In the silence of the startling news, I reach out to Michael and ask if we may write a text together. Imagine a correspondence. To acknowledge. And inscribe.

A path. And a diary.

Of planetary companionship.

And care.

C.P.

On a scorching summer day, dark clouds float across the azure of the sky. You could almost mistake them for a gathering storm, were it not for the intense smell of smoke that permeates the air. The mantle of smoke is wafting northwest from the other bank of Tagus toward the last portions of its extensive estuary before the Atlantic. For a moment, I breathe a sigh of relief. The forest or bushland that is burning is not the pine forest, next to which I live here and which I visit on a daily basis.

July 14, 2026

Time travel.

A breath.

Fire, consumes.

Me.

And.

You.

Look again.

Where do you stand?

Layers of ground.

Screens.

Pixelized.

Pyrocized.

Utter perception.

Forest fires have been one constant of Iberian summers that we’ve learned to live with, from Portugal to Southern Spain and, more recently, the Basque Country. With the expanding geography and a drawn-out season of these incendios, there has been a subtle change, however—not just in the frequency of spotting smoke or smelling it, nor only in the mindboggling number of hectares that have been burnt. Encircled by fires, besieged by them, one begins to relate to the neighboring forest as to an ecosystem still untouched by the blazes raging elsewhere. Its not-yet-having-been-burnt becomes a defining characteristic, lending the experience of the forest incredible impermanence and uncertainty. Although the forest—this forest—has not yet gone up in flames, it is but a matter of time: a moment will arrive when the not-yet will very quickly become an already.

July 15, 2026

Show me an AI generated landscape? Look at the forest fires.

July 16, 2026

An abode.

In flames.

And after the fire?

I ask the AI if the mycelium survives.

Communicates. Warns. Makes known.Do not scroll.

I have described the shift as subtle, but it is actually quite substantial. Affectively, I mourn the forest in advance, feeling its loss before it is actually lost. Some, including the father of psychoanalysis himself, argue that the ethics of care and even love, not to mention aesthetic appreciation, are meaningful solely in the dim light of mortality, of viscerally sensed finitude. Isn’t it an absurd tragedy, though, to start caring about the forest when it is about to be lost and living as if it has been lost already? This fatalistic and ultimately fatal care is the unfortunate engine of the prevalent obsession with ecology and the climate crisis. After nearly two decades of engagement with plants, in philosophizing and an embodied practice, I know that a much more affirmative ethics is both possible and necessary, one that is oriented by the positivity of plant growth, for example, among other vegetal behaviors.

July 17, 2026

How does the forest burn?

One tree at a time?

The fairy tales.

And imaginaries.

Strate of existence.

Presence.

Vanished.

July 18, 2026

I listen to the fire.

A breath.

One last.

But—back to the forest where I am thinking these thoughts, received like so many gifts from the forest itself! Ever since, across the time gap of nearly a millennium, I have started my apprenticeship with Hildegard von Bingen, I have come to realize that the forest, too, is an enormous flame: it is aflame even before it may go up in smoke. As the mystical communion of water and fire, of moist coolness and dry heat, plant life is an incorporation, a modification, a diversion (along countless paths), and a slowing down of solar energy; this life and everything it sustains is celestial fire received by the earth and dispensed back to the sky, shooting upward as so many green tongues of tempered flames. Forests really burn before they are burnt, but that is controlled combustion, of a piece with their growth, moderated by moisture in the elemental mix of opposites that eludes formal logic and by diverse species that inhabit this ecosystem (assuming that it has not been transformed into a monoculture). When conditions become exceptionally hot and dry, when the miraculous complex of water and fire that is a plant tends toward the pure identity of only one element, when the One is gloriously victorious, then it is handed over to the consuming fire, no longer slowed down, diverted, modified, or incorporated in diverse forms of plants. Forest fires then devastate green fire forests.

July 19, 2026

Text.

Prayer.

Sign.

Monument.

Epitaph.

Epigraph.

A semantic field.

July 20, 2026

Temporality.

Collapsed.

Existence. As spectacle.

Anaesthetized.

July 21, 2026

Burning through our bodies.

Φῶς ἐκ Φωτός.

Light of light.

Inspire.

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