SHAPING THE FIRE
At the supermarket, between the matzo ball mixes and dixie cup dispensers, I find a squat glass half filled with wax, a wick the sole hint it’s meant to be a candle. I do not buy it to slip under a chafing dish; I do not buy it to scent a room. Next Sunday will be my mother’s yahrzeit, one year to the day of her death. Though I know little about such rituals, I am determined to light the candle, read the Kaddish–that prayer for the dead that celebrates the power of one of the world’s best known creator-gods, he who hid behind a pillar of fire–and perhaps create a flare so intense even her dead blue eyes could see it. Not that I believe for a second they can see anything at all that any of us can even imagine seeing.
On the sidewalk outside a coffeehouse on Madison Avenue and E. 93rd Street, a woman dressed in black spandex pants and shirt, black boots despite the heat– lights a cigarette, sighs with pleasure as she inhales the smoke. The flame from her lighter, which is also black, is shaped like a long tongue by the light spring breeze. The brief spurt of color makes me briefly happy.
It is 1968. An American soldier holds his lighter up to the twigs and thatch that roove a spindly village hut, not far from Danang. His eyes, his skin, turn bright red, as if with fever. Years later he dreams still of hut-shaped fires, rounded, rooved by twig-like flames, with small gaps serving as doors through which one could, if one wished to, enter the fire. In Quang Ngai Province, village of My Lai, hundreds of Calley’s boys torch every hut, every tree, every bush, nearly every person in sight. In February, 1991, enormous flames from the oil wells of Kuwait joined together, rose so high they might have charred the very stars above the desert had they not slowly receded, slowly assume the shape of small red flowers, much to the disappointment of the Iraqi incendiaries. Could this fascination with shapeless, uncontrolled fire be some perverse version of the Zoroastrian fire worship? But always the Zoroastrians contained their sacred fires in specially constructed fire temples, versions of which can still be found in parts of the middle east and Asia, particularly Iran, and in the city of Bombay.
Slash and burn, slash and burn; so peasants for centuries cleared land for their
crops, a process known in northern Europe as swidden agriculture. But in the desert of 1991, no one wished to plant, only to exult in the symbolic destruction of the victorious enemy. Not one burning bush could grow in that desert, not one.
From the Book of Isaiah: “And the people shall be as the burning of lime: as thorns cut up shall they be burned in the fire. . .And the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch. It shall not be quenched night nor day; the smoke thereof shall go up forever: from generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it for ever and ever.”
The young woman dressed in black who has lit a cigarette on the sidewalk outside a stylish coffeehouse on Madison Avenue and E. 93rd Street lights another and then another. She cannot say with absolute conviction what she enjoys more: the taste of smoke or the long tongue-shaped flame spurting from her lighter. Even though she is sitting outside, people around her glare, waves their hands to divert the smoke from her cigarette. Americans are uneasy with private fires, no matter how shaped, unless they are using the fire: to char a slab of meat on a Sunday afternoon patio; to add crackling sounds and a small glow to a room that is probably already overheated.
When Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked a lantern,and burnt Chicago down. . .
“Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest burning” (T.S. Eliot, The Fire Sermon)
Better to marry than burn baby burn especially
since some think the world will end in fire, the Holocaust a misnomer for shoah –an overwhelming fire– burn baby burn South Central , Watts, the 14th Street Corridor of the Nation’s Capital, ca. 1968–and for dessert we’ll have burnt Alaska on a platter kindled by a match where would we be without matches big fat red-tipped safety matches, may I have a light, may I? have you ever smelled kerosene? No worse than the smell of your neighbor’s barbecue pit adulterating the gentle fragrance of a summer afternoon burn baby burn fat sizzling from thick red steaks, escaping from the pit of artificial coals to create tiny spasms of fire on thousands of decks and patios all over American burning burning burning
At sundown on Friday night, a woman with a white cloth wrapped around her eyes bends and lights the sabbath candles. They rest in elaborate silver candlesticks inherited from her great-great grandmother, who escaped from Poland well before the time she would have had scarcely a chance to escape its fiery ovens. A child blows out the candles on his birthday cake. Though he is sung to and urged to make a wish and even has been gifted with an extra candle for good luck, still he has extinguished how ever many candles are lit to represent each of his years on earth that have already passed, always and forever, immer und ewig. The child laughs. The woman removes the white cloth from her eyes, goes on to bless the bread and wine. Why is there no blessing for the candles themselves? BLESS THE CANDLES THAT CONTAIN THE FIRE, BLESS THE CANDLES THAT WHEN THEY MELT AWAY SYMBOLIZE A BLOODLESS SACRIFICE, BLESS THE CANDLES WITH A SPECIAL CANDLE, which, of course, will soon die down, like the flame in the squat glass I will light to mark the year since my mother’s death. As if the Roman calendar had anything to do with her yahrzeit. As if I really knew about such things.
In the dream I saw a perfectly round red bowl. But it was shaped not from clay but from fire itself, small flames joined to small flames in circular layers with even a lip on the top layer of the bowl’s circumference. Of course, I dare not touch the bowl; it rests on the earth which is itself not burning. I think of the Burning Bush and the Pillar of Fire, both of which were self-contained, but mostly I think how women were the primary shapers of fire: women who create pots, by hand or at a wheel, then use some form of enclosed fire to harden them; women who tend the hearth, all the many daughters of Hestia; women who receive a man’s fire, join it with her own fire to make a child inside the secret enclosure of her body. In New Guinea, according to James Frazer, it was thought that women, particularly old women, drew fire from their own bodies in order to cook the tarot roots and yams. Men, especially young boys, frequently succeeding in stealing a woman’s fire.
But as much as I would delight in the absolute truth of these suppositions, I cannot ignore that in many cultures fire is male; “the fire, like the father, is the master of the house” ( ancient India). The head of the village, always male, shaped fire to keep wild beasts away from the tents; to guard herdsmen and flocks. Fire is the not only the guardian but the pastor, the priest, the male ancestor. It is the repository of food for the dead, the medium of sacrifice. And, of course, the sine qua non of the hearth. Women may have cooked over the hearth, but only men could offer it ritual sacrifices: milk, ghee, fermented liquors, even corn and meat. Agnihotra: a sacrifice of fire in three forms, carried throughout the day by the masters of the house. And so it is he who shapes the domestic fire, he who through his sacrifices to the sacred fire grants universal order to the household, even possesses god-like powers to control the movement of the sun, to purify the soul, to bless a marriage or birth, and to harmonize the living and the dead.
Classical scholar George Nagy mentions an interesting side note regarding fire purification: Zoroastrians, unlike Indians, are unequivocally opposed to cremation. Instead the dead are left in a particular place, soon to be consumed by vultures. A major reason is that fire itself can be contaminated or rendered impure if it has come into contact with a corpse. In other words, that which purifies something else must be pure in itself . Laments about earth, water, and air pollution are all too familiar; to think that even now in parts of Persia and in the city of Bombay, people are concerned not with pollution from fire, but with the possibility that fire itself can be contaminated by human flesh.
According to Johan Goudsblom, a contemporary historian of fire, control over fire constitutes a major distinction between man and best. The more advanced a society’s control over fire, the more skilled its capacities to shape fire, the more advanced that society. (Fire and Civilization, Penguin, 1992).
One of the most grotesque domestic disasters in recent history : a fire so violent it resulted in the nearly immediate shapelessness of its object happened at the Cocoanut Grove Night Club in Boston, November 1942. Over 400 people, who but moments before despite the distant War made merry with drinking and singing and laughing, died in the stairwells, died on the dance floor, died gasping for air, trampled just short of a window. ( The night club owners were ultimately charged with gross negligence.) Lottie Christy of Park Drive, Boston, and Claudia Boyle of no known address, two of the eight chorus girls, made a spectacular escape, jumping into the arms of a male dancer.
Did Lottie and Claudia fear fire the rest of their lives? Did they shun matches, stoves, heaters; cower when they smelled in the fall the pungency of burning leaves? Please drop me a note if either of you is still alive.
Of course, some argue that a flame is shapeless by definition, just as one might argue the same about water. A child drawing a fire with red crayon always creates wavery triangles with perhaps a little spiral at the tip of each. But even a photographer with the most advanced camera cannot catch the shape of fire, only an illusion thereof. Moving, always moving, like an upside-down waterfall. Does the rapid movement of fire make it easier for barefoot fire-dancers to perform their act? Always in Bali they would perform with serenity and grace. Some claim to eat fire, as if they were eating cotton candy. Abracadabra alakazam: even after watching a fire-eater on Les Champs-Elysees, I believe this to be a magic trick, accomplished, perhaps, by some citron flavored cold fire.
Who, men or women, have been more misshapen by fire, disfigured, even put to death? I think of sati, a custom in which the Indian widow was forced to be burned by the fire of her husband’s cremation– a practice now outlawed but still occasionally practiced–;the Salem witch; the bride whose sari catches fire from deliberately spilled kerosene because of her meager dowry; the central European witch; the woman who set herself on fire in a field behind my grandmother’s country house–everyone whispered that she was crazy, mishuganah, nuts. I was not allowed to see her burnt remains, though I heard that her skin had turned to black flakes. But men, too, have been destroyed by shapeless fire, have immolated themselves–remember the young man from Baltimore protesting the Vietnam War; remember the Buddhist monks of Hue?
And the victims of the auto-da-fe, no more segregated by gender than the victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
I don’t wanna set the world on fire/ I just wanna start a flame in your heart . . .
What if I must leave the house after I light the yahrzeit candle for my mother? To blow out the candle would mean bad luck, very bad luck. But what if a stray breeze billows the kitchen curtain, which brushes against the tip of the lit candle. . .No matter, the candle’s flame must extinguish itself naturally, like the fire in an earthenware pot at the Hindu pujah ceremony, the latter a fire of purification. How purify grief? I undertake the ancient yahrzeit ritual because I do not know what else to do and she, herself, one year ago was reduced by fire to mere ashes–as if, as if–
In the former Yugoslavia one summer, long before the troubles became open warfare, I watched with a former friend a lamb being roasted over a fiercely red fire. How many of its ancestors had been thus roasted and offered to the gods or whomever claimed godliness? The fire continued to leap, dance, and roar well into the chilly evening, its shape consisting of its many rapidly changing shapes. Fire, not water as some mistakenly believe, is what Heraclitus assumed to be the first principle of the flux he believed to be characteristic of the natural world. Ice embalms; it makes possible a steady state, preserves the status quo. Fire–pace Robert Frost–like time itself constantly moves and transforms.
The day has arrived. I delay lighting the little yahrzeit candle until after I have read the morning paper. At first, I fear the flame will go out within minutes, so short is the wick on the thick wax candle inside that glass. But after some twisting and bending, the wick stays lit, I have nothing to fear. Instead of reading the Kaddish, the ancient prayer for the dead, I simply speak to her as embodied in the flame, now burning steadily. Good memories only, of course. Late in the afternoon I see the reflection of her flame against the glass as if there were two flames, one my mother, the other the memory of her, somewhat less vibrant, a kind of more autumnal orange, than the flame itself. For a moment I think I see the two flames joining, but that is, of course, an illusion of glass and light.
Slowly the candle recedes. I want it to stop retreating, carrying my motherflame with it. I want it to remain exactly as it is, for when the candle burns down completely I will know that once again I have lost my mother. And I must wait a full year to briefly– through the flesh of another candle– once more bring her back: not in the form of white and black ashes clinging to the keel of a boat under the sea where she was scattered; not in the form of a painfully thin woman twisted nearly into the earth like a very old apple tree; least of all not in the form of a young woman with long hair, posing hand on hip in front of a waterfall somewhere in New Jersey, but only in the form of a memory and its reflection on a squat glass.
Until then and long after I must continue to sing all of our old songs.
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