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At 63 I have not done much in life or accomplished much. Does it really matter that one went to an ivy league school or that one was an alcoholic in the grand scheme of things? Doesn’t a defeated man feel as much if not more pain as a successful man? I wonder. Does it matter at all? No. It does not matter. Does anything matter at all? No.

I read the recent Krakatoa and sensed its latent philosophy, human beings evolve without purpose; what is, is. What will be, will be. All the meaning of the world is determined by our miniscule life spans; other than that we are flotsam. Again, if I understand fire, I will understand more of who I am.

To understand fire is to understand all. Teach me about the shape of a flame; teach me why it burns at the head of a match stick; tell me why it burns the skin, why it gives off heat and light; explain the mysteries of fire in a hearth; why it can scar and cook, grill, burn, and heat; show me all these things without learned exposition, without academic knowledge; let me go beyond mind and feeling to what fire is and maybe, just maybe, I will have a fleeting glance of what life is.

Until that day we just play with what we “know,” ignoramuses that we are. Like my new cellphone, I will learn just enough to get by. Schools, most of education, deal with manufacturing and manipulating shadows. All schooling is concrete and specific and rote-like illusion-making. The kid who can’t read, on some level, is saying that he chooses not to partake of a false world. And of course we set out to crush him, label him, or convert him. He is compelled to participate in a kind of surreal — group favored –reality.

We are educated to become magicians. It is irony of a high order that makes us act upon the world — to doctor, to engineer, to soldier — as if our efforts count. They do count, to maintain our sanity. But we work hard as human beings without realizing we are defending against going mad.

There are moments in pyschotherapy, rare ones, ones I’ve experienced as a therapist, when the unconscious of the therapist and the unconscious of the patient engage one another in the deep nether broth of time without measure, with feelings intense and thoughts incisive, that for a moment, a fire is started –but it loses it all once brought to the surface and “interpreted.”

I had a daughter once. She died a suicide at 34. She rotted for a week before someone inquired about her. When my wife and I entered her quarters, riven with books, everything had the smell of decomposition to it. Alcohol, soap, fresh air, Febreze, nothing could erase that nauseating odor. It took me years to realize that her very flesh was embedded into everything she left. Horrible as the odor was, it was, in a way, her last effulgent gift to the world. She was embedded, would not leave. Did she ever live? Yes. I can say that — at times I wonder. For her memory is kept woozily intact by me. I give her life — but she is dead, I know. When I die, she dies again. When I come to die, all memories die. Many people die when each of us dies. In effect, cemeteries have no real purpose. They exist for the literal among us.

Caryn, I call out. No answer. I contain her within. I could speak, “Yes, father.”

“How are you, sweetheart?”

“I’m all right. I am restful now.”

“I loved you very much.”

I cannot write her response, for I can’t go any further. Like fire, I don’t know. A child’s death, a daughter’s death, is an emotional guillotine severing heart and mind. I struggle with it every day, knowing bitterly that when she was alive I didn’t know me too well and I didn’t know her and she didn’t know herself — or me, either. Whatever illlusions we mutually shared, the barest, merest thing I have is her loss — that is more real to me than death. In fact, I have “died” several times in my lifetime, so whatever happens at the end might be considered a respite.

I strive too hard; there is a striven quality to my life. I am stressed as a consequence; like any old person, change rattles me. This temporary — fragile — order we are given in our lives, the sense of who we are, our heritage, our upbringing, our relationships, our loving kin is the only order we have. It is our fog within the greater fog; at least it is our precipitate, ephemeral as it is. As creatures apparently we need a kind of stasis within all this flux.

I simply cannot get a handle on all this. What is it we do on a daily basis as individuals other than needs, bodily functions, working, and all the rest? What are we about? I imagine I waste my time asking these questions which may very well be another kind of deadening condition. In short, I am peeved. I don’t like the idea that I may only be lint in someone’s larger pocket. And I am not interested in “empowerment.” I am just curious. And I am not political, wearisome as all that is.

What is fire?

I don’t get it. I just don’t understand it.

Once ignited, metaphorically we are all fire. What sustains us? What is the essence of fire? I don’t know. Just curious.

I am almost 63 now, feeling much like I was at 30, 40 and so on, as if the body of a car ages and the transmission still hums along, unseen, unnoticed, still running in the way it  was when new. I prepare for my dying in several ways, non of which are helpful, for preparation is useless when the moment arrives. Aimlessly, I go further, repeating over and over the character nuances I have learned on levels of awareness unknown to myself. I am a top sent into motion by an unknown hand. I cannot stop. I just am an energizer bunny, a wind-up clown. What mastery in life? We are perfecters of the inept. Ineptitude rules. I look at myself in the mirror, grey and greying, pudgy wattles, male bags beneath my eyes, and right before me I have aged all the while lookingt o see if I am aging. Sorely hilarious, much like watching my skin suntan. I am ruled, governed, and Dr. Philed –conditioned, Krishnamurti would say, without my knowing it.

There is less time now. And I cannot really change anything even if I chose to — it isn’t that my life is out of control — it has been — it is that I’ve never had control of it to begin with (nor you). I don’t know what fire is because I don’t know what anything really is. Do you, fellow transient?

I feel at times that with only a slight push I could go mad and never retrieve what sense of reality I have now, shaky as it fundamentally is. Real madness is to sense that the All we experience is not really all there is; that we are bumblers in time and time bumblers, extras in crowd scenes directed by others. I can laugh at my fellow human bumblers when they exert control, or are decisive, or like Dr. Phil and Wayne Dyer are Emersonian bullies — and fools. Within their own orbits they play as gods. When you spot Oprah, — Jabba the Hutt, splayed out on a sofa –isn’t there a sense about her of an opulent fat cat, too lazy to peel her own grape. Her self-comfortableness appalls, scrapes away the corneas of my eyes.

The days go by so fast and as I try to “order” them, the more I realize it is a game that I play — what’s up or down takes on importance, for sanity’s sake — but a deeper part of me sees the play I am in and its futility, yet I persist, like all of us, in the game. Foolishly, I look for truths to grasp on to — I have found none, except embellishments I like, perhaps a good watch or a piece of art. When I have something to hold on to as I near my end, it bursts within my avid hands.

Over the weeks I have posted selections from my “book” of musings and reflections about the fire on Mt.Lemmon 5 years ago. I am 5 years older and I am editing as I go along. If you rifle through the blogs you will come across the first entry. I have now decided to enter the blogs on Mt. Lemmon in the order they were written. I’ve decided to do this to provide a continuity and to allow you and I to see how my musings have evolved.

22 June 2003, Arizona time 12.42 a.m. It begins.

What is fire?

I do not know.

What’s fire?

I don’t know.

No matter how I ask it, it is painful. I look out at Mt. lemmon and it is aflame, mostly smoke, but now and then it flares up and flames can be seen. I don’t see Mt. Lemmon itself. I see the consequences as they pass over Putsch Ridge which runs parallel to Oracle Road.

I hjave no idea what fire is. Like my new cellphone with instructions written in early Mayan, I don’t get it. The Verizon girl who sold me my gizmo had an appliance in one ear and two cells about her waist. The Borg — Resistance is futile. The young are adept at using this junk. It will always be junk and not the differential between ages. There is nothing new about new; in fact, what is new is very old.

What in the world is fire?

I don’t get it.

Christopher Walken is the man. I’ve seen it only twice and it will stay with me to the end; in fact, as I lay dying, I would enjoy seeing the video in mind — it holds much grace. I associate to Eddie Robinson on his deathbed in Soylent Green as he views for the last time the natural treasures of the world.

Here, in brown suit, with that mask for a face, his great put on, he dances throughout a hotel, making beautifully graceful turns to the left and right, his body pauses deft and regal; he actually dives into space in several places like a swan. He is the man. Christopher is a very rich man because his body says it all about his interior self — classy, svelte, animated, cool and cosmopolitan; but above all, the joy and pleasure in his movements. (if you know the title of this video, please cue me in.)

Again, what is fire? At moments he is fire, for me. I just don’t know, but I do take much pleasure in observing it in him. Now you know. It isn’t only a great video. It is an indelible moment in time, Walken’s great contribution to dance — he elevates himself. What a way to swoon out of life — watching this dance. It says so much about Walken — and me.

There is much to be said about the director and photographer as well as the choreographer — it is all of a piece, like foolishly trying to separate a frame from an old master’s work. I would only ask Walken to try again, to add if he felt like it, to his past efforts, to add considerably more to his dance, to extend himself, but how many Hamlets must one write. I cherish what I see. He was impressive in a Charlie Rose show, revealing warmth and the humility of a craftsman. Does anyone else realize what a treasure he is? (See him in Pennies From Heaven as he dances on a bar top.) And that is one aspect of not knowing about fire.

I whirl. I whirl. Dervishly entranced, I spin. It is all in the spinning, rather than the meditative trance that accrues — was Krishnamurti a “freak”?

As I blog into the ether, that blowsy slattern who cares not, I found it odd that I was concerned about writing more about my experiences with Mt. Lemmon about 5 years ago. Odd because no one gives a damn, odd in that I should give a damn. I was concerned that too much about Mt. Lemmon might be a strain on the reader. What readers? If the task of a blog is to communicate, clearly I have not done so, paltry are the returns. I now view this blog as an expression of keeping my tools sharp, forcing myself to write every few days, clearing my mind about different subjects.

As the Wordpress system which runs this blog because I assuredly do not registers hits I observe what Pages are viewed. It is too disparate to reach a conclusion except that readers go to my queries about my books more often than not at the expense of other blogs which I feel are good if not insightful, and always thoughtful. The best rule of thumb for me is not to expect anything and in this way I will not be too disappointed. It is a good rule for just existing with people and the world in general.

Blogs remind me of things, cars for example. They begin to own us and our time as we primp and preen them. Here it is 2 a.m. and I am restless, spilkes. I can’t sleep, so I turn to the blog and feel conflicted about what to write or not. I have the nether feeling that I will need to break free of the so-called “rules” of blogging and strike out on my on. I wonder what shape that will take. I am sensing-feeling that blogging conditions and that is appalling to me, worrying about what to write, the audience I am writing for, the ridiculousness of typing into electronic air and landing someplace into the silicon innards of other computers. Brave new world!

Blogging conditions because it raises false expectations. . . marketing erupts. . .narcissism burgeons. . .anxiety accrues. . . . We come to believe that it matters, and it does not matter. And so we adjust ourselves to self-lies and prideful fantasies. It is a shallow game and I am a participant in it. And I will struggle to free myself of its clammy controls. As in any attempt to decondition oneself, one must work on freeing oneself. So, I think I will write more about Lemmon.

I keep looking and staring at Mt. Lemmon as it is alive with flames and cabbage head smoke blown by the winds to one side. If I could grasp what I see, I imagine I could see everything else. I feel as I see life through cataracts. One word runs through my mind as a telling description of what I would hope to attain: — congruency. I’d love to experience a congruency between my inner and outer selves, between myself and the external world, to be at one. i believe it is more than Ram Dass’ Be Here Now. After all, what do mountains want? They have retired; they no longer run; they are enjoying life with monumental reserve. In their stolidness they are one. So maybe I should become a mountain. “Dad, what should I be in this world?” “Become a mountain, my son. You don”t have to remember and you won’t ask nagging questions about fire?”

“Is that all there is to it, to become a mountain?”

“A mountain is grantie fire. Get what it is and you might emulate it in your own life.”

What is a mountain?

I do not know.

What’s a mountain?

I don’t know.

Hillary had it wrong. He climbed Everest because it was “there,” implying a challenge, a dare to human spirit and courage. There is much more than “there” to Everest’s “thereness.” It is an imposition on what we observe and we are asked to grapple with all the questions it poses: what am I? man or mountain? what is it you really are ascending? why can’t you leave me be and ascend within yourself? Don’t you realize you conquer nothing when you ambush me? I am here, I am also not here. Greater heights than me are within you, but that is another issue.

I met a stuck man. Recovering from a gross operation last year, all he could talk about was this clearly transfiguring event. It changed his body, his ways, perhaps his attitude toward life. He kept coming back to the operation; I met him again and right off he is on his hobbyhorse. Clearly traumatized, he can’t go beyond obsessing; he doesn’t ask for consolation. Apparently he just wants to retell his experience. I don’t feel that the telling of it repeatedly is in anyway cathartic. He is stuck in his agony. I hope he moves on, but what is salient is that his life is on hold. He is frozen in time. He doesn’t hear or listen well, for he would come to understand that others might tire of his Job-like complaints. That’s not fair. He does not complain. He just remembers, remembering without purpose, like a stylus stuck in a groove on an old 78.

I’m on the verge, often I’m on the verge of seeing into who I am and then it disappears; it is fleeting, and if I don’t capture it, it is gone. As I look back I was romanticized as a young boy by movies and books. I took them seriously, apparently, without awareness. I was a receptor. We are often without awareness as we stumble into time. I absorbed without reflection, naively, openly, innocently, gestures, images, language that presented a kind of William Morris vision of Medieval Europe, not accurate, not historically honest, but like the King Arthur legends, moving, touching, inspiring, altruistic and brave-hearted. Harold Lamb’s Robin Hood grabbed my heart and disneyfied it. The death of Robin touched me so deeply that I can describe it in detail (see earlier blog) to anyone who is willing to listen. Such is the power of the word, or the image.

So identified was I with Robin Hood that his was the first “death” I ever experienced. (Remind me to place a stone on Kevin Costner’s grave, so deadly a performance.) And the way in which he died, the manner in which he mastered his dying, still moves me deeply. It is touching. The writer who writes passionately throws out a large net, for we all want to be moved, to go beyond ourselves so that we care for another — at least in imagination. I would hope that I could end my life with a beau geste, for it reveals how much of my life has been romantically shaped by art beyond my knowledge.

I have the sneaking suspicion that as a child, one recently self-revealed to me in my sixth decade, that I was a sensitive and intelligent boy, easily moved by feelings, powerful ones as well; that I was much the observer, passive, internalizing, inexpress. I was self-contained, inert, reactive as a young boy, conditional influences beat above my head like raptors hovering for the kill. I was made into a kind of person by the very incidental actions of parents, kin and strangers. I was jostled, angled, nicked, shoved and accidently shaped into a kind of soul, all unknowingly.

It takes decades to decondition one’s self, and then it is only partial. Whatever one can attain through awareness is a kind of joy, psychological and emotional, for seeing through conditioning reawakes the self, allows it  visitation rights. I do see through the beaded curtain, all the while the beaded cacophony rings about my ears as I part the strands to see through. I will go to my grave, partly aware, and I am gratreful for that. Other parts of me are so conditioned that I am unaware, what a curious problem: to accept, to know one is blind in life — but yet, where? Perhaps a perverse serendipity wiil allow me to discover this personal myopia.

I pause here and break up my thoughts on purpose. Listen, you out there, can you imagine what it is for me to be free of a god, to be free of the shroud of religion? I am so free that I am a danger to others, as is always the case. Back to narrative.

This is a theme behind the first Matrix film: how do you convince others that they are misled, blind, without any control in their lives? Perhaps you don’t bother to do so; perhaps you first reclaim your own life.

The fires in the Catalinas glow like coals at night. One can smell charring. Smoke issues from cracks, ravines, and orifices in the mountains. It is all very primal and volcanic, much like me. The volcano, Krakatoa, in each of us is only the physical sympton of an internal world shaped by subterranean forces beyond our conscious ken. We are made, we are forged in a primal broth.

I’m at poolside now, late into dusk. In the distance an immense cloud is above the Catalinas. It’s as if a big fist gave a shiner to the sky. A covey of birds, new to me, strut linearly about the pool, mother and chicks. Offbeat bird sounds punctuate the lambent air, now warmly cool. It is quiet now, a stillness, except for outdoor compressors kicking in to cool the interiors. Machine hum. A bird spits across the sky like a thrown lance. Swallows are above, or are they bats? In any case the Jew is out of here.

Safely ensconced, I’ll continue. I can’t wait to meet up with my first scorpion. Woody Allen, I am not. But why is it that Jewish stars never ward off vampire bats, and why did a Hungarian Jew, Bela Lugosi, become the bloodsucker par excellence? What I love about the movies are often unintended subtexts. The bi-sexuality of Garbo and Dietrich, Randolph Scott and Cary Grant, and Tallulah Bankhead. Delights. Only in America can a gorilla climb the Empire State Building in search of cross-species sex and have his balls and cock air brushed out. No wonder he was furious with those bi-planes. And I don’t want too get started on Pinnochio’s nose, Aladdin warming up his lamp, and a transvestite wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. Most of all, most of everything, reduced to barest essentials are openings, holes, entries — from Alice in Wonderland to Italian arias to Martin Luther’s chronic constipation. Shit or sing, that’s what I say. We are primitives, and that is all right. It is reductive, I agree, but so endlessly interesting to contemplate and consider, so on target. Leave it to American science to label the creation of the universe as the Big Bang, oh, the market economy lives. We even popularize creation, tacky, tacky.

Hard to sleep tonight. The Catalinas are cooking throughout the night. And then life in Pima County begins anew. I am not prepared for anything, nor do I have any expectations. I will die here, that much is sure. From Brooklyn to Queens to Arizona. What befalls us in life is a blatant mystery. Right before our eyes, life changes, switches, permutates. It is not even a roller coaster; it is a fucking mobius strip, every corner turns in and away from itself. It is like Escher on acid. I look back on my years and there is no spine to it, some decades relatively sane, other years vicious, and some heartbreakingly unkind — unwarranted, much undeserved.

In Bayside we had a woman neighbor who had never worked in her life. Few responsibilites coursed through her life; aimless, she stutters and bumbles in her life, unaware, not conscious of her appalling emptiness. And yet, in the insane riddling of the universe she’ll live long and prosper, die in bed with a $55 manicure. I seek no justice, no fairness, no equity from a universe, a life that mostly is a scrim, background to our individual skits. Job appealed to god. He went to the wrong entity. The inner fits and turns of his anguish sought easement, comfort by an appeal to an extra-sensory perception, an idol of the mind — a god. What if he ranted and raved not at himself, but the inanimateness of an indifferent universe, what if he used his tortured sensibilities, his exquisite sense of injustice, his knife-sharpened questions at air, at the spaces between things, at volumes, at spatial relationships, he would get no answer. What if in the Hebrew Bible Job was brought to a higher level, dismissing god, the answerer, and falling back upon the corrosive reality of having no answer, no remedy, no redemption, no understanding, and thus no forgiveness. I am alone in this experience and it moves grossly beyond Thoreau’s quiet desperation.

As I walked to the hospital morgue to see my wife a day after the accident, I was shaken and had asked for someone to come with me. A woman clergy member accompanied me and she tried to help, to be silent, to wait for my cries. i appreciated that. She was not of my faith, but that was irrelevant. Emerson said that a “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, statesmen and divines.” She asked me if I would like to pray with her, sensitively and caringly, spoken. I was very conflicted. I refused!

I just wanted to talk to my wife through the glass window, share my loss, spill out all agony and anguish. I could not pray to a god because god had nothing to do with all these events; I needed to succor myself or with another close friend. I could not make a Job-like appeal to a religious extrapolation that was as much shadow, if that, as Plato’s cave reflections. It may be a foolish consistency, but I would not cave in, not now. In fact, I was devastated by the limitless pain I was feeling. I did not say fuck god. Oh, no, I wanted to fuck awareness, consciousness, intelligence, all the states that made me aware of my wife’s death. I wanted to fuck being that had brought me so low. I will not accept or abide the religious caress; I find it to be a very tender trap — and immaterial if not irrelevant.

In fact, maybe I like life the way it is. Atomistic, coldly severe, heart-breaking, heart rendering, purposeless — meaningless,  random, accident propagating more accident, there, but without compassion or cognition, like Mt. Lemmon, just there. It is chilling, it is very hard, but at least, my mind is made clearer by its indifference and I fall back upon whatever strengths I do have. The viper has its fangs, the lion its teeth. We all make do in this low valley of indifference. A god makes us blind, and we garner our strengths from dogma, doctrine, myths, saints, the whole panoply that distracts from truly seeing the world as it is. The only hope for me is the other, although to connect is as hard as anything else in this world.

It is very hard to warm one self, but sometimes we need begin there. Human kindness, what there is of it, emanates from within; it is not the aurora borealis that comes from above in beatitudes and commandments. Life has made me strong, not necessarily wiser; it has brought out the sinews in me psychologically and emotionally. What I am I have not chosen to be, much like a sculptor chisels off marble until the essence is unearthed. I associate to the last statue that Michelangelo made before he died. It looks incomplete to the eye, rough cut, almost modern, it hints, it doesn’t define; the statue looks as if a self is emerging, a pupae. It is as if working one side of the see-saw for most of his life, the great master sped to the other end, dropping one way of creating to start another, all at the end of his life. If I were in fantasy to come back after death, let me return as that emergence, that crude evolutionary stance, that effort.

Inadvertently I associated Pif.com, a literary online magazine, with Perigee.Com. One of Pif’s editors, Derek Alger, interviewed me by phone last night and asked if I would clear this up to my readers. I have just cleared it up. I suggest you go to Pif and check out the numerous interviews Alger has made with authors to get a flavor of his modus operandi. What he does, in effect, which is telling, is to chat introspectively with you by phone and then he composes questions that the author answers by email. I am waiting for his questions at this time. Again, Pif.com. A review by Duff Brenna of Down to a Sunless Sea is in the latest issue.

In Pages I have just entered the query I used for The i Tetralogy.  I worked hard on that one, saying what is hard to say but struggling to say it nevertheless on one page. As the months go along I revise it, and this version reflects recents events. Tonight Derek Alger, editor of Perigee (see Perigee.com) which is a cleverly done ezine, will engage me in conversation from New York. After that he will compose some questions based on our talk and I will compose my answers via email. So I look forward to that. Alger has said that I will then be published with other interviewees some  time late this year in a collection.

So, dear reader or writer, you have three queries to review and extract juice from — remember, be free of me as soon as you ingest what you need.