Must have been after a trip to visit Celeste at her brother’s. Returning from Detroit, meteor to 15 degrees above horizon, toward Bloomdale just before I entered Fostoria

Celeste: “If you weren’t so expressive, you’d have an ugly face. Your features? You still have the eyes of a madman.”

Kat’s ceramics teacher had the students make a pot with their eyes closed and then destroy it in their fists. To teach them that in art the doing is more important than the product.

Celeste, after kissing and caressing: “I approve of Kat.”

Her surname translates = Lion!

From a novel: “You have a very, very fine piece of literature here.”

Rejection slip: “These have a truly interesting bullet-like form and some very powerful movement/section. Sorry we can’t use these.”

Kat: You never tell me anything important. LIKE YOU LOVE ME WHEN I’M NOT EXPECTING IT.

Someone, talking about wrestlers’ well-used trunks: “Yeah, and I mean well used. You didn’t hear about the match in which he had diarrhea. His opponent grabbed him – and he lost.”

A girl gushed out of Dells’, yelled my name with what I thought was the enthusiasm of familiarity. I turned, crossed the street and walked a half-block to meet her.

“You look different,” she said.

“Just washed my hair,” said I.

I couldn’t place her. A yoga student or chance acquaintance from another city?

“I thought you were in Florida,” I ventured.

Her anxious eyes queried my face.

“Who do you think I am?” I responded.

“John Paul. Why you?”

“No, I’m sorry. I’m known as Jnana, not John.”

Mary, in the restaurant window, knowing of my true love, nods at me and winks her finger, seeing only the warmth of boy-girl games.

~*~

Pennsylvania Dutch masonry details:

 

 

~*~

Slip of poetry draft on heavy paper: how much I was doing straight at the keyboard.

Boarding an elevator, can’t get off. Instead of numbered floors, there are bones by the buttons. The second bone opens on a restroom where two people want to give him/her a shower. Further up, the door opens on a big hole. “Go ahead,” a voice urges. “Walk on across.”

Yesterday, in middle of teaching a hatha class, I realized it was the anniversary of my leaving the ashram.

Here there is not enough time for anything.

Every day, I walk the same two blocks to work. Always different.

Doc drives to the office and sees nothing but traffic lights. It’s only a few blocks.

~*~

The Foster Block, 1856, is coming down. Along with the town.

Categories, genres: what is Hitchhikers? I don’t care. It’s a WRITING! That should be enough.

As for Shakespeare’s novels?

A scripture that unrolls on its own singing. A Senate, perhaps. Or sonata.

As for the worn-out art forms, still awaiting the new great novel, short story, poem, play, symphony or quartet. Back to origins, meaning springs.

~*~

Blue paper typed insert: Note how Snyder takes stories, dreams, and journal stuff and weaves this long discourse as longer poetry, not as short stories. (See Carlos Williams’ fictional prose for contrast.)

~*~

The six-day, 50-hour race at work is unsustainable, too exhausting for all of us.

July 4, in Vermillion, hearing from my future brother-in-law, principal of Bhaktaraj’s elementary schoolteacher mother, how the kid was off somewhere running a yoga temple all by himself and he didn’t get paid and had to write home for money. But then Steve piped up about how his wife conned her mother into enough money to fly to Florida or some such.

Brown rice with chop sticks is a good way to slow down on a busy day.

Kat’s roommate is from New Jersey. Asked if she knew Doris Kramer, the answer was yup. Small world. [Now, who on earth was Doris?]

Amid the flames, the Lord called between the logs and said, “Speak to the people of America and say unto the them.”

Who was Matthew Peacock?

In my journaling, rather than writing about what yoga can do for a presumed reader or student, I should have tried writing about what it was doing for me, at least more directly. There are mentions of difficulty sitting or concentrating, but those appear as failings rather than natural challenges in the discipline.

As for all of my railings against the perceived pressures of the conformist majority, if I could have only gotten around the casting of blame …

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

 

Seven days later, I’m struck by the whole concept that if one suffers enough, he (or she) will pile up great spiritual beauty and become a martyr. This approach seems to mark the principal thrust of Christianity; reflects a hatred of life, and breeds gloom. (So I observed at the time.)

Meditative action spiritual practice, in contrast, has God found within rather than above; life can be light and compassion.

“Have you been saved?”

“Yes. Have you been liberated?”

How to befuddle a Jesus freak.

The experimental aspect of yoga/Zen excites me: the practitioner is not ordered to embrace any dogmatic dictates but rather told to observe how he reacts: what he (or she) feels, tastes, hears, and intuits in a set of carefully ordered settings. The adept suspends  judgment long enough to experience first-hand.

Tonight in hatha class Bev was bewildered by the possibility of her own divinity, as introduced through Sivananda’s Practical Lessons.

Knocking down walls? “What do you have left? It seems like you are denying life.”

~*~

~*~

Thanksgiving Day: I used to think there was a glory, a kind of permanence to newspaper work: I valued craftsmanship and perfection. Now, regarding a faded, brittle 1952 clipping sent to the office last week, my feelings of temporality are reenforced. It is as permanent as an ocean wave on the shore.

Are modern civilizations, as the Club of Rome suggests, headed for THE GREAT DARK AGES within a century?

Joe Dell: “There’s no excuse for making a bad cup of coffee. Keep your equipment clean, buy a good quality coffee. Now you take these chain restaurants, they have these modern management techniques. If you’re gonna eat a chain restaurant, do it at the beginning of the month. About the middle of the month, they have to start cutting back to meet their quotas. They even buy a cheaper brand of coffee. That’s what the salesman said.”

Capitalism, not labor unions, is the ruin of the country.

Sometimes American society seems to break down into crooks and Quakers. [Now I just hope they never overlap.]

I am not at home here. I will never be.

Always the missionary.

I am my best, moving with the bright lightning bolt from deep within.

I must publish [in literary journals] within the next year.

The first American to perform magic in Europe called himself Philadelphia.

American Indians kept their magic private: make snakes appear and acorn and beanstalks grow.

The catching the bullet-in-the-teeth trick finally proved fatal to Chung Ling Soo.

Typhoid suicide.

Madness “made idiotic by the use of tobacco” with a frog in the stomach the real cause.

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

Opening page of the next volume has Box 16, Lima Hall, 45310 but nothing else. As a point of fact, she didn’t attend Ohio Northern until the fall semester but had that summer term as an introduction to college at the nearby state university. To her surprise, she passed that and was on to a new world.

First entry, next page, is 15:VII:73, Nikki’s birthday and Kat’s off for the summer. I was already entwined with the latter’s family. Helped Sam erect his backyard flagpole.

An entry on locking myself out of my apartment while shaking a rug over the banister. Keys left inside. Lights and air-conditioner were left on. I was in shorts, no shoes. Brady next door knew the way over the transom. Got my keys and I then headed off to her campus.

Call from Swami: “How’s that 17-year-old?” She thinks I need somebody about 24. Also, mention of upcoming New York Times piece on the ashram, by Judy Karlstad or Karlsrud: it was long and had six pix.

Mom and Dad dropped in, a surprise. They wouldn’t have found me if Kat had been home.

Coming back to my apartment at midnight Friday, saw Brady’s wife was in the street, telling me of a 17-year-old in her bed, he’s been jealous and beating her, she had him locked up. He’s been in jail since 13, she was pregnant three months at marriage, he was 18: trapped, no maturity. (You can’t make up stories like this, can you?)

Then five men in Day’s tavern baseball shirts, to her, “How’s your tomato? I bet it’s got hair on it!” Out of Holman’s, obnoxiously drunk. They went off driving and throwing eggs, twice. We, to police.

She said I talk sense, not knowing it was only yoga talk.

Monday, a call from Gene and Nikki: first conversation with her since before yoga. The same spacy, faraway.

American Swami Rudrananda killed in plane crash. (He’ll show up later in these spiralbound journals.)

Girl in laundromat, two black eyes, hoarse voice, her birthday / same as Nicki’s / no diamond, lives in trailer in the country. Though we speak, no mention of eyes.

~*~

~*~

From a letter to Len: This is the flattest, most endless land you could ever imagine, and the people reflect it, having stripped off all the trees and driven out all the deer and Indians. … The local cops think we at the paper are all pinkos. … Kat and I went to Chicago to see the 41 paintings from the Hermitage and Pushkin museums.

So we would have stayed with Iris and Luis? I thought that trip was a year or two later.

Land left spiceless.

Len came out from Gotham for a visit and left this morning, back to the City. We apparently had a bottle of muscatel, or muskadibble, which whacked me. A legacy from a wino he once learned, after asking what was in the brown bag.

Also, late Tuesday afternoon, my one and only Scuba dive: heavy, like a backpack, throws me off-balance: we suit hot in humid air, flippers hard to walk in, throw you backward but easy to swim

No hair under mask: will leak

Every breath, I instinctively raise my head above water: reflexive unthinking: “Not me, not this!”

I’d never before used fins nor snorkeled.

Minnows or darters swimming up to my mask. Gold and black streaks rim their tails.

Brown and black snake in reeds three yards away. “Let’s clear out,” Bob says, remembering ‘Nam.

3:XI:73 / Last night, deeper, our relationship transformed. Her fears, and mine, unexpected, vanished. No hurt, “It feels strange.”

Her new face, of moon mystery.

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.