THE RITE OF SPRING
You may find this difficult to appreciate or even to understand, but I’ll tell you anyway. This happened a few years ago when my very best friend was a starving artist who lived and worked in a squalid studio in an empty 1960s downtown office building that was in official transition between its dreary mid-level business past and its potential future as loft apartments.
Yeah. So one night, drunk on red wine and David Bowie songs, as we were wont to be, he soaked a whole roll of toilet paper in paint thinner or solvent or gasoline or lighter fluid or some other flammable artistic fluid that he had handy. I don’t remember what. And we slid down the halls with a comical combination of stealth and care not to spill our plastic cups of wine, and we took the forbidden elevator up to the creepy abandoned penthouse and then crept up to the eerie horror-movie creaking elevator mechanical room at the top of the non-slip metal stairs and then we burst out into the clear cold Calgary downtown nighttime skyline, punching our erratic footprints through the crust of stubborn snow.
And he cleared a patch and lit the damn thing on fire, and the flames, surprisingly, shot up a good three feet into the night. It was intended as an act of puerile pyromania, but we wordlessly recognized it as something more and spontaneously began to dance in an ancient circle around the fire, unleashing pure primitive forces.
After, we stood at the edge of the roof and looked out over the assembly of glass and steel structures rising around us and wondered why the earth uses man to assemble its minerals in crystalline structures that yearn to touch the sky.
Then we went downstairs for more wine and David Bowie.
