Fire There Is – by Searlait O’Neill
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My younger brother said that it looked as though all the feathers had been pulled from the skin of a bird, leaving nothing but demarcated veins.
He went on to say, ‘That’s not exactly how it looked. I can’t say, really, how it looked.’ At the time we spoke about this, I was trying out images. I thought I’d stumble across something that could capture it. Asking him to recount the experience of seeing our brother, J, and the fire, I was looking to capture a feeling more than anything. The feeling of seeing your brother’s arms burn, of seeing his clothes dropping away like singed leaves.
‘When he stopped burning, I turned the music off. There were other things I did,’ he said, ‘but those things felt like the stage directions when you’re reading the print copy of a play. Like afterthoughts, despite being central to the action.’
While J burned, I watched the circular outline of a cloud change shape and colour. It was almost sunset, and I was flying from Sydney to the Ballina/Byron airport. This was before the virus, when catching a plane from Kingsford Smith to Byron Bay was a normal thing to do. Across the aisle was a well-known professional surfer. Beside me, a woman pointed at a cloud and said, ‘I don’t remember the name of that cloud. I’d like to learn their names.’
She said, ‘Is the air contested space? Politically speaking. I always feel as though, up here, I’m separate from everything. I can’t be touched.’
She didn’t ask the question to me so much as near me. Instead of answering, I looked out of the window and down towards the cloud; the beach town below it was almost invisible through the grey of smoke. It had been raining, but the ground was burning. The name she was looking for, the name for a cloud that forms above a heat source, was pyrocumulonimbus.
When I got off the plane, nobody came to collect me.
My youngest brother said, ‘They’ve put Glad Wrap around his limbs and given him the good drugs.’
Later, he said, ‘I thought I was watching him die. I had to watch him, and process that he might be dying, and help him. And also tie the dog up, because even while his limbs were burning he wanted to pat the dog. I was worried about germs.’
“These are only parts of the conversations we have. Most of what we say I’ve forgotten. When J’s limbs double in size from infection, neither of us talk about flames. We talk about Glad Wrap.”
These are only parts of the conversations we have. Most of what we say I’ve forgotten. When J’s limbs double in size from infection, neither of us talk about flames. We talk about Glad Wrap. How something nearly everybody owns is one of the most useful tools for saving a recently burned person – short of antibiotics, surgery and skin grafts.
At one point, J rang me and said, ‘Buy red cellophane.’
I didn’t ask why, because I knew he wanted to cover the light beside his hospital bed with clear red plastic.
When I left the hospital, I could see a red square glowing from the tenth storey of the building. He’d covered the glass, too.
In my own apartment, a week later, I read the essay Cinders by Jacques Derrida. The entire thing is based around the contradictory phrase ‘cinders there are’ – the paradox being that cinders disappear, yet are there/there are.
I thought of an open mouth, filled with smoke.
Scars, J and I decide together, are a kind of skin. I look up the origins of the word ‘scar’. The Latin word eschara doesn’t just mean a point of healing, but refers specifically to the scab that forms after burning. Environmentally speaking, a scar can be a point of separation or a border – a rocky ledge on a smooth mountain. When applied to both human skin and a part of the landscape, a ‘scar’ separates a time before from a time after. The time after a landscape is burned is marked by the ‘scar’ of charcoaled forest. The time after J was burnt is marked by the joints of new skin on his hands. Somewhere, a piece of bark falls from a tree. At the juncture, a scar forms from resin.
“The time after a landscape is burned is marked by the ‘scar’ of charcoaled forest. The time after J was burnt is marked by the joints of new skin on his hands. Somewhere, a piece of bark falls from a tree. At the juncture, a scar forms from resin.”
I highlight the following words in Derrida’s Cinders: fragile, singed, remain, return, delicate, without, incensed, hearth, insofar, naïve, tacit, undecipherable (my italics), witness, preserve, trace, letter. The words used to describe fire are words that memorialise our own connection to it. The hearth holds in its letters the words ‘earth’ and ‘heart’. Even though it also holds the word ‘art’, writing about witnessing fire can be disrupted by metaphors. If a fire is a war, it may be only during the ceasefire that language can begin to capture its impact.
At the heart of fire is the sludge of wet charcoal, the anger of elders losing access to burning the land, red fields behind a red hospital window. After you’ve seen someone burned, fire leaps in parts of the brain like firing synapses. It smokes like old rain on tarmac. When I think about making art about fire, I think of Robbie Williams’s song Come Undone, where he sings, ‘I’m contemplating thinking about thinking’.
J says to me, ‘There is an omnipresent warmth to my skin.’
If I sit in a plane and look out the window, I can trace the colour of a sunset by the reflection on the roofs of cars on a highway. When the light goes, I question whether it was ever there. When the fires die down and J leaves the hospital, he doesn’t talk about Black Summer and neither do I.
I consider a bushfire and I think of Lolita. I think of Pale Fire. I think of a manuscript in cantos, separating itself out from the page like flames on the Border Ranges, tracing a line down a mountain. Fingers of flame on the ridged coast.
“The fire is distant. It’s over there, in the past. It’s in this room. It’s the diaphanous glow of lines embedded in the skin of J’s chest.”
The fire is distant. It’s over there, in the past. It’s in this room. It’s the diaphanous glow of lines embedded in the skin of J’s chest. Sometimes it’s nothing, just the idea of a burnt brother. When he makes friends in the hospital, we laugh along with their jokes.
Derrida says that fire is a non-present thing. Can I see it? Now that the fire season is over, I can only see it via what it isn’t. I can see it in the books I’ve started inserting fire into. When I read Eucalyptus again, I imagine lighting a match in leaf litter. When I pick up Murakami’s Kafka, which used to comfort me, I imagine a fire in a small cabin by a forest. The fire burns, and Kafka Tamura gets stuck on the other side of the stone, removed from what is real, painful, serious.
When the fires are burning, the melody of the land becomes harmonic, like the changes I feel when I light a cigarette. Sparks and tinder flaming on the landscape create feelings distinct from the realities of bone-dry rock, leaf litter and 80 km/hr wind. When I hear people talk about fire, I think about broken glass scattered in paddocks, light glinting off the edges. This fire myth is just a feeling – it isn’t the way a fire starts.
“When I hear people talk about fire, I think about broken glass scattered in paddocks, light glinting off the edges. This fire myth is just a feeling – it isn’t the way a fire starts.”
*
Opening a window from a plane might seem disastrous, but at the same time I wonder how the air would smell this far from the earth. Onboard the plane, the air’s sterility is cold, like the smell of subterranean water, but not like the earth’s core, which smells of Ni-Fe, nickel and iron. Between the water and that inner sphere is carbon dioxide, water vapour, oxygen, nitrogen. Sometimes, these four are called fire.
The doctors tell J he won’t play the guitar again, but he’s booked for a gig within months. I watch him play in the low light of a small bar. I watch his fingers swim in the light. In my head, I hum a song I’ve written – something about a snake losing its skin on a summer’s day. It’s discordant to the sound of his voice, which is clear and strong in the air.
*
Air can be heavy. That’s a feeling, rather than a fact. In 1667, German scientist Johann Joachim Becher suggested this heavy air might combust. Rather than fire, what scientists found in testing this erroneous theory was the existence of oxygen. But Becher’s theory created another delusion. As glassmakers like Robert Mansell created detailed figurines, people began to ask whether their own bodies had a perishable quality – could they be broken, if dropped, like one of their glass pieces: clear, shining and delicate. These people wondered if they were in a process of decomposition, halted only by the presence of a large glass piano resting below their hearts. They walked sideways through doors so as not to crush this piano, worried that its glass fragments would rupture their organs, causing massive internal bleeding.
‘Have you ever heard that old phrase: set the river on fire?’
I say this to J over coffee. I also say: ‘It’s supposed to contradict itself. It’s supposed to be impossible.’
He’s already with me. He laughs while I’m speaking and repeats it. ‘Set the river on fire. I like that.’
We make black coffee. We talk about books. He lights a cigarette in his nimble fingers and I remember the cuticles of his nails, gone.
Derrida says that language is a fragile urn. Or something like that.
An urn is vase-like, often ceramic. It has a lid. So, is language the thing inside the urn or the urn itself? The urn is a fire object. It holds the ashes. Put a fire at the bottom of a ceramic bowl, cover it with a lid and its breath stops.
The luminosity of thunder is lightning that sparks a tree. The drip of fire down an easement changes the shape of a yard. Anything dry is swallowed – though ‘swallowed’ is a word too easy to use for the way a fire subsumes matter.
My brother asks if it’s true that fire makes the land better. After what he’s been through, he struggles to shift from personal artefact to fact.
I say that I’m still not sure. Not because it’s true, but because he wears an ecological process now, and he’s not convinced he’s better. I don’t say, the land has priorities the body can’t feel. Or, it’s not our fire.
Derrida writes about ‘pyrification’.
I suppose if it’s written about, it can be.
When I think about fire, I don’t think. I feel. ▼
This work is part of our Australian Nature Writing Project suite
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