Alice Bucknell
CHAPTER 7:
FIRE WALK WITH ME
Malibu is on fire, again, and this time the neon pink-tinged synthetic vapor clouds of private water company Aquarius offer no relief. But firsts and lasts are kind of the same thing, right? The end bends back on itself to become a new beginning. A forest fire creates a clearing. As Federico Campagna and Jack Halberstam would put it, the ending of one world makes space for another. The final level of The Alluvials is something I've been thinking about a lot in terms of ecological grief and Bo Ruberg’s idea of permalife (a challenge to ‘permadeath' games). It’s impossible to die in permalife worlds, impossible to lose them. But to continue playing as the planet continues burning is maybe the hardest challenge. Here the game is the landscape, revealing itself to you as a world falls apart. You play as wildfire.
The level’s full of stories: text pops up as it pulls you through, narrating the history of artificial wildfire danger in the mountains around Los Angeles. Such routine disasters are largely a product of protecting private property over the ecosystem’s health: multimillionaire HOAs preventing the very necessary protocol of controlled burning historically practiced by the Tongva people, the original stewards of the region. The game splices this account of financialized disaster with an 18th century treatise from Émilie du Châtelet, a French natural philosopher and mathematician, on the speculative nature of fire (cosmological, material, chemical, godlike, sentient (?)).
In staying with the trouble of a damaged planet, a video game can become an engine of ongoingness. This level is about the idea of a loss of control that gives way to an alternative intelligence. Sometimes playing to lose is actually a demand for more, different life.
Download the game to play on PC here.
AN ENGINE OF ONGOINGNESS
“Everything alive is on fire,” suggests John Durham Peters in The Marvelous Clouds, a love letter to and training manual for reading media as ecology and vice-versa. Fire burns incessantly; as a kind of infrastructural intelligence, it has fueled language (through enabling us to cook our food and so grow our brains); industrial development (with the advent of coal-powered machinery, the atmosphere became the first posthuman hand in semi-automatized labor relations), to humans’ first take on terraforming via agriculture (controlled burns cleared vast swaths of territory for farming and helped replenish the soil’s natural nutrients). Fire is, in many ways, a media technology, capable of holding stories (think of every narrative yarn ever spun around a campfire); its induction facilitated the death of Earth time, or cyclical time, ushering in longer work hours alongside the candle’s flickering flame; in good ouroboral fashion, fire fanned the technological kindles that would eventually spark its electrical replacement.
But fire is not a tool, it’s a technology and a shared ecosystem that collapses scales between the first body—your body and my body—and the second body—the body of the planet. Marshall McLuhan makes the point that technologies both sharpen and stub out our sensing organs; hypertrophy and atrophy are a parallel process. While fire helped grow the human, we are inextricably dependent on its dependencies. The flaming domino ring goes like this: We are in debt to fire, fire is in debt to fuel; so to fuel we are equally indebted, forever setting things aflame, forever trying to settle the score. From the spectacularly human-imagineered systems like fire disaster insurance relief programs to the systemic and multispecies concerns of air quality and biodiversity loss that this element brings, fire demands a constant sacrifice.
And yet, as if by paradox or sheer magic, this loss necessarily begets more life, often exponentiated, though difficult for human eyes to bear witness to. Slow to spore andpermanently edge-effected, fire mosaics world worlds of maxed-out diversity, where whole biomes cross-fade and flourish within a shared compost heap of ashy rings. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, muser of mycorrhiza and prophet of patchwork ecologies, encodes this process of contaminated life: “Diversity is created in collaborative synergies; it is always becoming.” What looks like death is actually a different protocol for being alive. To understand the rhythm of fire—this ongoing gesture of giving and taking, combustion and reseeding—is to dislocate the human from a system of natural intelligence over which we like to consider ourself the master architect. Into the fire pit goes all kinds of life; from the ashes we come, and so we will return.