Blue fire runs across the ice before burrowing into its hole. An echo of the sky, which had long ago turned dark, its blue light bends and twists as if in peril or pain (and one usually leads to the other). Tricky things – fire and ice – each burning in its own way, each dangerous, each a warning unto itself. They invite you to get as close as possible, sometimes demanding it for your own survival, and then they threaten you with eradication.
On a cold morning at the end of December, I’m siding with the fire, and so I play this classic song by Johnny Cash. At first listen, some songs seem deceptively silly. Their instrumentation and production may feel dated, their delivery out of sync with the time. But the soul of a song – its spirit – won’t be lessened or diminished by the confines of its era. A song will live on as long as it means something to someone. This song suddenly meant something as I looked back on the many roads I took in search of love.
I FELL INTO A BURNING RING OF FIRE
I WENT DOWN, DOWN, DOWN
AND THE FLAMES WENT HIGHER
AND IT BURNS, BURNS, BURNS
THE RING OF FIRE… THE RING OF FIRE
Burning the place down was the theme for this fall on the website, and it’s going to smolder for a bit to bring us into the New Year. A pervading sense of nostalgia informed the last few months, and re-examining the many mistakes I made brought me back to the very first man who ever kissed me. In some ways that was a kiss of death. Certainly it was a kiss of pain – literally and figuratively. It burned like sandpaper against my young face, tracing its sting along my chest, and traveling downward to the burn I bucked against with all might and desire. A flaming September left fall in cinders.
Memories of lovers or would-be-lovers of the past mingled with newly-informed introspection and retrospection. While I don’t usually like to look back, it has afforded a certain wisdom over the past year or so – and I’m better able to see the longer arc of evolution that makes up one’s life. In the ensuing years after that first kiss, I would start my own fires, carrying a smoldering collection of embers to fling into the faces of would-be-suitors, not bothered by the blowback of deadly sparks that worked to blind and bind me.
My favorite pop star once asked, “Where do we go from here?” in a song fool-heartedly named ‘You Must Love Me’, lamenting that, “This isn’t where we intended to be.” Guessing the future, for all my planning and organization, has never been my thing, and I’ve always abhorred questions that demand some sort of knowledge of what may come, as if any of us could ever predict that, as if any of us could have a clue. We can hazard our own thoughts and cry our own tears, but no one really knows. “If you want to know how to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.”
I FELL INTO A BURNING RING OF FIRE
I WENT DOWN, DOWN, DOWN
AND THE FLAMES WENT HIGHER
AND IT BURNS, BURNS, BURNS
THE RING OF FIRE… THE RING OF FIRE
And love… exciting and new… come aboard… we’re expecting you…
Yes love…
Love has always proven the downfall and the rehabilitation. It is that ring of fire that burns brightly around us, blinding and thrilling and obscuring and revealing, until we can’t help but be transformed – for the better, for the worse, but always for something, never without consequence, never without reason. Bringing us high, high, higher and swinging us back down – the most obscene and insane amusement park ride one can imagine – spinning and whirling and rushing in gloriously-debilitating fashion. The heart races and the head tries to catch up. A parade of my beloved ones marches through my past, silent and accused, sheepishly pretending not to notice, or maybe not pretending at all. Perhaps such pretense was the only way they knew of letting someone down gently. Perhaps they truly are phantoms – ghost figures hollow of anything other than the patchwork of life I’ve given them in my head – floating in mostly empty fashion, made up of fragments and wishes and insubstantial wisps of what never even existed. We populate our pasts both with what we remember and what we make up.
