The Fire

The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

                                                                            —T.S. Eliot, “East Coker”

Once there was a man who wanted to live. This man searched many places and talked to many people and traveled across the entire world, but he couldn’t seem to find what he wanted. 

For many years he had heard vague rumors and whispers about a wise, old woman who lived in a barren and desolate wilderness. Some returned claiming she was divine and powerful; others said she was not the real thing; still others declared her advice was too much to take. Quite past middle age, this man was by now quite desperate, and very curious. And so he went to her house in the wilderness.

“What must I do to live?” he asked the wise woman.

She looked at him for a long time in silence; finally, she waved her hand over a pile of logs on the floor. A bright flame leapt up high. “Put your hand into that fire,” she said.

Now there is something you should know about this man: he was deathly afraid of fire.

For a long time he stared at the wise woman. Then he asked, politely, “Excuse me? I think I must have heard you wrongly. Could you repeat that?”

“Put your hand into that fire.”

The man shook his head. “Now that’s the one thing I’ll not do. Ask me anything else! I’ll do it. But not that.”

“There is nothing else that you can do to live.”

“There must be!” cried the man, frowning. “That’s ridiculous. I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“I speak the truth,” the wise woman persisted. “It is the only way.”

“I’ll hear no more of this,” grumbled the man, and he stomped out of the house.  

But the man could not stop thinking of the wise woman. He saw her sorrowful eyes in his sleep and dreamed about her fire at night. He seemed unable to go anywhere without hearing or reading stories about people who found the wise woman, followed her commands, and became alive. It was made worse by the fact that the more the man tried to forget her words, her eyes, and her fire, the more desperate and frustrated and angry he felt.

“I should never have gone to her,” he muttered to himself. “Then I wouldn’t be in this silly funk.”

Finally he became so tormented that he returned to the wilderness and the house of wise woman, to ask her once more what he must do to live.

Not jovial and expectant this time, he came before her sullen and resentful.

“What must I do to live?” he demanded, scowling fiercely. “Tell me!”

The wise woman eyed him shrewdly. “Do you really want to know?”

“I must know,” returned the man. “Or I will die.”

“Indeed,” said the wise woman gravely. She watched him for a moment, then spoke.

“In one thing you have done well.”

“And what is that?”

“You came back,” said she.

“I couldn’t get your fire out of my head—nor what you said to me.”

“That is good.”

“It was terrible.”

The wise woman nodded. “You are not the first to be afraid. For some it is too much to ask.” 

And she looked at him. “Will you enter my fire?” As she spoke a bright flame—brighter even than on his first visit—blazed up before them from the pile of wood.    

The man began to tremble. He stared at the fire, then at the wise woman. “I can’t,” he told her, and he could not keep his voice from shaking as he spoke.

“Then it is death you choose,” said the wise woman softly.

“Old witch!” he sputtered, and, turning on his heel without a backward glance, the man stormed out of the house.

But a moment later he regretted his decision. He almost thought of turning back, but couldn’t get himself to face the shame of it. So the man returned home.

Everything was even worse for him than it had been before. He could hardly eat or sleep. The wise woman and her fire were always on his mind. He was so distracted at work that he lost his job, and he was so moody and unhappy that his friends proclaimed him “no longer fun to be around.” He wasn’t frustrated or angry anymore. Rather, he was filled with despair; he knew now what he must do (for he no longer doubted that what the wise woman said must be true), but he simply could not bring himself to do it. He would not do it. It wasn’t worth it! It couldn’t be! Her fire would burn him, consume him, kill him—of that he had no doubt. And what kind of life must lie beyond such a death as that? No life at all. She was cruel, cruel, cruel to ask it of him! She was a witch!

But then he would remember her kind, sorrowful eyes. They had seen so deeply into his hopes and fears. Surely she must only ask him to do such a thing because she knew it must be good for him? Others had said so.

But the man could not accept that. He was not other people. He could not simply give himself up to be killed—burned!

This is what the man told himself over and over again in his head.

Soon he became so thin and wasted that every move he made was an agony. He crawled and crept along the streets, hollow-eyed and lost.

One bitterly cold winter day, the man stumbled upon a little huddle of tramps clustered around a fire for warmth. “Come closer, friend,” one called to him, more alert and tender-hearted than the rest. The man inched closer, staring at the fire. As he neared it, glorious, golden warmth began to creep over him.

Fire!

Feeling its warmth, the man remembered the wise woman. He had not thought of her in many months! Suddenly he wanted to be near her, to hear her speak again, to feel the glow of that bright, blazing fire that had once so terrified him. “Even if it kills me,” the man thought wildly. 

And so he made his way once more to the house of the wise woman. The wilderness seemed harsher than before; the sun seemed to blaze more fiercely, and he thought he would never be able to find the little house made of stones.

But find it, he did.

The man hesitated at the door, hand upraised to knock.

“Come in,” came a voice from inside.  

Swallowing hard, the man put his hand to the latch. But he was too weak to push it open. He stepped back again, defeated. “I can’t do it.” 

The next moment the door opened. Standing in the doorway was the wise woman.

“Come in, my son, and eat,” she said, and guided him gently to her table. He followed her like a child, unresisting.

She gave him milk in a little bowl, and helped him raise it to his lips. It was the most marvelous thing the man had ever tasted. Hungry for the first time in months, he gulped it down as fast as he could.

“Slowly now, slowly,” soothed the wise woman, smiling a little. She sat down near him, watching him with eyes even more sorrowful and thoughtful than he remembered.

Finally the man finished, and found himself looking straight at the wise woman.

“I have been waiting for you to return,” she said with another smile.

Shame filled the man again, and he looked away, unable to bear her steady gaze.

“You have come to feel the warmth of my fire,” said the wise woman.

“Yes,” said the man. “I have nowhere else to go.”

“You understand what it is you are doing?”

“I know it will kill me.”

“Yes, that is true.”      

The man shuddered. “And will it hurt?”

“More than anything you’ve ever known.”

The man stood up, trembling. “Can…can we do it right now? Or I might not be able to bear it.”

The wise woman was swift. She swept her hand over the logs on the floor and an enormous blaze sprang up into the air, crackling and snapping like a live thing.

“Come,” she said gently.

The man crept towards the fire. At first it was merely warm, but after a few more steps he could feel it burning him…

He sprang back, gasping. “I can’t do it. I just can’t do it…”

“It is the only way,” said the wise woman, softly, and her words reminded the man of a day long ago. Well, he’d had something to lose then. Now he had nothing. Only his own self, and that didn’t seem like much to keep. He was sick and tired of it. He must let that go, too—and better to the wise woman and her fire than anything else on earth. He was convinced of that now.

He turned to the wise woman desperately. “Please, will you help me?”

“I will do much more than that,” she replied, and before the man could move or say a thing, she stepped into the fire.

Something happened then that the man could never fully describe afterwards. An aroma, sweeter and softer than anything the man had ever encountered, filled the room. The fire blazed up, higher and higher, until it reached the roof of the little house. But the wise woman was not consumed even by such a fire—she turned to face the man, and he watched as her wrinkles disappeared, her stoop straightened, her eyes flashed with a fire all its own, and her hair fell to her knees in rippling, amber waves. Brighter and brighter she glowed, until he could no longer bear to look at her.   

“Come,” cried the golden creature from the fire. 

The man trembled and shook. He saw now that she had entered the flames for him, to show him that everything would be all right. Now she was calling to him. But what if he was not like the wise woman? What if the fire actually did consume him? He knew himself to be weak and pathetic compared to her…

No! He must follow her. He must. He was tired of waiting, of watching, of being afraid. He must follow. There was nothing else to be done.

The man stepped into the flames.

Nothing could have ever prepared him for the searing, blinding, mind-numbing pain that was the wise woman’s fire. It was as she had said—worse than he could have ever imagined. Somehow it passed through him and reached to every inch of him in moments, though it seemed like an eternity, penetrating even the deepest parts and leaving nothing unsearched. He was undone—naked, bare, exposed and skinless. The man screamed, and cried, and writhed with agony, and almost fled. But then the wise woman was beside him. She called to him, and took his hand. Her grip was surprisingly, unbearably strong, but the man clung to the ache of that grip like a child pinching his own skin to distract himself from a doctor cleaning a much deeper and more serious wound.

It was hard to tell when the change took place.           

The pain became sweet. It was tearing him apart, but only the part of him that was not actually himself. It was burning it all away. Like the wise woman, he was being transformed. He was becoming a new creature—something and someone entirely different than he was before, and yet also more truly himself. It was the self he always imagined and hoped he might be, but never actually was. Strong and supple at once, unafraid, pure, full of an unexplainable and unreasonable joy. A marvelous ecstasy overwhelmed him and he started to weep, great, golden, blazing tears. And there all the while was the wise woman, laughing, her eyes like stars. And all in a moment, it was over and the fire was gone.

The man and the wise woman stood—not in a cottage now, but in a meadow, lush and scattered with flaming-red poppies.

“What happened? Where are we?” the man wondered aloud.

“Here,” laughed the beautiful woman standing before him.

“What do you mean?” asked the man, bewildered. “You don’t mean to say we are still in your cottage?”

“I do,” she replied.

“But…how?” stammered the man. “Everything has changed.”

“No,” returned the wise woman quietly. “You have changed. And because you have changed, the world has changed also. Life flows always from the inside out, never from the outside in. To attain it, one must die—burn up in my fire that destroys only what is evil in him, and transforms everything else into good. But few are able to accept my words and trust me. You have done well, my son.”

“Only because of you,” the man murmured.

“You are here with me now,” she responded gently, “and that is all I care about. Come! There is so much I want to show you.”   

And she took his hand, and smiled.