They say this about impassioned painters, writers, playwrights, et al, who do not wear their hearts on their sleeves but are, rather, inner charcoal pits of glowing embers and leaping flames. They say their hearts are on fire. Rilke's heart was apparently on fire, nearly all the time. So was Emily Dickinson's. And Dante Gabriel Rossetti's. Maybe Li Po's. Swinburne's. And, no doubt, Edna St. Vincent Millay's. Oh yeah, and Yeats.
There's the Roman Catholic Sacred Heart. Which burns. Jesus's heart burned.
So there's supposed to be this inner burn. You even see it smouldering in their eyes. The burning is dithyrambic, dionysian, deranged. An incarnating spasm, ideas, passions, tearing away like solar flares leaping from the sun.
It's exhausting, I reckon.
Take these Aloe Vera plants: respectably quotidian on the outside, roman candles within. Creative heartburn. Overheating. Is it something to be desired--or cautiously, sensibly avoided?
"One loving heart sets another on fire," wrote St. Augustine. So be wary of too-loving hearts.
