The Fire Next Time
Grief and Reality in Los Angeles
I remember only one major fire growing up in San Diego: hundreds of thousands of acres were burning twenty miles inland, and the Santa Ana winds were blowing its ash down on us in La Jolla — us surfers and beach bums and rich kids — far away on the glittering coast. I was just about to turn fifteen and my newly greyscale, ashy beach town became a sort of delinquent teen paradise. All the cops and firefighters were busy inland managing the catastrophe, leaving us to our own devices on the boardwalk to drink and smoke and enjoy the week of cancelled school as our city burned. My asthmatic brother had to flee the region entirely in search of fresher air; I remained with friends to party in an apocalyptic landscape that, for the first time, reflected the naive cynicism only a teenager could possess.
The fire became known as the Cedar Fire, which in 2003 held the grim title of the largest California wildfire in over a century. Fires this big were rare, and historic, and you can ask anyone who was in San Diego at the time whether they remember “the fire” and they won’t have to ask you which one. We all remember the ash and the flames and the destroyed homes because we share the Cedar Fire as a rare focal point in our collective memory. The Santa Ana winds will always, for us, spell fire.
These days, Californians have to ask “which one.” There have been nine fires larger than the Cedar Fire in just a twenty-year span. And smaller fires are encroaching on land that hasn’t burned in living memory: the Palisades, Altadena, Malibu. History seems to be in a hurry as “once-in-a-lifetime” fires erupt each year on our mountains and hills and coastlines, forcing us to revise yet again our lists of the largest fires this century and last. The smoke has infiltrated our homes and our conversations, now peppered with talk of IAQ and AQI and all sorts of other acronyms for whether the air is going to kill us.
The fires are part and parcel of the tangled web of disaster known as “polycrisis.” This term has been given to the global emergency we face today, described in Homeland Earth as “no single vital problem, but many vital problems [whose] complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, [and] uncontrolled processes…constitute the number one vital problem." In polycrisis, we face more than simply the layered accumulation of multiple independent crises; rather, as The Cascade Institute explains, “multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects” (italics mine). Each crisis amplifies the others; there is a runaway feedback loop of accelerating change which begets accelerating misery.
Think of Los Angeles: as climate change worsens, Los Angeles’s chaparral ecosystem becomes drier and drier, transforming vast swaths of greenery into a parched landscape ready to ignite. Because of the ongoing oppression of indigenous peoples and perspectives, beneficial controlled burns have been largely neglected by the city’s land management strategy, thereby missing an opportunity to reduce fuel stores below the dangerous threshold at which they currently reside. L.A. fire departments are notoriously underfunded due in no small part to the obscene amounts of tax dollars that the police departments receive in order that they may beat and murder Black and brown Los Angelenos with growing impunity. Rain is scarce, tempers (and temperatures) are high; L.A. is a tinder box in more ways than one.
When the fires do, inevitably, break out, more layers of the crisis reveal themselves: water stores are low due to climate-change-induced drought. Mask-wearing has become so stigmatized in the last five years due to Covid propaganda that residents inhale the smoke of an urban wildfire without PPE, even more toxic due to the deregulation of numerous consumer industries whose products have now combusted into the shared air. Neither masks nor air purifiers are prioritized in evacuation shelters. As a result, infectious pathogens are spreading rampantly among displaced people with Covid-damaged immune systems and smoke-weary lungs.
These are not just separate problems layered on top of one another like a to-do list of doom; they are more like magnifying glasses, each concentrating the crisis of the other into a dangerous focal point. Remember when we were kids and could set an ant on fire with a magnifying glass? We’re the ant now. The fires make Covid infections worse; institutionalized racism makes the fires worse; each node of the crisis is causally entangled with the others and therefore burning brighter and hotter in the heat of the other.
A bleak quote about our modern day spectatorship of this polycrisis has been making the rounds again online in the wake of the fires:
“Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it.”
The accuracy of this particular quote hit quite close to home for me this time: as the fires made their way up the hillsides of the Palisades, I refreshed my screens and searched Twitter and zoomed in on illegal drone footage for hours on end to determine how close the fire was getting to the hillside home of my relatives. The street names mentioned on the L.A. Fire Scanner became increasingly familiar and increasingly close to this house that I had visited often as a young girl, a house and family which had offered me sanctuary during a miserable year at UCLA, where the midcentury furniture and the wooden kitchen and everything else stayed wonderfully the same as all around it old bungalows were demolished and replaced with garish mansions overlooking the Pacific Ocean. This house was nearly on fire.
I finally received a grainy video taken by a helpful neighbor’s son that surveyed the property and revealed that the fire had barely engulfed the garage, leaving the home itself standing amid a sea of mostly ruins. It shook me that this video of disaster which could have been on any news station depicted a house I knew so well. There’s where the key is hidden; there’s the side gate; and, oh, there’s the scorched earth and blackened sky. The crisis wasn’t at my door, exactly, but it was damn close.
When Thich Nhat Hanh fell gravely ill in 2019, my meditation group joined with people around the world for a simultaneous meditation in his honor, marshaling our collective energy in the hopes that it would help him. It was one thing to vaguely believe in the teachings from his book, No Death, No Fear, in which he invites us to explore the realities of existence free from the boundaries of life and death. It was another to reckon with the looming death of the man who showed us that. I was in the midst of my own terrible year of grief, and sitting with others in the presence of death was comforting.
In that text, Thay (which he was lovingly known as) recalls a journal entry he wrote on the day his mother died: “A serious misfortune of my life has arrived.” Grief plagued him for the next year, as it does most people whose mothers die. Then one night, “in the highlands of Vietnam,” his mother visited him in a dream. They chatted and sat together all evening in this timeless space, “as if she had never died.” And when he awoke, his grief transformed: suddenly her presence was felt everywhere, as if he had simply failed to see it all year. He wrote:
“I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea….From that moment on, the idea that I had lost my mother no longer existed. All I had to do was look at the palm of my hand, feel the breeze on my face or the earth under my feet to remember that my mother is always with me, available at any time.”
Every so often, I feel this same cosmic communion with my departed stepfather, Brian, for whom I had my own terrible year of grief: a certain playfulness in my cat or the sound of a shrieking athletic whistle reminds me that he’s here. But his presence in my dreams is rarely of the sort that Thich Nhat Hanh describes, all timeless and moonlit and free from aging. When Brian visits, he still has Alzheimer’s and words still abandon him when he tries to use them. The grief is palpable. I wake from these dreams feeling not, as Thich Nhat Hanh does, that “my mother is always alive in me” (as he did after his own dream), but that my stepfather is always dying in me.
I feel that this is, in some way, the relationship we all now have to the earth: it is dying even in our dreams. The deeper we get into climate crisis, the more absurd it seems to plan for the distant future as if it were guaranteed. Our horizons are foreshortened and we’ve been forced into the present, biding our time (and biting our nails) until the next fire comes along. Unlike the enlightened present of meditation, we seem to be in an inertial present that is anywhere but here. We know it is 2025, but we’re not sure how close we are to the end.
Eve Sedgwick, the preeminent queer and critical theorist of our time, described her own engagement with Buddhism to have sprung from a “tête-à-tête with mortality” — namely, when a cancer she thought was in remission was in fact terminal. Of course, all of us are terminal in some sense of the word, but most of us harbor this knowledge abstractly in our intellect rather than concretely in our bodies. Indeed it was this very difference that her encounter brought into focus: it “[made] inescapably vivid in repeated mental shuttle passes the considerable distance between knowing that one will die and realizing it.” This gap, “the troubled mismatch between knowledge and realization,” opened its doors when she received the bad news.
What does one do in the space between knowing that one will die and it becoming real? And how does one manage the temporal incongruity between the “quickness of apprehension” and “the far statelier pace of realization”? Death, after all, does not always come quickly, though we know it is coming all the same. Sedgwick suggests that the answer might be in a change of affect: namely, transforming our impatient contempt for the “obscure temporality” of realization into a kind of respect — “a respect for the very ordinariness of the opacities between knowing and realizing.”
In this suggestion I find a refreshing reverence for the mysteries of pace, a tenderness towards our own foibles rather than hostility. Why does it take us so long to do what we know? I know, for example, that I shouldn’t be flying on a whim at this stage in climate crisis; and yet I have a ticket booked for next month. Others know that they should pay more attention to the spread of contagious illness; and yet they have dinner reservations booked for tonight. We do all sorts of things that we know we shouldn’t; the recognition of our ideals far outpaces our realization of them.
Where most people respond to this incongruity with denial, or rationalizations, or any number of other strategies that attempt to dissolve or disappear the incongruity, I take Sedgwick to be suggesting that we find a way to live in the midst of it, confusing as it may be. In this state, where we know that the world is dying and we don’t try to explain it away, we can encounter “the most heightened example of reality” — reality understood in the sense of realization, to be made real. Respect for reality is respect for loss, and life, and the merger of the two; it is respect for the ways that those who are dying have always found a way to live. In that sense, I am reminded of the meditation recited at Thich Nhat Hanh’s funeral, a recitation that can help us realize ourselves on a dying planet:
“Breathing in, I wave goodbye to Thay. Breathing out, I meet Thay in every moment of daily life.”