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The Continuing Memoir of Mt. Lemmon: At 17
At 17 I was in a bookstore in Greenwich Village with my friend, Stan Edelman. It was 1957. In my hands I held a thick volume by a James Joyce (Finnegan’s Wake). I opened the book and I could not understand the first sentence much less the whole paragraph. It was the second great book after Ulysses. I put the book down, bothered by its incoherence. I remember how off-putting its language was. I had met a great unknown, a prometheus, the great white whale. I was ill-equipped to understand it. I had no sense of either its import or lack…
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A Twist of Lemmonade
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…
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More Lemmonade: Musing Over death
I muse over what death, not dying, is like. What an abomination it would be to go on after death. Heaven and hell are twin disasters. I don’t want eternal constructs. So, I assume death is like 4 a.m. last night; I was out, not aware, not knowing, gone, zonked, dreamless. i experience death each night — and it is chilling to say so, not to be, no touch, not be awake or aware, but like a stone, a car in a parking spot, a spoon, to be inanimate. Assuming that the former do not have awareness, that is what I…