The Fire You Carry

On Meaning, Magic, and the Courage to Begin Again

Hey, Slick—

I’ve been trying to articulate an answer to the modern entrapment and the collapse of meaning.

We’ve heard Heidegger’s call for the poet.
We’ve battled demons with Nietzsche and made our own gods in the ruins.
And it’s… a lot to carry.

So maybe it’s time to return to the beginning—
to Plato’s cave.

Not to stay.
But to rewrite the ending.

And this time,
we bring our own torch.

La creación de las aves, by Remedios Varo

You wake up in a cave.
You look around.
You watch the shadows on the wall, flickering and strange.

And one day…
You notice something.
The doubt doesn’t leave you alone, so you have to look—
and you find out—

It’s not real.
Just shadows, cast by a fire behind you.

The cave cracks.
Your world breaks.

And so you look at the shadows.
You look at the fire.
And you gather your courage.

You steal a torch from the fire,
and you walk away.
You leave the shadows behind,
and everything that you knew.

And you climb out of the cave.

You brace your eyes for the light—
but there is no sun,
and there is no moon.

Only a starless sky,
black and vast and empty.

But you don’t turn back.
You walk, ever forward,
and you wander through the ruins
of a strange, forsaken land.

And when you’re done wandering—
the impossible happens:
Something shines the light back at you.
And in the light, you see beauty.

And suddenly,
you find meaning,
under this starless sky.

There,
you light your own fire.

Because you don’t want to tell them
that the world is barren,
that there are no stars.

No—
you don’t want to pass on the void.
You want to pass on the fire.

And so you begin to make magic—
you shape small figures
out of clay, and ash, and bone—
and you place them near the fire—
and they cast beautiful little shadows,
shapes dancing on the wall,
flickering and strange…

And when others wander into the cave,
they see the shadows—
and for a moment, they see magic,
and they believe.

For a moment,
they feel wonder…

And then they see through it all.
The cave cracks open.

And at some point—
maybe, hopefully—
they find the courage
to climb out too.