Category Archives: fire

On the smell of burning leaves

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This is a nostalgia piece, and normally I hate nostalgia because it conjures a false image of the past that never existed, but this topic might be a little different because it has to do the master of memories, a strong evocative smell. When I was a kid, we had huge trees around our house, so we also had a lot of leaves on the ground in October and November. We raked the brown and yellow and red leaves into enormous piles which at some point we would burn. Today, of course, you can’t burn your leaves without the police and fire department showing up to raise hell with you, and to be honest, it is air pollution. Having an open fire on your property or in the street is totally illegal. Back in the day, if my memory serves me right, back in the sixties, we would burn our leaves each fall, and an almost magic smoke would fill the air. Both acrid and sweet, the smoke had an incredibly rich smell which evokes for me other times and other places, people, seasons, short days, crisp nights, bare trees, incipient winter. The fallen leaves, the burning leaves, were announcing the changing season. I was so much younger then, younger than anyone really has a right to be. When I accidentally smell that smell today, the memories just wash over me like a huge unexpected wave. That nostalgia plumbs the depths of innocence as you warm your cold hands over the flames of memory. Sparks fly up and away in the darkness, children smile and watch the flames, chatting about nothing, but the bonds of those times are strong even though all of that–the burning leaves–is gone, up in smoke, a mirage lost in the past of another lifetime, another country. They say the past is a place to which we will never return, but the memories conjured by those potent and pungent smells assail us in ways we cannot ignore. The burning leaves of our pasts are still there, still burning, and the poetry that we wrote then, inspired by those people, places and events, will always return us to the past when we catch just the slightest wisp of smoke.

On the smell of burning leaves

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This is a nostalgia piece, and normally I hate nostalgia because it conjures a false image of the past that never existed, but this topic might be a little different because it has to do the master of memories, a strong evocative smell. When I was a kid, we had huge trees around our house, so we also had a lot of leaves on the ground in October and November. We raked the brown and yellow and red leaves into enormous piles which at some point we would burn. Today, of course, you can’t burn your leaves without the police and fire department showing up to raise hell with you, and to be honest, it is air pollution. Having an open fire on your property or in the street is totally illegal. Back in the day, if my memory serves me right, back in the sixties, we would burn our leaves each fall, and an almost magic smoke would fill the air. Both acrid and sweet, the smoke had an incredibly rich smell which evokes for me other times and other places, people, seasons, short days, crisp nights, bare trees, incipient winter. The fallen leaves, the burning leaves, were announcing the changing season. I was so much younger then, younger than anyone really has a right to be. When I accidentally smell that smell today, the memories just wash over me like a huge unexpected wave. That nostalgia plumbs the depths of innocence as you warm your cold hands over the flames of memory. Sparks fly up and away in the darkness, children smile and watch the flames, chatting about nothing, but the bonds of those times are strong even though all of that–the burning leaves–is gone, up in smoke, a mirage lost in the past of another lifetime, another country. They say the past is a place to which we will never return, but the memories conjured by those potent and pungent smells assail us in ways we cannot ignore. The burning leaves of our pasts are still there, still burning, and the poetry that we wrote then, inspired by those people, places and events, will always return us to the past when we catch just the slightest wisp of smoke.

On a bonfire

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There is something completely primeval about a fire that speaks to a primitive memory that we all harbor in the deepest, darkest reaches of our DNA. We see fire and we turn toward it. Fire is at once both a saving grace and a sign of destruction, warmth and salvation, smoke and ash. We build fires to celebrate community in a ritual so old we have no memory of its origins, no memory of its meaning, but we cling to the light in the darkness as it protects us from shadows, both known and unknown. The bonfire, whether on a beach or in the woods, wards off the approaching specters, shielding us from our own irrational fears. The fire provides light and warmth against the dark and cold, the difference between making it and perishing. The memories are both collective and ancient, unspoken and unnamed, reaching into the darkness before even words mattered. The bonfire becomes a modern ritual of celebration that we cling to without knowing why. The bonfire commemorates our success, lights our road into the future, chases away the shadows. We are drawn inevitably toward the flame, like moths, yes, but more than moths. The light illuminates our darkest dreams and desires, filling us with logic and reason, and the warmth pushes away, if only for a moment, the cold and cruel reality of everyday life. Perhaps what the bonfire really stands for is hope, hope for the future where a bright, warm light shines, keeping at bay the chaos and lighting the path that we find so dear.

On a bonfire

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There is something completely primeval about a fire that speaks to a primitive memory that we all harbor in the deepest, darkest reaches of our DNA. We see fire and we turn toward it. Fire is at once both a saving grace and a sign of destruction, warmth and salvation, smoke and ash. We build fires to celebrate community in a ritual so old we have no memory of its origins, no memory of its meaning, but we cling to the light in the darkness as it protects us from shadows, both known and unknown. The bonfire, whether on a beach or in the woods, wards off the approaching specters, shielding us from our own irrational fears. The fire provides light and warmth against the dark and cold, the difference between making it and perishing. The memories are both collective and ancient, unspoken and unnamed, reaching into the darkness before even words mattered. The bonfire becomes a modern ritual of celebration that we cling to without knowing why. The bonfire commemorates our success, lights our road into the future, chases away the shadows. We are drawn inevitably toward the flame, like moths, yes, but more than moths. The light illuminates our darkest dreams and desires, filling us with logic and reason, and the warmth pushes away, if only for a moment, the cold and cruel reality of everyday life. Perhaps what the bonfire really stands for is hope, hope for the future where a bright, warm light shines, keeping at bay the chaos and lighting the path that we find so dear.

On firemen

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Being a fireman is a very strange job, and all of us non-firemen owe them a huge debt of gratitude every time they answer an alarm. Ever since men and women have lived in wooden structures there have been firemen, and history is checkered with the stories of horrendous fires that have destroyed hundreds of thousands of structures and tragically ended the lives of tens of thousands of people. Human beings fear uncontrolled fire, and they should. The fireman is a relatively modern invention of the late 18th century although loosely organized fire brigades have existed for centuries before that. Ben Franklin is often credited with organizing the first volunteer fire brigade in Philadelphia to fight this terrific scourge of colonial America, where most all of the homes were wooden structures of one kind or another, and open fires were used for both cooking and heating, making life in the colonies a dangerous proposition.To this day, houses burn down every day–lightening, bad wiring, dangerously stored chemicals, children playing with fire, unattended cooking fires, smoking in bed, malfunctioning furnace, bad hot water heater. Into the chaos steps the fireman, big coats, helmets, and boots, red trucks, hoses, and axes. To say that this job is dangerous is to underestimate, certainly, the real danger of an uncontrolled fire, and the collateral damage of collapsing structures,dangerous smoke and fumes, possible explosions and host of possible complications. Central Texas just lost ten firemen to an explosion in West,Texas. Firemen die every day in the line of duty, so one wonders what drives the soul of fireman to constantly put their life in danger on a regular basis.Of course, some people are fearless, and don’t give danger a second thought even though their lives may be on the line. Others are service oriented and want to help others through a sense of civic duty. Still others will do it as a job, although one wonders about how much money it takes to make a person risk their life for a paycheck. The fireman in American culture is iconic, and many a young boys have dreams of one day becoming a fireman. The job may seem romantic, heroic, mythic, maybe, but the reality is that people make mistakes,fires happen, and modern organized societies need fire-fighters, so young men,motivated by a series of factors, sign on as firemen. The job of fireman is,then, a paradox of danger and heroism. Perhaps it is this mix of the heroic and the tragic which creates this strange aura of romantic hero wearing a red helmet. I know firemen, and I appreciate their work, their rushing in where others fear to tread, their total lack of fear. Communities need public servants to help them deal with the chaos of disaster and the destruction of accidental fires. Literally, they might rescue us from our own mistakes and folly. As long as there are firemen, in spite of their (our) best efforts,tragedies will happen, and firemen will lose their lives, and the job of fireman will forever be an exotic mix of heroism, danger, and thrills lived out in smoke, fire, and water, soot and sweat. As long as firemen continue to save their communities, little boys will want to be firemen.

On firemen

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Being a fireman is a very strange job, and all of us non-firemen owe them a huge debt of gratitude every time they answer an alarm. Ever since men and women have lived in wooden structures there have been firemen, and history is checkered with the stories of horrendous fires that have destroyed hundreds of thousands of structures and tragically ended the lives of tens of thousands of people. Human beings fear uncontrolled fire, and they should. The fireman is a relatively modern invention of the late 18th century although loosely organized fire brigades have existed for centuries before that. Ben Franklin is often credited with organizing the first volunteer fire brigade in Philadelphia to fight this terrific scourge of colonial America, where most all of the homes were wooden structures of one kind or another, and open fires were used for both cooking and heating, making life in the colonies a dangerous proposition.To this day, houses burn down every day–lightening, bad wiring, dangerously stored chemicals, children playing with fire, unattended cooking fires, smoking in bed, malfunctioning furnace, bad hot water heater. Into the chaos steps the fireman, big coats, helmets, and boots, red trucks, hoses, and axes. To say that this job is dangerous is to underestimate, certainly, the real danger of an uncontrolled fire, and the collateral damage of collapsing structures,dangerous smoke and fumes, possible explosions and host of possible complications. Central Texas just lost ten firemen to an explosion in West,Texas. Firemen die every day in the line of duty, so one wonders what drives the soul of fireman to constantly put their life in danger on a regular basis.Of course, some people are fearless, and don’t give danger a second thought even though their lives may be on the line. Others are service oriented and want to help others through a sense of civic duty. Still others will do it as a job, although one wonders about how much money it takes to make a person risk their life for a paycheck. The fireman in American culture is iconic, and many a young boys have dreams of one day becoming a fireman. The job may seem romantic, heroic, mythic, maybe, but the reality is that people make mistakes,fires happen, and modern organized societies need fire-fighters, so young men,motivated by a series of factors, sign on as firemen. The job of fireman is,then, a paradox of danger and heroism. Perhaps it is this mix of the heroic and the tragic which creates this strange aura of romantic hero wearing a red helmet. I know firemen, and I appreciate their work, their rushing in where others fear to tread, their total lack of fear. Communities need public servants to help them deal with the chaos of disaster and the destruction of accidental fires. Literally, they might rescue us from our own mistakes and folly. As long as there are firemen, in spite of their (our) best efforts,tragedies will happen, and firemen will lose their lives, and the job of fireman will forever be an exotic mix of heroism, danger, and thrills lived out in smoke, fire, and water, soot and sweat. As long as firemen continue to save their communities, little boys will want to be firemen.

On the heart

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As a friend undergoes quadruple bypass surgery, my own heart bleeds for his wife and young son. The heart is such a delicate thing. We only have one. Unlike our kidneys or lungs, Mother Nature only gave us one, and if it doesn’t pump correctly, we are so out of luck. It is the pump that drives our life’s blood, that keeps us alive by delivering oxygen to our cells and carrying away the waste produced by those same cells. When the heart’s blood supply is cut off, we die, and the complex network of arterial arteries and veins can become clogged and cause trouble. My friend is having his plumbing reworked tonight in an attempt to save his life. The heart keeps us alive, though, in more ways than we know. The heart is also a metaphor for love, beating a little faster when the beloved is near, feeling empty and heavy when the beloved is absent. One suffers heartbreak, loneliness and sorrow because of the heart, a fist sized organ tucked in between the lungs just under the breastbone. It sustains us when we are said, celebrates our victories with joy. We can feel it when it beats, sending blood pulsing through our veins and arteries. Both literal and metaphor, the heart measures our well-being, or our sadness, or our happiness, our bliss, our ecstasy. When the heart goes wrong, our outlook can only turn black. The heart sustains us even in the dark night of the soul because the heart believes in hope, and maybe that is the only thing we have left in our darkest hour. Hope is a good thing, perhaps the best of things, but without it, I’m not really sure what is left. Certainly, the heart faces failure, defeat, and disillusion because those are also a part of all lives, but I also think the heart is resilient and can snap back from those blackest of thoughts when one feels alone and abandoned against the entire world. Healing comes through the heart. So tonight, one man and his family will face the toughest challenge a man can ever face: his own mortality. Yet it will be his heart that which sees him through to the other side. The heart, the veins, the medulla, burn gloriously and brightly, but there are severe truths that even the heart cannot deny. If he heals, it will be his own heart which brings him healing. The hands of the surgeon, created and guided by God, will put him back on his feet. The heart knows about mortality, knows that it will eventually return to the ashes out of which it rose, knows that nothing will go on forever. Yet, for now, the soul swims in that cold river of mortality because the heart knows how.

On Dark Shadows star Jonathan Frid/Barnabas Collins

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Jonathan Frid, the Canadian actor who played the melancholy vampire of the ultimately campy and strange soap opera, Dark Shadows, died Friday in Hamilton, Ontario. He was 87. The production values were low, the dialogues were melodramatic, and the special effects were horrific, but not because the show was scary. For an eight-year-old, the show was incredibly spooky, frightening, and creepy. I guess the production values for a daily soap opera lent themselves to a campy, gothic, soap opera about witches, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, curses, the undead, and general supernatural salad that probably invented a few new ghouls and goblins. The best part of this outrageous production was watching all the actors play their roles straight as if they believed every word. One often did not know whether to scream in terror or laugh because it was so funny. The show was a parody, a complicated riff as it were, on the whole idea of soap operas: people fall in love, they fall out of love, they are greedy, they fall in love with the wrong person, violence ensues, people disappear, they reappear, somebody gets their arm cut off, there is a fire, a monster lurks somewhere in this dark old house, at least one character turns into a werewolf, somebody lets the vampire out of his coffin, someone gets pregnant, another fire ensues, and so on. Soap operas are played with no specific end in mind. They are continuous, which is particularly interesting if you are a 175 year-old vampire who is looking for a lost love who has been reincarnated, conveniently, in the ravishing 21 year-old daughter of the creaky (creepy) mansion’s patriarch, the great-great-great grandnephew of said vampire. So now we can add incest to the list of creepy behaviors crawling through this soap. Frid fell into this role and became an instant pop icon of the period. In an era before video-taping, people would stay home to watch the soap, which was filmed and shot in a very tantalizing way: never show the monsters or the blood, unless it’s the Friday episode and you want to leave people hanging. The show would be immersed in the most inane dialogues about ghosts and witches and such and the thing would never really progress. Show me the monster! Yet it would progress just enough to keep it interesting, a kind of soap opera striptease. Frid played the role of the melancholy, misunderstood, but blood-thirsty vampire probably better than he ever wanted to. Fangs, cane, strange bangs, ruddy cheeks, he oozed vampire from every pore, and of course, the women watching from home could only guess what those fangs might feel like on their own throats. The show was a campy romp through repressed Victorian sexuality that played quite well on television, and Frid starred in more than six hundred episodes before it finally burned itself out, which is the only logical end for a soap opera this strange. Tip-of-the-hat to a great actor who turned into a pop icon vampire, and only ever flashed a smile when he knew lunch was about to be served. He never drank…wine.

On Mildred Montag (Fahrenheit 451)

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In Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel, Fahrenheit 451, the main character’s wife, Mildred, tries to commit suicide in the first pages of the novel even before anything has happened. This means, of course, that as readers we have entered the novel storyline en media res, i.e., we are coming into the story in the middle. Obviously, Mildred is very unhappy, but the question still hangs in the air, “why is Mildred unhappy?” Mildred is a mystery because it seems like she has everything. She has her televisions, her reality shows, and a spare family that loves her and strokes her ego on a regular basis. She is so integrated in her faux-existence that it would be cruel to turn it all off. Mildred thrives on her television life and wants more, asking her husband about getting a “fourth wall” so that she can completely surround herself with her television world. The “fourth wall” is, of course, a reference to the role of reality in the viewer’s life. The viewer must suspend disbelief in order to get involved in the fantasy world of television, but the fourth wall is always reserved for the audience. Perhaps Bradbury wants to examine the problem of letting television become ubiquitous and pervasive to the point where everything is a simulacrum, nothing is real, and television, the simulacrum of life, finally substitutes for reality. Mildred is now substituting faux-people and faux-situations for reality, creating a pseudo-reality. Nothing in the real world, including her husband, house and family, matters to her anymore. Everything has become a simulation of reality, including her emotions, thought processes, and interactions with others. Yet how does the simulacra differ from the genuine experience? Or does it? Real life differs from television because it is complex, and experiencing complexity has a completely different feel than experiencing simulacra, which is ordered, simple, predictable, repetitive, and repressed. Experiencing the chaos of life, disaster, complexity, unpredictability, disillusion, brokenness, and failure all spins around the idea of liberty, the freedom to choose the next step, not to watch the next show. When people have to make decisions, weigh all sides of an argument, listen to advice, draw conclusions, discuss options, take an ethical stance, then life happens. I think that Mildred has watched too much television, and that her moral compass is broken, leaving her totally at the mercy of her television shows, the propaganda spread by the government, and the total predictability of her life as it is governed by the media. Eventually the brain rebels, and Mildred’s only way out of her mind-numbing pseudo-simulacra faux-existence is to kill herself by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Losing one’s ability to control one’s own destiny is so common, however, in Mildred’s society, that a couple of “engineers” are sent out to pump her stomach, revive her, and wipe clean her memories so she won’t do it again. Memory is gone, and television substitutes as a simulacrum of reality again. Eventually, for Mildred, reality slips away once and for all, and she becomes another victim of her dystopia, a dystopia delivered to her house by Big Brother via the digital media upon which she is hooked and mentally and emotionally dependent. Books are illegal, ambiguity is unknown, and personal thought is prohibited. Reality is whatever the government tells you it is.

On monsters (III)

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My first essay on monsters was an attempt at describing monsters, but it said nothing about where monsters come from, and I don’t mean from under the bed or from the depths of a pond or from a dark closet. I think that any given society creates its own monsters out of the irrational fears that it harbors. In the fifties there were radioactive blobs trying to kill overly hormonal teenagers that were fleeing creepy scarred old guys. The Cold War was only too kind to share is manias, fears and irrational assassination plots with the rest of the world in the form of giant ants, fire-breathing dinosaurs and scaly green lizard men. Our contemporary society is so messed up with paranoia, conspiracy theories, and crop circles that monsters even got their own movie. They had become so commonplace that they had become comedy and not tragedy. But our obsession for monsters from outer-space, the depths of the ocean or the depths of our minds continues to grow. It’s hard to know if monsters are a sign of mental health or lack thereof. Slasher monsters don’t interest me because they grow out of a fear of random violence and general paranoia, which is just sadistic and uninteresting. Other monsters tend to be the outgrowth of our own hubris and pride, such as Frankenstein’s monster. Werewolves and vampires are just the result of pent up and repressed sexuality–nothing new there. When we start looking for ghosts and spirits, however, things start to get a little out of whack. Guilt seems to be the greenhouse for monsters, where they first take shape, take their first steps before bursting out into the nightmare world of your own dreams. Monsters don’t have to be ugly, but they do have to be menacing. Monsters are monsters because they want to hurt you, take away your stuff, scare you. Monsters hide in dark corners, in black alleys and empty cars. They are in the basement or up in the attic. They lurk well after midnight and make scuffling noises before they go dead silent. Monsters have no pity, are invincible and fast, do not worry about ethics, are unafraid, don’t care if they hurt you. Some of us handle the monsters better than others. I found that as a child, the monsters were everywhere and out to get me, but as an adult I am pretty good at keeping Grendel’s mother at bay. Nor do I harbor ghosts, spirits, sprites or genies. So if you hear a little scuffling in the dark corner of your closet, ask yourself this: what am I really afraid of and why is my conscience bothering me? Well, what’s the worst thing you ever did? Now, check for monsters.