The Golem of Los Angeles

Parable of the Burning House

33 Parable of the Burning House We could have burned to death in our sleep, my roommate says, then brightly asks will i drive her to the edge of town to see the flames bounding through grass and up eucalyptus trees, each tree a torch that lights the next so it relays itself across the landscape into the hills above our house, a river of black smoke roiling overhead, splitting the sky into blue halves. We drive to the park, where a little crowd watches blazes lope through the valley then leap the freeway towards us like yellow lions. i am still in my head, thinking of Heraclitus, the fire philosopher, who says all things are made of fire and will change back into fire, but when a light voice asks, Mommy, is our house going to burn down again? and a heat-blast prickles our cheeks, i shout, Let’s get out of here! and we ricochet to the car in cartoonish fear. it’s easy to talk about the baptism of fire, about the forge of the spirit, the purifying flame, but when the sun is a bloodshot planet in the smoke and the sky fills with orange nebulae, people watching on porches start to run. When we get home, my roommate packs and flees but i’m on the roof with the garden hose watering the house down as fire spills downhill into the graveyard across the street, the trees like brushes painting the sky red above the sleeping dead. 34 i’m gauging how much time i have before i must run, too, when the wind shifts and i stand on the roof with the limp hose, watching, guilty, relieved, as other peoples’ houses burn. Here is a woman riding out of the hills on the handlebars of a young man’s bicycle while her house flames behind. Wait, she says, my novel is in the house. it is ten years’ work, no other copies, but the young man doesn’t understand. Don’t worry, he says, it’s only things. California is burning and it makes the eye burn, the nose burn, the tongue burn, and as the matter of the world goes up it makes the mind burn as well, since all things of the world are on fire, with the fire of lust, fire of suffering, fire of attachment. But it isn’t easy to be a Buddha and let go of the world that houses our things, the mind that houses the world, of the women who loved me for a while, of even these words for which i’ve had such hopes. it isn’t easy at all, and even if it were, what would be the point of being that free, of standing alone when the fires die, like this bathtub on claw feet in black stubble, this field of chimneys without houses? —for Maxine Hong Kingston ...