No.144. Recollected Fire. "Fire, that striking immediate object...." (Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalyis of Fire, Boston: Beacon Press, 1964, p.2) Yesterday afternoon, he painted a fire. It hadn't been in his mind to do so, but the decision came upon him with an urgent, almost corrosive ferocity as the result of his reading a passage in artist Lynne Wynick's brilliant new book, Edge. "There was a blacksmith at the foot of our garden in Llysfaen, Wales, 1955," she writes. "The flickering light from his forge, late in the evening, would send shadowy pictures onto my bedroom wall." It made him remember something he'd always enjoyed forgetting: that twelve years before Lynne's flickering forge, in the summer of 1944, he was awakened, in a creepy little house on the north-east corner of Princess Street and Division street in Kingston, Ontario, by images of flames dancing up his bedroom walls. They were the reflections of a huge, raging fire greedily consuming Anderson's grocery store right across the intersection, on the south-west corner of Princess Street and Division Street. There were no sirens, there was no ruckus. Just quiet crackling. The fire must have been suddenly new. He thought their house was burning down.