Love's Body, Reissue of 1966 edition

X: Fire

X Fire The choice is between partial incorporation and total incorporation (integration). Participation (playing a part) or fusion. Total incorporation, or fusion, is combustion in fire. "The way he behaved could also be described by saying that he kept me inside of him. . . . Yet I did not feel that these ways of talking about what happened were entirely adequate; for all of them take for granted the idea of a clear boundary; if I am felt to be inside him then he has a boundary, and the same if a bit of him is felt to be projected into me. But there was much material in this analysis to do with burning, boiling down, and melting, which seemed to me to express the idea of the obliteration of boundaries." Milner, "The Role of Illusion in Symbol Formation," 94. I76 /77 Fi™ Set fire to the sacrifice. The sacrificial fire, the sacrificial food; the food is fuel. All things are food, are fire. The real prayer is to see this world go up in flames. Cf. Evdoldmov, La Femme et le sdlut du monde, 240. Chandogya UpanishadV, iv, i. The true sacrifice is total, holocaust. Consummation est. The one is united with the all, in a consumingfire. To bring this world to an end, in afinalconflagration, or explosion, bursting the boundaries. "If the whole of mankind were once more integrated in a single spiritual body, the universe as we see it would burst." Satori is explosion : "The balloon bursts, every limitation disappears: the one is united with the all." "To accumulate in the invisible the charge of energy which will one day blow up in him all the cave of phantoms." Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 44; cf. Blake, Night IX, 230. Benoit, Supreme Doctrine, 111, 104. Cf. Meerloo, That Difficult Peace, 23, 28, 107, 131, 187. The final conflagration; or apocalypse. The unity of life and death as fire. "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection." Das Lebend'ge will ich preisen Das nach Flammentod sicb. sehnet. Hopkins, Poems. Goethe, "Selige Sehnsucht," West-Ostlicher Divan. To heal, to cauterize. Therapy as apocalypse, conflagration ; error burned up. Not catharsis but cruelty. "He would make what he called furnaces, with a very careful LOVE'S 'BODY ij8 choice of what ingredients should make the fire. . . .And often there had to be a sacrifice, a lead soldier had to be added to the fire, and this figure was spoken of either as the victim or the sacrifice. . . . The fire seemed to be here not only a destructive fire, but also the fire of Eros; and not only the figurative expression of his own passionate bodily feelings, not only the phantasy representative of the wish for passionate union with the external world, but also a way of representing the inner fire of concentration." Milner, "The Role of Illusion in Symbol Formation," 96. Cf. Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, ch. I. "Plague." The fire next time. The revolution, or second coming; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. Luke III, 16. A fiery consummation. Not suspense, but end-pleasure; not partial sacrifice (castration), but total holocaust. It is as fire that sex and war and eating and sacrifice are one. "Woman, verily, O Gautama, is a sacrificial fire. In this case the sexual organ is the fuel: when one invites, the smoke; the vulva, the flame; when one inserts, the coals; the sexual pleasure, the sparks. In this fire the gods offer semen. From this oblation arises the fetus." Sex and war and the Last Judgment—"the Loins, the place of the Last Judgement." The word consummation refers both to the burning world and the sacred marriage. Chandogya Upanishad, V, viii, 1-2. Blake, Jerusalem, pi. 30, 1. 38. Cf. Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 196. A. Balint, "Die mexikanische Kriegshieroglyphe ." Reik, Masochism in Modern Man,51, 59-64. Learn to love the fire. The alchemical fire of transmutation : Wolle die Wandlung. O sei fur die Flamme I'jg Fire begeistert. To be content in the purgatorial fire. The fires of hell: "Walking among the fires of hell, delighting in the enjoyment of Genius, which to Angels look like torment and insanity." The apocalyptic fire: "Meditate on the make-believe world as burning to ashes, and become being above human" Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pis. 6-7. Reps, Zen, Flesh, Zen, Bones, 165. Rilke...