with a particular delicacy. They were a space of playing in which we learned, in the doing, the careful coexistence with the flame. If it had not been for the terror and the invocation of “dangerousness” in the elders’ discourse after having been burnt, our fire-child relationship would have been even more careful. More subtle and intimate. But it wasn’t.
You fall a thousand times before you learn to walk, but that’s not a reason to forbid us to touch the ground. The scrape on my knee was not far from the blister on my finger. The bump on my head was much more painful. As far as I know, hitting the back of your head on concrete can be more lethal, or cause more after-effects, than a superficial burn. But adult grammar works in mysterious ways.
**
A box of matches made freely available by me. The whole group impulsively wanted to light them. We touch the boxes as if touching the face of a dear old friend. We invent excuses, “games”, to avoid facing the emptiness of meaninglessness. The absence of reasons. There is an imperative to give this moment a place in adult discourse. Although we know, deep inside, that it is not necessary. Arguments are superfluous. There is nothing to justify.
To tell a story in the time it takes to consume a lit match. Quickly. There is no need for embellishment. The tongue must not hesitate. The mandate is to submit us to the time of the fire. The breath becomes one with combustion. Our body seeks to keep the flame alive and forgets the fluid form of speech.
—Unlike all of you, my childhood was very close to the fire.— says the eldest of us. In the time it takes for a match to burn out completely, he invokes the memory of his little hands holding the ashes left over from the family campfire. It takes us back with him to that time when his grandmother would scold him if his hand burned or let go of the burning material. —Those who know how to hold fire do not get burned.— his grandmother’s voice echoes in his throat. The children in his family must learn to master the heat of the newly formed ash, to bring it inside their home and live with it. With its warmth. The live ember is part of his story. It is an element that composes him today.
Another of us confesses to have burnt the story of his illness. His diagnosis of diabetes had marked a control in his metabolism. Medical discourse forced him to record everything he put in his mouth. To take note of everything he chewed. To become a scribe in the service of his own struggling body.
He counted calories and grams of sugar in a notebook that he filled in with his mother. He did it with clinical precision. Took care of every detail. The numbers and ingredient names became part of his vocabulary. He repeated them over and over again. They were a mantra. The prayer of a small sender, to an addressee of cruel non-existence.
One day, neither of them could take it anymore. The fire consumed every hour of meticulous dietary analysis and took the burden of writing the story of the twisted feeding. As we watched the notebook burn, we cried together, cuddling with my mom. The fire purges. It fades, at least for a few seconds, the weight of the disease. The weight of pain. It is an element that hurts and calms. It is a deep wound and a burning analgesia.
After we finish talking, we recognize each other in the silence. Oxygen materializes. We are the ones to whom the fire spoke directly. We know we are amputees of something, but we do not know yet what it is.
**
Apparently, at some point in our lives we reached the age to allow ourselves to burn. We pass through the liminal space in which many cultures propose fire as facilitator, priest and judge of this transition. Since we were deprived of this, we never knew when we crossed the threshold. So today, we raise the stakes. Invocation ceremony. A warm salute to us as children. Those who never had a rite of passage to adulthood, accompanied by fire. Those who were never able to enjoy the playful ignition in calmness make themselves present.
It is forbidden to forget the space that hosts our meeting. Is it only the academy that justifies burning in the name of knowledge? Is it perhaps the flow of language spilled in some document that allows us to initiate small ignitions?
We play in awareness of the burden of the present. We know we are deformed by time and discipline. Yet, even with it in our hearts, we execute the union of two matches by their flammable ends. To make the oracle of fire appear. To interrogate about what is to come for our country on tenterhooks. The forced curve in the material is the answer: upwards a “yes”, downwards a “no”. Form is content. Combustion is the message.
The smoke, the smell, and the taste. The strange burnt taste and aroma. The test of courage: Extinguish the living flame a few centimeters from our tongue. We put the lit match in our mouths in front of the astonished eyes of some of us. We are emboldened by laughter. We worry about those who want to attempt such a feat, providing a space of care.
CR-CR-CR-CR-CRACKLING MATTER! It forces our bodies into silence to fill us with the sonorous ash. Mutual submission and ardent complicity are interrupted by the voice of one of us. She shows us the drawing of a burning match on her skin. She tells us the link between this symbol sealed in ink and the impact that the image of the burning city had had on her eyes. What happened at the very moment when the country was “awakening” (October 18th, 2019). She exposes, without hesitation, that the flames that burn the city purge the political body of the police order. They are the slash-and-burn of public space. A fire that confers dignity. That demands the necessary confrontation.
To make fire walk among burning materials. To take it out of its utilitarian dimension. To promise never again to point it out as a resource. To amaze us, to astonish us again. We weave stories, sensations, poetics, and reflections in small writings. Narrative grafts in our mouths, our eyes, our ears, and our skin. They are the writings of fire. Their form is the incandescent darkness and mystery. Affections, their fuel. They burn through our biography and natural history. They seal the agreement to leave as ephemeral this space in which we, relatives of the calcinating element, returned to link us with something lost. They allow us among the smoke, the crackling, and the light to recognize ourselves as creatures of fire.
§2
Writings of fire
“Crepita detrás.
Aquieta mi espesor.
Obligada paz.”
[“It crackles behind.
Quiets my density.
Compelled peace.”]
–Gerardo Mora
“No pensaba que lo necesitaba,
mas ahora que me explico,
cambiaron los roles.”
[“I didn’t think I needed it,
yet now as I explain,
the roles have changed.”]
–José Cueto
“En la yema del planeta u en la chispa de una idea,
se encuentra ahí el conocimiento en expansión.”
[“In the fingertips of the planet or the spark of an idea,
there lies knowledge in expansion.”]
–Carlos Portaluppi
“La flor roja es tanto bella como peligrosa.
Si no se usa con cariño, puede teñir hasta la más mínima hoja de rojo.”
[“The red flower is as beautiful as it is dangerous.
If not handled with care, it can tint even the smallest leaf red.”]
–Cristián Muñoz
“El fuego quema y se lleva lo que pesa de la manera más liviana.”
[“Fire burns and takes what weighs in the lightest way.”]
–Javiera del Canto
“Aroma cálido que transforma la muerte en vida,
el sudor en aceite regresa al agua.”
[“Warm aroma that turns death into life,
sweat into oil, returning to water.”]
–María Belén Sánchez Recio
“El fuego tiene tanto poder que lo necesitamos para empoderarnos
Atte. las revoluciones, las armas, la industria, etc.”
[“Fire holds such power that we need it to empower ourselves.
Sincerely, the revolutions, the weapons, the industry, etc.”]
–Gabriela Vallejos
§3
About the Pyromaniac Research Unit and the pyrocene concept
The Pyromaniac Research Unit appropriates the concept of “pyromania” and selectively steals certain powers from its alienation (those most likely to feed the apparatus of speculating upon new or re-imagining old relationships with fire). The euphoria of burning things does not mean that one desires or works to produce fires in any space/time deliberately. Much less to cause damage to ecosystems, communities, or diverse beings. Instead, it is about the vindication of provoking combustions in spaces in which the relationship with fire makes us actively reflect on our elemental kinship with it.
The first action carried out as a Pyromaniac Research Unit was a workshop called “Would you like to play with fire again?” and summoned people who had childhood experiences playing with matches. This instance was divided into three parts: one of sensitive experimentation, where participants shared the games they played with matches as children, in addition to the invention of some new ones that were produced in the space provided by the Unit; the second, a literary discussion seminar based on the text “Fire, savages and domestications” written by Stephen J. Pyne. Finally, an exercise of “fire writing” was carried out. The latter consisted of composing an aphorism that braided the sensitive experience and active reflection lived with the fire biographies of the participants. All to set the enchanting machinery of “sentipensar” (‘feel-thinking’) with the elements in motion.
With the activity already finished months ago, I would like to launch a provocation to the reader: As Latin Americans, we are close to the fire as an elemental relative. So close that we feel its mobilizing heat in our history. Moreover, this becomes strangely fascinating when we become aware of the existence of a mesh of events that reinforce this idea.
First of all, it is a beautiful coincidence that many studies have shown that pyromania patients were from homes without a paternal figure present and that the Pyromaniac Research Unit was born in Chile: a country, in Sonia Montecino’s words, of mothers and huachos (a word used in Chile to refer to children not recognized by their fathers.).
On the other hand, unlike the Greek myth of Prometheus stealing the sacred fire from the gods and giving it to humans, the Tupi-Guarani and Gê cultures propose an earthly, vital, and non-anthropocentric origin of this element. Specifically, and as well documented by Lévi-Strauss, these Latin American indigenous groups “make fire come from an animal, which has ceded it to humans or let it be taken by them: vulture in one case, a jaguar in the other” (Lévi-Strauss, 2013). This non-human origin gives us a clue about new ways of relating in coexistence with fire, not from the perspective of a resource to be used, but of an actor with ontological value and agency. One with which we coexist and interact daily.
Moreover, the fact that the colonizers baptized the southernmost point of the continental territory as “Tierra del Fuego” is a fact that enlivens the flame of the poetic potential of the global south to propagate a new kind of kinship with fire. It was in that exact geographical place where the Yagán people, when someone drowned not far from the coast, lit a fire. Thus, when the flame was extinguished, the spirits of the drowned were conjured to re-inhabit the land. It was also the site where the Kawesqar formed an intimate relationship and trans-corporal complicity with pyrite, a material that generates sparks of ignition when percussion stones are made.
Finally, I cannot avoid mentioning that for the Guarani culture, the land on which we live today is a second creation. The flood destroyed the first one, and according to some prophecies of these people, the present one will be destroyed by fire. This prophecy has its correlate in the narratives of the universal conflagration and the discussed geological era of the Pyrocene.
The need exists, at this point, to question which are the narratives and representations of fire that inhabit concepts such as the “pyrocene,” the “mega-fires,” or the “ekpyrosis/universal conflagration.” Now partial and biased and marked by a kind of modern “asepsis” to fire. The exercise of leaving fire sentenced to be a danger.
The meeting arranged by the Pyromaniac Research Unit shares a context with the debate on the Pyrocene mentioned above. Although the proposition of a geological era in which everything is constantly on fire may sound a bit dark, I choose to stick to the definition that Stephen J. Pyne gives to this concept:
Earth is a uniquely fire planet, the only one that we know has had fire ever since it has had terrestrial vegetation. The manipulation of fire is also unique to humans — no other animal does that. It’s our ecological signature. We underwent a major acceleration when we began burning fossil fuels. When you add up all of the changes that we’re producing, it looks like we’re entering an ice age for fire. From sea level rise, to mass extinctions, to huge shifts in biogeography, add it up and it looks like we’re replacing the ice ages of the Pleistocene with a fire age that I’m calling the Pyrocene. (Pyne 2020)
It is Pyne who also warns us about the perception of fire in the modern imaginary, which derives from the demonization of the Pyrocene concept, with the following words:
[…] federal agencies have long argued that fire was intrinsically bad and the more we removed it the healthier landscape would be. That’s fundamentally wrong, and it’s ignorant of science and the knowledge of Indigenous communities. But the effect was enough to disrupt forest systems and make them more fire prone. When people talk about fuel build-up, this is the legacy of that.
Accordingly, it is not so strange to think that the terror towards fire inflicted on us when we are children, which limits us to relate to it in only one certain way, is a symptom of the catastrophic look of this element.
Following Pyne’s spirit of redemption, the proposal embodied in the Research Unit is to conceive the Pyrocene as an inhabitative problem to develop. One in which a new way of understanding the kinship with fire, both at the macro and micro level, gives us clues to coexist with it on the planet, far from the paradigm of technological solutionism that suggests seeing fire as an “enemy” to fight.
Closing this reflection, I cannot forget to mention the beautiful images that the experience at the Pyromaniac Research Unit left me. I can’t stop thinking about the burning notebook of the boy, with all the data of the food consumed. A necessary record for his diabetes treatment. And I am convinced that fire was not present in terms of danger or usefulness in that intimate place. Instead, a ritual fire was present, a brother fire, a friendly fire, a complicit fire.
In addition to this, the grandmother’s story of teaching her grandson to take the ashes while they are still burning is also a sensitive approach to composing kinship relationships with fire, an invitation to “sentipensar” reality. Suppose one learns to manipulate the material in ignition. In that case, the person who embodies this knowledge not only acquires data on how to bring a material with that temperature into his home to heat it. They also learn that fire should be treated with care, with a different rhythm and corporeality. The element forces us to perform other corporealities. Corporealities of fire, perhaps.
If Timothy Morton’s (2013) reading of distance is correct (the one that says that things are ontologically closer than we think), the proliferation of “fire writings” may be a response to the imaginary of “useful or catastrophic fire” that has prevailed since modernity. A response that opens the possibilities of a future in which our relationship with this element is different. One that can offer different affinities of what Donna Haraway (1997) has called “friendship, labor, partially shared purpose, intractable collective pain, and persistent hope.”
* The Pyromaniac Research Unit [PRU] is established by Jesús Ponce with the kind collaboration of Gerardo Mora. The illustrations are by Jesús Ponce.
–
Bibliography
Haraway, D. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets _OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (2013) Lo crudo y lo cocido. Fondo de cultura económica, Madrid.
Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. U of Minnesota Press.
Pyne, S. (2020, 20 August). Welcome to the ‘Pyrocene,’ an Epoch of Runaway Fire. Bloomberg. retrieved 30 may 2022, at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-27/as-wildfires-rage-the-pyrocene-age-is-upon-us?srnd=premium