Commentary on “Fire Lizard”
A shadowy memory clambered out of my subconscious last summer about the kid that brought a salamander to school. I remember feeling both fascinated and repulsed by this gelatinous lizard. I wanted to touch it so badly, but couldn’t get my hand near it. I felt as if it would somehow scorch my fingers, the way dry ice could burn. I’d been learning about amphibians at the time this memory surfaced, and so I looked up what ancient people had thought about salamanders. Turns out I wasn’t the only one who’d felt some awe and mystery towards them. It was widely believed that salamanders could live in fire, and were untouched by even the hottest flames. And yet they were creatures of the damp earth, crawling out of ice-ponds every spring to spend the summers living under rotting logs. (Incidentally, it was this proclivity for living under fallen logs that may have fueled the myths about living in fire: they were often spotted scrambling out of fire-places!)
Amphibians generally, like the salamander in “Fire Lizard” or the ill-fated frog in “Hopkin’s Spring,” are somewhat emblematic of a problem I pose in my work: the difficulty of living wholly in either the terrestrial or the aquatic (spiritual) world. For me, one of the frustrations of life is recognizing that, even though I have the required organs to survive in both worlds, those organs are rudimentary at best, imperfectly-suited for either place. And then again, maybe I’m not finished metamorphosing, maybe I’m still at an early, incipient stage. . . newt sprouts wings, learns to fly. Yeah right.