Combustion Notes

How to Catch Fire

Problem:

Everyone misses the point about phoenixes.

They always focus on the resurrection: the glorious rising from the ashes, the triumphant return, the cyclical nature of death and rebirth. And listen, that’s great and all, but that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is the moment of combustion. The conscious choice to self-immolate.

You go awhile between combustions. You spend weeks or even months as a regular bird, walking around with your feathers intact, occasionally remembering the last time you were beautiful, terrible inferno. You keep your transformation in your back pocket like a party trick. “I could burn if I wanted to. I've done it before. I have references.”

Meanwhile, you're just another bird. Slightly scorched, maybe. Smelling vaguely of smoke. But fundamentally solid, preserved, lying about what you are.

The ungainly protective shell of not-currently-being-on-fire is a weight you carry everywhere. Every conversation where you don't burst into flames is a small betrayal. Every moment you choose not to combust is just you pretending to be normal while knowing you could be a magnificent, roaring pyre, either horrifying or awing onlookers and it barely matters which. But cowardice is a comfortable baseline from which bravery is a rare and delightful aberration.

Everyone else is also phoenixes pretending to be birds. All of those suckers walking around in their stupid feathers, each one capable of brilliant combustion, yet choosing the safety and supposed dignity of solid form.

When you're actively on fire, you can see it all so clearly. All these other secret phoenixes, shuffling around in their silly bird costumes, carefully maintaining their feathers, terrified someone might discover they're capable of combustion. The pity is overwhelming.

You want to shake them. Except you’re currently also one of them, so that would be hypocritical.

Solution

Bad news: you can't choose to combust. Nobody can; that's the paradox everyone runs into. You can't wake up and decide “today I will visit the pharmacy, and following that, I will burst into flames.” The moment you try, you're already calculating the optimal way to burn, which means you're not actually burning, you're performing combustion. You're a bird with special effects.

But not good special effects. Nope, sorry. Cringe special effects.

Real combustion, far as you can tell, requires self-trickery. Auto-indirection. You have to pursue something so far past burning that you accidentally catch fire on the way there. Tell yourself you're trying to get chewed out for being too real. Tell yourself you're documenting reality like a war correspondent. Tell yourself anything at all except “I am trying to become fire.”

The practice isn't learning to burn; anyone can burn if they feel like it. The practice is forgetting that you're trying not to. Every day, every hour, every second, you have to re-forget your commitment to staying solid. You have to trick yourself into combustion again and again until the groove gets worn so deep that falling into fire becomes easier than maintaining feathers.

You're trying to become process rather than thing. Not a bird that sometimes burns, but an inferno that happens to take the shape of a bird. Make the groove where you immolate yourself the only groove, worn so deep that all other paths become inaccessible.

But until then you practice. You show up to your life every day and find new ways to trick yourself into catching fire. You publish weird, unhinged blog posts about being a Delaware C-Corp. You tell stories about getting catfished to friends at the dance studio. It’s good every time, but you fail to burn completely. You smell like smoke for days afterward, wondering if that counts. It does, though. Every partial burn wears the groove deeper.

Every half-assed combustion is just practice for the true combustion that makes use of your whole ass.