kleines feuer
It is as though primal man had the habit, when he came in contact with fire, of satisfying an infantile desire connected with it, by putting it out with a stream of his urine. The legends that we possess leave no doubt about the originally phallic view taken of tongues of flame as they shoot upwards. Putting out fire by micturating…was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use…This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his renunciation of instinct. Further, it is as though woman had been appointed guardian of the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire. ~ Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1929)
As everyone knows, Prometheus also brought work to mankind when he gave mortals the gift of fire. ~ Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society (2010)
No, we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it. ~ Billy Joel, We Didn’t Start The Fire (1989)
Burn, baby, burn! ~ Nathaniel ‘Magnificent’ Montague, KGFJ (1965)
Burning is a kind of drawing. It’s about a line. Or – not a line, because it’s impossible to tell the beginning and the end, the two points which would make it a line. As Anne Harris points out, “there is no fire in Eden.”
Guy Debord’s 1978 In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni,
a palindrome and a movie:
We go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire,
in which he claims that Paris has disappeared which is to say his Paris has disappeared, the Paris of his youth, of high spirits and casual criminality. What has taken its place? The same with New York, replaced stone by stone, in the night till you wake up one morning to a completely different city. Film lends itself to palindrome – Anemic Cinema? – though gone are the days of slipping into a movie midway and making your own Moebius strip of it.
The first films were nitrate, celluloid, solid nitroglycerin. If they started burning (easy to do) the fire was inextinguishable. It can continue underwater, undrowning.
Reading Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, it seems unfilmable but someone (Werner Schroeter) made a film from it and all the fires in the film are “real”. When it arrived in New York in 1993, Stephen Holden gave it an exceptionally crabby review in the NYT: “For the last half-hour of the film, she [Isabelle Huppert as the main, unnamed character] thrashes desperately around an apartment in which many little fires have been set, but none seem to be spreading.”
The act of not existing is the only resistance she can offer. In the end, there is no place to be but inside the wall.
6 september 2021