Quotes about Fire from Elemental Ecocriticism (2015)

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Work Cited: Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome and Lowell Duckert, editors. Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

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Fire’s history: 

Fire comes in the Devonian Age, 420 million years ago, in the midst of the Paleozoic Era, the fourth great era of Earth's formation. It comes a good 100 million years after the first forms of life appear; it comes, basically, when there starts to be enough oxygen in the air for things to Ignite. (27)

Empedocles’ 4 elements: 

Fire oscillates between concept and event with Empedocles (ca. 495-435

BCE). The poetic fragments of his philosophy make up On Nature and The Purifications formulate a crucial moment in the history of elemental ecocriticism: they isolate and prize these four elements of fire, water, earth, and air that Western culture will come to see as constitutive of every thing for hundreds of years. It did not have to be this way, it did not have to be these four: Chinese cosmology, for example, announces five elements-water, fire, wood, metal, and earth—as fundamental and formative elements.74

Powerful and long-lasting material and humoral realities were established in the West with the elevation of the four elements: they have intermixed into endless combinations, entertained then eventually dismissed possible fifth elements, and held creation firm until the atomic age. (43)

Fire come first:

All creatures are born from and borne by fire, sings Empedocles. In Fragment 67/62 from On Nature, fire is the shaper of life. (44)

First there came up from the earth whole-natured outlines, 

Having a share of both water and heat;

Fire sent them up, wanting to reach its like, And they did not yet show any lovely frame of limbs, 

Nor voice nor again the limb specific to men." 77 (44)

Fire generates humanity before it can regenerate itself.

Bodies are made of a fire that strives ever upward. Before they are shape, before they are will, before they can assure their own exis-tence, bodies rush and heave with the movement of fire. They are caught up in fire's desire to gather itself until itself. Or rather, fire's desire to engulf and perpetuate births their own. The will of fire burns brightly here: it is a creative force with no boundary or limitation save its own reach. (44)

Fire, when we find it, is always after origins-in being a post-Edenic, post-Creation, mid-Paleozoic element it can be sought and found in what has changed, in what has been wrought, in what will be made through it. I would argue that it is fire that has made humanity. We are its creatures, the only species to use it, and when we do, we mediate its desires for heat and calorism, transformation and change. (47)

we might think that we control fire in igniting it, but it is fire/that allowed homo erectus to sleep safely at night on the ground; it is fire that cooked the food that nourished and developed our outrageous brains; and it is fire that made us human. In our intertwined ontologies we collapse materiality and metaphor: we are fiery, and fires die. (47)

Fire’s trait - connecting past/present:

Fire is one of the four "rhizomes" as much because of the inability to fix its starting and ending points (fire's enduring (past) present, and future) as because of its ability to spread and permeate (fire's endless potential). To paraphrase Macauley, it is perpetual, uncreated, and perpetually creative. (28)

Fire’s trait - conscious or unconscious:

He begins with the reverie in front of the fire: the mind of inquiry adrift, tempered by neither science nor fiction, not quite conscious or unconscious, but led by fire beyond fire: “this hypnotized form of observation that is involved in gazing into a fire.” From that reverie comes invention and imagination. (29)

Fire’s trait - separation and combination: 

In his book The Psychoanalysis of Fire, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard subtitles his chapter on phlogiston "History of a False Problem. (56)

phlogiston burns with poetic ecological meaning The substance shines a light on the mixing of fire and air, the two least physically substantial of the four elements. Interrogating this imaginary substance reveals a paradoxical entanglement of separation and combination that is itself characteristic of elemental relations. Both process and substance, story and matter, phlogiston models an ambivalence crucial to ecomaterialist thinking. (57)

Fire’s diverse forms and its impacts: 

Fire embodies a metamorphic multiplicity: its manifestations are flame, ember, coal, ash, smoke; its states of being include ignition, conflagration, smoldering, and dying; its effects are light, warmth, and pleasure.66 For Rolle, fire's ability to be multiple things in transformative succession leads to the spiritual progression of fervor-canor-dulcor: warmth and song and sweetness.67 (42)

Fire’s existence is based on intra-actions: 

And it creates by moving and changing: the permutations of rhizomes are famously explored by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, (28)

We destroy ourselves: 

Let us destroy the fire of our life with a superfire, by a superhuman superfire without flame or ashes, which will bring extinction to the very heart of the being. When the fire devours itself, when the power turns against itself, it seems as if the whole being is made complete at the instant of its final ruin and that the intensity of the destruction is the supreme proof, the clearest proof, of its existence. This contradiction, at the very root of the intuition of being, favors endless transformations of value.

—GASTON BACHELARD, The Psychoanalysis of Fire (55)

Demystifying burning: 

After Antoine Lavoisier, the "father of chemistry, discovered and named the elements oxygen and hydrogen in the late eighteenth century, enlightenment science came to recognize burning as rapid oxygenation, a heat-producing combination of fuel with a particularly flammable part of the air. (55-56)

The shift into modern chemical terminology identified a number of physical substances that paralleled and subsequently displaced the classical Empedoclean quartet of elements, demystifying the nature of fire and combustion. (55-56)

Fire as transcorporeal matter that assumes intra-actions between human and nonhuman bodies:

The elements gain an aesthetic dimension through human sensation.

Mary Carruthers has recently argued that "medieval aesthetic experience is bound in human sensation" and "human knowledge is sense-derived, the agents of which are all corporeal." (42) 

Fire as beautiful, bountiful, and even sweet. The realism of Fire begins to get bound up in its aesthetics. Deep into his treatise, he recounts the tale of the fire’s ignition once more: “It was just over nine months before a conscious and incredibly sweet warmth kindled me.” His bodily experience makes the fire vivid and immediate and physically possible, and simultaneously brings to reshape it within an aesthetics of beauty and sweetness. (42)

What we think of as fire, however, is not simply an isolated element, one of Emped-ocles's four primary substances. In order to burn, fire must engage a semi-substantial companion element, air. Burning requires multiple substances to come together, fire plus air plus heat. What modern chemistry and fire safety manuals call the "fire tetrahedron" combines heat, fuel, and air into a chain reaction that produces more heat and light.' Even exotic forms of combustion, from the nuclear cauldron inside the sun to the subcellular energy generated within mitochondria, produce energy through rapid combinations of substances that resemble the elements of fire and air. (55) 

Burning has an intrinsic value:

We all crave ignition. Sparks lead to fire, blares that spring up, alive and crackling, giving life to inert things. Combustion makes visible once-hidden power, consumes matter, generates heat and light.

…burns with poetic ecological meaning.

Imaginary substance: fire 

Phlogiston's entangled insistence that there is no combustion without invisible consumption generates a possible building block for an environmental ethics that preserves space for errancy and fiction. (58)

Accepting that combustion requires fire and air together implies a vision of burning as a unified process. Burning cannot simply be, according to Priestley, nothing more than air (oxygen) and fuel coming together rapidly and exothermi-cally; it must be its own entity and dynamic process. (58)

This kind of thinking shows that the attribution of life to fire is both an ancient spiritual belief and a versatile poetic trope. For the sixteenth-century alchemist and physician Paracelsus, "Fire is life" (Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, 73), as it was also for the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. (58)

As one approaches the campfire, the images loom larger and larger until, suddenly, one realizes that he or she is close enough to the fire and within the influence of the light sufficiently enough to no longer need to be able to "see in the dark."  (Brownell 65)

The light of contact blocks it out and one is present in the light, visible to others in the light, and vulnerable to those still outside in the dark-ness. It takes courage to step into the circle of contact and make oneself visible. It is safer to remain in the darkness, but in the darkness there is no real connection, only groping around and an ambivalence about stepping into the light. Being present means more than simply being with; it means being available, open, authentic, and self-disclosing in a fully embodied way (Mann, 2010). This will include one's physical, cognitive, affective, relational, contextual, and spiritual dimensions. It will mean showing up on the outside as one knows oneself on the inside.

To be present is to be "focused on the here and now, to be aware of one-self, and to bring the self into the therapist/client encounter" (Melnick, Nevis, & Shub, 2005, p. 110). (Brownrll 66) 

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Kate Rigby’s Proliferating Fire in Dancing with Disaster 

Planet Earth as a fire planet: 

To get the chemical reaction that manifests as flame, you need free oxygen, combustible material, and a source of ignition.

Among the planets in our solar system, only Earth has all three ingredients and the means to combine them. And those means, as Pyne explains, are biotic: "Marine life pumped the atmosphere with oxy-gen, and terrestrial life stocked the continents with fuels."4 And once the biosphere really got going, with oxygen and carbon dioxide cycling nicely between plants and animals, oxygen stabilized in Earth's atmosphere at just the right level: too little, and no lightning strike would engender anything more than a bit of sullen smoldering; too much, and the entire biosphere would be consumed by flame. (113)

If humans have become uniquely fire creatures, as Pyne puts it, it is because we have evolved on a uniquely fire planet. (114)

But the particular effect of the heat-force may also be damage to the thing burning, that is, damage to the self. In the same way as the object becomes dysfunctional as a result of exposure to uncontrolled fire (high degrees of heat), so does the self as a result of uncontrolled intense emotion. This can be seen in expressions like be burned up, be consumed, and so forth,

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