Publishing the Southwest

We have long recognized that our lives are a complicated, even mysterious, combination of time, place, and person, yet we seem to emphasize the chronological member of this triad more than the other two. We view our lives as an unending cyclical sequence of events and happenings. We allow various historians, economists, philosophers, artists, and other experts to harvest clusters of events that they interpret as periods of activity known as periods of time. In the process they segment that unending flow of happenings in a way that causes us to lose sight of the person and even the place.

Although we do not deny the fact that one of those “periods,” the Industrial Revolution, infuses every phase of modern life, we perceive our individual relationship to it as remote and impersonal. On the other hand, when we recall that our ancestors were so impacted by it that they moved to some new place, we discover that it can be quite personal and intimate.

John Warnock, who ranks high among those who bemoan the generational lack of such intimacy, offers us a means of making the triad of chronology, place, and person more attainable and real. He presents us with an unending chronology of happenings at a place “at the foot of Sentinel Hill” whose beginnings are never to be known to us and whose future Warnock tells us is “to be continued.” He urges us to merge the flow of events in our own lives with the flow of events in his account of Tucson happenings as a way of achieving a better understanding of who we are. His innovative proposal is a form of what we may call “participatory literature.” He includes some of the events in his own life in the longer narrative to illustrate a way of putting person back into the triad.

Because so much of our world today began with the coming of the explorers and missionaries, prospectors and miners, ranchers and settlers, who converted this region into colonial northwestern New Spain, he also includes events connected with the life of Jesuit missionary Eusebio Francisco Kino that permeate the stories of the history of Tucson from beginning to end.

The recurring nature of things and the endlessness of time are themes that resonate well with the world view of Father Kino and his contemporaries. Their Enlightenment world placed great emphasis on the cyclical, constantly renewing, and never-ending nature of human existence. This theme permeates the literature of that time as illustrated by these lines from Goethe’s Unbegrenzt (Unlimited):

That you cannot end is what makes you great…Beginning and end are forever the same:And what the middle brings is oftenWhat remains at the end and was in the beginning….For when you are older, you are newer.

Journal of the Southwest, which is pledged to provide an unending flow of insights into that mythical place called the Southwest, is pleased to offer its readers this fascinating chronicle of an ordinary place called Tucson. We invite our readers to embrace this participatory literature with the hope of achieving not only a better perception of themselves but also maybe a glimpse of what “to be continued” means to them.