Invoking the Flames
Invoking the Flames
Elements #6: Fire and Transformation
The final part of this six part journey through the elements, in a southern African context. You can hear it on the podcast too, where last week I revisited a previous elemental excursion through Wood: Green Cathedrals.
"It's sunny today in South Africa". An old catch phrase from a calendar; an English visitor, astonished that it might be true. Normally, it is, at least somewhere in this big country. And normally there's at least a little sunshine during the course of the day, wherever you are. Today is one of those Cape days, though, that have been very grey, very windy, very wet. There has been fire in the sky: but striking electrically, accompanied by booms. The kind of day when you regret that it makes no economic sense to have "central heating" in the Cape. When a fireplace is very welcome, and bags of Namibian camelthorn dry wood go down a treat. Not a very sustainable treat, perhaps: denuding the desert of its remaining trees feels a little shortsighted. We have plenty of aliens up for burning in the Cape - wattles and port jackson and gum, even if they're not as dry, not as useful for tinder. I like lighting fires these days. The one time I kept the flames going while men sat in a sweat lodge, fuelled by hot stones from under my fire, I felt the truth that branches burst into flame that is just ancient sunlight, trapped in the earth and released into the beautiful expressions of life we call plants. The heat roasted my soul; at a time that it really needed a little pressure cooking.
Coming back from the Namibian heat a quarter of a century ago we were met by temperatures over 40 in January in Cape Town and fires to match. Dancing capriciously across the mountains, stripping the fynbos, burning the proteas to charcoal flowers that would give rise to new seeds, put forth only after such fires. It's been said that proteas are the kings of the flower world and orchids the queens. Certainly there's a polarity at play there, at least if one thinks of the kind of sensuousness of the rainforest orchidaceae; there are precious orchids in the fynbos too of course, thriving in little damper spots amidst plant forms dedicated to sandy soils. The proteas, by contrast, present a whole bouquet in a single head, thousands of different faces, like Proteus himself. And they burst forth, their seeds exploding with the aid of the fires. Of course human interference affects their careful cycles, preferring to pop up after a good few years of germinating rather than being rudely awakened by a drunk city dweller's stompie-blaze.
Pour a little paraffin on it: the modern crusty Saffer way to get the fire going. At my last Afrikaburn a decade back the diesel fumes poured from the Department of Mutant Vehicles or the Department of Public Works. Carnival drama for a new age, side notes to the great sculptures being gifted to smoke and ash, visible for miles over the dry Karoo. The firefighter who held fort at the ceremonies, a living archetype in his antlers and kilt, spoke to me of the joy of feeling people's mass love for a huge, safe, creative-destructive fire, compared to the mass fear in his day job when it spins out of containment.
Guy Fawkes in November was the outside fire time in my childhood - and with it that gory ancestral memory in the bones shared by all of us with European heritage, of a time when you could be burnt for holding the wrong beliefs or indeed, for an atrocious time, being the wrong sex. Independent-minded Flanders beguines - or the "witches" that followed them - or the Protestants or Catholics that followed them in the madness of those first centuries of the European printing press. Trial by fire, so the flaming savage cannibals of colonial myth were at least partly a shadow of the great desire to burn flesh, like Piggy in Lord of the Flies, long before our townships burned tyres in their own version of terrifying righteousness. Humanity's darkest and brightest sides visible at the same eruption. And somewhere, perhaps, an awareness that there is creative magic in the flames, a ferocious and enticing power, like the shameless witches of men's fevered dreams, destroying and recreating in the instant. Stumbling arsonists on the mountainside are tuning in, however incoherently, to the same forces.
September 24th is supposed to be National Heritage Day in Mzantsi, but mostly it's known as National Braai Day, men roasting stuff on a fire again. A memory at the Burn: three wickerwork statues, "The Fear Gods", bent over like we have been for a couple of millennia. Pan walks round on stilts, a great torch in his hands, and blasts them into flame, right in their genitals. My neighbour in the crowd turns to me. "There it goes. All those centuries of sexual shame being released". And I feel her truth, chaotic though it is. Years later, during lockdown, three new wickerwork sculptures loom up, goddesses of fecundity, born in a municipal permaculture garden.
Fire leads us to unpredictable cycles, but it's fun. Ask the folks who stripped down to ancestral fashions by the mammoth firesides at the Burn. Somebody's heart probably got cooked though, burnt with jealousy in the wildness of the night. Of course we want to go to hell sometimes, we've made it seem so exciting because there's lots of fire dancing there. A mentor warned me once that my partner and I were ‘playing with fire’; it was so very tempting, but that relationship had danced over the hills before we could stop it and we both fell, badly burned for a time, though the sun kept on circling.
Still, apparently that braai flame is indeed where it all began down here in Africa: the transformation of plants and flesh to cooked stuff that tastes good, is easily digested, and allowed more energy freed up for our brains to grow. For it's our stomachs that are where we mammals use our heat most, the fiery pits of transformation. So obviously that's where we humans get creative, if we're not being destructive (sometimes both). The dance begins round the African fire, as we know. Sitting and singing too, on so many evenings on so many stoeps or garden fire pits. We are mostly a dry country, so it's a frequent memory, as it was for our ancestors. Fire says Karoo to me; though on clear nights even in this crazy city I can see Orion challenging me again, that old friend to humanity, that little reminder of our fiery stardust origins.
There's another kind of sacred flame, that brings forth smoke. Imphephu, the rich smell of South African streamsides, silvery-green. Its puffy pillow-leaves give off that rich smell of the landscape, and calls the ancestors, the ones who knew the fires, who told the stories there. Standing on koppies in ceremony I feel the smoke make the veils thin between the illusion. I recall first feeling it in a run down house on a hillside in District Six, where the old government had previously tried to snuff out the creative rebels, where in the national rebirth of the nineties the imphephu was wafted thickly to fill the room during a creative festival, and perhaps a Northern tourist was freaked out. Later I felt the power of the smudging myself, impossible to pin down, to categorize, to limit; saw it fill huts, kill bugs, bridge worlds.
In the Hindu Vedas too the fire is vital: Agni, god of fire, ignites the whole creative play of the universe in which Shiva beats out his dancing performance. The old Vedic fire ceremonies, which I breathed into in a back garden in Mowbray, accompanied by chants and movement. If Cape Town is a melting pot, it's always the fire that brings us to melting point; the air alone sometimes makes us Capetonians a little fresh and frigid. We have to step towards the fire and sacrifice ourselves a little: funny that we light little flames on cakes to remember our birth, to recognize the flaming sun's transit, to acknowledge another step around the sacred fire of the years. That tiny spark, the simple candle; born traditionally from the wax of that magical creature of transformation, the honey bee; though often, in less rarified situations, from tallow, the oily bits of a beast again; but still precious in the darkness. At the school our children make lanterns: themselves delicate, paper that could catch light if not held with care on spiral walks at night time winter festivals. Each little light preserved to shine like that midwinter star, surrounded by a little person's creative work. I stared into a candle, to find focus here in the city, a small ritual with a lover years ago. A way to centre in the ever changing fire of Heraclitus. And we sing together, Rise Up O Flame!
There is indeed magic at the flame, lit perhaps by traditional friction methods rather than paraffin firelighters, when we allow ourselves a little more time to generate the spark, a little more time for remembering how much nature gifted us this fire in the first place. On Solstices we've given prayers to it, written or spoken, incantations asking for fire angels to bless them. I lit fires in the garden before there was a house, invoking, calling, calling, calling. Always acid and alkali, smoke and ash, ripping apart to recombine. The sheer joy as a boy of seeing things split apart; feeling the power of the fire in me too, spurring me on. I've never been much more than an experimental smoker, but taking fire into the lungs is a sacred act of presencing in many cultures when it isn't a nasty habit. It's not something to be sniffed at any more than it's something furtive to be tried out in the bike sheds. I wonder what those ancestors smoked before tobacco turned up out of place; I wonder, too, how tobacco became such a sacred offering in African ritual, like it is in native American ritual. Something to ponder over a smoke perhaps. San Bushmen from a hundred years back whose words were recorded in the archives at UCT suggested that they were “smoking people”, while we busy city types were “working people”. They couldn't understand why we wanted to be so busy, any more than a pipe-puffing hobbit could.
A sunbird in the garden in Scarborough; in fact five over the course of the day. The latest fire has impressively stripped down the landscape, and pushed the birdies into thriving colourfully in the village itself. As I release this article, poured through brilliant synaptic sparks, lightning conducted, to your screen, it is almost winter solstice in the south. In the north the sun will blaze out almost ceaselessly, while it's our turn to find the balance, to jump over the embers in the challenges of a winter version of the St John's fire; to cook stokbroodjies over the morning flames alongside youngsters whose fire is strong. What would a world without fire be like? Do all colours begin in the fire? Gazing into it again, comforted by the hearth, I ponder questions like this and the poetry they lead to. Of course I do. I'm a human by the fire.