It has become apparent to me that the philosophical turn of my mind lends itself to short and hopefully pithy little essays. About three years ago I arrived in Oro Valley, Arizona to set up a home. At that time Mt. Lemmon, a kind of woody Greenwich Village on a mount, caught on fire. As it burned I could see day and night from my house the burning cauldrons that pockmarked the terrain. I bought a spiral notebook and began to make observations each day for about a month or so. I intended to publish them; so now, here on this blog, from time to time, I will put up these self-reflections and musings. A blog seems the perfect place for a short piece.
The lady in the coffee shop said that the fire on Mt. Lemmon was twenty-five percent contained. Good news for the town of Oracle which feared that the conflagration would encroach upon it.
I’m lying down on the carpet in my new home in Oro Valley, waiting for a meeting with the interior decorator we’ve hired. As I look through the patio doors I see the Catalinas, with a cerulean blue sky as its backdrop. I take a swig of Canada Dry seltzer. And I wonder what will next flow from my pen. I have no idea. I have no control over that. What will issue will issue.
Today I will pick tile for the house, yesterday it was the painter, next week window shutters. I’m trying at 64 to have the house all in order, my final resting place. I’m trying to put together in one home what I was never really able to do as a younger man for lack of funds, essentially. And now the dollars fly from my hands as i design a home for the last third of my life. My life? I have never owned my life. It has never been in my hands to shape. I am on loan to myself, I feel, as I reconsider the past. We awake, if that, one day to realize that life is a pawnshop; we are on loan to ourselves, and the interest we pay to redeem ourselves is a deepening ignorance of our selves. Here, I am, holding a seedy pawnshop ticket.
There is much to the expression, “going through the motions.” Yes, indeed, in a profound level we do go through the motions, as substance eludes us, and a fair share of daily living is motion and shadow — I feel like a motion-detector, spotting movements and mass; unfortunately motion detectors only sense, neither interpret nor ascribe. Being aware is having a motion-detector that does more than alert and inform; what is required is the observer and the observed, much the same person. To identify with, to empathize with another self is to become that self; two selves become one, cognizance overlapping cognizance; in that motion is not only detected, it is absorbed and acted upon.
When I read I and Thou decades ago as a young man I could not get it, until I reread the opening pages repeatedly in which Buber defines I and Thou in several different ways. After that the book became a vortex as I entered it, was drawn into it, as my shoulders rubbed against the up and down motions of this religiously existential whirlpool; I learned in accretions, like nacre forming about a bead in a oyster. Like whipped cream being folded back into itself with a spatula, I learn, and I write much in the same way; I risk repetition, I risk being tendentious, but I also risk not coming into something new and revelatory if i do it any other way. Anyway, i don’t want want to do it any other way! After all, these are my reflections, not yours, and I’ve been around too long to emulate, adore, imitate or suck up to others.
I have long realized that I like to philosophize. And many people are adverse to this kind of memoir. However, i abhor systems, ideas that confine and condition, that restrict. Systems are mankind’s fear of the unknown. I just like to mull things over and to put down my thoughts about them. I do not recommend this to anyone. I do it because I am out of control, as I have said, and argued, and this life I live, I wear, and experience finds its expression in this way. I am more comfortable now with this. I just let it flow — no good orgasm is channeled. For people who are orderly, formal, constricted, the orgasm must be a frightening thing, an experience not unlike dying. To let go is scary. Not to let go is a lifelong psychological constipation — no shit!
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