Fire Walked Like Me

Second dispatch from an inflamed Los Angeles, January, 2025

Where is your fire, you got to find it and pass it on — Sonia Sanchez

Burn study

It’s just like me, for real, the illusion of something erratic or flippant that is in fact concentrated, relentless, premeditated. It’s just like James Baldwin predicted, the fire next time, it’s just like Martin Luther King warned— get too comfortable and you’ll be integrated into their burning house, their karma, their dharma, their wooden gait. It could get too late in the dilemma, the drama could seduce you, and you could misidentify it as yours, and claim it, and save them from themselves, be reduced to some spiritual conflagration sent to rescue and enliven them, an oracle, or martyr, or answered prayer, singing to the damned or singing along to their doomed anthems. It could get too late, and you could discover you’re harboring nightmares of the street in flames and falling asleep as they consume you, entranced, drunk on lack of oxygen, exhausted beyond—

What do they call her?

Evacuee, escapee, runner, fugitive, coward, Moses, Judas, the meek ain’t gonna inherit the earth, cause I’ll take it, abeg, I pleaded, shedding soot in a choked-up way, leader, benevolent dictator, flippant constituent, truant, seer of the dead, seer of the walking dead, restorer, seeker, dealer, a breach in the ego where the intuition (soul) is sovereign, sun house, initiate, imitating god to speak to god— I woke up the morning after the power on my block went out January, 8, 2025, the foul stench of incinerated palm flesh, asbestos, and non-disclosure, coating my tongue in a new code, gripping the rook in my throat that might have howled in agitation had it not been constricted by a soft protective gauze of mucus to block the particulate pollutants from cutting the inner flesh like blowing glass into my larynx to carve refusals into yeses. A lynx slashed to just the eyes. Where is our miserable comfort? There was something provocative about that urgency, daring us to recognize it. The sky was amethyst translinear light flecked with blood-orange, insinuations of solaris, the second coming of La Jetée, and I felt coerced into the throws of Chris Marker and Abbey Lincoln, to “Throw it Away” to remember it better, later. Write a letter to yourself from the future and in it you are the brave one, the dissenter, the one who went ahead into a new, decompressed Cyprus to check for plague and came back vital and unscathed to alert the others, a vigilante— evacuee, escapee, runner, fugitive, fixer, coward, fix them for their long white robes, I planned to leave, where was there to get to?

Against my infinitely stubborn but reliable will and guided by an emboldened survival instinct, I began wiping ash from the suitcases I keep in the garage and packing by the the glass-eyed LED candlelight, electricity still down on my entire block, the room smelling of burnt lavender. Would I go to Philly on an assignment, abruptly, that afternoon, would I go to San Diego to help my grandmother prepare for anything that might come there (I called her, she was packing, my uncle was on his way to pick her up) would I go hangout at the house of someone with electricity and wait it out, bags ready at the door. I started talking with friends and loved ones, some had already lost everything, some were in the shock of neurotic hypotheticals. To gather: documents, clothes for every climate, food that might rot, data (hard drives, laptops), crystals (this is Los Angeles), shoes, skincare (see previous). A friend had driven back from Tucson, Arizona the night before, blissfully, eerily unaware of the dire precipice Los Angeles was overlooking, and our group chat lit up with nervous banter about the state of the city. It became clear that the only reasonable act was departure, right then, when feeling pulled to, heading to back to Arizona with her on the narrow 10 highway before panic created gridlock in every direction or the air grew more dense with fumes (urban wildfires burn rubber, asbestos, plastics, the materials old houses are made of, all which can get trapped in the lungs indefinitely and damage health in the long and short term, we had the luxury of contemplating this). We left before losing our nerve and becoming sitting ducks entranced by the devastation until it felt inevitable or adventurous to struggle through its worst phases. Staying felt indulgent, superfluous, as people who can work remotely, and reserve energy to go back and help when the smoke clears.

Don’t look for me in the whirlwind, I will have gone into the desert. I will have been sent ahead. I will have been excessive and ruthless and level-headed and unreasonable. I will have brought the black leather jacket and the brown one, two computers, a tablet, sprouted walnuts, organic kiwi, yerba maté, anointing oils, sacred texts, two autumns, all the privilege of having and gathering all of this, the blue optimism that whatever was left behind will be returned. The right to return, unalienable. Overturned semis lined the highway for a stretch and high wind sent cars zigzagging like aggravated arrows ricocheting back into their own hearts, eros in a sling, but otherwise our exodus was flawless, surreal in its mechanics. A perfect phonecall. We’d had time to question it or hesitate, a portal had opened and we either had to go through it or sit out the bonfire of the vanities LA is becoming like zombies in limbo, maybe join the excess of volunteers sifting through piles of throw away items for viable donations, or just watch in stunned, debilitated silence as the winds shifted and taunted

.Were we quietly militarized and part of a drill or psyop and the side we are on was decided long before that awful, breathless morning? The city has not stopped burning. Someone close to me lost his house, a record collection that would have been in the Smithsonian had it survived, 8 years of original music production, escaping with the clothes on his back, the phone he reached me on. We sped up, faster, get away from that feeling of loved ones sheltering in downtown hotels with nothing left but the memory that they’d had so much, they’d made all the American dreams come true until the finale is recuperating sold souls through unspeakable inversions of hope and despair, the finale is darn that dream. Two generations of a family, having lost their homes, went to shelter at my friend’s house. The city of Los Angeles can sell suffering right as it’s happening, right back to itself as pathos, the bread and the circus one giant Icarus and I’m leaving, my body is thinking for me now.

The desert doesn’t burn, the future, some say, is an Arizona Bay where California drifts sullenly into the sea and becomes the fauna of a new beached desert, Phoenix or Tucson the new shores. Every hour of the 8 hour drive between the old and new coasts, news of more locals losing everything they owned, of the fire spreading indiscriminately, lurching, leaning out for love, being arson, being nobody’s fault, being biblical, being satanic, being inconsequential, some girls still at hot yoga and Soul Cycle, Rodeo Drive, Erewhon, ash on the windowsill like confetti to them. Then heading home to fresh evacuation orders— faster, past the abeyance between endings and second chances, these are our chances. To have calmly laid our burdens down and turned them into skinned roadkill and lived on the carrion as if it was candy, bounty, I’m going hunting. Fatuous sentimentality has abandoned me for the time being and left me with the space for real curiosity, risk that isn’t contingent on reward or the next set of diversions. A new version of the self emerges every time the world collapses, there’s this disamibiguation, an ability to turn what looks like a hopeless collapse into a mandate without pandering to trouble for favor, until a close call that won’t stop approaching is forced to retreat, and there’s an ensuing survivor’s guilt as days have passed and the wind picks up again— my city will not stop burning.

—

I often recount aloud but have yet to on the page, the story of poetry reading that made me realize I had to be or already was, a poet first. Galway Kinnell, at the Getty Museum in L.A.. I was in high school. He read from his Book of Nightmares, a poem called “The Dead Shall be Raised Incorruptible.” In it he recounts his time as a soldier shooting his way through a field as tears and smoke blur his vision, mourning each person he kills, hallucinating their eternal return to him. Compassion and compulsion, survival and evil, love and murder, mercantilism and its no mercy eyes-on-the-road double agent of poetry and combat, going forward, out of the line of fire he himself creates. The Getty was evacuated a couple of days ago. I bought Galway’s book the night of that reading and he signed it for me. Five years later I took a private workshop with him in Squaw Valley, he read a poem of mine about the color green, approved with a gleam in his eyes and statement akin to, you have nothing to worry about, this is what you came to do, twist the notion of green into forests after the visible ones are engulfed in and destroyed by, their own heat. Nurture the lyricism that isn’t over-eager for radios, plow the barren land with it. I’ve carried his book on almost every trip I’ve taken since that reading, as talisman, or reminder, he set a fire, I have make something grow. Some of the affinity was made clear when I read past the stunning central piece I’ve described and can still hear him reading aloud in my mind, and into the other works in the book. There’s an unequivocal reference to Waterloo, Iowa, the town where I was born and lived until the age of five when my family moved back Los Angeles, it’s as if the book is written to me, this is how many great poets call their kin. These corpses will not stop burning, his poem repeats; he’s the one with the kerosene. My eyes are still burning from the smoke of that morning in a low, distant way, so that I can’t tell if I’m on the verge of tears or was just softly, tenderly poisoned by smoke and uprooted spirits of the undead. It does not matter. The distance between mourning and daily existence is no more. The crying maid in Get Out was not a basket case, she was the only sign of sanity in the whole cinematic situation, she was the music, the real score, all she said was no. No, no, no, please never stop burning.

Lauryn Hill’s “I’ll Get Out,” and the Unplugged concert where her going acoustic inspired so many to call her insane, also comes to mind. All she said was no. And what did we know of the industry’s austere and lonely offices, the abuses she’d endured to ‘blow up.’ I can’t say I have a clear idea of what to do next. The city pulses in me like a phantom lung. My sister is still there, so many people I love are. I’ve been given the kind of grace that makes me feel suspicious, like I’m being set up to do something terrifying and essential that I won’t have a chance to refuse. Hints arrive. Mirages in the desert. Esperanza Spalding happened to be in Tucson last week and I happened to know because we’ve been meeting regularly to plan a Grammy party for her and Milton Nascimento; they’re nominated for a gorgeous album they made together. When we spoke, just two days before the fire, and she mentioned she was on her way to Arizona and packed while we were on the phone, it felt like an important detail but I didn’t why at the time. I texted her on the drive in and we planned to meet with her and the elder, shaman scholar who was hosting her, a man called Baba Eno who has spent his entire life studying black dance, from folk forms to classical ones, and proceeded to spontaneously teach us concepts and shapes of ideas that cannot be learned or contained in books, cracking open an somatic intelligence in our spirits, mirroring lost parts of ourselves back to us so we could integrate them with the emergent self and dissolve the broken beats. The unknown began to feel safer and more reliable than the predictable that afternoon, more of me surrendered to the violent gusts of it that keep coming, there was no where but the unknown to get to, nothing to attain but a present moment that didn’t feel like siege or dread or yearning for release from either.

An influx of messages from people around the world reminded me how much trouble L.A. is still in. The Poetry Center here offered me a temporary apartment. I’d done a residency there years back and have memories of riding the bike that came with it around the university, to the local coop and crystal shop and used book store. More of me surrendering. I have friends here, some semblance of community. I’m reminded this week of how beautiful human beings can be, on a whim, for no reason and with no fanfare, just because it’s easier than being indifferent or vile or careless and phony. I’m also reminded of how oblivious and obstinate we can be, how one half of a city can be in flames and the in-person commercial auditions and earnest latte addictions can persist as if nothing matters but the performance of normalcy. I’m reminded that if I don’t keep reminding myself of the good and the real it would be easy to slip into a malaise or a daze and get stranded there, in revulsion; there is no room for stupor and ruminating. Let’s review the facts: Los Angeles is burning, the city’s air quality is so bad the outside air entering homes and businesses through ventilation systems has sent some to the emergency room with double strep throat and headaches and other ailments. Departure is not casual, return is not casual, many will continue to amble through soot and flames as if this isn’t happening, no one knows what to do, new fires in Venture ignited just hours ago. The city will not stop burning.

Another Ark of Bones

Goats are sent out to eat brush and help tame the incendiary. Donkeys turn up in yards, abandoned dogs are found by their owners, one woman finds a turtle trapped in a pond of sludge, another finds an owl with a charred wing and wounded eye, disoriented in the ruins of a former front yard. I buy a Johnny Hartman album at a local flea market and it has a version of “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” on it. Johnny Hartman who is known for singing torpor-driven ballads of total romantic ennui accompanied by John Coltrane at his most subdued and swooning. We will not stop burning. I think about flashes of premonition I’ve experienced in recent weeks; vivid memories of biking through Tucson several summers ago returning for no apparent reason, with no ostensible desire to relive them attached, the sense of massive shifts in routine and desire that would never relent, that were upgrades, that were enforced by divine ordinance, that would make sense later, the deep urge to write more candidly, more rigorously, to read like a student again, to think about the dreams as they are happening.

For cataclysm to be insinuating itself so blatantly throughout the dismantling U.S.A, two weeks into 2025, the night of the wolf moon, the night of the purple moon, the morning after, stray angst on every hillside, and knowing the place I long to get back to might not exist, the environmental and mental health crisis to come even more frightening than the fires themselves, the way the local and federal governments will collude to gaslight and exploit this emergency even more alarming, the land grab and surveillance capitalism that might prevail, the immanent domain thieves foaming with ashy lips, offering distraught residents millions to flip into billions, he end of the fantasy and glamor of Los Angeles that will surely prevail, where those who won’t give up the ghost will be swallowed alive by it—the book of nightmares is speaking now. The threads of the spine of my copy of Galway’s version are unraveling and pages slip out of the binding like fortunes. On the second page he writes:

The raindrops trying

to put the fire out

Fall into it and are

Changed: the oath broken

The oath sworn between earth and water, flesh and spirit, broken,

To be sworn again

A feeling more ancient and untethered from protocol, one that couldn’t descend into the cliché of takes and didactic, ‘here’s what we can learn from the end of the world’ attitudes, abounds. We are the morning dew in the instant of deciding to join the combustion; we have nothing left to learn from things as they are. Los Angeles’ self-immolation was figurative before it became so literal, tribal, unveiled as a demand to be fulfilled or it will become more severe. I get along without you very well, the rest of the world reminds Hollywood, just as I do, except I need you, you supply every fantasy that matters most to me, your destruction is your comeback story, will you please keep burning, will you not stop burning? Aren’t all muses undermined by the searing evil eyes of those who pretend to adore them, forced to fake their own downfall to disband those who might conspire against them otherwise. Los Angeles is faking its death and when the convulsions end, the nightmare will embrace us and raid itself with hidden light. In the meantime, throwing flowers on the grave of a living city as if there is a ritual that calls for this; there is no ritual that calls for this, commemorate the uncalled for right to discern between miracles and chaos magic; this is just a counterspell. Write tomorrow an elegy so that it will scowl at death defiantly like a trickster or government official and trade destinies with the Phoenix.