(Py)romantic Valentines

Valentine’s Day seems like a perfect time to consider the chemical and relational aspects of the hottest part of human experience: fire.

It is the metaphor we most readily reach for when we think and talk about all forms of love: the flames of passion, the slow burn of a long-term bond, the dying embers of a relationship in peril, and the flickering memories of treasured love lost.

Fire is likewise a central character in so many of our current headlines: wildfires lit by the ravages of climate change, advances in technology made possible by sparks and combustion, and political rage expressed in flammable liquids made projectile.

This piece — an article about actual fire in a humanities journal — may not seem, on the surface, an ideal vehicle for re-imagining the wonder and the limits of love, lust and commitment. But if read as an extended meditation on all the various ways love might be the human-soul equivalent of fire, the piece illuminates corners of human feeling that are so often dark and under-considered.

The author, an environmental historian, writes that “the tame drives out the wild. The controlled burn replaces the savage,” simultaneously describing a paradox the heart already knows well. Reading the ways man has domesticated fire (candles, stoves, heating appliances and bonfires), the mind thinks of the many ways love (or its mere promise) gets harnessed for other means. For example, shrunken into less threatening simulacrums, its mythic potential often even more compelling than its quotidian reality.

And what of flammable love left wild? By sketching the contours of fire’s ability to annihilate that which has served its purpose and now hinders progress, the destructive potential of an open flame is clear, begging the consideration of rigid institutional fear of queer love, intimacy outside the margins of norms, and the subversive power of freedom and inhibition in any form.