A Village on Fire

Today in my Wallace Stevens class, Tom Simmons had us construct small structures out of matchboxes in order to better understand architecture, in order to better understand poetry, in order to better understand Wallace Stevens' poetry, in order to better understand Wallace Stevens.

His kids though it would be really cool if we lit them all on fire after class.

So did we.

There were these wonderful flickers of majestic fire, where the old Cecil B. DeMille notion of flaming tornadoes in "The Ten Commandments" actually existed in brief. The experiment that we conducted felt one of a kind, yet there was utterly no significance to it save what we could conjure in our own imaginations.

Some people imagined the sticks to be people, and that we were demolishing someone's home. Others pictured it as a simple act of pointless destruction. I saw it as a plague of fire that swept through this licentious villa of matchsticks, as though their sins, however inanimate, were being punished.

The scene would have made a wicked album cover. Luckily, photos exist.

What a wonderful tool the imagination can be. What an awful weapon against one's self, but at the same time, what an awesome bandaid for the spirit.

In that moment of complete and utter pointlessness, that action of burning a little matchbox village, which has no relevance to any of the literature I have as yet come across, an act of imagination was born.

Like some magic to cure boredome.