The Fires
I hate the fires. What does it mean? Nothing.
Finding myself nauseated by all things fiction. I open a book by Don DeLillo and an image obviously meant to evoke a certain emotion makes me feel ashamed for fiction. For making up worlds that do not exist. For the pathos of it all. For using the manipulation of emotion to make the reader believe he or she is human or alive. For wasting my time. (However, I do not believe in the wasting of time).
I am currently waiting to find out whether my house is going to be burned down by a wildfire. I’ve been waiting all morning. And I can’t stand reading any fiction. This has happened to me before. I tell myself it’s because I’m meant to write something down. I just can’t figure out what it is.
There was an oddly-placed mirror at the cafe I was at in Brentwood earlier. In a corner of the cafe, in between two corner windows and a fireplace, I chose my table. I noticed a mirror the size of a car side mirror floating above and behind the table, attached to the wall. Perhaps it was meant to reflect whatever I was reading or writing to the person sitting across from me. I found this absolutely too much and chose a different table.
Sometimes everything I read reads like reflection. This is when I can’t stand any of it. Seeing writing as a reflection takes all of the mystery out of it. It takes the art out of it. It’s too bad. Idiots reflecting to other idiots. I miss the times reading felt like action and I could pick up the sentences. When reading felt revolutionary, rebellious, insurgent. Now I can see the words have just been stuck on the page. No magic.
There are two times I’ve felt like this before. The first time is when I came back to the US from traveling other countries. Anais Nin became melodramatic. Joan Didion’s prose seemed overbearing. Thomas Pynchon; maniac. All my favorites were trying too hard to convince me of various realities. Their arguments felt flat, dismal. I hated myself for wondering if I had outgrown them, as if I could do any better.
And here I am again. Trying not to try to see the meaning in the wildfires. Trying not to try to see them as an entity.
I said a prayer last night at the group home with two of the boys. One gave me his stuffed duck to pet but then he made me hold it and I think I held onto it without realizing for a good half hour as I ran back and forth into the house and outside to the front yard to watch the growing flames.
The first thing that happened was that we experienced the power outage. The boys reacted predictably: some started humming creepy horror movie soundtracks, others became animatedly panicked and excited. But we got them all into bed and asleep within the hour. Except for the boy who always takes forever to go to bed, who suddenly had a critical longing to see the stars. I made a deal with him that if we let him outside to look at them he would not leave his room afterward. He agreed. I rushed outside with him because the faster you move to go outside to look at the stars, the more cinematic it feels because it’s like you’re suddenly cutting from an interior shot to an exterior shot of the sky, and to feel cinematic is to feel more alive. So we ran outside and looked up at the stars together, frantically. Wow! He said. I told him they were brighter when I left in the early mornings at 4-5am. He didn’t believe me, of course. But looking back on it I probably just sounded like a typical grown-up kill-joy. Because I had been on the earth a certain amount of time longer I must know more about it and what things are meant to be exclaimed about(nothing) and what things aren’t. I have a lot more empathy for my dad now that I’ve realized how easy it is to accidentally project this stupid lie.That was when he first spotted the fires. He pointed out a pink cloud. Then we saw there were two pink clouds. What is that? We wondered. It’s a fire. After he was in bed I watched it grow and grow and then smoke arched over us all. What does it mean? Nothing. I hate the fires. But it feels like I’m hating sharks. Sharks don’t kill people, they just eat. Fires don’t destroy homes, they just burn.
I drove out of Ventura at 2 am, loaded with all my stuff and headed to West LA where my boyfriend lived. As I drove past the wildfires I started to feel like I was ditching my city. I needed sleep and I knew I couldn’t get it where fires raged a mile away from me but Guilt tapped me on the shoulder anyways. I texted my friend who lived in the hills to see if she was okay. She had already evacuated and was expecting to be homeless tomorrow but she didn’t need any help.
Then I started to think about my purpose in the world and what it meant to be a teacher and who I was in my community. I’m not sure how this made me feel but I’m pretty sure the best feeling is remembering how unimportant you are. How it doesn’t matter what happens to you.
I read a whole book cover to cover the next day. It happened so slightly. I was driving back to Ventura and I stopped at the county line to pee and to check the surf. I got back into my car and started reading Patti Smith. Then I walked across the street to Neptune’s and got a crab cake sandwich with fries and tartar sauce and kept reading. I drove home and saw black smoke bleeding out of Ventura. The smoke made it feel like the town was one bathroom in a cigarette smoker’s house. I took a nap and then drew a bath with Epsom salts. I finished the book in the bath. Somehow I felt a little better about my place in the world.
My cough started the morning before the fires had even ignited. What does it mean?
