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.

 

Vol. 25, green Indiana cover, begins 19 February ’73 in a Bloomington visit, then turns into the first of the Fostoria series. Some overlap with the previous volume.

A phantom follows me around in flashes of her traipsing and schlumping through campus … my real reason for the visits was to win her back, only to be thwarted in the pursuit. And then Capt. Amerika flaked on me, after all the hospitality I’d offered him earlier. Did I take the Greyhound on any of those trips?

You list an old address and an older phone number. Who are you running from? Or what? It’s funny how so little can say so much. Two friends saw you last week, about the same, with a slob-freak grad student, an older man: still seeking a father you can punish? Still seeking to punish yourself?

15:III:73 / Day in Yellow Springs: see why Fern and Cedar ran back to the ashram after moving out: security of the tribe.

“We expand through sorrow.”

The self-righteous barrier of Quaker smiles scared me off in Waynesville Sunday yet I should share through speak.

Knife in the Water: such a fine title (film by Polanski): using only three players.

Ugly Ohio: snarl of rails, grain elevators, auto parts factories, sky vast as Montana, endless prairie, 50-hour workweeks at scab pay.

(So I was mulling the job.)

Horoscope: opportunities multiply.

Associate editor = managing editor elsewhere, opportunity of editorial page column; 12 correspondents and a small staff.

Move with ideas.

Mom revealing her mother’s past [add this to my Mother’s Day perspectives!] As for the aunt divorced and smoking scandalous cigarettes?

Searching for an apartment: highway trucks shake the walls all night, a king’s ransom for not enough room to turn around in, “furnished” means crowded with junk, Grubber tells me of kicking the last tenants out for taping Playmates to the ugly walls, “Told ‘em: Out! Tonight!” And no wimmen in the room either. No closet and a terrible stench.

And then, stalking the wild auto, Morris Jones, fine rap VW salesman, delivered …

~*~

~*~

Entry of 29:III:73 introduces Kat and Ann, the waitresses, Italian and Polish.

Two weeks later, a Friday / Met a great Boddhisatva, Jesse Owens. Expected an aging jock and found a yogi who gives his energy to spur on others. He told of a high school track coach who sacrificed vacations to tell students of muscles in such clarity “You could see it” … and in response “you wanted to give this man everything you could … you learned your lessons well” A Virgo, September 12, too fast to be a Capricorn

Soon, betwixt Palm Sunday and Easter, I was calling the place Prairie Depot, but with only one “i,” a misspelling that continued a few years. One eye? Or half-blind?

Two weeks later / West Virginia white-water rafting trip. No dams upstream … Cheat River … Kingwood Albirght power station smoke Mamie’s motel and restaurant.

Cold, cold river.

And two weeks after that, a dash to the ashram. Memorial Day weekend? Swami’s first comment: “You have city pallor.”

Swami Black Cloud in hell.

Slave wages = no pride.

Small-clan Fostoria, small minds and no imagination
and divorce from nature gods.

Mid-June. Took Kat to BG today: in her brother I saw my old self: selfish, materialistic, mean, bossy; she, too, saw a difference, “You’re alive, you’re human.”

I was also teaching hatha in the apartment …

“Be a lay teacher … for laymen.”

And then poetic blasts about glaciers before I’d ever seen or heard any …

“where once flew eagles now sail buzzards” except that eagles have returned with a vengeance

By July, Troubles with Kat …

Why great monasteries are in mountains: the reaching up to the glory of the universe, versus the running out to worldly desires …

Many yoga notes, too.

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

Deep into the well of the heart is the universal cosmos.

Many items on drafting Subway Hitchhikers, though I should note it was much larger in scope, including Daffodil and the other eventual Hippie novels … “a false tone in so much of my past writing: a thin line between that neo-Baroque artifact … invoking that jerk in the sky.”

Am now realizing: With Hitchhikers, I was hoping to make a change in the world at hand; instead, I should be seeing the characters as individuals whose lives are prayers upholding the goodness of the world and keeping it from falling into Trumpism and other darkness … preservationists against the evils of global capitalism etc.

 

2:III:73 / meditation makes the whole world seem new.

Contrasts ‘tween Nikki and Fay. “That Nikki! Gnawing, grasping, devouring, desperate and destructive hunger, insatiability …”

Sunday 4:III:73: “The Friends’ meetinghouse in Waynesville perhaps 150 years old (town settled 1797): white simple brick: porch and two doors (one men’s, one women’s?) Worship 10:45.” (At least I now knew where the Quaker site was.)

Little Miami River Valley: roads: Corwin, Feedwire, McBee, Upper Bellbrook, Oregonia, Ferry Church, Chenowith, Middle Run, Old Stage (Pittsburgh-Cincinnati), Indian Ripple, Stuttman, Alpha, Trebein, Darst, Carpenter. Past places where Fay and I necked or were chased … this time, I passed a baptism in the river …

Wednesday, off to Glen Helen in Yellow Springs: drafted the Eight-Fold Path poem.

Afterward, stopped at an English prof’s from my past. She was prompting me to “adopt” Eroica, a real sex bomb, flirt, flaunting it: needs other outlets.

To drive a new car. [Was that the Bug? Or Dad’s?]

My troubles began when I was born.

From a short story by John Bart Gerald, July ’71 Harper’s, on rich girls (one of the “horrors of the world”): She may well direct her energies to pleasing some older man, possibly her father. Life will be essentially a game … seeks total moral or sexual obliteration and continually manages to survive it … Rich girls shut horror out of their lives at any cost, and someone else will pick up the tab.”

Sunday (First-day), Quaker Meeting in Waynesville: my mind very dualistic: hard to sit the 45 minutes: the Dharma is further away.

“Do you as Quakers strive to make your homes a place of peace, joy, and contentment?” (asked once a year)

Was also reading Berry’s Hidden Wound …

Listen to animals and observe the water.

Overcome sleep and master the breath.

In letter to Barb: What’s Hitchhikers about? Reincarnation. Or life. Or both. Zany and surrealistic … actually, it’s a lot about my experiences in the past five years.

Has Bharti’s 2027 Walnut noted on last page …

~*~

On a slip of teletype paper: now back to practice
4 am arise and meditate, read clear thoughts
5 am exercise and shower, cool water
6 am prasad of worship
7-11 am work sesshin I
11 am brunch
Noon to 3 pm work sesshin II
3 pm pranayama
3:30 pm work sesshin III
5:30 pm dinner
7 pm work sesshin IV
Meditate at 8 and bed

Looks brutal, though sesshins covered writing or revision, calligraphy, job applications, violin, cooking, carpentry, cleaning, packing. Also, must have been short-term focus, reflecting Zen sesshins ….

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.