Am surprised by my trips to ashram in this period, considering this visit may have been that pivoting vacation just before taking the plunge into marriage.
Swami, after much illness, short hair: (shaved, looks like Sivananda): accentuates her features, age of wisdom.
“I thought you were married. … Is she a yogi?”
Then I head, with Swami’s son, to some mountain climbing in New Hampshire for a last round of deep consideration.
Parnelli Kid: “New England towns will freak you out”
village greens (commons)
largest houses I’ve ever seen
framed, four-stories
stretching to barns
as for your dreams?
~*~
Back in Prairie Depot:
June 29, told Kat’s dad.
June 30, talked to the grandmother and also Father Gorman.
July 1, her parents’ turn to talk to him.
Asked her brother to be my best man.
Looked at dresses (like a funeral).
Kat appointment with her dad.
So much so fast …
The gauntlet to run: good thing we didn’t stretch ours out any longer.
We undertake all of the ritual steps pretending they’re for us, rather than marrying into the family.
Somehow contrasting guru/chela, Shiva/Shakti.
Father Gorman telling Kat we should live together instead.
The priest making me feel for the first time the poverty of Sannyasa.
~*~
Service officiated by the Reverend Father Stephen Paul Cairns.
Stephen, as the martyr stoned to death.
Paul, as the principal persecutor.
Cairns, as in piles of rocks.
I see now he died in 2012.
“I don’t even know if I’ve had a virgin come down the aisle,” yet all dressed in white an acquaintance, displaying the photos. As one said, “I was getting pretty far into motherhood at that point, but I covered it up pretty well.”
And then, despite the bed and books and her possessions, there’s no claustrophobic sensation. Rather, a feeling of the luxuriousness of Swami’s room. Tea master grace of the proper casual stroke: everything looks right, only half by design.
My thoughts return to Farina’s Been Down So Long, just the funky flavor of it.
Faces on my altar not to be worshiped but to be honored as examples, guides.
Homage to the Light: let it grow within.
I was still writing Prairie with only one “i”: remember my shock in realizing I had been misspelling it all along.
~*~
From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.
Reporter Tom: “I can remember my dad arguing with his mother till he was red in the face: ‘You think they’ve got a separate heaven!’ It wasn’t until I was older that I found out the colored people we shared our pew with every Sunday in the Presbyterian church were different. I’d always thought of Negroes as the National Geographic.”
Somewhere along the way, I had begun dating the entries, in one of the new styles (colons or periods, depending).
The next volume, one with wide margins, had me realizing as I keyboarded how little I’ve traveled as a vacationing American in my adult years but rather relocated: the syndicate years that came in the mid-‘80s would be a variation on this.
~*~
Inside cover:
into Aquarius 1974
May my strength increase
and my wisdom multiply.
Ordained not with words, which are fragile, but with observation that detects proper hidden motions … changes that occurred perhaps in October, I’m not really sure.
My shakti has appeared, and I am grateful
My typewriter has come home! (from the shop). Back to work on the hard-copy draft! [Meaning perfect typescript]
There were no streams to speak of in Prairie Depot, a few drainage open sewers, perhaps, brimming over with their chocolate filth.
Her big self-discovery, that she awaits the approval of other people or fears their censure … now, to make the effort into self-assurance.
A long work of writing requires a much wider variety of sentence construction, arrangement, timing, than normal press writing calls upon … reading to her aloud, I saw so many typing mistakes, clumsy sentences, too much attribution (it breaks the rhythm and flow too much).
Typing is very uneasy: need new typewriter, all I need is the $.
Being under a bug, I left the office at noon and slept two hours. Missed pizza party for me b’day … “We wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for your dumb girlfriend.”
Heavy into Snyder, including Dharma Bums [Kerouac] …
We had a guy at ashram before I moved in who delighted in doing hatha exercises nude. Ran around in rain with only shorts on; barefoot in snow as well. Very stoic: would climb three flights on wood-rung ladders barefoot, balancing 100-pound rocks on his shoulders, no hand on the stone. He quit, became a Pentecostal preacher. Never understood the Dharma nor his nudity.
Kaubisch Memorial Public Library, with its translucent marble front wall.
The Dictator of Forsythia.
Hitchhikers needs a good, long Baroque subtitle!
On my 22nd b’day, Nicki and I had big fight over transcendental meditation and broke up. And here I am, a swami.
And yet:
“She’d only known him four weeks when he popped the ring on her. It’s too fast. They’ve only known each other two months and they’re getting married in a month.
“Pam and I had been going together two-and-a-half years before we got married. I couldn’t of got a better wife, but if I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t have done it. There are just too many opportunities out there.”
Same day I convinced Kat we’d get married come summer.
~*~
The town was surrounded by rich flat farmlands, many of them drained from the Great Black Swamp, in Hancock, Wood, and Seneca counties, shown here in an aerial photo by Nyttend via Wikimedia Commons.
~*~
At Reservoir 5, very cold, windy.
Kat, angry: “Leave me!”
Left alone, she gets better.
She doesn’t see what she has to offer. Thinks she’s bad for me.
Looked at electric typewriters, will get an Olivetti Editor 2. Was so nervous at the store I couldn’t type. Then sat in the car in rain at Van Buren Lake. A kind of morning I almost drove many miles in search of “something.”
7:IV:74, we bought the ring Saturday, now she’s feeling scared.
“You don’t know what you’re getting into,” her mother said.
Don’t know now whether it was to me or my bride-to-be.
TV host Lou Gordon’s guests Sunday night were the Kidnapper for Christ and a deprogrammed Krishna freak.
Kat’s mother believes him and is shocked I lived in one of those “communes.” Sez she, “They ought to be investigated.”
By whom? Greedy senators, bloodstained, potbellied generals?
If these “cults” brainwash kids and “hypnotize” them, what does “civilization” do? All the television commercials? As for the parochial schools, the biggest and blackest culprits? (And this is well before Trump and Fox.)
Today, the original Christian disciples would have been the “brainwashed” by Jesus and Pontious Pilate the savior. Our bankrupt, spiritless society could not see the difference.
Who can truly identify the self-realized but the self-realized?
“If Kat went to one of those places, her father would be the first to come and get her.”
Also: “She’s too young to get married,” before attacking Debbi’s parents for “pushing” elsewhere on the family.
Slave labor? How much do you pay your wife?
Su Tung Po:
“the beauty
of the evening cannot
overcome my sorrow”
“the gentle breeze over ten thousand acres
makes a fine brocade of the waters”
As for an awkward moment, ran into her mother in Ada tonight. She’d seen the packed suitcase. “Well, if she doesn’t want to come home, that’s OK.” Wrecking our plans, all the same.
Completed five sections of The Thunder Cloud this week. From Asian back to more Western formal, via late Plath: mocking, histrionic, direct first-person address …
As I wrote to Kat, I’m feeling compromised here, so that my beliefs become hidden.
As I was asked, “Why do you wear those beads?”
If only I had replied, Sometimes they’re a rosary, for prayer.
Kat wants someone who knows what he likes. Poor me!
After all of this, I have no photos of Sam and Jeanice, nor of Helen Moran …
~*~
JOHN CHAPMAN
“Johnny Appleseed”
Swedenborgian minister
“He lived for others”
per tombstone
and engraved Bible
~*~
A declamatory style suits me best.
Two or three syllable end-line tugs, so typical!
~*~
From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.
Again, I’ll argue that this round of insights is applicable to much more than serious writing.
“I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times ― once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say. Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.” ― Bernard Malamud
“My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.” ― Anton Chekhov
“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” ― Somerset Maugham
“Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” ― Henry David Thoreau
“No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.” ― Russell Lynes
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” ― Ray Bradbury
“Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.” ― Jane Yolen
“Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don’t let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won’t matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.” ― Esther Freud
“I go out to my little office, where I’ve got a manuscript, and the last page I was happy with is on top. I read that, and it’s like getting on a taxiway. I’m able to go through and revise it and put myself ― click ― back into that world.” ― Stephen King
“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” ― Mark Twain
The next volume, beginning in December 1973. opens with many Tibetan notes and has 3-inch left margins, a touch I still love.
Coincidentally, I revisit these after perceiving how much Kurt, from our Yakima years later, eventually photographed Tibetans in America and gained their respect, leading in time to the Dalai Lama’s.
To my delight, the local library had a solid selection of Tibetan Buddhist books, which I devoured in developing Subway Hitchhikers. Even in diluted form, you can see why in my novel Subway Visions. All thanks to Dan, the consummate librarian. He often bought paperbacks and had them bound, which was cheaper than buying hardbound. He also bought only one copy of a bestseller and had those readers on a waiting list, rather than buying multiple copies. That freed up funds for a deeper collection.
Research, research, research, and then follow your intuition.
~*~
Note the extra-wide margins, something I loved when I could obtain them.
~*~
Bonsai notes, not that I ever pursued that …
Sunday, 17 March ’74:
“If you keep walking in circles, you’ll never hit the center.”
Asked Kat’s mother for advice on how to approach Sam. “It’s about time! I was about to ask what your intentions were. … Did you tell your parents?”
“Not yet.”
Afterward, Kat was stunned that I had actually done it.
“Shit, looks like you’re going back to school.”
“Bird calls are so monotonous,” sez famed pianist …
Winter: when the skies are flat clouds over muddy fields / no escape for the eyes.
Well, she was flat, too.
Let’s leave it all ambiguous.
Some yellowed clippings of Howard Hintz “Nature Hints” column, one of my better additions to the paper.
Other entries became sourcing for my novel Nearly Canaan and the first novella in The Secret Side of Jaya.
~*~
From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.
Although I lived near an apple orchard in Indiana, the blossoms became a special memory once we made the big move after that, as you’ll see. These are beside our house in Maine.
In my early journals review, I set apart two sequences from my ashram entries for presentation as Chronicle PDF downloads at my Thistle Finch editions blog. Remember, they’re free. One is Early Yoga, drawing on my initial experiences with the mysterious woman swami who came up to our town to teach classes. The other is Dark-Haired Beauty, a captivating fellow yogi, also from that introduction. In addition, the poetry broadsides Ahamsukhi and Ashram are available, as well as a photo album Ashram Memories. My, how young and green we were.
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.
A few asides on the small town where I was dwelling.
John Quinn, who grew up in Fostoria: “Small, flat, uninteresting. Platt-Deutsch. Smelly. Thick-skulled Catholic diluted with third-removed Yankee.”
B.L. Reid: “An ethnic polyglot with many Germans and a sprinkling of Irish and one unusual strain, a tribe of Belgians. To the time of the First World War, three out of four sermons a month in the Catholic church were preached in German. The Belgians were the glassworkers and conducted the local industry. A small opera house was visited by traveling musicians and players. Pretty public parks were much frequented by the Germans and Belgians, often observing their transplanted holidays in their native costumes. The Belgians formed a fine concert band and Belgian funerals, led by the band and followed by mourners on foot, were a familiar and impressive sight.”
Radio “newsman” Mel Murray, in his own voice, used my newspaper column as his “editorial” this morning on WFOB, two days after the concert I had reviewed. Obviously, he wasn’t there.
The people of this town gossip and bitch to each other but when it comes time to stand up, run away. They all want somebody else to stand up for their view, yet are afraid of anything different or new. They seem to be sleeping on their feet.
“Findlay’s only got nickel millionaires, but here, shit, these pishers may got money but they stick it up their ass.”
Nickel millionaires, sez the trashy town’s foot doctor.
[Findlay was headquarters of Marathan Oil and Cooper Tire & Rubber; Fostoria had none.]
~*~
The town sat at the nexus of four major railroads , the B&O, C&O, New York Central, and Nickel Plate lines. They were a constant presence. Photo by Nathaniel Railroad via Wikimedia Commons.
~*~
This piss-hole of a city! So much negativity, jealousy, and hatred it’s a struggle for anyone to remain alive long – negativity that could kill a horse
This place is still a swamp, not even an idea to look up to.
Everything’s got to be good or bad. Their minds can’t handle anything more. Their minds don’t work anywhere near as fast as their hatreds do.
They keep electing crooks just like themselves.
Reporter Tom, a West Virginian, observing how these Midwestern towns build statues of their founders and then live in the shadows: They think they’re friendly, chattering all day, cutting down each other, not a good word to say, a whole damned town of gossips, women and men …
As I saw it, the thing about this place is there’s nothing to look at, no lofty ambitions like a mountaintop, not even a holy man with a begging bowl.
There wasn’t even a river running through it or a lovely lake or pond to ponder. Just the railroad tracks and truck traffic.
Jnana's Red Barn 