THE PURPOSE OF THE FIRE-DANCE

What was the purpose of the fire-dance? Was it to let the Feds know they serve us and not us them? I say “Feds” knowing it an American term we don’t have in this country. Was it that the fire-dancers believed it would lead them to the Future State of Poetry? Did they think it would be as Rimbaud desired, Christmas on earth? Rimbaud, incidentally, bemoaned that his people only rose up to loot and burn and had no higher Ideal.

I was reading poetry throughout the fire-dance and didn’t know anything was going on until my father texted me saying “a riot has broken out. Stay indoors.” I did what he said until a friend came to my door and said I should go and check it out, as it was all kicking off right outside the building. I went out there for literally a minute, saw shop windows being trashed and shops looted, then returned to my bedroom to read poetry. It was a book I got from the library. I don’t remember its name but it was by an Irish poetess who seemed to be using only ten or twelve lines per poem as if to provide the building blocks of a happier world.

Was there something purgatorial going on that day? You heard of things like “the happening” back in the 60’s, whose purpose was to wash the eye and cure boredom but the fire-dance was more, more widespread, more destructive. Despite my not getting involved, I was told at a later date that everyone cornered by the police said “it’s called the fire-dance” and “it was John Tucker.” So I’ve been being observed ever since at my laptop even this deep into the countryside.

At the time of the fire-dance, David Cameron of the Conservative Party was Prime Minister and I assumed that was what it was - that the Left didn’t want the Right to come into power. Bin Ladin had also just been discovered; and there was a wave of revolution around the Muslim World.

Now we live in post-Brexit Britain. Covid-19 followed that, then the war between Russia and the Ukraine, then the war between America and Iran. It’s as my old friend says on Facebook: “life has felt like a weird action movie.” I cast my mind back to the fire-dance, as they called it, and try to fathom why I was blamed.

At the age of about fourteen or fifteen, I left Wellington College and sent back a poem book I had written to my mate F-D, whom it would seem used to go on night-walking adventures with me at boarding school. I don’t know this for sure because I didn’t read the notebook I sent him, and it was such a long time ago, but I think it was called ‘The Fire-dance’ because he was F-D. So that’s one antecedent in literature, and I can also think of the James Joyce poem ‘Golden Hair’ which Syd Barrett put to music on The Madcap Laughs and which contains the line “watching the fire dance on the floor.” Jim Morrison also says “the music is your special friend/ dance on fire as it intends.” Miles more recently that intelligent indie band The Kaiserchiefs sang “I predict a riot.” Still, I didn’t see it coming and didn’t participate when I found out, and can’t think of its stance.

One would suppose that if there was a choice about what to trust, the fire-dance or the State, that the fire-dance would be more trustworthy. At the time I thought of the point in Jim Morrison’s The Lords And The New Creatures where he mentions a “loose, nerveless ballet of looting,” also of Morrissey who urged “shoplifters of the world unite.” A couplet came to me, into my inbox, which went:

Weird, sudden giants have knocked a new door

which will not lock for all the docs of the law.

It should’ve gone in a poem somewhere, but now it doesn’t seem like I am going to prison, I don’t need it. The fire-dance, anyhow, seemed to be asking of the need for a creed. I don’t think it should be down to me to write the creed because I recently took an O. D. the likes of which it was said to be genius to survive but coming back down found I could no longer ejaculate. I don’t think I should be made to sign everything I do over to Anon as a result either, because John Stuart Mill says, in the essay On Liberty, that a progressive country can quickly become a backward country if there is a decrease in Individuality. By now my friends in the city where I used to live report that my best bits so far in the fifteen books and pamphlets I have published are the Oedipus Wrecks set list because it was the portal to the island of penguins and also the maths of the new colour from when I was seven.

Now I have decided to ask my friendly A. I. co-pilot what the fire-dance was all about. Instead of calling it the fire-dance, I called it the Tottenham Riots as that’s how it’s more formally known. A. I. takes a couple of seconds and gets back to me saying there was a protest against police shooting someone called Mark Duggan two days earlier. Protestors marched to Tottenham then it escalated, lost unified political purpose and became widespread rioting, arson and looting, also opportunistic criminality driven by personal gain, excitement and resentment towards policing. There was what A. I. calls “copycat disorder” spreading across London and then to other cities nationwide. Interviews and court data later showed that most participants were not motivated by a political cause, but by: anger at police; social exclusion and lack of opportunities; consumerism and desire for goods; thrill‑seeking and peer influence. So in the beginning it was a focussed protest demanding accountability for Mark Duggan’s death, then as events unfolded the “purpose” dissolved. The riots became a multi‑factor eruption of social frustration, opportunism, and breakdown of trust, rather than a coordinated political movement.

That was 2011 and it is 2026 and I am only just finding out. But can A. I. be trusted? There may have been a wider cause like Power to the People brewing on an imminent and latent level. And if A. I’s account of what happened is correct, why did I get blamed by everyone cornered by the police?

This time I really am I going to ask A. I. not of the purpose of the Tottenham Riots but of the purpose of the fire-dance to see if it has cultural history. It says across the world fire-dances are rituals of transformation, protection, renewal and connection with the sacred or spirit world. So you could see something neo-shamanic in it – like a mass fertility ritual. I do remember my dad saying something about how “the system needs shaking up,” so I think he knew more about it than I did but I still don’t think it originated with him.

In Papua New Guinea, the fire-dance invites, placates and then sends away spirits. Fire is seen as the threshold between the spirit and the human world. Other fire-dances involve walking or dancing on embers with the purpose of purification, testing courage or faith, rites of passage, healing and social cohesion. Firewalking traditions across India, Polynesia, Greece, Bulgaria, and Spain serve as initiation rituals and collective religious experiences. These rituals strengthen group identity and create what Durkheim called collective effervescence — a shared emotional state that binds communities. In other instances, the fire-dance has the purpose of religious devotion, prophecy and communal blessing.

A. I. says in Polynesian and other indigenous traditions, fire‑dance often expresses: mythic stories; warrior identity; cosmic renewal; cultural heritage. For example, the Samoan fire‑knife dance (Siva Afi) evolved from warrior demonstrations and now preserves cultural identity through performance. Fire‑dance can also mark cosmic cycles, such as the Aztec New Fire Ceremony, performed every 52 years to renew the world.

It also mentions fire-dance as artistic expression and spectacle. It says modern fire‑dancing (poi, fire‑twirling, fire‑spinning) often serves: Entertainment; Storytelling; Aesthetic display; Cultural tourism. But even in these contexts, the deeper symbolism of transformation, danger, and mastery of elemental forces remains.

If it was about me, maybe I should’ve walked to the Houses of Parliament and nailed a message to the door Luther-style, saying “cannabis is legal. Fact.” I’ve actually grown out of smoking it, haven’t had a smoke of anything for years, but at the time was still interested in weed. Maybe they thought I had a plan? Maybe I let everyone down by not foreseeing it, not being in on it, not having heard anything about Power to the People. Anyhow, you get the idea: I rather think if I really had started the riot I would’ve known about it. If it started with a protest against a cop killing a member of society, I see its cause as just, for that life we will never have back.

At the time I was living in a Council Hostel in the East End of London. I had gone down south after my degree, my First Class Honours degree, and run out of rent money, and couldn’t get a job and was on the street. After appealing to the council and a long day of endless phone calls and faxes I was allowed to have a bed in the Council Hostel. There were tramps all over the street yet in the Hostel there was a whole corridor of untaken bedrooms. That’s where I was when the riots broke out, and I admit to stealing food from Iceland and to begging and to living at the fringes of a wasteful society. It was no way for a new graduate to be living and after a year I returned to the foot of the fell – my parents’ house, claiming I missed the fresh air, the lucid light, the gorgeous tapwater, and the north in general. Living in the north is a poetic decision – but all this is by the by. You see even in a cross-section of the life of someone in me who didn’t even get involved that there is potential rationale for the fire-dance. I suppose if you took a cross-section of any life, examined it, in the moment the fire-dance was unloosed, you might find many more lives contain a potential rationale for the fire-dance.

At the time, in London, after my degree, I was working on a text that said it took the form of defaced bank notes… it was something left over from my degree (where I also did a dissertation on a scientist poet called David Morley who says “poetry is the opposite of money.”) It wasn’t necessarily about a more fair, free and equal society, my piece, but its form was left over from an Age of Terror that began when the Towers came down in my Gap Year. I would’ve said it’s also one of the good ones I have done; and as for that creed I mentioned it is not true that if you can’t ejaculate anymore, you can’t be loving.