How to Build a Fire

~3 pages on old rituals, telling stories, tending fires, and the Ace of Wands

In my era, each dude in the troop had their own Boy Scoutish realm, of which they were the chief exemplar and agent. You could see in us the lineaments of a paleolithic hunting band: the swimmer and the catcher of fish and the tribesman most deft with an edge and the best teller of jokes. I became adept at starting a fire in all conditions and with any tool: the ferro rod or the magnifying glass or the fireboard, grinding that little wedge until my hands blistered. I built them and tended them until even now I have a kind of ethic and aesthetic about the whole enterprise. When we discovered fire—and tamed it—we enclosed our domain of the cosmos into our tribe. We found our long-lost sister-brother. And yet it is entirely simple. My most reliable pleasure is to start a fire and care for it while it burns.

Each Ace in the deck represents, too, a gift that is unique to humans. There is a mind below your mind, just beneath the surface, the part of the iceberg submerged but visible from your boat. This is the realm with which the Wands deal, the subconscious an alembic of intuition and instinct and perception. Wands and Fire, too, for the endemic creativity and passion and lust and violence, the so-called fear of God—careful to use the heat and light without it consuming you.

One must assume that it’s God’s hand there shaking the Ace of Wands for your attention. The leaves that fall free have been associated with the Hebrew Yod, the first letter in the name of God. And we may think of these as the Gnostic sparks, the millings of Divinity that circulate in the blood, the livid embers that burn on in us as long as we breathe.

A fire is like a story. Or vice versa. Perhaps it’s from long hours staring into that mystery that we learned to tell a story to begin with. In any well-rendered tale, there is the surface feature, the “gimmick”: it is a chilling yarn with a monster, or a bawdy reminiscence with a punchline, or a sob story about just how thoroughly the heart can break. This part you can see from a mile away, flames that will ward off coyote or draw in the drifter half-frozen and -starved. And then there is the structure of the tale. The novice builds a teepee and douses it with butane, the old head a log cabin or a lean-to—consider what soft, small tinder has been used to hatch the flame, what kindling no thicker than your thumb and how it is laid. These are the plot and the characters and the circumstance, all arranged so the fire can go through the night if carefully fed. And then there is the central furnace, the coals that sometimes still smoke in the morning: the theme or the point—these are not the right words and there are no words down there is the thing.

Have you ever noticed that the closest approximation of You is a story in which you are the character of prime concern.

The countless variables of your environment must be boiled down to an essence before they can be used. The true chaos of things, it turns out, cannot be survived head-on—there’s just far too much of the world. And so every decision, you know this, comes out of a combinatorial explosion that leaves hardly a smithereen—you could spend your whole life piecing together a single moment and what glue would you have save your slipshod memory. The choice, in truth, is often forged in the fire of the subconscious, like a piece of pottery fired hard. And perhaps not all that matters in fact survives that heat, but all that survives indeed matters.

Up in Michigan one February we camped-out with the temperatures in the teens, then the single digits. All you could do was have a fire or shiver in your bag. Across the way from our site was a few acres someone had cleared for who knows what and much of the timber was still in great crooked piles, eight foot trunk-sections big around as your waist. Some other boys with whom I was in deep, like a crew of hooligans who cleaned up after themselves and didn’t mind moving rocks, followed me over and we gathered up these timbers, dragged them back. With all our expertise, we leaned those heavy trunks one against the other and stoked the fire—it begins with a spark smaller than a rain drop—until it was twelve feet high or more. The cold had frozen the little beast in every boy’s heart and the warmth restored it with an urgency and joy. Great perilous flames like a monstrous edifice carved in ecstasy not for the pasteboard, suburban God of our parents but some darker, more mistral thing. The heat grew implacable and as it surged around us we stripped down to our blue jeans and boots. We cavorted and threw in whole tree limbs like offerings in a ritual of shouts and whoops. I don’t know what the adults must have thought of me. What was it, exactly, that I sought so urgently to burn.

Have you seen these cathedrals we’ve built?