A.R. Ammons, "The City Lights"

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

Secret Histories of the Arab Spring

Mohamed Bouasisi: the Tunisian street vendor who self-immolated on 17 December, 2010 in protest against the corruption of the Ben Ali regime. Bouasisi’s suicide would soon become a symbol. He was martyred. And his martyrdom marked a founding moment of the Arab Spring.

Self-Immolation has an incredible history. So too does fire.

Gaston Bachelard writes that “Fire smolders in a soul more surely than it does under ashes” (13). Fire: “…from the sight of the great blaze of fire shining against the night sky and extending out over the broad expanse of ploughed fields.”

Boehme anticipates Bachelard: “Our life is as a fire dampened, or as a fire shut up in stone” (Incarnatione).

For Norman O. Brown, “The choice is between partial incorporation and total incorporation (integration). Participation (playing a part), or fusion. Total incorporation, or fusion, is combustion in fire” (Love’s Body, p. 176). Love is all fire (179). “To be aflame at every point. To be alive is to be burning.”

Of course, Bouasisi was hardly the first martyr of the Arab Spring. Before him there was Bradley Manning. Manning’s leaked classified diplomatic cables exposed a range of illegitimate dictatorships in Northern Africa, Western Asia and the Middle East. The publicized cables made formerly repressed private sentiments publicly recognizable. Popular unrest soon translated into fervorous revolutionary upheaval.

Manning's motivations stemmed from his disenchantment with Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. A wave of democratizing energies sweeping Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Morocco, prompted by the US military’s policy on closeting gay soldiers.Manning: secret progenitor of the Arab Spring.

What is Anger?

Anger, like violence (violentia), is etymologically associated with explosive fire. Anger is combustion, fusion, an all consuming flame. Love is all fire, Augustine tells us, and so heaven and hell are the same place. Norman O. Brown takes this to mean that "the torments of the damned are part of the felicity of the redeemed."