Inventing the Enemy: Essays

EKPYROSIS TODAY

Fire is the destroyer in every time of war, from the fabulous and fabled Greek fire of the Byzantines (a military secret if ever there was one, and on this point I’d like to recall Luigi Malerba’s fine novel Il fuoco Greco) to the chance discovery of gunpowder by Berthold Schwarz, who died as a result, in a personal and punitive ekpyrosis. Fire is punishment for traitors in war, and “Fire!” is the command for every firing squad, as if the origin of life is being invoked to hasten the end. But perhaps the fire of war that has most terrified humanity—by which I mean all of humanity, around the globe, conscious for the first time of what was taking place in one part of it—was the explosion of the atomic bomb.

One of the pilots who dropped the bomb on Nagasaki wrote, “All of a sudden the light of a thousand suns lit up the cabin. I was forced to close my eyes for two seconds, despite my sunglasses.” In the Bhagavad Gita it was written, “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be the splendor of the mighty one . . . I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” These verses came to Oppenheimer’s mind after the explosion of the first atomic bomb.

With which we come dramatically close to the end of my lecture and—over a more reasonable space of time—to the end of human existence on Earth or the existence of Earth in the cosmos. Because now, as never before, three of the primordial elements are under threat: air, throttled by pollution and by carbon dioxide; water, contaminated on the one hand and increasingly scarce on the other. Only fire is victorious, in the form of a heat that, by parching earth, is upsetting the seasons, and by melting the icecaps, is inviting the seas to invade it. Without realizing it, we are marching toward the first real ekpyrosis. While Bush and China reject the Kyoto Protocol, we are marching toward death through fire—and it is of little importance to us whether the universe regenerates after our holocaust, because it will no longer be ours.

The Buddha made this recommendation in his “Fire Sermon”:

Monks, all is aflame. What is aflame? The eye is aflame, O monks, forms and colors are aflame, visual awareness is aflame, visual contact is aflame, and whatever sensation arises depending on the contact of the eye with its projections—whether perceived as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral—that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of attachment . . . Aflame, I tell you, because of birth, aging, and death, because of pain, sorrow, anguish, despair. The ear is aflame, sounds are aflame . . . The nose is aflame, aromas are aflame . . . Taste, O monks, is aflame, flavors are aflame . . . Touch, O monks, is aflame . . . The mind, O monks, is aflame . . . O monks, seeing all thus, the noble disciple who has understood the teachings is serenely disenchanted with the eye, with forms and colors . . . with the ear, with sounds. He is serenely disenchanted with aromas . . . with anything arising depending on the contact of the tongue with its objects, whether perceived as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.

But humanity has been unable to relinquish (even in part) its attachment to its own aromas, tastes, sounds, and tactile pleasures—and to relinquish producing fire through friction. Perhaps it should have left the production of fire to the gods, who would have given it to us only once in a while, in the form of a thunderbolt.

[Lecture given during the 2008 Milanesiana festival of literature, music, and cinema, organized around the theme of the four elements—fire, air, earth, and water—on July 7, 2008.]