Flicker to a flow to a jet
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Fuel. The whole series is here. Please share this email. Sign up free or, if you’ve done that, please pledge to support my work below.
I went through match after match on Monday night, trying to get the fire pit going. The ground and the air were damp and the wood had been sheltered but it wasn’t really not damp and the imperceptible wind was enough to kill about 17 matches. Finally I thought things were on track and went inside to finish cooking, but when I came out to check again it was all dead. So I started over, lighting a few little sticks of dry, sappy fatwood and placing them at points of intersection in the structure of the logs, to which I added on until—I could see it, one moment to the next—the airflow cohered and the flame brightened and gathered and leaped, from a flicker to a flow to a jet. Ten minutes later we sat with our lemon-garlic kale salads and grilled chicken and listened to the crickets and the wind and marveled at the sea of fire before us. A thing from outside this plane that we’d tricked into existing until it thought the idea was its own.
This is creativity. It’s so close that it’s not really analogy. I mean, it is, but the pattern—precarity that seems immovable until the second it flips into inevitability and gains a force and intention of its own—it plays out exactly the same way, two recordings of one song. I’m working on the third chapter now of the real-thing version of my novel manuscript, the one I’ll submit to agents later this year, and all of the hundreds of pages I wrote before this sit behind me like used matches, familiar and tributary and spent. They brought fire, and it was real; it could light and it could burn. But it couldn’t stay, and actually that came from the structure not being enough in place. I didn’t have everything I needed yet to sculpt the air.
The last year has been an internship in fire-making, and the most important moments have been the ones of direct study—of watching firsthand the way the materials work, the way they respond to different conditions, of how you build small fire into bigger fire into bigger, and what can derail that and what makes it more sure. I’m proud of each those matches, each with its little dose of defeat but, also, its prefiguring of the great blaze. Before I knew much else about my book, I knew the name: “Holy Fire Burns Closer.”
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com.