Set Me on Fire

There's a woman in my life who does precisely that. (I still have scars) Okay, not literally ignites me, but I never really understood what it meant until now. She does set me on fire, in a metaphorical sense- she makes me want to do more, to be more. All this energy needs direction, however. I would do anything for her, and she knows that, but what we both need now is a constructive end to put all this energy towards. From the ashes of defeat come renewal and advancement- reminds me of the old stories about the Phoenix. The Phoenix was (or is) a big bird, a mythical creature. Some accounts have the bird building a funeral pyre, then sitting in the flames, others that the bird simply catches fire and burns. In either case, however, the bird reduces itself to ashes. It does this when it is ready to die, and from the ashes is reborn again, and repeats the cycle all over again. I can see why people like this concept-the idea of reinventing or renewing yourself. But also, in order to do that, the bird must first go through the fire. Maybe all our lives are like that- we need to be tempered by the difficult things that happen to us, so that we can come out the other side in better shape than when we went in. There may not be any sense or reason for why things happen the way they do, but at least we can gain some small degree of experience from them.
At any rate, enough armchair philosophising. Last night at the library was a time worth reporting. I had a couple hours to kill, so decided to settle in with a good book for a little while. Sure, I could have stayed home and done the same thing, but there's something about libraries that I always liked. Perhaps it's the sense of being surrounded by books- all different words, different ideas and stories, each one waiting to be picked up and examined. So there I was, reading Gregory Corso, (a true son of a Beat, I am) when klezmer music begins to play from somewhere nearby. At first I thought it was over a loudspeaker or something, but the stops and starts made me wonder. It sounded like a group of musicians warming up, going over a few bars they wanted to get down perfectly. It was a really interesting, surrealistic touch- I began to imagine my friend across the corridor, a librarian, juggling books, her face painted in black and white, the library becoming some cross between a library and a European circus. As it turns out, there is an ampitheatre in the basement of the library, and a band was playing that evening. I went downstairs to listen for a bit, expecting at every turn to be confronted by masked and costumed jugglers or acrobats, and to be called upon to take a place in the circus. A nicely surrealistic little daydream- it's our imaginations that keep life from being too dull, I've always thought.