THE GENIUS OF KOMEDA
It resolves into the last wholly romantic period
before James, six weeks
at the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony
in the scorched hills overlooking Temecula:
rattlesnakes, blackened chaparral, kerosene lamps and a wood stove,
chaotic LA weekends and,
thudding fluently out of the old Remington Noiseless,
the unfinishable novel that decades later still sprawls
asymptotically
toward its climax in the burning oak.
Out of reverence, I never touched
the mahogany Steinway in my cabin, which
the caretaker told me
Rachmaninov had practiced on when he was in the area. A few years
after my residency, the piano burned
along with the rest of the colony.
Kerosene lamps, I thought,
but arson was suspected.
James wanted a fireplace and I vetoed it.
I’d just read that woodstoves produced
more airborne carcinogens in London
than auto traffic. Amid the city’s
newly risen smokestacks, Blake gave the world
six thousand years before fire
would consume all of Creation,
yielding holiness and infinitude
where now reign corruption and transiency.
“This will come to pass,” Blake writes,
“by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.”
Fire spreads among the senses
the way it spreads through the world.
I adhere to descriptions of death by fire—
war and Holocaust, 9/11, Wolf Hall, Australia and California,
the boy at Short Mountain who incinerated himself
in a cave. We romanticize fire reflexively,
involuntarily, just as we are hypnotized by it,
like that Komeda song where she sings
Fire, fire, fire, fire
Fire, fire, fire, fire
Fire, fire, fi-yer
Fire, fire, fi-yer
Fire, fire, fire, fire…
Paul Festa’s essays, criticism, and poetry appear in numerous publications and anthologies, including The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Daily Beast, Salon, HuffPost Opinions, Beyond Words Magazine, three editions of the Best Sex Writing series, and Nerve: The First Ten Years. Paul teaches fiction writing, poetry, and modern Italian history, among other subjects, at Bard College Berlin, and has won awards and fellowships including several residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo.