The sight of a ruin affords a special kind of pleasure, combining grief with gratitude, yearning, joy. Set free from the degradations of use, a building or a statue becomes a piece of fate. It is finished, lifted from the stream of change, permanent in death, united with the whole. Consummatum est. Viewing it, one enjoys a sweet sadness, which has been named, and therefore sanctioned, by cultures far apart in space and time, as ancient Rome (lacrimae rerum), Tokugawa Japan (mono no aware), Weimar Germany (Sehnsucht), Portugal from the Middle Ages to the present (saudade)
Mankind has not so consecrated the pleasure of watching things burn, though it is perhaps the more universal pleasure. Our only word for it, pyromania, has about it all the ugliness of a moralizing psychology, with its clinical disapproval of everything that cannot be whittled down to fit a society of control. To take pleasure in fire is always dangerous; in our time, it is anti-social. My father once upbraided me harshly for confessing, after a camping trip, that I liked to see things burn. An anxious man, his native joyfulness often buried beneath the weight of his own rectitude, according to which he was responsible not only for his own sins but for every evil he failed to prevent, he tried early to instill in me the principle that one should always care what others think, morality being in most cases a certain respect for consensus. It is not done to admit that one likes looking into the flames.
Lacking a collective outlet — an auto-da-fé, a holocaust, any kind of orgiastic ritual — for the arsonical impulse, we are left to condemn what we cannot legitimately enjoy. Here, at least, we reverse the civilizing process: relinquishing our hold on the burning brand, we resolve to have fire “only as a gift from heaven, as the igniting lightning or the warming solar flame” or, indeed, the wildfire. Our politicization of the latter is as usual a form of self-deception. We need a justification for staying glued to our screens, and find one in fears over global warming or tales of political corruption or nostalgia for the California that was. The truth: we like to watch things burn. A smoldering city is a joy forever.
Do not mistake me! Joy, I wrote, and joy, I mean. [The spirit of the LORD came upon me, a second Stockhausen.] Trance there may be in the contemplation of a fire; there is nothing of peace. “It was a pleasure to burn” — a savage, searing, yellow delight. It is a species of the pleasure we take in destruction, the passion for which, says Nietzsche, is “characteristic of all rich and powerful men and ages.” It is hateful to moralize that desire. It is ugly to seek reasons why L.A. deserves to burn. No! Not justice but destruction, destruction as such, is good. Nature is never so beautiful as when she undoes the works of men — any men, all men. Yet only an innocent love of destruction participates in her divinity. Only divorced from a moral interpretation can one’s innate desire to raze the cities become “a sympathy for everything terrible and questionable.” And it is innate. A cat will kill for sport; a dolphin will rip the heads from fish it does not intend to eat. Even a cow may delight in stomping. Spoliation is in the blood, which in the act of smashing, tearing, crushing, or burning pulses gladsomely. We are deceived if we think of destruction primarily as the fruit of sullen, inverted natures. These will never know the roaring animal spirits which are the destroyer’s natural right. He devastates first as an expression of his own strength, his pride in himself and his capacities, which is among the most affirmative emotions. An arsonist is full of terrible joy. Or do you think the Lord Jesus Christ unwilling to incinerate the world? do you imagine that his heart is still “exceeding sorrowful, even unto death” when, the last trumpet sounded, he unleashes from his throne the river of fire which devours his own works? But his Passion is concluded; he left sorrow behind with the wrappings of his earthly life, his servant’s seeming. He has become again the divine child, with all a child’s demonic innocence. Now his soul vibrates with the awful thrill of the inferno, its music flowing through his fingertips, his act not fundamentally a denial of life but the condition of life, whose “eternal fruitfulness and recurrence requires agony, destruction, and the will to annihilation.”
In imitation of our Lord one ought to speak not only of the arsonist’s joy but also the joy of being set alight. There, too, “it is a pleasure to burn.” Where ruins are confirmed in their individuality, becoming more truly themselves for being useless, a burnt thing is changed, becomes other. In the Baltimore Catechism it is written that “sacrifice is the offering of a victim by a priest, and the destruction or change of it in some way, as by consuming or by fire.” Fire translates from the profane to the sacred. Through burning, a thing loses its particular qualities, strips off everything that divides it from the Whole, passes from actuality to potency. Which is to say, that through destruction a thing becomes capable again of creation, its energy set free — the same Greek word, λύω, means both “to destroy” and “to release from bonds” — to flow elsewhere. Destruction is necessarily destruction of being; therefore, it draws things up into God “who neither is nor is one,” the void from which all being proceeds: “the sacred (=0).” Our delight in fire is, accordingly, something holy. To witness a burning is to participate, if only ritually, in the ascent from earth to heaven, the transformation of matter into energy. Identifying at one moment with the victim, at another with the flame, we are stabbed through by a shudder comprising terror, grief, delirium, and, yes, joy. If we exult as arsonists in the rush of power, we tremble as victims with the ecstasy of sacrifice — ecstasy, which requires the obliteration of the individual, the individual’s surrender to death, its presence conditional on his willing, if only for a moment, his own annihilation. An embrace of death, it is nevertheless the opposite of ascetic resignation. The Buddha wishes to be snuffed out (nirvana); I want to burn. “I have always—at least, ever since I can remember—had a kind of longing for death.” Yet what I desire in it is not a peaceful dissolution but dissolution per se, an outpouring (2 Tim. 4:6), a scattering, one last expenditure of energy for which fire is symbol and consummation:
then is the time … for us to penetrate into the cavern of the sombre Slave-Girl of Death, to enter upon coition with the sombre Slave-Girl of Death, to enjoy explosion with the sombre Slave-Girl of death … a violent explosion mechanically perfect … a Sun-Explosion into Sun.
Los Angeles ablaze, the merging of hues — orange the sky, orange the ocean waves — dies illa, solvet sæclum in favilla — fire and air leagued against earth. A Turner canvas come to life, or else, as objects lose their lines to become simply color, something out of Rothko: primordial, tragic, shimmering, irreducible. An (e/irr)uption of the infernal, an horrible interpermeation of elements, ourselves melting back into Nature, the soul slipping its bounds to inhabit the flames, to urge them on as they glut themselves, not satisfied until the moment when they turn like dogs to rend her, their fangs spilling her own hot blood; when, ashes, she drifts down unto the sea, and is swallowed.