Thirteen Ways of Looking at FIRE

I

I’m looking at a piece of solid fire. There’s no way an artist could have made this object alone. A child, maybe, but I don’t think so, for even in a child’s scribble there is style. You could make a copy of it, but there’s no way you could form it, ex nihilo, out of your own head. The sculpture is beautifully simple. And that’s the key. No human hand could have created this sculpture because no hand, however innocent, can escape the fetters of its style. The object is there, yes, it has been made, yet whichever way you look at it the question remains: who (or should that be what?) did the making? The sculptor who made this object had fifty hands, each attached to a different mind, or no mind at all. The object is sculpted, yes, but with no eyesight colouring the hand. We can talk only of heat and survival.

II

There is something uncanny about that which emerges from fire. The sculpture speaks of deformity. We stare at what in human flesh we would prefer not to see. Hybrid creatures, mythological, alien and recognisable. Ash sinks. Smoke rises. Seeds burst. Stone cools. Planets form. What is it anyway? An element? Earth, air, water … Fire does not exist in the same way. Fire alone lives and dies. As elusive as divinity itself, fire has never been of this world. Prometheus stole it from the gods; every god its personification. Fire creates; fire destroys. Different words for what in fire is the same act. There is no life; there is life. That first moment when