Fire season // an essay in embers

on the cosmological complexity and paradox of fire in our lives, how to live and write anyway

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I have known what I feel called to write for my next book since our unseasonably warm autumn travels in 2023, but for the last year I have been approaching it from the edges, as one might feed a fire. In fact, fire has been an enduring metaphor in these early days of thought-gathering. Flickering embers is the image I hold for the form and tone of the book, and the notion of there being an urgent energy at the heart of the project feels true and governing. Until this week, fire has felt challenging to work with – so different from Weathering and Grounded before it – but now like the wild fires sweeping LA, it has felt impossible and uncontainable. As I have watched the film-like horror sweep through movie-land from afar, I have struggled to contain my own global despair long enough to set words to the page. Here, I have sat trying to write into a personally-felt fire (whether I’m attempting to stoke it or quell it I’m not sure) while others, imaginally never-far, evacuate from it. In the room next door my husband is working on his first engineering project of self-employment monitoring how fires are extinguished. Neither of us have ever worked with fire, literally or figuratively, before. Fire engulfs us, but it is not literal. The mercy of this. Nevertheless, I go to bed worrying that it might. I make mental lists of what to save first as a comfort (fire?) blanket. I read somewhere that people who have endured such terrible fire damage and loss, want to help others prepare in this way. I feel like all I can do is witness and listen. This, the fire I am always in.

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I am struck by the notion of containment. I went as far as to write a whole chapter in Weathering about it. Though back then I was talking about a high level of containment in both therapy and on the land. Now, here I am again facing zero containment on the news and in my heart. What do we do with so little containment? How are we to live in a world where things refuse to be contained? Fire resists containment. But so too it seems do the likes of Trump and Musk. What are we to do about the forces that burn through the tinder-dry sward? What ignites without the sustenance of life-giving water?

At this start of the year, I am compelled to notice the ways contra-indications surround me. Things are collapsing – buildings, edifice, known-knowns. Yet, fires grow, outside and in. Some days recently, I have feared for my sanity – is it diminishing, or strengthening? Is it the same thing? Only a few months ago I was writing about a spell of madness coming over me, now I feel deranged again. Unhinged by the effort to resolve hope in this uncontained, burning, ruinous time. If last year, I was nurturing the counterpoint of art to my science, now I am considering the coin flip of my own philosophical positions. What remains when I hold my ideals to scrutiny, or my own feet to the fire? I don’t want to do it. I want to do it. Unnecessary. Necessary. Cold and hot through the same pipes. Shape-shifting I call to mind the fire salamander, her skin the damp container for the heat she tolerates. I call for water.

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If there has been cosmological solace so far this month then it has been in the burning firmament. In dear, beautiful, toxic, Venus shining so brightly above the crescent moon, brighter than the brightest star, as she makes her close transit. This month, Venus. Soon, Mars. We cannot contain the universe in a corralling sense, but we do contain the universe in a fractal, possessing way. In the sense, that we contain multitudes and star material and the stuff of universal consciousness, or psyche. When I fear for the fire, I also feel the brightness of planetary bodies in my own. I feel myself to be an unheavenly body lit with something eternal that I fall into through dreaming, and moments of awe. Sometimes – often - I stand in the fields at the top of my village at dusk and watch the weather come in. I am an air sign and I need the wind, and when it comes fanning the flames, or not, I repeat like an incantation we live on a planet, we live on a planet, we live on a planet. Sometimes I can’t believe the power of this spell.

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We have unprecedented, panoramic views of time, and places and spaces across every moment, and it makes us feel like we really see. But do we? We don’t see the detail of everyone’s lives. To think we see, and know, is an illusion. This new view through our phones gives us everything and nothing. We imagine we have the measure of horror and darkness, but we are always surprised by more of it, and yet are never allowed to have the measure of goodness. You did not see what I saw this week – a man who looked exactly like his long-haired white dog (which is always brightening, reassuring) picking a clod of lichen from the road and placing it lovingly on a branch in the hope it would re-fix. Before he did this, we passed each other and nodded, and it was only then he muttered, sheepishly, oh, actually, let me rescue that. It was my gift to tell him that I would have done the same, that I wish I had. Bystander regret. A necessary prod. I saw this, and no one else. Just as you will have seen good things, miraculous things, that I haven’t.

This is what I mean when I say we see everything and nothing. We have to live within this terrible occlusion. This frightening and consoling paradox. We have to live it, and for those of us who write, we have to write through it. How are we to write in difficult times is the same question as how are we to live? But it is not really a question, it is a happening that continues without express consent. We live, anyway. We write, anyway. Laws of gravity and thermodynamics and inertia, keep us in a sort of momentum that is hard to resist. Perhaps, hope is operant by the same mechanism. It rolls forward. Terrible things happen, and we write about our piffling day in the woods. Half the world is in shadow, half in light. Then we change, and change, and change. We each get our turn. But the burning of the sun, doesn’t change. This usefully tells us something about the irreducibility of our eternal dilemma. Just recently, I started to write about a place I visited for the opening scenes of my book. Then I discovered atrocities were committed in that place that have largely been erased even from those who live there. I sit, still, in shock. Sickened. I still feel the reverberations of discovering this erasure. It is impossible to write about atrocities, through atrocities. It is impossible not to. We are metabolising the sun when we try. And we probably should.

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Let me tell you about my piffling day in the woods. A very short story. I went out, I toiled through frozen brambles to the top of a clearing and there the sun filtered through bare branches and showed me three important houses in my life. I could see the empty pond liners outside of one. Torn up paper in another. My mother, in a third. Further along, there was a stag, he was injured and someone had left him a votive offering. A red candle. As I left the woods, bewildered but satisfied, I asked why write, when this is the world? The reply was clear: For the life moving forward within all of us.

Now supplement ‘woods’ for ‘my dreams’. No one likes to hear about other people’s dreams unless they are that way inclined, so I have to sneak in the wisdom of the dreaming way without you noticing. Inclination, declination – these are moving words that name how we lean towards, or away from. Axial tilt. It is a planetary thing to care about dreams. To care at all. The angle, the gap, between magnetic north and truth north is known as declination: what lives in the gap we lean away from? Dreams live in the gap. Truth lives in the angle still to be closed. Lean in so I can tell you again: we keep writing for the life moving forward within all of us. We live for the fire that keeps burning.

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Delusion by Witold Pruszkowski (1895)

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An audacious request: I want to leave social media as we know it today and I need your help. I want this to be a feminist act against the bad actors that have created work out of ego and continue to raise the wrong kind of fire. I want to vote by removing my attention, despite the hard work I have put in for over 10 years building an audience. For many it is easy to step away, but my work is tied to it. I want to be able to say to my publishers ‘Look, I don’t need to be on there to promote the books you have kindly agreed to publish’. To do that – to step away – I will need to continue to build my online life away from social media and demonstrate that I have readers elsewhere. This year, I am making a concerted efforts to bring this plan to life and I need your help. Please share any writing of mine that you enjoy. Please subscribe to my Substack. You can subscribe for free and help me demonstrate readership, and you can subscribe for my paid work for £4/month/£40/year, which continues to help me become self-sufficient as a writer. This is a free personal essay that I usually write for my paid supporters. For more like this, please consider becoming a patron.