“What single item would you take from a burning house?” A reporter once asked the writer Jean Cocteau this clichéd question. Without skipping a beat, he retorted, “I would take the fire.” 1 1 - Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being, trans. Edith Sprigge (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), back cover, quoted in Johnny Golding, “Ana-Materialism and the Pineal Eye: Becoming Mouth-Breast,” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 19, no. 4 (2013): 67. To take the fire out of the burning house involves an impossible act: lifting burning itself — the brash light that bends destinies, engulfs surfaces, consumes what it illuminates — from the material substrates on which it feeds.
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