immanence

Watching Onscene.tv’s continuous, commentary-free footage of the fires in and around Los Angeles is like watching a Buddhist cremation ceremony.

Recently vacated homes and buildings burn, slowly collapsing, walls crashing, smoke plumes exiting from windows, and embers blowing from building to building, as a hand-held or vehicle-mounted camera moves silently through empty neighborhoods. Sometimes it pauses to linger on a scene, taking in the scattered trash, the recycling bins lying on their side, to see if a wall will collapse or a metal railing snap.

Sometimes the camera moves as if pursued. Sirens or a police radio may be heard, or firefighters seen in action, actors in the midst of a sublime scene. Or a more active intervention: water hoses sprayed all around, or an attempted rescue of someone surrounded by flames, an animal fenced in, a dog running confusedly between fire trucks and flames. Then: cars driving on a highway through thick plumes of impenetrable smoke and billowing flame.

At other times the scene is silent, with only wind, flames, and the sounds of burning. Or the slow, processional movement through blocks of charred, leveled homes.

To watch it Buddhistically is to view it with full awareness of what you are witnessing and how you are witnessing it. It is to watch and listen closely to the sights and to the sounds, and to your heartbeat, breath, and felt response in taking it in. It is to know that these fires are actually happening as you watch, or were happening quite recently. (Onscene’s About page tells us that “From the moment the photographer arrives at a scene to the time it is broadcast on our secure client-only server, average elapsed times exceed[s] no more than thirty minutes.” By the time it gets to its free video repository, or to YouTube, it might have been last night, with the buildings now bare remnants of what you are watching.)

It is to know that people fled these homes and are elsewhere, in some purgatorial waiting room, their lives upended and their belongings vanished. And that this is one of the ways that things come to their ends, which all things will. To take in this sublime event, this reminder of the continuity of destruction, the fire burning at the heart of all things, and to feel the full weight of its meaning in the lives of every being, every witness, everyone born that will live and will die, is to feel the solidarity of all things.

If “reality TV” was always a misleading label for things that had little to do with reality and more with contrived situations, these scenes are reality TV in its raw form. Like the images of the evacuation of Fort McMurray in 2016, or the Spillcam at the BP Gulf Oil spill of 2010, they render visible the reality of what lies ahead for all of us, in a mesmerizing kind of horrific beauty. They approximate William Burroughs’s “naked lunch,” “the frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”

As the Buddha is said to have put in the Ādittapariyāya Sutta, or the Fire Sermon:

“Monks, the All is aflame. What All is aflame? The eye is aflame. Forms are aflame. Consciousness at the eye is aflame. Contact at the eye is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye—experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain—that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I tell you, with birth, aging & death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, & despairs.”

The trick is not to lose ourselves in the horror or the beauty of the flame, nor to wallow in the “disenchantment” the sermon itself advises (interpreting it is a risky business, and one must choose one’s Buddhisms just as one chooses anything else). It is, rather, to allow it to connect us to everyone everywhere. And then to take that connection with us, carrying it like an ember to our next encounter, and the next.

The ember carries the spark of our solidarity with all beings: empty in essence, cognizant in nature, unconfined in capacity. It is how and why we connect and live.