From Cottage Country
A few words about flames
I made a fire. It wasn’t hard. A fire pit, some wood, makeshift kindling using some nice quilted paper towel dipped in olive oil to really get it started. Popped out my lighter and then it was just a matter of tending to the logs, each one added just so, allowing the right amount of air in to fuel the flames, sending them higher and higher, reasonably impressive even with the sun still out. With a copy of From Hell in hand, I spent a time reading, entranced by Alan Moore’s tale of Victorian Era depravity and Eddie Campbell’s bleak evocation of London sketchy line drawing. I was reading a chapter in the graphic novel in which the character who will become Jack the Ripper, Dr. William Gull, takes an illiterate coachman on a tour through the city’s underbelly of pagan and masonic symbolism, outlining a deranged vision of human history as the rightful domination of women by men, a vision which must be reestablished in the face of a changing order. Modernity, of course, brings with it an egalitarian spirit, suffragettes and the like. In Dr. Gull’s mind, it will take a great work, a work imbued with symbolism, a work suffused with the thousands of years of patriarchy that have, in his eyes, built the greatness of London, of civilization.
As the sun set and the light became too dim to read, I put the book aside. I’d finished the chapter anyway. I stared at the fire, its flames dancing, giving off sparks as logs cracked and bark crumbled. There is something about fire. The warmth of the August sun receding, the fire’s heat made its presence felt. The scent of the firewood wafted about, its sweetness the perfect balm. For maybe two or three minutes—though the minutes felt much longer—I sat with myself. Thoughts of Dr. Gull pervaded as the soft smoke rose and billowed and floated through the air. Bits of ash occasionally drifted my way, pleasant like snow flurry. I wondered about the world through the eyes of the Ripper—Moore’s Ripper, at least—its intricacies and contradictions cohered by a totalizing ideal. A grave expression of humanity. And for a moment I felt a fear about the world, that its intractable incoherence might inevitably inspire such derangement of thought. My mind soon drifted.
So I picked up my phone, of course. The dopamine rush from strangers sharing a story I’d written momentarily satisfied the constant itch of addiction. I saw an old friend had reached out to congratulate me on the piece, and I felt a pang. As time goes, and as my cancer diagnosis naturally forces me to confront my mortality (still a long way off, but present in my head nonetheless), I think more about the people I’ve encountered, the relationships formed and relationships broken, and the relationships that ebb and flow with the realities of day-to-day. There’s a lot of pain wrapped up in life, but I find myself mostly at peace, even when my mind wanders to those painful experiences. I put my phone aside and stared again into the fire. The embers glowed bright, the flames illuminated the surrounding. In the darkness, it seemed so alive.