Consuming Fire

Passion is consuming fire,
He reaches inside to remove
All that you don’t need, for the pyre,
So that what’s left just might improve.

As your flames reach to the sky
Most will see and stay away
Lest sparks jump off as they pass by
And scorch them with your light display

But those not burnt are chilled and dead,
So do not embrace jealousy,
Your burning may mean pain and dread,
But a stone cold corpse is worse to be.

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If you’ve ever been uncomfortably passionate about something, to the point that you have to avoid monologuing about it when you’re around new people, then I think this poem is something to which you might relate. I’m probably writing to an audience of these people considering the nature of blogging. Eventually you are left with the choice to “burn” publicly, or to smother the fire for social reasons. If you’ve chosen the former, you have almost certainly experienced the awkwardness and discomfort that comes with that.

At some point, in at least the last several decades, “passion” kind of became weird and socially unacceptable. To be “cool” was to be above it all and to not care. The world largely embraced nihilism and absurdism, both of which sort of make the case that everything is meaningless. You can die somberly like a bleak character from a Russian novel, or while laughing, like a madman from a Russian novel, but none of it matters. If everything is meaningless, caring about anything is both pointless and weird.

But where does that lead? Definitely not to any great works of art, difficult but necessary moral corrections, or new pro-human discoveries. I think this isn’t an overtly political thing to say, but would a society of passionate people be okay with the fact nobody on Jeffrey Epstein’s client list has been named or investigated, let alone arrested and prosecuted? The lukewarm indifference of the population is how that is allowed to happen. Would a passionate society be okay with our architecture growing steadily more oppressive and ugly? Every period of civilized history prior to the 20th century left behind beautiful art and architecture worth preserving. Our descendants will be tearing down and replacing a lot of what has been built since World War 2. Would a passionate society be okay with not visiting the moon in over 50 years? That’s such an absurdly long span of time, in the face of technological advancement, that it has spurred the widespread belief that we never went to the moon in the first place. Most technological advancement over the last century has been driven by military expediency, not passion or yearning for flourishing.

It’s a good thing to care. Do more of it.