Fire

A grad stu­dent orga­ni­za­tion at Montana State University (where I work) has decided to start an aca­d­e­mic jour­nal of sorts. Their first CFP is ask­ing for writ­ings on “fire.” Any man­i­fes­ta­tion of that potent sym­bol is wel­come, either in essay or researched paper form. If any­one who still reads this is inter­ested in sub­mit­ting to the jour­nal, leave a com­ment and I’ll send you the link to the Web site — I’m not sure if they sub­mit­ted it to the UPENN CFP list or not.

At any rate, since I have this cyber­space, vir­tu­ally unused, and a few odd moments to myself at work, I thought I would brain­storm a bit in pub­lic on pos­si­ble sub­jects for the paper I want to write. The one idea that keeps com­ing back to me is the idea of post-apocalyptic lit­er­a­ture, which has made a major come­back since the ter­ror­ist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, but I think the sce­nar­ios have changed some­what since the stal­wart days of Soylent Green and Blade Runner — and yes, I argue that both are, in their own ways, post-apocalyptic.

In those days, the fear in the post-apocalyptic sce­nario was a quiet death through over­crowd­ing, being crushed by the pres­sure of the masses. I sup­pose this is because the great­est fear was that if the world didn’t end in the glare of a nuclear fire­ball, we would breed uncon­trol­lably until was suffocated.

Now, how­ever, we see a dif­fer­ent sort of sce­nario — iso­la­tion. Look at Jericho, the CBS tele­vi­sion series, for an exam­ple. We, the Internet reared gen­er­a­tion, fear iso­la­tion most of all. We fear being cut off from the world around us, with­out our link to the Web, with­out the vital infor­ma­tion that we think is nec­es­sary to mod­ern life.

What does this have to do with fire? I’m not sure yet, but I think there’s an Emersonian sym­bol worth explor­ing deep beneath that lack of con­nec­tion with other peo­ple — also the close link between the apoc­a­lypse and fire is not a new idea...

Related posts:

1. Link: Tire fire vid