To be free to agonize is better to me than not to be free, enjoying all the conditional glut a market economy can afford. Flick on the tube, stand 20 paces away, fine tune your mind and what do you behold: pollution. I was in Target the other night browsing for a sunshade to ward off the Tucson sun and I passed several 10 or 11-year-olds, no older, holding pistol-like grips in their hands, playing games on a console that had several screens. I made a judgment quickly which is my way and I recalled how playing marbles held me entranced on a different level, for marbles combined winning and losing — greed, but they also involved skill at a much slower pace. It was tactile, not visual — that’s not exactly accurate; one did need to assess the positions on the playing field, measuring perspectives. Whatever I saw at Target was fast time versus slow time, durational versus exponential time, quickness as opposed to thinking and evaluating. I saw my “old” time, and did not favor this “new” time. I do not care for it, but as Krishnamurti said, that is: what is.
One generation unfolds into another, like ocean foam crashing against evolutionary reefs and rocks. I go into a dither when I come close to expressing the swooning, reeling effect of being alive without a designed purpose. What fools we are to try to “carve” out some meaning in the ridiculously short spans we inhabit. All is nought, yet our very DNA compels us, like the waves, to go smashing into something. Are we fleshened cyclotrons? Are we matter examiners? Or does it not matter? Or are we deluded, as if all about us is matter-of-fact? Hi-diddle, hi-diddle, I go.
What comes next is not up to me. I cannot say, predict, know or sense as I write words, how they might conceptualize themselves. I suppose any writer is ultimately an orderer of what flows, a word-shaper. Some shape and order better than others. What intrigues me is the idea that the flow within, the innateness of the writer, may be more interesting than what he turns it into. So Hemingway and Doestoevsky — one a great stylist and shaper of words; the other more profound internally than the other, but not as felciitous. Grandiosely, I feel that my art does not equal who I am; so here I am a ventriloquest’s dummy and he moves his lips too much. Charlie McCarthy versus Jerry Mahoney. One, a smartass salacious, woodpecker, the other a buoyant soul with better voice control. So I write what I have to say, not too happy with the artifice I can muster. I just put it out there.
If I had to write like another, Nikos Kazantzakis would be the one. When he describes rain hitting mother earth in the desert, you feel the warm pulse of each drop. He had the balls to continue the Odyssey in two volumes of verse and by all accounts equaled Homer. And his Report to Greco is the greatest confessional of the 20th century. “Reach what you cannot, Nikos,” his stern, Cretan grandfather urges him. And he met that task in his spiritual life. An amazing soul.
I am always stirred by the spiritually great, how they transcend without the mealy-mouth urgings of the Dyers, Chopras, and the Dr. Phils. “Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break!” This is authentic, not a namby-pamby platitude. There is a picture of Wayne Dyer on the cover of one of his books in which he looks deeply and spiritually entranced. The question to ask: how many crisp hundreds are in his billfold?
I am watching a made for TV film, “Caesar,” on TNT while I write and the sponsor is Immodium, the film a farrago of logorrhea and diarrhea. I digress.
As I returned home from visiting my sister on Oracle Road, I could see the plumes of smoke on the Catalinas, small ashtrays littering the hillsides. I’ve heard that they are making a breakfire, and all will be well, the fire contained. I passed a man and his parked car. He had a tripod set up and he was taking pictures of the mountains. A recorder and a rememberer, I imagine. What will he say when he shows his photos of this fired up mountain? That he was there; that he captured a once-in-a-lifetime event — when next will Mt. Lemmon be aflame, smoking; that he captured, for all time, what his eyes and events had brought him to. He is indeed a metaphor for his own life; can he capture it, shag it, net it, make it utile and efficacious?
If only we could encapsulate on silver nitrate what our lives are; better yet, instead of recording might not we live it, whatever we are capable of living. We live as if in lieu of. Perhaps we might be better human beings if we acted out of amnesia. I am not so sure about memory; it feels like an inhibitor.
When we lose our loved ones, a wife, a daughter, as I have, we are destroyed — if we feel. We become molecular dust, incorporeal, flattened, deadened, motes. And the gravitas of time itself sabotages our intensities, our unwillingess to “get on” with life and things. We begin to forget. Time creates ruins of the lost loved one in mind, crumbled desert palaces. An Atlantis is created in mind, a lost, wondrous city. I’ve heard mourners bewail the passing of time for it was the final death knell of their dear one. I feel we lose our dear ones more than once. Erosive memory kills the odors, perfumes, the shapes, the face, and oh, the voice, of the one we knew so well, so intimately. I cannot remember my mother’s voice who I lost at 20; 43 years have silenced it. Is that why we have all this videotaping and recording?
We create archives of our loved ones amidst the vibrancy of their lives so that years hence we can review them alive and heartily well on tape and CD s — ghastly. We do not engage them while alive, for we are disengaged; and we remember them as images or pixels on computers. I think it was Mailer who said that film was, in effect, death. George Raft refused to watch his movies because he knew they showed him aging — good for you, George. At least you didn’t buy into this ghoulishness, although vanity played a part no less.
Massive vaults of archives exist for the 20th century, and what will we learn from all this? It is beyond comprehension how this visual glut will be transmogrified into some new kind of learning — or insight, perhaps intelligence. I will not argue the case. I only feel that visual satiety is like eating a Gummy Bear — of little nutritional value. Someone recently asked me how he can stop being so anxious; he wanted an answer, an anodyne now. When I told him his anxiety had value, for he was attentive and vigilant as a housepainter, he passed it over. He didn’t hear me. And when I said that you don’t go around anxiety, but wisdom says you go through it, I had completely lost his attention. Calling Wayne Dyer! And so he will continue until life, relationship or event does him in and he sees a little, or he is never awakened and he ends his life with a primer and then a final coat of Benjamin Moore flat.
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