⁂ Achilles, Burn the Ships: Night & Morning in Migrant Hysteria 1/2
In 2022, a life of substandard care and self-abandonment became, briefly, a menacing pyre, before being taken by force and discovering— J'suis pas Jean D'Arc.
“Although my decision to set fire to the Golden Temple had been such a sudden one, it fitted me perfectly, like a suit that was carefully made to measure. It was as if though I had been planning it ever since my birth.” — Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima
A content warning for: suicide, death by fire, incidences of fires which are crimes against humanity. And, Hysteria.
Death by fire is the end of the saints, of the monks and of those who light the paths to the future. It can be painless, in theory, if you control all the elements involved. It’s a matter of contradicting the firefighters’ indications: inhale smoke, stay high, wait until the oxygen in the room is depleted. You lose consciousness, in theory, before the carmine tongues of your flaming grave ever graze across your face. The remains are nearly unidentifiable, there are none of the lasting signs of great agony that characterize other suicides. Thus, it is the most ennobling and generous to those whose faces have come to wear the stain of madness. I was first exposed to the beautiful luminescence of Jean D’Arc in an illustrated article, though I struggle to remember if in Castilian or great island Fries, if in National Geographic or one of the serialized tomes of every country then still on earth which I cherished for being the window into a world which I had suddenly discovered had borders, guards & climates. Time zones & kilometers. Then, surely, it was the monks in the gravure-barrel duplicated photographs (or offset?) of their lapid-colored robes, in life velveteen hues of rich carmine (saffron of one kind) or sumptuous butter-colored germ of the same (saffron, much less concentrated, the mordant entirely different though related, ingenuity that takes the flower’s masculine member & rescues its virility if not its agony). Or was it the photo of Mai Lai, the maps of the agent orange, the desiccation of the palms from the flames of the Americans & the Khmer Rouge, the South Vietnamese and, ironically, the Britons whose own capital and libraries had been set recently ablaze (via the Burmese, surely, or at least aboard planes from the airfields beside the stupas of Rangon/Yangon, land of a thousand tombs & a thousand eternal flames).
Apart from the other, unutterable blazes in the billowing & now-again-hungry ovens of Europe—which I held in reverence and in sadness in two childish hands as I saw the tattoo on the hands of a docent, who chided me, for my persistent, irritating innocence face to face with the metallic stomachs which I assumed were showers or tanks of milk for curdling. I do not know if in México or the New Galicia there have been noticeable bouquets of flames. Juan Escutia and the band of cherubic fruit falling from the great mast of state with the flag unfurled briefly, surely, may have looked like the ruby & chlorine jet-flame of state gasping for air as Americans whose anthems is full of flames trampled the feed. The great earthquake in Guadalajara, the one which brought down my cherished golden needles, not the one which announced my internment, was mysterious in the account of the Spanish visitor who called my mother ugly, an offense to christendom, but lacked room in his record to the Cortes and the Viceroy’s officers to note any warm ribbon of potential-then-real energy unspooling to consume the retablos or the Cabreras which were surely spared their heroic finale and instead decorate El Prado or the rooms of embarrassed family to share in the gnarled limbs of abolengo a node with me. The apotheosis of the Mercado Libertad, the freedom exhibited by the blackened canopies of San Juan De Dios, which I emphatically beg you to believe me would have been mine to govern and mourn if it weren’t for my temerity to be the passive belonging of a man and his Worker’s Party. Is that the famous fire of Guadalajara? Not one kindled by the victorians and set by an angelic bovine? Su devastación arquitectónica, sans flâmes o ¿sin mancha negra tiznando la frente criolla de la ciudad que hierve pero nunca quema?
From the flames of the Hundred Years War to the ones I hunt for in my memory of blazes which surely are the bookends of an obsession with martyrdom and protest, there is a thousand plus years of history? No, less, maybe less. But the primeval forests of Africa that were our root cause of migration and then those of Siberia or virgin America, the tinder that caused fires which blackened the flaming cyst in the sky, which tans our skins, or at least makes mine more humble & more beautiful.
To be like Jean D’Arc, or the pre-Haussmann Paris or its echo, Byzantium of the Bay, that was the goal from the beginning, an emergency exit of sorts in a life which surely would require such things.
On one evening in July, entirely dazed, I had taken two cans of petrol and started the bonfire of my favorite French cuff shirts and the large portrait I had taken of myself whose gaze like a sphinx stared towards the door to prevent anyone from coming in unopposed. I took, too, the wicker basket of clothing both soiled and freshly delivered from the laundromat where surely I was an enigmatic figure. For the pyre, the wool slacks and the suspenders I coveted as they were hand made by artisans, Père et Fils, and the shirt stays I brought from the Great North and had treated with the requisite devotion and relevance even as the elastic frayed and their noble nickel-aluminum fastenings began to betray their age and the number of times I had kneeled, squatted, or sat before a man who thought them fitting for a personality as maladroit & neurotic as mine. The pink shirt surprisingly luxurious for a fast fashion brand, the shirt with nosegays of lupins and poppies (of Normandy, not my paysage neglected), the blouson (as I called it mockingly) with the comedically elastic sleeves that opened to the cornucopia of flesh and musk when I wore it during the hangovers which perfumed my body odor with acrid notes of acetyl alcohol from the tepache I smuggled into the market’s most dangerous & thrilling corners (by the illicit sale of fighting cocks and my true brethren plucked from the sky, from the trellises and caged). The jockstrap which fooled more than one wagging tongue, the thong which brought me closer to the women whose gait and whose air of frivolity I took deadly seriously. The ribbon of wedding lace. The bowtie. A boot made of something’s skin.
All of it, I set before the funerary portrait. A splash of petrol on the offering to Narcissus or Pygmalion, on my legs which began to tremble, until with the Tom Ford (not quite yet Café Rose) the scent recalled a tree of paradise rarely seen blooming. A lighter, not the vain dandy’s Zippo or my beloved brass-effect Clipper, but a handy plastic Bic set the tempo. One, two, three, four—I lost count of the number of times the conductor failed to set the audience (imagined or real) into their delight. Then, a burst.
The air became thinner, briefly, I’m unsure if as I imagined the sacs in the lungs evacuated or collapse their excessive breath full of scorn for myself and entreaties for the stain of myself. But, I imagine or hope they did briefly (or else, how embarrassing). As the semi-solid columns of smoke were hewn by masons and erected themselves upwards before they curved their way down my throat and into my lungs—I recalled the times in my childhood where I had fantasized about this very thing on the steps of the Capitol in Sacramento or at the United States Supreme Court. I repeat, had gotten the idea first reading about and then seeing illustrations of the burning of Jean D’Arc by the Burgundians and how this teenage girl who heard the voice of God had created a nation by the sheer beauty of her divine luminescence. Once I learned of the Buddhist monks who weaponized their bodies and made road flares of their resplendent saffron robes to end the War in Vietnam, I had decided at age nine the form and style of how I wanted to die. That they failed made it all the more intoxicatingly romantic. Ah, a mistake to mention this to a conspirator & not to the psychiatrist (yet).
The portrait was consumed in seconds—I had succeeded finally in destroying the image of myself I had created, the accretion of successful and great labors on behalf of many others vanished in a gradient of nothingness, which I felt empathy with in this moment. The frame was more sturdy and survived until the metal fasteners popped and fell like luminous grains of rice upon the waiting charger, the flagstones of my supposed grave. The stare consumed survives in my memory. Every news report I came across of gay men burned alive on the streets of Manila or in the rural towns of México’s gulf coast came into me and into my bones as I began doubting secretly if I could withstand the defacement or the embarrassment of being left writhing & screaming without the epithelial layer of shame to occlude the sweating & crackling being that would be left behind.
On July 24th, 2022 (near bouts), I realized I was not on the way to liberate France (or myself). The can of butane erupted, singeing in places with its plasticine hailing or metallic embedding itself superficially in me, scalp, legs & neck. I panicked. I panicked. The people inside? With all the subsequent self-loathing, I took to the geranium in its great earthenware pot and inverted it over the flame which was spreading and the smoke which was not enough to even make me just a tad tipsy. Out the flame went with kicking and pounding.
Embarrassed, permanently, by my inability to become pyrotechnic or to enact an auto-auto de fe, I fell to the ground as a child, petulant and enraged. Hold. The basalt column of particulate vanity that reached the sky must have provoked God or irritated his eye. A brief respite. Rain. A drizzle. Just enough to perfume the ashes with petrichor & to snuff out my great obsession with the end of martyrs, saints and protestors whose deaths merited not even a day off work for the Judges & Clerks of the great temple of Justice in the North. So pitiful God sent me rain.
Death by fire can be painless, in theory, if you control all the elements involved. It’s a matter of contradicting the firefighters’ indications: inhale smoke, stay high, wait until the oxygen in the room is depleted. You lose consciousness, in theory, before the carmine licks ever graze across your face.
In theory, only in theory I became particulate matter or gaseous expansion and consumption.
No one mourns a failed last stand, one of many to come. Now, the monks or the great men of action and justice, who leave only slightly-discolored stains in place of a beautiful, whole person whose voice may have once been mistaken for the sound the earth makes when it shakes. You can set light to your vanities, but not to your reality or the consequences of fate. I learned, too late, bits of glass, panting, bleeding. I am unsure what someone offers to the audience or witnesses of such self-hatred.
I survived. However. Renouncing the flame, the same. Though, not yet, not then yet. Just hours before the thud of the musk set the river within me to leap its banks.
Set fire to the ship, Achilles. Not to thee. If you must.
(cont.)