During the Renaissance, the five senses were understood to form a hierarchical system from the highest sense of vision down to touch. Vision was correlated to fire and light, hearing to air, smell to vapour, taste to water, and touch to earth.
Perhaps the human fascination with fire stems from the totality of its sensory stimulation. The fire gives a flickering and glowing light, ever moving, ever changing. It crackles and hisses and fills the room with the smells of smoke and wood and perhaps even food. It penetrates us with its warmth. Every sense is stimulated and all of their associated modes of perception, such as memory and an awareness of time, are also brought into play, focused on the one experience of the fire. Together they create such an intense feeling of reality, of the "here and nowness" of the moment, that the fire becomes completely captivating.
A primary motivation for creating my Stream was the paralysing sense that a blog post needed appropriate length and weight. Since switching to Kirby, there’s relatively little friction to posting, but there’s definite friction in evaluating a post’s worth to the reader. I’d think to myself, “I’d like to write something about that, but I’ll have to come up with all sorts of extra stuff and dressing, and it’ll take all afternoon.”
And so, I was increasingly aware that I was letting many interesting or essential thoughts go undocumented, allowing them to drift from memory, or exist only on social media, likely to one day evaporate. I’ve become more and more interested in the human desire to document, and it’s something I’ve always valued, so I needed to find a solution that I could entirely control and own. That solution was my Stream.