I built another thing for the Equinox. I burned it.

Once again it’s time to consider the ongoing tide of time by building a thing and burning it.

The weather on the actual fall equinox (Sep 22) was clear enough, but it had been preceded by days of rain, so I postponed our celebration until Friday.

Because the labyrinth is on the Tour of Homes on Oct 15, there are several items that have been loitering about for a while that I need to clear out. One of them was a wooden pallet:

This thing has been hanging around for years, possibly since 2015, as the remains of a burn art project that never came to fruition. It was called Sit Here & Think About What You’ve Done, and the pallet was to have been the base platform for a mini-set: two walls forming a corner, with a mirror and a chair, and the slogan painted across the top. (You will hear me describe it in the video, where I failed to credit Ben Bjostad as the originator of the idea in 2015.)

In any case, Sit Here has yet to materialize, so I decided to use the pallet for the mini-effigy. I spent Thursday looking at the thing and drawing chalk lines on it, and on Friday I cut it up into tangram-like pieces.

My original idea was a structure with pieces like these grouped in right angles to each other, but when I drew the boundaries of the firepit in chalk onto the driveway it became clear there would not be room for that. I went with a more postmodern architectural idea.

And it was amazing.

Let me repeat that: I sketched and cut up the pieces with one concept firmly in mind, and then I had to radically change the plan. And then I had to wrangle these pieces into an æsthetically pleasing thing within the (literal) boundaries it had to observe. GESTALT: It’s a thing.

It was heavy. Unlike the other effigies I’ve built and burned, this one was massive. It was taller and denser, and most importantly, it did not float on a stand — it sat flat on the ground, which I knew at the time might be problematic for getting it not to fall over when we moved it to the fire.

As evening fell, I decided that it needed lighting up, so I placed tea lights inside its structure. The result was very impressive indeed.

As usual, our guests whose first time it was thought the structure was too beautiful to burn, and as always they changed their minds as it went up in flames. The burning is the point.

Finally, the fire in the firepit had burned long enough for us to rearrange the wood into something mostly flat, and we placed the effigy carefully onto it.

The artist and his work:

One thing you learn to consider as you build one of these things is how it’s going to burn, and I am proud to say that with this effigy I was absolutely on point. It burned gorgeously.

I also figured that we would have to guard carefully against it falling over, since it was taller and denser than my previous effigies.

Sure enough…

…and it became a raging bonfire, beautiful in its own right.

Eventually, of course, as all effigies do, it burned itself down into a regular fire. (The blue and green flames are from packets of chemicals called Magical Flames, which I secrete into the effigy. Worth the purchase!)

All in all, a phenomenal burn. Here’s a video for those who want the full experience.