Sunday, February 1, 2004

The Phoenix and I


There was a man there that lonely Winter eve. A very strange one at that—but a man all the same.

I had been sitting lone in my house, beside my warm fire, my thoughts thinking and crackling. The fire had touched my face as I sat watching—had given my face that glow of ember. And I'd just been thinking. My thoughts were of nothing much. They were of nothing important—of nothing of too much meaning.

The fire looked very warm—and I could tell it was. Its tongues, crackling and licking on the wood supplied there, gave off warmth. A warmth cozying, tiring. The warmth which can only be that of fire.

Fire, I had thought. Fire—it meant so very much. It was power—it was destruction—it was warmth—it was wild, uncontrollable nature. And the flame to my eyes, it was hypnotic to stare at it—it caught you in a trance and held you. Just looking into the flame, that glowing, ululating thing; that flickering, colorful thing—it caused your thoughts to wander. To go away and leave.

Fire is very much like man. It feeds off of oxygen, uses it to keep it alive and breathing—it uses oxygen like we use it in our lungs. It uses it to breathe and be alive. Just like the filling and unfilling of a lung, that expansion and recline, that systematic, intuitive thing that is breathing; that thing which is our bodies at work keeping us alive, allowing our blood to be nourished with oxygen, allowing us to function—so is fire. Without oxygen there would be no fire. Without oxygen, fire sputters and dies. And like man, if given the right conditions, fire will too spread and grow from its surroundings.

What is fire? Is it passion—is it destruction—is it creation—is it life itself? What is fire, and what, then, are we to do with it? When man first harnessed fire, saw its ephemeral glow in his eyes, what was it that had been found then? Was it mimicry of the stuff that is, the stuff that we shouldn't seek to control? A Phoenix, that fabled creature. Reborn from its own ashes—from the emulsified napalm of its own doing—only to do it again, and rise again, and fall again, and rise again.

Is the Phoenix fire personified—is man fire personified? I can see houses, thin woodwork, and steel, and nails; I can see streets of concrete, and I can see a hustling—a bustling—metropolis of highways and byways—the very veritable civilization of man. And I can see this woodwork being burned down, I can see concrete being heated and bubbling; and I can see fire, wild creature as it is, destroying and molding and changing.

And most of all, I can see sinew and fiber—I can see mallow and bone—I can see hand and leg—I can see skin and muscle, heart and lung. I can see man—I can see him for how weak and lowly he is—and how grand, great, he tries to be. Man messes with fire like fire messes with wood—man seeks to be what fire is. Man seeks to harness the very things which create him, he seeks to understand it all—but he can't. Man is as wild as fire, and in the end all he seeks to create—all he seeks to control—will eventually burn to what it was that man is. It will become weak as man's flesh, weak and swaying, and it will all burn as fire burns wood. Burn until embers glow, and ashes blacken.

And from that, man will arise again. Will he learn from his mistakes—will he harness what he once knew and had and realize the most uncontrollable is the controllable? Will he see that nature wins in the end? Will he see the dinosaurs—monolithic, dead, now only bones and fossils—will he see that is where, one day, his race shall go? Will he understand that the bigger you go, the higher you build, the more you know, the more you take for granted; will he understand that still all there is is fire—fire, burning passion strong, blackening, burning eye—will he see it will all fall, will burn by nature. Will he see simplicity is more capturing than anything other? Even the smartest, most advanced, most technologically knowing, most educated civilizations are the most stupid. What man is cannot be averted—what man does cannot be smothered. Flesh and bone and cells and beats and inhale and exhale and breathe—bone and brain and hand and cartilage and pain—this is man, this is him. He is a functioning singularity. He is a teeming, wandering mass of himself. And he is bounded to this forever.

There is never certainty where there is chance—there is never intelligence where there is blind arrogance and all-knowing knowledge. There is always uncertainty. There is always fire. There is always blaze, there is always warmth spurring into hurt. There is always burn. Flicker, sway and darkness.

There is always this man, there is always he looking at a fire and it looking at him. If fire can melt ice, let the water flow and bubble and sizzle. If fire can burn, if it can flicker, let it be. Let it do its swagger. The Phoenix and I, one day, will understand one another. The Phoenix and I, one day, will kill ourselves in madness. In lunacy, in dumb autonomity. It will go by its nature—by its own self-sustained, ordained, blamed, claimed, and inevitable decay and decline. By its own devices of devise. By its own death given. By its own mortality interred. Its own frailty discerned.

May the dead die. May the fire be smothered. May eyes close and bones rest. And may flames die and flan the flesh. May man one day rest in peace; and man find comfort in it.

And so my thoughts went—fire, man, fire, man—and there came a sudden rapping at my door. A stiff, cold and numb rapping by a cold and numb hand. Was there some desperation in its knocking? Some loneliness? Some reason and find to it?

My thoughts interrupted, my gaze gone from the flame, I came to my door. I did not glance to the window—I was too lost in my thoughts, trying to hold onto something half-lost now.

I clicked off my locks that barred my door, placed my hand on the door's knob, turned it, and flung open my door.

There was the man.

He stood before me. He was short—of less than four feet tall—and wore a tattered old white shirt, and tattered old denim jeans. His hands were facile and old—meticulous hands. Hands that spoke of creation—a writer's hands, or a laborer's hands. They were well-defined, but old; full of veins, and what appeared to be bruises. His hair was grayed, in a thin tangle on his head. The man was nearly bald. His face was thin—cheekbones shown outward, defined. And those eyes—those eyes.

Those eyes went right into you, went right into you like guilt. They jarred into you—made you want to shake, made you afraid. But why did they make you afraid? It was because those eyes were the eyes of a senile. Because they were full of a dumb madness—a dumb lunacy which drove you to some ream of fear. Those eyes seemed to dance and jest with a flame of their own—as if the pupils were a deep hole, and deep in the hole there was a jeering flare. His eyes, they made you feel fragile, breakable, shattered. Broken. As if you couldn't be fixed.

And the way his mouth looked—it was held open in an even more dumbing, maddening gape than his eyes. Those thin, colorless lips parted and held open, the space in between them abyss, no teeth juttering out. It gave off an even higher feeling of dumbing madness.

He looked to the ground as he spoke, swaggering his head, bobbing it, as if intoxicated, or dreaming. "Oh, hello," he said. It was in a mutter—a low lull that you could barely make out. It was as if he was talking to himself rather than you. As if he was more gone than there with you right there. "I was, uh, wondering. Wondering if you could. Could let me stay. Stay the night. Uh, I'd be, uh, thankful."

I did not know what to say. A man walks up to you in the middle of the night, out of nowhere, knocks on your door, looks madder than you've ever seen. And he asks to stay the night, of all things. Asks you to let him in, give him kindness.

Was this really happening? And why me? Why me, of all people? Why me?

The warm fire was behind me, and harsh Winter cold was now breathing onto my skin. I was only wearing my pajamas, which did not insulate well against the cold. I began to shiver as I looked at the man, the black night behind him. He looked so mad. Looked so insane.

He looked like he hadn't lost his marbles, but they'd been grounded to a fine dust from the beginning.

There was a part of me that wanted to be kind—that wanted to allow this man to say. And in my head it was screaming now. It was blearing, badgering, bickering.

Just let the man stay—let him stay. How could it be bad? What if you were that man—what if you were him and you were only wearing an old and faded white shirt, and old and faded denim jeans? What if you were out in the coldness without a home to have, without a warm fire, without anything but yourself and cold Winter? Who knows, maybe the guy's suffering from a craziness brought on by the cold—and you're going to deny him to your house just because you assume he's insane, just because you think he's insane, just because you are only going on first impressions? Where else is the guy going to go? Where else, other than here?

I hated that voice. I wish it had never spoken to me, had never convinced me to let the man in. But I listened, listened and was kind-hearted.

I realized I must have been standing there for longer than two minutes, just thinking, going over rather or not to let him in. And the man was still only looking fixedly at the ground, and bobbing back and forth with his head in that dreaming way.

"You can stay the night, I guess," I said as kind as I could. "Come on in."

And he did come in as I held my arm in a gesture for him to do so. The fire was still going as he came in, it flickered over his face, his mad face, those mad eyes, that dumbstruck, maddening gape of his mouth. I thought then I had never seen someone so mad looking—so lost looking—so cracked, and insane. And maybe that was right.

I gave him a blanket to warm up with. He looked quite cold. He sat right beside the fire, as I sat on my couch, and we began talking into the early hours of the morning. We talked of many things, of a plethora of things. And through it all, he sat beside the fire, sometimes glaring in at it, sometimes turning slightly away. It was as if he was drawn to the fire—drawn to it just like I was, but to a much higher level.

It was a long time before we slept. Day was starting a wide grin as we'd gone to sleep. He slept on the floor while I slept on the couch. I sat there for a long time, just thinking over things, watching what left of the fire glow and seem to hum.

Sleep soon overcame me, and the world of dreams came.


Comments (0)