You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Sandy’s shouted “No!” rebounds down the stairs like a Slinky.
Got record albums from Nicki, guess she mailed them. No stereo, though …
My fingernails are growing unevenly and I have no clippers here.
~*~
I have no idea now who Sandy was or where.
~*~
Also has me wondering:
Did Fay’s tomboyishness bring out something boyish in me?
As for our shared Aquarian flash, only the Georgian much later would connect in that dimension again so much later …
Prairie as a symbol of America [make that U.S. and Canada], the middle or bread basket or heartland. I kept trying to envision the openness, wonder, even terror when white pioneers found her, back before she was ripped apart for farming. Even the Interstate highways coast-to-coast. The middle land of Protestants without heritage, too blind to see clearly the potential of balance and healing before them.
Somehow, that poetry project never found root.
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.
~*~
~*~
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.
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.
~*~
~*~
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.
Do take a look.
Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet.
Jnana's Red Barn 