Fire in the body –and in this era

It's six o'clock sharp and from the gallery of my house I see several neighbors getting up from the solarium terraces: they have slept outdoors and are now carrying mattresses and pillows inside their apartments, before going to work. In my laundry room, a small shady oasis, it's already hot from the draft of the air conditioners of other neighbors who are still sleeping with air conditioning. Neither seagulls nor swifts cry out, nor does anything buzz but the hungry hoverflies. I only hear the bricklayers who – finally somewhat protected by a change of schedule – are preparing to continue chipping tiles in the building rising to the left, where the resident of the first floor has been the only one to resist the real estate pressure: they empty them, they gut them, and they will barely maintain the facade with green shutters. Perhaps he hasn't left as an act of resistance, but rather he cannot afford to leave: in birds and other mammals, the body tells them to leave for higher latitudes to survive and regain the pleasure of being stuck feather to feather, hair to hair.As always, I ponder this article and how I can explain the suffering that, due to the carelessness of governments and companies and the immobility that streets and media breathe, I feel no one else is willing to try to alleviate. The suffering of knowing one's desire is manipulated. In the morning, everything is easily simplified: less noise, less materialism, and less virtuality, less tourism up and down; and, in exchange, whispers, reading and explaining, touches, friction, and the re-cognition that must reconnect us with bodies and inhabited spaces. But memory occupies neurons, imagination creates energy, and the heat is shrinking the brain that should contain them, as happens to scorched squids.While I write with my body at forty degrees, I am surrendering to some inexplicable, premature neural flares and imbalances, which only find solace in the verses of 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 body that are churning, and may perhaps explode still as great unknowns, one of the great mysteries of humanity: it is now shown that common painkillers, ibuprofen and paracetamol, do not work in a woman's brain as expected (as has been assumed and promoted) against pain in a woman's body; that they were designed to communicate with the head and relieve the bodies of men; that our pain and our joy follow different paths; that of our body and our fire, doctors have not investigated even half a cell, they don't understand even half a jot.Desire rebels and, in the United Kingdom, some gentlemen throw up their hands in despair upon realizing that the famous skeleton from the Bronze Age (found with a ceremonial tunic and tools for working gold) was not that of the shaman, but of the shamaness from Upton Lovell. “Passion will fossilize you,” writes Núria Martínez-Vernis. I imagine a stony destiny, finally refreshed by the caress of the sea or the rush of the torrent. The editors of Foc al cos, the anthology of Catalan erotic women's poetry published this summer by Proa, join the ever-shortened and erased list of women who study and work, constantly, to recover, point out, redefine issues as essential as the particularities of female desire and the healing of our bodies.There are many humans, male and female and queer, who relate from other understandings of the world and the body, with the world and with the body and with fire – and there have always been. Who know the healing herbs and rubs; who remember how the bonfire is lit and how it should be done so it doesn't get out of control; who all year round walk their skin and pasture their desire through the woods. I want to think that, last night, the neighbors, on the rooftop, were able to sleep clinging again, in the tight embrace that warms; that, before closing their eyes and starting star dreams, they intertwined and rubbed, and let their skins sweat with the stickiness of bonds; that they enjoyed the stuffiness and heat with a salty aftertaste that summer offers. Adaptable humans who, imitating insects, with rising temperatures do not stop fucking, and double or quadruple their clutches; humans less vulnerable to this fatal future that forces us into paralyzing, consumerist lethargy controlled by the capital of private air conditioning units.Oh! The perceived heat from underground and walls is no longer generated by volcanic lava, nor by movement within beehives. The sound sensed beneath the ground is no longer the rustling of arthropods, water, or worms. We are in the age of fire and we cannot distinguish which is natural (the healing one) and which we have caused ourselves and will devastate us. I wave the fan with intention, because, like the Mediterranean poet Sappho, "I desire and I burn".