Life at the Workshop, part one

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Starting to get squared away at office: so much space amazes me [my own room!] and then all the backup material, staff, and freedom of movement. I feel like I’m in heaven. Hard to readjust to open work scheduling. New freedom, large-vocabulary return: academic life and performance seem somehow foreign, though I’ve never really left it. Either I perform/deliver now or flunk forever.

Feels very good to work at a slower, more thoughtful pace …

“Have the girls fill this out,” Charlyne said, as I trotted down the hall.

Our administrative assistant, incredulous when I wickedly passed the word along while getting my three carbon papers: “Tell Charlyne the girls are very busy; tell her the girls send their love.”

Charlyne was the uber-feminist in the outfit.

Openly referring to myself as “Jnana” sounds strange again: kept starting to say the legal equivalent of “Boy.”

The leisurely pace of academic reflectiveness, gestation, can be guilt-inducing after the gut-busting pace of the Review-Times [or other newsrooms or assembly lines]. But guilt will only clog intuition. I must learn to pace myself so that I will be producing at peak quality [not quantity]. More than three or four hours of heaving editing or writing is too much for one day, since concentration slips.

Sometimes, on this slower pace, it seems I’m going nowhere, that I should be producing on an 8-5 shift and doing my homework – reading – at other times.

Workshop, a place where craftsmen bring design/theory/aesthetics/tradition/discipline to fulfillment/practice in diverse materials …

In our sense, a place of testing and integrity …

A whole garden to delight the mind’s eye and the physical touch …

Somehow, right after the “little stroll around the block,” I note, 13:XII:74 [a Friday], just back from St. Louis, much energy. [No idea where we stayed – out near the airport? – think we did go to a fancy German one evening.] Came back with a clearer sense of the newsletter, greatly simplified: more like our yoga newsletter!

I think we settled on WORKSHOP REPORTS, with the potential of designating different series such as a police or city government.

Lynn wants at least one foundation or funding source thanked in each workshop paper: it builds their files, gives them a sense that their work is going somewhere (even if only into a folder).

VO discussing difficulties he’s had in writing for publications and how he developed the strategy of writing to write and then usually delivering the work as a paper when invited. Using this approach, he learned he didn’t spend a year to find out the editor had “chickened out” and that if an editor is interested, publication is a byproduct. This way, we have a good backlog so that when the shit hits the fan, we will be ready to market.

He mentioned that Hobbes worked over several decades revising his work.

Another time, he mentioned that his most depressed period was in trying to write a water report and not being able to frame his words: the theoretical framework was weak.

Also, the difficulty of maintaining a creative tension while writing.

My pace is recovering my yogic …

Kat on VO and EO: “I couldn’t imagine them married to anybody else,” and he was now Kat’s favorite person. How curious, considering how upset she would get at my political discussions.

~*~

On the side, Vincent enjoyed designing furniture with carpenter Paul Goodwin. Here’s a sketch of a bookshelf system in his house. I’m not sure now, though, how it connected to the floor, wall, or even ceiling.

~*~

Etienne and Amelie could frame a novel.

Her mother from a very wealthy, steel-making family that lost and regained its fortune; her father, from immigrant Ukrainian miners.

Etienne, from a morbid, divisively argumentative peasant family. It was preoccupied with death. When he was 12 or 13, the grandfather was living in the same farmhouse, not knowing he was dying, though the house reeked of the odor of rectal cancer. The father, in a furious argument, told the old man, “It doesn’t matter, in two months you’ll be dead!” something the wife, Etienne’s mother, could never forgive. The fights that followed led to separation but also their remarriage a week before Etienne and Amelie’s wedding, “so it would be proper.” Yet they still fought.

America? “Here it is just eat your brother!”

France? The mad pace of Paris or the boredom of the provinces.

“I’ve broken many bottles over such cars,” the ones trying to run down pedestrians. “Oh? Did I do that?”

In an office, I feel trapped or cut off. Want to be closer to sun or wind. My mind is no longer original.

Perhaps I write this under the weight of Saturn: I feel sluggish, sedentary. I have piles there and here, projects I do not know how to resolve.

That “little stroll,” by the way, led to my Leonard Springs poems. The site has since been developed into a public nature reserve.

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.

Oh, hail, Indiana University

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Or “heh-ell,” as the dialect might say. It’s been a half-century now since I left Bloomington as a research associate, and a few years before, when I graduated.

Rather than rave about the graduate library or the celebrated rare-books temple or the music or business schools, let me take a different tack, as viewed from now.

  1. We’re still in disbelief that the football team could have a winning season, much less be ranked in the nation’s top 25 teams. Basketball’s a different matter.
  2. Considering the conservative nature of the state, it’s a bit shocking that the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction is located on the campus. Its extensive archives and research initiatives are discreetly housed, though, in the ivy-covered former Women’s Residence Center – or was, back then.
  3. Its collegiate gothic-style buildings are clad in locally quarried limestone. As are some more contemporary ones.
  4. The stream that meanders through wooded parts of the campus is called the Jordan River, not as a Biblical reference but rather in honor of David Starr Jordan, the school’s first non-ordained minister to serve as president – he was a scientist who believed in Darwinian evolution and left Bloomington after six years to launch Stanford University in California.
  5. Founded as a seminary in 1820, the school is one of the oldest public universities in America.
  6. The alma mater, “Hail to Old IU,” was set to “Annie Lisle.” a Scottish melody, as was Cornell University’s, and perhaps brought to Bloomington from Ithaca, New York, by Cornell alumni Jordan.
  7. A practical joke is spelled “boress” but pronounced a bit differently.
  8. The dining hall service continues to suck, as I’m finding in online comments. It was a major factor in the upheavals in my novel, Daffodil Uprising.
  9. On-campus parking is limited and expensive.
  10. Nobody’s ever figured out what “Hoosier” means, as far as I can tell.

 

Perhaps I was too busy simply getting adjusted to do any journaling?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

There’s a huge gap between the previous journal and the one beginning here. Is another volume, maybe two, missing? Did Kat perchance destroy them?

Instead, this one is half Workshop in Political Theory notes, followed by extensive Snyder transcriptions, many of them no doubt from the Lilly Library.

The chronological sequence is ruptured.

And there’s nothing personal, beyond that, in these pages.

We must have made an earlier trip to Bloomington, because I have a listing of research deadlines as of 6/6/74 but apparently for 1975.

Then the minutes from a trip to my first board of consultants’ meeting soon follow.

From there are many penciled Snyder transcriptions; am guessing they’re from Lilly Library. My deep immersion in that sanctum.

Gary was, in many of these, far more prosaic than I now expected. Perhaps that’s a liberating insight!

As for the Stoney Lonesome poetry crowd or Bloomington Quakers? So far, nothing.

That was about to change, though. And how.

~*~

Stretching between the courthouse square and downtown and the college campus, behind the camera, iconic Kirkwood Avenue figures prominently in my novel What’s Left as well as the earlier, Daffodil Uprising, though not by name. This time I would be living to the west of downtown. Photo by Yahala via Wikimedia Commons.

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.

Upcoming presentations will break from the chronological sequence into topics, as you’ll see. Our life was getting richer in everything but money.

Making our first relocation together

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Or, as I noted, back in foothills …

Frankly, I can’t envision my return to Bloomington without her.

Our Bloomington goods runs? Three trips, I’m seeing now. Using whose pickup, with the tarp flying behind it? Followed by our green VW Bug.

Ottawa, Ohio, on the site
of the last Ottawa Indian reservation in Ohio

seat of Putnam County on the Ottawa River

Realize that the move to Bloomington allowed me to reclaim, fully, my Jnana moniker.

Bloomington redux was also, in a way, a return to the grad student realm I inhabited in Binghamton, but with the twist I was now married and officially a research associate, quasi faculty. And my hours were so much more flexible, even regular.

This was second of the three times I stepped out of the newsroom career and had no guarantee of reentry if things soured. The ashram was the first. For me, this was risk.

Much of this move is abstracted in detail in my novels Nearly Canaan and The Secret Side of Jaya, though I did move the locale to the Ozarks – I had already used Indiana extensively in Daffodil and, later, What’s Left.

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.

 

On work itself, when done right

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Reporter Tom: “I was building a cabinet several nights ago and everything kept falling into place, everything fit, I cut the wood just right and there was such a good feeling of simply working that in a way I didn’t want to finish the thing. They never taught us to work that way. It’s always to get the thing done.”

Nowadays, no sense of craftsmanship. No unity of elements or workers. Just things, not creation.

For Esquimaux artists, objects do not have to be seen but treasures to be unwrapped and felt on special occasions.

~*~

The downtown since I left. Main Street by Nyttend via Wikimedia Commons.

At last, a hard, honest look at the relationship

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

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.

For me, walking has often been therapy

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Let’s clarify.

  1. Not in hallways, parking lots, malls, or many suburban housing developments.
  2. Not purely for exercise, especially walking in circles.
  3. Often, I’ve found downtowns invigorating.
  4. Neighborhoods with homes that reflect individuality and care. Craftsmanship, detail. Gardening, shrubbery, and trees, too. Ivy can be magical.
  5. To get from one point to another. Think of exploring.
  6. On trails. (Going back to Boy Scouts.)
  7. Forests.
  8. Riversides and beaches.
  9. Up and down a hill or a mountain.
  10. As a break in the practice of writing or revising. I’m recalling the orchard and irrigation canal banks, especially.

 

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