Mt. Lemmon burns. It sends out smoke so blossomed in bloom that the sky is a corsage of roses of varying hues. It is volcanic as well. The Catalina Mountains are not rugged nor fierce to my eye, merely judgmental. Like fire, they simply are — unexplained. What I would give if I could see free of everything that conditions and blinds me?
I wish I could have spoken with Kazantzakis. I wish I could have taken on Jung for his anti-Semitism. I would have liked to have played with Jesus (an imaginary playmate) as a child. What larks, Pip, what larks! I wish I could have been with Krishnamurti when he began his metamorphosis into a greater spiritual self. I wish I could console myself. I wish I could give me solace. I wish I could spare myself meaning, or purpose; I’d settle for intent. I wish I needn’t have to wish.
I have it, I think I do. It is fleeting, like the heated air left by a hummingbird off to heliocopter elsewhere. What I experience, moment to moment, in this day, the febrile heat, the dryness, the glaring desert sun, the awful brightness, the steaming inside of the car, the lava-hot steering wheel, the furied air masses that on ground level configure my body as I go about daily business, is surface slick. I know this, I feel it, as if what I do or say is already prescribed — or mandated, much like a speeding zone — regulated, apparent, evident — yet none of these.
There is nothing on a daily human basis that really matters, for we neither have the control, design, or purpose to accomplish it. What we really do is shuffle images, and this gives us a false sense of assurance, as if we are responsible and accountable. This “reality” is so palpable and vital that we can live our entire lives within the walls of its castle, gratifyingly so. Like the courtiers in Gulliver’s Travels, we leap over thimbles. I live on a faultline and I live in a fault, and so my view of existence is angled, shard-like, askance, and anti-perpendicular, causing me all kinds of grief and internal vertigo. I live a mischief, a tell-tale self-misery, much of my own “doing.” Indeed, what I am examining is what “doing” is. I have no idea except to report back what you would relate as well. All is clearly manifest, but there is a latent world as well, one riven with derivative cock-eyed notions and clues we need to listen to with the third ear — if we are so inclined to do. My curse is that I am inclined to do so, the writer’s bane.
What is the knot I present to the world? In this fleshened knish of bone and blood, piss and sweat, I sally forth. Even when I speak it is spontaneous — perhaps all to the good — for I have no guarantee that what I say is what I mean. To speak to another is to perpetuate an unwilling fraud; to tell someone that you love them is more than a lie, it is without foundation. Any moving feeling is a nettle of thorns. We ambush one another in droves of warhooping Indians. Intentions, whether good or not, are fables. We are not about business because we have no real idea who we are or what petri dish we swim in. Fiction and films offer us order, edited versions of how to behave or act — even exist, under certain circumstances. And this is broken down into scenes, discrete and telling cinematic moments. If done well, we are moved; if not, it is so execrable as the “existences” we move about in. Robert DeNiro called it this miniscule moment we have to live in, this time between book ends, this sad sandwich served in sladash — if not — slapstick style.
Galling it is to recognize some glimpes of time whistling by and to feel enervated by the inability to order it into some configuration, some meaningful stab for completion. There is so much palpable DNA in a virus that it fights and mutates in order to survive man’s intrepid attempts to render it harmless, to make it go away. And then we see in each man and woman incalculable amounts of DNA that one can only stand back and be amazed at the species continuing struggle to endure, to go on. What is amazing is that we are terminal and within that parameter we struggle so very hard to define ourselves, to perfect ourselves, and in some singular instances to transcend — “Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break!” Kazantzakis wrote in his Report to Greco. The exclamation mark says much.
So, what is fire? When I look at a relative stranger or make a new acquaintance, what do I have before me? We talk, we interact, we share frivolities, we gossip, but what is really going on here? I would say not much because two people are in a dream state, and very little is real. Krishnamurti argued that we should look as if it were for the first time. However, the first time may be impossible to achieve. It is the hardest thing to do — to see. We see and we are blind, that is the cliche — and the truth of it. We do not register others, because not only do we not register ourselves, but the world itself is seen but not seen, “experienced,” but not really taken in and absorbed.
Sometimes as I canoodle over all this, I feel I am going “mad.” In the summer of 2002 I went to a hospital in Arizona after experiencing a general array of symptoms — claustrophobia, difficulty in breathing, hypervigilance. I was diagnosed as having had a panic attack (my first ever). A medical social worker interviewed me and concluded after I shared the events of that summer and the last three years that my “plate was full.” Indeed, it was. To have a panic attack is to have the movie film of one’s life twist and turn, knot up, ornery celluloid in hand, crinkling slick, difficult to unravel and reel up. We are so fused to the film to be projected properly that an interruption bamboozles our senses. And so I experienced a disorientation, as if my body was not mine — it never is –as a simple cold tells us that.
Addendum: 2 may, 2008, 5 years later.
it is important to be free of others so in this way we can be free ourselves — equally axiomatic is that we need to be free of our conditioned selves so that we can be wholesomely free ourselves.
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