The world is on fire and nobody lit it. That’s the part that bothers me. Not the fire. The fire I can work with. Fire is at least a thing. Fire has behavior. You can study fire. You can stand at a reasonable distance and take notes on fire. What you cannot do is find the person who started it, because there is no person, because the fire started itself, and a fire that started itself does not have demands and cannot be negotiated with and does not care about your timeline for when it should stop.
I keep watching people look for the arsonist. This is the main activity now. Identifying who lit it. Was it the billionaires. Was it the algorithms. Was it the other political party. Was it the generation before us or the generation after us or the specific generation currently in charge of the specific institution currently producing the most smoke. Everyone is standing in a burning building arguing about the origin point while the ceiling develops opinions about gravity, and I am standing in the corner thinking: what if nobody lit it. What if the building was always going to burn. What if the materials were wrong from the start and the structure was stressed in places nobody checked and the fire is not an event but a consequence and the consequence has been arriving in slow motion for decades and we just didn’t call it fire until we could feel the heat.
This does not help. Knowing the fire started itself does not help put the fire out. But it does change what you do next. Because if someone lit it, you find them and you stop them. That’s a quest. That has a villain and a resolution and a shape you can hold in your hands. But if the fire started itself, there’s no villain. There’s no quest. There’s just a burning room and you, in it, deciding what to do with the fact that the room is smaller than it was yesterday and will be smaller again tomorrow.
Describe an unseen shape.
I keep coming back to this. Not as poetry. As instructions. The shape I can see is the fire. The shape I can’t see is what the fire is revealing. Because fire does that. It removes. It takes away walls and ceilings and assumptions and the furniture you forgot you’d arranged your life around, and when it’s done, if you’re still standing, the room is a different room. Not because something was added. Because something was taken away. And the thing that was taken away was blocking your view of something you didn’t know was there.
Building something versus removing what’s hiding it. That’s the question and I don’t think most people realize there are two options. The default response to a fire is to rebuild. Get the plans. Call the contractor. Put the walls back where they were. Hang the same pictures. Buy the same furniture. Rebuild the room you had, because the room you had is the room you knew, and knowing is safer than discovering. But what if the room you had was wrong. What if the walls were in the wrong place. What if the fire, which nobody started and nobody asked for, is doing the work you were never going to do yourself because you were too comfortable and too afraid and the furniture was fine, the furniture was good enough, the furniture was arranged in a way that let you move through the room without ever looking at the parts of it you’d been avoiding.
By removing the old life, the subject creates a vacuum that pulls the new life into existence without manual labor. I wrote that during a week when three things I had built fell apart simultaneously. A relationship to a job. A version of my schedule. A belief about what I was supposed to be doing next. None of them were destroyed by enemies. None of them were taken from me. They just stopped being true. The way a fire stops needing permission. The way a structure stressed in the wrong places eventually does what stressed structures do, which is reveal where the stress was, which is information you could not have gotten any other way, which means the collapse was also a diagnosis, which means the worst week was also the most honest week, which is a hell of a thing to realize while you’re standing in the ashes of your quarterly plan.
I am not going to tell you the fire is good. The fire is not good. The fire is fire. It is not for you or against you. It does not have a lesson plan. It is not a metaphor that resolves into personal growth if you squint at it from the right angle on a Sunday morning with enough coffee. The fire is the removal of things that were in the way and some of those things you loved and some of those things were keeping you warm and the fact that they were also blocking the door is not a comfort, it is just a fact, and facts do not care about your comfort, which is something the fire and the facts have in common.
Every time I tried to build over the ashes without looking at what the fire had shown me, the fire came back. And every time I stopped rebuilding and started looking, really looking, at the new shape of the room, something fit that didn’t fit before. A door where a wall used to be. A window where there used to be a bookshelf full of books I’d already read. The shape was always there.
The world is on fire. Nobody lit it. There is no arsonist to catch, no quest to complete, no villain to defeat. There is just a room that is changing shape whether you want it to or not, and the only choice is whether to keep rebuilding the old walls or stand in the new space long enough to see what it looks like without them.
I’m standing. It looks different in here. I don’t know what it looks like yet. The smoke hasn’t cleared. But I can feel the edges of something, the way you feel a draft before you find the window, and the draft is coming from a direction the old room didn’t have.
The Hofflebrock 