Fires in Los Angeles
Radical acceptance of what is happening
Welcome to the Frontier Psychiatrist newsletter. Today, a meditation on current events and ancient events, both.
Fire is primal. It's a leading iconic technology if you consider the NY Times an authority. Watching Los Angeles burn doesn't feel good. It feels even less good to have everything you love burned as you run as fast as possible, hoping it won't engulf you, too.
It's also worth remembering that fire has been around for longer than we have. I've written about fire before. It's easy to take it for granted. It's easy to think about a wood-burning fireplace—it it makes a living room cozy! Or having that gas range—that's a high-end appliance. Let's see that other option for a high-end kitchen…
When it comes to pure science facts, fire is a combustion reaction. The combination of carbon, oxygen, and heat creates water vapor, carbon dioxide, ash, and more heat and light.
Everything we know—the water that makes up Rain itself—was forged in fires, ancient. The ability to have those pine trees make new pine trees? It doesn’t work without a fire to burn the whole goddamn forest down. The pinecones aren't opening until there's enough heat.
Similarly, conditions must be perfect for a fire to blaze out of control, and conditions need to be right to extinguish it. Some of these conditions are beyond our control. Humans have tamed many forces in the natural world; it's easy to imagine we will continue to do so. Los Angeles proves that not all forces are within our control. Some of them? They are existentially, terrifyingly, abruptly, and horrifyingly beyond anything we tiny little humans can turn the dial on.
Our conceptualizations hinge on factors bigger than us, too. Time frame matters—did we have time to run? The size of the fuel supply matters. Our control over a thing burning matters…to us. Fire doesn't care about any of this. It's gonna do what it does, and if it burns us alive, that's just what we get for being heretics who believed we could control it and not that it would exert its relentless power over us.
Our modern world is an homage to the impossible dream of harnessing fire and not letting fire own our nightmares in return.
My prayers go out to my friends in Los Angeles and to anywhere else in the world that did burn before or might in the future. We need to be careful, lest we are treated by the gods as heretics, all.
To quote a second emo band in two days, catastrophe keeps us together.
I hope this comment won't be deemed too far afield, but I am concerned because much of the media is using the fires to deflect attention away from the criminality of Donald Trump. While journalism which exposed what went wrong and how we can avoid these infernos in the future would be welcome, much of the reporting just reitterates what we already know: The fires are terrible.
https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/the-la-fires-have-been-donald-trumps