Reflections on Jimi Hendrix “Fire”

In 1992, Jimi Hendrix’s last producer Alan Douglas gave me a manuscript of Jimi’s autobiographical writings (Starting at Zero: His Own Story, Bloomsbury 2013), and I was drawn to passages in it such as: “When I was in Hawaii I saw a beautiful thing, a miracle. There were lots of rings around the moon, and the rings were all women's faces. I wish I could tell someone about it…(Hendrix 2013, 179). Jimi’s words echo my own belief in a metamorphic energy flow that animates everything. Aldous Huxley describes this as the knowledge that: “All is in All ” (The Doors of Perception, 1977, 22), and Dylan Thomas as: “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” (1934). Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism (the theoretical frame in my PhD and autoethnography) describes it as a flow of matter through space and time, and that there is: “no absolute boundary between here-now and there-then…Matter itself is diffracted, dispersed…” (Diffracting Diffraction 2014, 168).

 “Fire” reflects these thoughts and theories, expressing the belief that energy flows without separation between self and other, past and present. Although Alan had anticipated censorship due to its erotic content, he defended its artistic integrity and refused to allow it to be altered, leaving the film as an uncensored and powerful articulation of the boundary-dissolving phenomenon I had sought to animate.

"Fire" on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/43315666

PhD: https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/5277/

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