Prometheus: Fire and Poetry 1998 I
As a child I learned to dream awake before the coal fire in our living room. Staring into the fire, with its ever- changing flames, shifting coals, falling ash and what were called ‘strangers’ – skins of soot flapping on the grate – evoked in me my first poetry. My first meditations were induced by the domestic hearth. I have always associated staring into flames with the freedom of poetic meditation. It has been proposed by Gaston Bachelard that it is from brooding before flames that early man developed his interior life. It was also my job to light the fire, and to fetch the coal up from the cellar. With a bucket from the dark dank cellar that had been our shelter from German air raids and incendiary bombs, I brought the black coal that fuelled my dreaming. I later learned that the Latin for hearth is ‘focus’. And fire is what I focus on in Prometheus. And I remembered my Latin when, filming Prometheus on the roads of Romania, I saw on a forest-fire sign the word ‘foc’: ‘fire’. II
The myth of Prometheus, who brought fire to mankind, keeps entering history at significant moments. One of the sources of my film is the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus – 247 –