It's painful, but it's part of the recognition that makes real healing possible, if healing is possible (the jury is out on that, that's the usual phrase - should I say the jury is deadlocked?). Staying with the pain, attending to it, being present to and with it - that's the task, because that's the only (as far as I can tell) hope of finding a way forward.

It is worth asking who decides what's an "obsession" and where it differs from meditation or the kind of deep dwelling on a subject we see in philosophy or the work of Robert Wilson, for instance?

I'm interested in finding new and more humane modes of safety, and in exposing the arbitrary and superficial protections that have failed us.

I love that "furious and gorgeous barrage." That helps me see the relation between the introduction and the book's final section, where writing about a fire (and about the attempt to understand the event), also becomes an attempt to understand how writing might get closer to the fire, in so many ways.

In the "Intervention" section of the book we go into that looping from a battery of positions (where healer and sufferer are blurred). I'm very interested in "repetition and revision" (to use Suzan Lori-Parks's phrase) and in the culture's desire to loop or repeat.

Is it possible that where the subject is socially approved (tah tah tah TAH tah, it's war) almost no one thinks we're "stuck," but when we think too much about what no one else wants to think about, as well as when we think without the thoughts evolving, then we're seen as trouble (and / or troubled)?

It seems all "protection" has to be monitored, considered, weighed and justified - I am suggesting we do that (but it's something Mary Shelley (and Gertrude Stein) also suggest). "Torch Song," the book's final section, looks at an arson committed by someone hired to protect the wilderness from fires, a catastrophic failure of protection!