This is What I Do In My Spare Time.

It has taken us about half an hour to get to the site, earlier in the day we’d all been sent out into the landscape to gather items for our totems – items representing things we’d like to get rid of in our lives. Between us all there are a variety of objects – stick sculptures, leafy pieces and mud-caked creatures, wrapped in coloured string, paper and tissue. “Take me to the fire/take me to the flame” was the chant we sang as we made our way out to the heat haze. As we paused to breath between the lines, we’d hear the sound of the fire crackling; calling us and pulling us towards it

Along with our objects, we carry drums and rattles. As we make a circle around the fire, the darkness surrounding us gets deeper and deeper – a slow fade out leaving swaying and chanting bodies. The spirits of the place are there in the circle; liquid smoke and semi-transparent forms swirling and moving. The drumming becomes more and more intense – louder, harder, faster – and there is a shift in the atmosphere as one by one we enter into collective trance-space. The floor is liquid and the sky is spiked rubber.

We are in the dream-world now – travelling over the landscape, tunnelling into the collective consciousness. My body is changing shape, it is merging with the person next to me and next to them, and so on all the way round the circle in a circuit.The flames flicker yellow, amber and white, illuminating faces and then just as quickly the darkness pushes its way back down over the visual field. The heat becomes even more concentrated, people are sweating, dripping faces grimacing or blanking out as they leave the physical limits of their usual awareness.

The howling begins – shouting, screaming, guttural primal grunting, bounces off the drums and dances over the flames. A couple of people start jerking and the phrase “epilepsy is dancing” goes through my head. They are running towards the fire, stopping right at its edge and just screeching at it. They hold their totems above their heads and as we all cheer and drum, they throw the totems into the pyre. The flames lick and tickle the objects, the throwers fall to their knees – “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you” one of them yells “burn you fucker burn, burn, burn!”. Earlier that day we’d been told that these totems weren’t representations of the things we wanted to get rid of, they were the things we wanted to get rid of: extracted and obliterated. One woman, no older than 20,  is wailing so loudly that it carries over and above the sounds of us drumming – it’s a sonic blast that draws its power from somewhere deep down in the earth. “You can’t do this to me anymore, you won’t do this to me anymore, you’re dead, dead DEAD!” She is also on her knees, face contorting, sobbing and clawing at the air, letting whatever dislocation it is that brought her here go into the circle, into the fire.

Then in my peripheral vision I get a sense of rapid movement, coming towards me. It’s someone I’d been chatting with earlier in the day about hypnosis – a woman in her late 60s, just over five foot high, white hair, delicate and gentle with mischievous blue eyes and a lilting Northern accent. She is nothing like that now: she spits and froths and hisses glossolalian syllables. She kicks out violently like an exploding aluminium star and spirals up and down in bursts of possessed energy. She stands in front of the burning flames, raises her hands above her head and jumps over the woodpile as if she is on a pantomime wire, as she lands she speeds around the circle, nothing more than a blur. She reinforces the protective space and then makes jabbing gestures at the centre before finally throwing her object in. She then kicks it, stamps on it and grinds it into the ground, completely oblivious to the risk of setting herself alight. We make more noise, louder, louder, louder; she flies up into the air again and then vanishes into the shadows.

Later on that night, after the Fire Ceremony is finished. We sit around into the early hours, and the same woman who has worked for most of her life as a nurse in a busy Accident and Emergency Department, tells me about the torrid affair she had with a Rastafarian hitchhiker she picked up last year. “All my friends were shocked” she says “they kept saying aren’t you frightened you’re going to catch something? But my views on that are that life is short and you have to take any opportunities for adventure that come along. We were both adults, both single and no-one was getting hurt, so what’s the problem? And, she says “the sex was amazing”.The fire is still burning but lower now, we are returning from wherever it is we travelled to, the ground is firm again and the sky is spacious.