I’ve been spending some time with Mt. Lemmon. Her ridges, her slopes, her rugged byways are festering, roasting, burning, as we watch from our condos and upscale stucco and adobe dwellings across the way from Catalina State Park, the preserve that borders Oracle Road which runs down like a larynx to mid-town Tucson. How long can I be in awe, agog, with what I behold? Here is a mountain and its scrub, its flora and fauna, its ridges and copse-rutted indentations, its very defining characteristics that make language tells us it is a mountain and yet I have an array of responses to it, for as Krishnamurti taught, the word is not the thing iself.
Driving along Oracle Road, going north , the Catalinas on my right, I see a slew of small wildfires sizzling down the sides, burning up the scrub. I wonder if they will build a backfire, for there are homes perched in the foothills. I would be tense and edgy if I saw these feral bonfires inching down from the high slopes. I ate at Clare’s, a greasy spoon with good coffee. The temperature is over 100 and I returned quickly to my rental, hibernating through the late morning hours. I expect one morning to wake up to see one immense roast along Oracle Road.
I can’t seem to write this afternoon as if all roads leading to Rome have been shut down. I continue to write these reflections realizing that they will go nowhere except into some file — to ferment, or rest. No one will want to read these blatherings; yet I do persist which is ridiculous to me. I need to scribble. When I go to retype these reflections, I’ll add and subtract, amplify for sure, flesh out, give more details, all to no avail. It is simply me talking to me, sedating and soothing self. I doubt their worth even for myself. Yet I go on. Curious. The Kilroy syndrome, leaving sign. Look, I’ve been here, look, I once existed and “fluorished”; look, I was alive and here.
A great folly, it is. yet I persist. I cannot even answer myself about myself. To write is for me as much as seeing with my eyes. I see, but I do not register. All, or most, of my writing, apparently, is a lubricant of a kind that keeps my mental machinery running.
i am a timepiece that shows and keeps time but has no idea of itself. Poor inanimate objects that run and we use for their movements, like watches, cars, generators, drills, lawn mowers, that have no existence of themselves, yet serve us, the primal movers. I run the timepiece on my wrist and I lord over it, yet who lords it over me, for surely, I have no idea what awareness can do for me. All this energy and for what purpose other than motion, setting things into motion, using motion willy nilly, having no real control over this motion, except in the short range — bake a cake, grill a frank, write this essay, drive to Las Vegas, etc.
I tire of words, poor pack burros for such an arduous journey.
The fan on the ceiling cools my butt off, as I am on my side writing into this tablet, in my shorts, feeling drowsy and groggy now. Perhaps I will “drop off,” what an incisive phrase, and sleep the sleep of the dead, unknown to self, unknown to the ambient world. As i age as a self and writer, I weary of story and plot to set off into. As I need a Tiffany setting to show off a stone-story, I would rather just say what I have to say without tangential showmanship. I tire of direction. I tire of lines — give me the arc, the upsweep of a curve ascending into nothingness.
