A flame is something you can see. Gas touches air, combusts into a play of orange and yellow, white and blue. It is an appearance, indicating that something has happened, is happening. But there are parts which remain invisible. The dark zone around a wick, the veil above an arc.


Hold up your palm, you’ll feel the heat. Get too close and it will blister your skin. You can taste drying matter, petrified wood, paraffin rolled into a candle, a sheaf of letters on smoldering coals.

Conditions have to be right. Then: immolation, as in music.


Tone, rhythm, the weave of sounds. Listen and you’ll hear what is solid and real—a coil of metal, steel wrapped in copper and pulled across a pin. Sound waves bouncing on the curves of oak and glass, escaping through an aperture, entering a world, turning on, lighting a fire. A dance floor pulsing with moving bodies. Gold and sequins, the edges hot-to-touch.