Tuesday, January 4, 2011

meaning as fire

It s an old Heideggerian story - that given the only real element is fire, on needs to understand that fire in two ways. fire is the secret that lurks in the heart of all things- the secret reserve that can burst forward can conjure itself into reality. fire is the hidden world in us all- the world our mind makes marrs and destroys : the fires of our passions: A fire that gives us our world, but at the same moment makes us something in the world. That is the fires the slowly burn in us, making us something in the world, but also defining the sense we are of it: or these fires burn with the energy that animates all of matter, and in having our secret fire, our hidden energy smoldering away we are of the stuff of matter. Fire is ours -our right to the world, and yet that right only comes to s through the slow use of what is shared with all things- and as a consequence of what in the using slowly consumes us who use it. We might gain mastery of a world with fire, and yet in burns though our flesh in the doing, and waistes us into age.
But there is a second fire that runs between us all - the fire of reality that urns holes in our mind in its revealing. The fire that assures that merely imagining a chair is never the same as seeing it - a fire that makes the present burn so much brighter that the past: the fire that then forges in our mind both our trails of memory, requiring that certain things are linked, but also stamps into our brains certain faculties for seeing or thinking or processing information: The fire t turns the mere potential for seeing into its vivid reality: The fire that makes us into a something, by giving us all a world before and between us all. The fire that burns sharing into our minds and does so immediately and directly,so that we cannot perceive or understand the world as anything other than shared: The reality of stuff beyond me that makes a me possible in the fist place: That unrevealed in itself makes or gives us things that linger awhile in their being, in all the flux of stuff, a lingering that forges a me in its light, and then is gone...
Fire gives us in the same meaning, in the same world with us in it, the fires within and without ourselves - a dual world perhaps in its origin, and yet given always together, in the same power grab of power, in my claim to have this world in me and yet of the world also. Fire is the secret power that burns me into reality, by making me at base merely of the stuff of the world even as I have the power to be different to make myself that world; but at the same time in burning reality into as something different, gives me the secret of the world, of what is shared, and makes me exist around that secret, a move that allows it to be mine at last.
The meaning of fire is then the doubling of mystery- it is that which flows into me, and allows me to flow in the world: that whose meaning is this doubling a doubling of nature in us, of something singular to it: The power then to be unified, a power a midn might dream of and scheme for in vein, and yet given, engraves in the shifting worlds of flame.

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