Kat still edgy, depressed: “I hate myself!” This time burning rice meant for dinner; out of sorts, suicidal?

The emergency brake won’t work: she drove 200 miles with it on …

As she said, Saturday morning, looking at parents and their children in this town: “They never had a chance.”

“There’s no place I feel home,” she pouts in her hometown

Unlike a turtle, going anywhere!

Iron pills seem to be helping her green complexion and mine.

Sunday morning [note, I was writing day of the week rather than the number of the month through this stretch of journaling]:

“My wife was a great thumping bitch this morning.”

I find myself shocked that I actually admitted that. Typically, I make excuses for those closest to me; I try to see their good side rather than shortcomings.

Bly’s Tooth Mother or Stone Mother describes my Nikki, earlier, ultimately pulling me toward paralysis.

I kept seeing the girlfriends in my life as dancing goddesses, not that we were actually dancing. Their role, though, seemed to be as a counterweight to my seriousness.

I’ve been stunned to see notes regarding a playful Gopi at the ashram who at 15 had been drugged, raped, taken lesbian, involved in crime, as well as exposed to museums, art, and literature. She nearly swept me off my feet, and here, two years later, Kat was coming in second by comparison, even at the core of my obsession.

Now, with Kat, I was placing great hopes on our Indiana move: a hothouse, in a way, to raise our seedling in. As I journaled, “We’re so apart here: there are no models, no challenges, no competition. The wind beats her down. She’s afraid to give rein to her private visions, her terrifying garden, ‘going over the edge.’ She won’t know herself till she does.”

On the reflection of this span of my life, I’m seeing how bitchy she was throughout the marriage. Where would she be if I had just walked? I was about to say this is the biggest point where I ultimately failed, but will leave other possibilities open for comparison.

Revisiting these pages is emotionally heavy for me, I’ll confess.

Now I see neither Nikki nor Kat or even Fay as “mothers,” at least with me. And Celeste had already ruled herself out.  

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

The next volume, another wide-margin notebook, included our preparing to relocate from Fostoria to Bloomington: much rough verse but, to my surprise, many riches, too: a fertile profusion. I’m so glad I didn’t incinerate this stretch before the final gleaning.

I am surprised how little I have regarding my boss, Doc Bordner, who was quite an original. Perhaps sometime?

Instead, I was preoccupied with the suffocation by conformity.

The poison here is unbearable; I wish we were long gone; am counting the days till we move

As I walked in autumn leaves bordering a savage Scout jamboree, the words, “Look, Mrs. Smith, there’s an Indian,” meaning me, in my headband.

Two fine lines from Snyder’s Japanese lesson:

“It is unspeakably wonderful to see a large volume of water falling with a thunderous noise.”

“Sparrows entertained me singing and dancing, I’ve never had such a good time as today.”

Reopening Snyder (now is the time), am struck by how much larger his vocabulary is than I had thought: not just accurate and clear, but broad and sometimes academic.

High blood pressure wears away the organs, leading to failure in 20 years, may explain my headaches, eye trouble, need for more sleep: must reduce salt intake sharply (Sivananda’s day without salt each week) [much less a true fast, food or speech].

Sometimes, deep in memory-desires, making love turns not to the finite body with me but someone else even fresh from the street adding to her thousand faces and shapes into a new woman as my lover-wife

Always that heart, with the million clouds of emotions, expressions passing over.

Here, I thought I was rejecting / renouncing newspaper journalism as my life’s calling, leaping beyond the gossip and fashionable tides that sweep the barroom, clubroom, of deluded masses …

They forget what they read, discard it all …

As for me, on to Cold Mountain?

Except that was his destination, not mine. And I was still ensnared in Maya’s web.

Communism capitalism?

Too much stress on the supporting THINGS.

Far too little on the SOUL.

Either way, everyone is reduced to objects, without loving brotherhood or broader community support.

~*~

“Dolly? What can I do for you,
Dolly?” Always, Dolly.
Owner/manager of art/health food store in Findlay.

~*~

~*~

The modern “leisure” classes, those with education working in professional or managerial roles, are those with the least amount of free time. Many work 50- to 60-hour weeks, leaving little time for culture.

As for the novel? I thought my biggest potential readership would be in students or those just out before responsibility is foisted on them.

It’s success, of course, would be my escape out of all this. Maybe in four years or so, from Bloomington.

My railing at “they” can more recently be seen even within my own congregation!

“For when the will fails, so do the hands, and one lives at the expense of life” – Wendell Berry, Farming.

Harvard president on the quality of a leader: His ability to inflict pain.

Japanese children are taught calligraphy as inculcating composure

Wondering how we’ll define ourselves in Bloomington … late hours, attending concerts etc.? Or early mornings, meditating and getting simpler? Dharma Bums or Down So Long artists?

A note on card systems for scholarly mags etc. … for the Workshop or my own poetry submissions? Or both?

What did happen in the upcoming Bloomington sojourn was aligning with Friends, finding a poetic voice, and renewing my hiking in nature time. I am surprised I didn’t partake of more cultural performances, but my early rising and personal writing can be blamed more than Kat, perchance. Lifestyle definitely included gardening and organic funky.

After handing over my desk in the newsroom, I went through all of my front pages and editorial pages, felt very good: so much solid work after all, especially with Marcy. There is goodness and sweetness in all her work.

And then, in moving, came the first snow since we married, as Kat said.

Do note that one of the paradoxes in this practice is that when life’s going well, there’s often very little time for journaling.

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

This point in our review coincidentally comes on the cusp another job relocation and has me curious about whether you’re somehow fascinated by the staccato pace of the entries or are instead questioning the bigger picture, specifically alternative ways my career and life could have gone from here.

The newspaper industry was notorious for requiring young talent to slave away in small settings like Binghamton (which wasn’t so small in retrospect) and Fostoria (which definitely was small), training grounds where we had to “pay our dues” in moving up to more respectable – and better paying – metropolitan dailies. It was something like minor league teams in baseball. A variation on that was moving up into management on papers in medium-sized markets, meaning the majority of papers across America.

Returning to the spiralbound notebooks had me trying to envision myself continuing at each place rather than moving onward or away. Would I have actually been satisfied as managing editor in a modest city, attending my kids’ softball games or being active in Kiwanis or Rotary community service? Something within me obviously yearned for more.

Or, had the Wall Street Journal followed up on its interest in me just before graduation, would the big city life of Dallas or Detroit or some other bureau have ultimately led to a life as rich, in its own quirky way, as the one I wound up with? There would have been no yoga with its reconnecting me to my body and fitness, no Society of Friends (Quaker), probably no poetry, either – things that are so much of who I am today.

There are also the questions of why I didn’t pursue an academic path or become a lawyer or find some other profession. The best I can come up with was that I had “ink in my blood,” or at least was addicted to writing and publishing. The route I sought beyond journalism was book publication. Other posts here at the Red Barn carry on in that vein. So be it.

 In Fostoria, I really had no support system beyond my new girlfriend slash eventual bride, distilled here as Kat, and her family. Beyond that, those of us in the newsroom weren’t paid enough to be part of the community, especially on the six-day week the absentee owner had us working. Let me extend that to all employers of minimum-wage labor; they impoverish a community, period.

Now I am wondering how I would have grown had I become familiar with one of the town’s churches besides St. Wendelin’s or maybe taught yoga at the Y rather than in my loft. Meaning other circles where I might have discovered a deeper level of the community. Or even the community theater, no matter its taste for conventional fare.

Despite my negative portrayal of the town in my journals, something others confirmed over the years, there were some bright lights all the same.

Joe Dell, whose family owned and operated the corner restaurant where I met Kat, was one. He found a niche and he and his wife and brother and sister-in-law flourished within it despite the brutal hours.

As were my landlords, Judge John and Kathleen Bender, whose son Thomas Guernsey Bender, as I later learned, pursued many of the Asian awarenesses I was but applying them to architecture, ultimately in Oregon.

I’ve already touched on the insightful librarian, Dan, whose last name I’ve lost, someone I would definitely hold up as a paragon of selfless public service, no matter the cost. The library’s board, for that matter, should be included.

Nor should you rely on the earlier entries of Kat for her full portrait. She was often sparkling, very funny, original, a “stone fox” in the view of a friend of a close friend to whom I had sent a photo. There are good reasons I married her.

In this review, I’m sensing so much that I wasn’t aware of or at least didn’t inscribe. If I had stayed longer?

Yet much of the negative observation of the people and place as poisoned may be more prescient than I’ve been giving credit: Think of Trumpian acceptance across the Midwest in places that economically were dead-ends, even before the hostile corporate vultures who swooped in to raid healthy small-town businesses as Brian Alexander details in Glass House: the 1% economy and the shattering of an all-American town. (A book I highly recommend.)

I wanted symphony and opera and, well, something more akin to respect and power. I mean, had I settled somewhere and had the resources, I might have taken splurges in New York or San Francisco or Chicago to indulge in those.

Yet as I review these journals, for the last time intact before incinerating them, I am struck both by a sense of inevitability in their seemingly unlikely episodes and by wonder that I survived at all.

The path wasn’t one I would have charted, yet each stage provided unique lessons in my evolving awareness.