Fire in the body –and in this era

It's exactly six o'clock and from the gallery of my house I see some neighbors getting up on the solarium terraces: they've slept outdoors and are carrying mattresses and pillows into the apartments before going to work. In my laundry room, designed as a shady oasis, it's now hot from the blast of air conditioning from other neighbors who are still sleeping with the air conditioning on. There are no seagulls screeching or pigeons cooing, nor anything buzzing but the hungry hoverflies. I only hear the construction workers who – finally protected by a change in schedule – are bracing themselves to continue hammering the tiles of the building that's teetering to the left, where the inhabitant of the first floor has been the sole holdout against real estate pressure. They've emptied it, gutted it, and they'll barely maintain the facade of green shutters.

As always, I ponder in this article, whether the one on the first floor stayed as an act of resistance, or because he can't afford to leave; whether the residents of the bivouac must have had an ancestral love; and how the suffering caused by manipulated desire is explained and cured. In my mind, everything simplifies: less noise, materialism, virtuality, and 'touristing' up and down; in exchange, whispers, touches, friction, and the recognition that it must reconnect us with inhabited bodies and spaces. But imagination creates energy, memory occupies neurons, and the heat is shrinking the brain that should contain them, as happens to scorched squids. And I'm giving in to some inexplicable, premature fevers and neural imbalances, which find comfort in verses by Dolors Miquel: “Now I am here. / I am a forest of obscene hours. / I am a forest of immodest vines, / I am the masochistic tearing of brambles. / I cross the dark spaces of the brain.” Of a brain and a forest that are churning, and perhaps will ignite while still great unknowns, one of humanity's great mysteries.

Of our ailments and our joy, modern medicine has no idea, because doctors (who were men and nothing more), of the particularities of our bodies and our fire have investigated no more than questions of appearance, those that were economically profitable. A natural desire, but half-misunderstood, rebels in me while, in the United Kingdom, some gentlemen are getting worked up about understanding that the famous Bronze Age skeleton (found with a ceremonial tunic and gold-working tools) was not the shaman's but the shamaness's from Upton Lovell. “Passion will make you a fossil,” writes Núria Martínez-Vernis. I imagine common destinies of stone, finally refreshed by the caress of the sea or the jolt of the torrent. To the always cut and erased list of women who study and work, constantly, to recover, point out, redefine questions as essential as the particularities of female desire and the healing of our bodies, are added the editors of Foc al cos (Proa, 2026), the anthology of Catalan women's erotic poetry from the Middle Ages to today, which includes the verses I quote; and the Mallorcans from the magazine Lucas, who in their fifth issue have gathered photography and words to warm us up further.

I stop to observe the little cups portrayed by Aina Pla and I am comforted by the certainty that there have always been humans who relate from other understandings of the world and the body, with the world and with the body and with fire. Those who all year round stroll their skin and graze their desire through the woods; those who know about herbs and healing rubs, or those who awaken the bonfire without it getting out of control –because they clear and temper it like a daily chore. I want to think that, after a fire, there is organic matter everywhere that revives green and verb; that, last night, the neighbors slept clinging, on the terrace, in the tight embrace that tempers and that, before closing their eyes and starting star dreams, they intertwined, rubbed and sweated with the stickiness of bonds; that there are those who still enjoy the suffocating with a salty aftertaste, instead of fornicating like corpses inside an artificial freezer.

The heat of the earth, the sea, and buildings must be generated by earthquakes, volcano lava, canine desire, and movement within beehives. The noise beneath the ground must be the rustling of arthropods, water, or worms. We are in the era of fire and we do not distinguish which is natural (the healer) and which we have caused and will devastate us. I could imitate birds and other mammals, to whom the body instructs to leave for the north to recover the pleasure of feathers with feathers, hair with hair. But I choose to imitate insects that with the lethal increase in temperature do not stop fucking, and not those that enter houses frightened. I choose to be a human less vulnerable to the fatal future of paralyzing, consumerist lethargy controlled by the capital of privatized air conditioning devices. I choose to move the fan with brio and I let my body catch fire – and in this era.