Fire

"Yes, but who will heal us of this deaf fire, the fire without color that at dusk on the rue de la Hachette, exiting the corroded thresholds, the minute halls, of the fire without image that licks the rocks and stalks in the doorways, how will we manage to wash off the sweet burn that follows, the one that  lodges itself to last, allied to time and memory, to the sticky substances that keep us on this side and that will burn us, sweetly until we're chared"

Julio Cortazar, excerpt from "Rayuela" ("Hopscotch").

I started reading this book yesterday, and for some reason, this painting reminds me of the feeling I get from the main characters of the book: passionate, contorted, trapped, consumed...mad. She is being consumed by something that changes her turning her almost alien in other people eyes, making her feel incomprhensible things that other people label "madness", but that she calls her life. 

I haven't finished reading the book, so I cannot tell you what the fate of this character will be (and even if I knew, I would still recommend you read the book because it's wicked good). However, I can say that agony, passion, fear, rage... all of these emotions that "consume" us at one time or another (for whatever reason), always end up changing us. We let ourselves be burnt by a particular fire, and instead of becoming the charred remains of who we were, a mount of ashes, we become something else. We are reborn, like the phoenix, not necesarily the same person we were before (which is a good thing, I guess), but still ourselves. That's what this piece is about.