Looking Into The Fire

He was about 8, a chubby, serious child with a look of abstracted inwardness that I remembered from my own childhood. The dreamer. He was with his mother and grandmother on one of the leather settees in the parlor at our local pub. I’d come down there too for the gas fire. It was cold winter. The flames curled around the imitation logs in a fair copy of a real log fire. Except that no logs diminished. Coals did not form and glow and shimmer: no red, gold, blue. No figures appearing in their depths. No fairy folk or trolls.

He stretched across a seat and stared into the shallow face of his iphone. He had a game up and running. Planes chasing planes. Explosions. Battles. Beside him an arc of real flames hissed and flared. He didn’t glance at it. He didn’t seek pictures in its heart. His pictures were before him: structured, ordered, accessible anywhere. Always the same pictures over and over. You can go deeper into the game but the game has always been defined. It will never take you anywhere not predetermined.

I remembered those cold nights in the farmhouse and the magic of the coals. I looked deep into them and watched those fairyland figures evolve. They suggested stories to me and I felt the stories unravel in my mind. Unlike the coals my mind’s fire did not consume itself. It fed deeper and deeper. It suggested more and other worlds beyond the first world of the fire and the second world of the images. Beyond a third world of stories were other possible worlds also waiting to be called into being. Waiting.

His dad came back with a tray of drinks and a fatherly joke for him. Dad admired the game. His back to the fire as well. Only I watched it. I wanted it to begin to consume itself and – in its slow, lingering death throes – create the possibility of pictures. The fire was always a dance between that self-consumption and the steadying hand of the fire-feeder who would stoke it.

The planes went down in the game as he played. I wondered about his mind and where it would go. How would it it feed and grow? Precise and structured, like a game, like the digital world that was as natural to him as the farmhouse fire had been to me. The pictures in my world had been analogs. From them I inferred a personal world of the imagination. The pictures in his world were digital. From them he would learn a series of actions.

For me it seemed natural to believe that the world was far, far bigger than anything I could imagine – because in my mind I could see all those misty worlds beyond worlds behind the images in the fire. There would always be characters out there yet unrealized, unborn, come to haunt me in my nights. But if the game contained all that ever could be imagined, where could the mind go in search of the beyond? And how could it go there? What inner techniques could he discover that would take him on such journeys?

Are we closing down our minds now? And if so: why? What is it that we are afraid to let imagination call up, turning instead to the predigested simulacra of the games? A world of rules and outcomes; inputs and outputs; where the only possibility of a world beyond the code is contained in that cryptic phrase: ‘error message’.

An error is a crack through which another reality strives to enter the world of rules.