Magic Fire

creative writing piece

‘There is a special place, at the end of the garden where I spent a happy childhood. Between two walls, one newer, one old and backing onto railway tracks, there is - or was- a thin space, a hollow like a corridor, just wide enough for the little boy that I was to squeeze through. In late summer, at a certain time, and if certain conditions were right, that place would present an apparition of nameless beauty. For, looking through this passage one might see in the distance, set in line as if by a photographer, the rose-ruddy blaze of an upper storey window of a certain house, down and across the tracks, as it reflected in a brief glorious moment the fire of the western setting sun.

What was the vision of? Just this place. What was the effect? Just sublime. It evoked in my childish fancy the image of a magic fire at the end of a long, shadowed labyrinth passage. So briefly there, and then gone.

Gone where? The elements all remain. They all return. The miraculous configuration is just a simple return of all things in being-time. Perhaps, you could attempt to explain the chains of causation to the last limit of human capability- and still be hopelessly confined to a mere interpretation of a mere aspect.

And what good would that do? Exhausting and futile, furnishing much less than looking with wonder. That exquisite moment flashes forth from the pattern of the world, then all goes all’s ways again. Afterwards, the world becomes confused, and loud, and hard, and contrary, and painful with the clamour of perpetual change and effort.

Many thinkers and philosophers begin by wondering how and why change and motion should or could be possible, taking stasis, silence, stillness and perfection as the assumed basic state of things. Why should it be so? Why not wonder – and expect no more of an answer to questioning– as to how any such moment of sublime vision and the apparition of perfection, stillness, rapture- could or should ever arise in the ever frothing maelstrom of existence, in the vortex of living, dying, darkness and the stars?’