Something within me was about to erupt

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

PERFUME SAGE – a phrase from Yogananda.

Sivananda’s books reflect self-torture. Sex is evil, noise is awful, greed is terrible. Don’t enjoy!

In the valley, the ridges are blocked by trees or buildings. Or even little rill hills rather than distant views and vistas.

Water is suspended and sparkles before crashing and going on as if nothing had happened.

Serpents of water spiral around rocks and slither hissing away.

Where do we go from here?

Question: “What would Nikki think if you got married?”

“That’s her problem. She’s been in New York and could have taken a bus out, it’s two hours, but she’s afraid to. I’ve got my own life to live.”

Myth rather than Belief.

Hindu gods and goddesses rather than Boddhisatvas ….

Maslow’s “optimal people” as models for others.

Good hokku are full of overtones.

In Japanese, no articles, almost no pronouns, few distinctions like singular or plural, prepositions after nouns, kireji (“cut words”) untranslatable but often indicate an unfinished sentence or an elusive force / no relative pronouns: modifiers must precede the noun / normal Japanese sentences end in verbs.

Find beauty in things not inherently beautiful.

When am I going to leave? My heart is no longer here. I need a place for my books and records, a place to not feel threatened. I’m almost 25 and still no where.

Who am I? poet, journalist, playwright, copywriter, copy editor, essayist, critic, novelist and short story writer, artist, calligrapher, designer, typographer, teacher, monk and swami, philosopher and theologian, political scientist and urban economist, man of letters, music and music critic, historian, Quaker, cook, laundryman, cleaner, woodsman, naturalist, chemist and biologist, astronomer at times, dreamer and idler, architectural addict, hiker and swimmer, chess player of sorts, dabbler, claimer of new responsibilities though slovenly accountant and bored by business (except as econ), gourmet and ignorer of food (unless I’m fasting), organizer and promoter / nervous and roving, homebody without a home, hungry for love or attention and too demanding for a mate, confused and angry, a fukkin’ prince or sunshine stompin’ through life.

Is the devil a demon?

In Manhattan, in television interviewer David Susskind’s office. Joan Kennedy, the power sitting back and watching: subtle and sharp, how do we react to Swami and to each other. Sam Zurich the star questioner, hot and cold and in the spotlight, dressed casually but expressively, easy and irreverent, interested and bored, cut us off with more questions … Joan has a dream office, to my eyes. The show passed on airing us.

Swami tearing into me again, yet reads my palm: “You’re gonna be great.”

Yet, from Bharati, “Why don’t you ask her for a week or two to work on that novel? It couldn’t hurt. When I was working on a piece last September, it got many things out in front of me and I grew a lot.”

“Jnana, nobody is holding you here. We’ll give you anything, just name it, to keep you here, if it will make you happy.

[What I see now is that I had no idea of what I wanted to write. Perhaps if I wanted to really do the inside-yoga volume?]

My last meditation with Swami: all her energy lifting me, a swell, bodiless: nothing mattered: pure energy, pure orgasm: fear and doubt and delight and ego …

Owe camp $30, I presume for bus fare and food … and escaped almost unnoticed, like the anonymous wind.

Leaving the ashram is like breaking off with a lover: emotional and fear of freedom.

Characters: pig-pen, the mouth, mastah sigh, mr. meticulous, boots and whip, sentimental slob …

“Works of art are generally formed through integration of two incompatible elements, one of these being an attempt to communicate and the other, an artistic structure that contradicts the communication … The harmonious compound formed by these two elements has qualities found neither in nature nor in human affairs, and hence it can communicate no information about real facts. But it can draw on our unorganized memories and embody them in its own structure, evoking thereby deep emotions in us.” – Michael Polanyi, “What is a painting?” in The American Sholar, Autumn 1970 …

“Among hunting tribes there exists a custom according to which, before the men set out for the hunt, the women must dance and create an atmosphere of sexual excitement; the hunters, however, may not have intercourse with the women at this time but must satisfy their sexual excitement by killing animals. Frazer reports that the Nutka Sound Indians were compelled to refrain from sexual intercourse during the week of the great whale hunt. … The identification of women with prey is partly connected with the beginnings of the sex struggle.” – Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach

“Zen monks deliberately seek to outwit their thinking facilities by immersing themselves in practical acts – gardening, tea drinking, fencing, archery, and the prosaic details of everyday life – in the belief that in such pursuits the instant of real experience will at some point manifest itself.

“This practical, if non-rational, doctrine has permeated great areas of Chinese and Japanese life and art, and is especially well exemplified in the type of painting known in Japan as sumiye, in which the artist working with ink, sets an instantaneous impression on paper and is prohibited by the nature of the medium from going over or altering the strokes his brush has applied. … Life … delineates itself on the canvas called time, and time never repeats: once gone, forever gone; and so is an act: once done, it is never undone. Life is a sumiye painting, which must be executed once and for all time and without hesitation, without intellection, and no corrections are permissible or possible. Life is not like an oil painting, which can be rubbed out and done over time and again until the artist is satisfied. With a sumiye painting, any brush stroke painted over a second time results in a smudge; the life has left it. All corrections show when the ink dries. So is life. We can never retract what we have once committed to deeds; nay, what has once passed through our consciousness can never be rubbed out. Zen, therefore, ought to be caught while the thing is going on, neither before nor after.” – Winthrop Sargeant, “Profile of D.T. Suzuki,” The New Yorker, August 31, 1957

[Incinerated]

~*~

From Spiralbound Yoga, with commentary from now.

The novel is quite different from the operas

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

You know the common declaration that the book was better than the movie. Almost nobody acknowledges the reality that a movie can cover no more than 20 pages of a novel, or so I’ve heard – basing it on a short story would be much more fitting. (Who’s counting, anyway? A lot of a movie script involves fleshing out details. Say for five pages here, five pages there, five more for the finale. You get the idea.) There’s also the problem that cinema presents surfaces, while fiction can delve into individuals’ perceptions, reflections, and emotions in ways that even a first-person narrator cannot equally convey. Falling back on a voiceover, from a critical point of view, usually reflects a shortcoming in the movie itself. Perhaps you’ll come up with exceptions, and I’m open to argument. The point is, a filmscript has to discard a lot to fit into an acceptable running time for commercial release.

All that got stirred up after hearing a broadcast of Puccini’s 1884 opera Manon Lescaut, a retelling of Massenet’s once popular 1874 opera Manon, which still gets performed, unlike Auber’s largely forgotten 1856 version.

Usually, the discussion involves comparisons between Puccini and Massenet’s works, which I’ll touch on later, but this time I picked up on a clue from Sir Denis Forman’s “irreverent guide to the plots, the singers, the composers, the recordings” A Night at the Opera, a go-to book I’ll highly recommend. Manon is not one of Puccini’s blockbuster hits, something Sir Denis dismisses as “rather a dim little affair. It is made up of scenes from the Abbe Prevost’s long novel and whole chunks of the narrative take place between acts. This is dramatically inept because we lose any sense of continuity in Manon’s downward spiral and the agony does not pile on as it should.” OK, so my lack of enthusiasm for this work isn’t my fault, even though there are dramatic high points throughout, as Sir Denis cites.

He really grabbed my attention when he proclaimed, “The libretto is not good. Puccini’s Manon has a worse script than Auber’s, a much worse one than Massenet’s, and all three fail to mobilize the original Prevost’s story, which is full of good stuff and could make a rattling good television series today.”

That was good enough to send me down the rabbit hole. The novel in question is Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, the seventh and last volume of the Memoirs and Adventures of a Quality Man Who Retired from the World. First published in 1731, the novel was deemed scandalous in 1733 and 1735, seized and condemned to be burned, ultimately leading Prevost to revise and republish it in 1753, with an important episode added.

The operas – and I presume the stage and movie adaptations, too – all focus on the beautiful young woman in question, Manon Lescaut – but quickly diminish the storyteller, the young Chevalier des Grieux. The action begins when she’s being conveyed by coach on her way from school to a convent, accompanied by her brother, Lescaut. When they stop at an inn for the night, the normally shy des Grieux sees her, is stunned by her beauty, somehow strikes up a conversation, and immediately falls in love. Her brother, meanwhile, is engaged with Geronte di Ravoire, a very rich government official who instantly plots to abduct her, perhaps with her brother’s approval or assistance. In private, des Grieux boldly proposes that they run off to Paris together, she accepts, and they escape successfully. Just in time, of course.

End of Act I, more or less.

Puccini’s Act II begins with her being Geronte’s mistress, however bored and also yearning for des Grieux and some sexual stimulation. Massenet instead opens with her cohabitating in poor student squalor with des Grieux when his best friend, who plays a prominent role in the novel but is utterly absent in Puccini, arrives, ostensibly trying to intervene before des Grieux is surprised by the appearance of his brother, who abducts the kid and returns him to his father’s estate. The friend, in cahoots with the brother and stern father, has forewarned Manon, who then chooses to side with Guillot’s luxury (yes, the sugar daddy is given a different name, to the same effect). The novel paints a darker scene. Des Grieux has gloated of handing control of his purse over to his lover and is proud of all she’s been able to purchase; he’s shocked, of course, when he finally hears her explanation of “donations” from Geronte; she coyishly claims the exchanges do nothing to diminish her affection for the poor boy, who still believes she’s innocent in all ways. In the novel, she’s revealed as a coconspirator in facilitating the abduction, which then permits her to disentangle herself to commit to dissolute wealth and ease. Unlike the operas, the novel then plunges into des Grieux’ pits of despair and anger, including incarcerations, along with her string of rich patrons she fleeces and promptly flees, each time pulling des Grieux back into the picture to assist her escape. To thicken the plot, des Grieux has turned to seminary and priesthood, only to fall once more for Manon’s pleading and charms. In the book, she’s more manipulative, and the novel’s more about him than her.

Ultimately, in the operas, Geronte/Guillot has the police arrive as she’s trying to pack up jewelry she received in payment for her services. You might say she accidentally spills the beans. She’s imprisoned and convicted on theft and prostitution charges and sentenced to exile in frontier New Orleans. The operas cast her as a tragic victim of injustice in a cruel world. The novel, however, has her more of a repeat offender who never lives up to her end of the bargain with a succession of libertine benefactors. In contrast, des Grieux can be seen as darkly comical in his obsession even in the face of her repeated duplicities. Come here, come here, go away, go away. (The story painfully reminds me of a similar upheaval in my own past. I can’t say that he or I were truly victims of anything but our own fantasies or fancies.) The first stage adaptation cast the story as a dark comedy, but that effort fell flat.

From the novel one can venture that she’s not the innocent virgin des Grieux is when they run off together. Perhaps that’s the reason she was bound for the convent, a response to her earlier sexual behavior or escapades. She certainly appears experienced in their initial passionate coitus on the road to Paris, the deflowering of des Grieux. It’s enough for him to consider themselves married. Throughout both the book and the operas, it’s easy to view Manon’s brother as something of a pimp or procurer. He’s not exactly her protector at the inn or anytime thereafter. As Wikipedia says, despite its “poor critical reception, the novel quickly seduced the public.” Frankly, it does border on pornography.

The author, more formally Antoine Francoise Prevost, parallels much of his own life in Memoires and Adventures, which includes Manon.

And then? Let’s turn to Sophia Coppola’s third movie, Marie Antoinette, with all of the lavishness of French ruling class excess at the end of that century. Trace through the history of Marie’s husband’s grandfather, Louis XIV, and you’ll learn of the custom of mistresses – it seems every rich male had them, along with multiple estates – and clergy were often active in the arrangements.

In the end, I feel much more sympathy for the ill-fated queen than I do for the conniving courtesan. Puccini, though, compensates des Grieux with a big aria that expresses the rapture of desire, “Donna non vidi mai.”

~*~

The novel in digital formats is available for free in English translation at gutenberg.org and Internet Archive [https://archive.org/details/manonlescaut00pruoft or audiobook https://archive.org/details/manon_lescaut_1606_librivox%5D. It may also be purchased in Kindle and print editions at Amazon.

And here I thought it was a dark stretch

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My time in Upstate New York did generate a prolific amount of poetry, which you can now find as free PDF chapbooks at my Thistle Finch editions blog. Among them are Susquehanna, Splitting the Rent, Halle Street, Riverside Neighbors, and Still Tender. There’s also a prose piece, Escapes to Cornell. So much of note was happening in my life when it seemed nothing of importance was. On top of that, I do wish I had been journaling back in the summer of ’68 when I lived in a boardinghouse across the river from the office and had only a bicycle and my feet for everyday transportation. Whatever scribblings I had from then, alas, have been lost in letters to a long-vanished lover.

Do take a look.

Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet. Maybe you’ll even sit beside the river with me. I won’t say anything about the bed.

What a spiral

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The next volume starts 23:XII:72 and ends with my leaving ashram.

The inside cover is inscribed :

His Holiness Swami Jnana-Devananda
Prince among the flowers of delusion

Coming Boddhisatva among the yogis
Sleeping giant within the future
Fool among the ignorant
Blessed Immortal Atman into Capricorn

O suffering December, the month I would eliminate! Its forced merry and sleighs no one can remember, unlike the Apache snowmobile. The Santaclauswitzes Each December has a heaviness, a feeling of unfulfilled destiny. I’m not even yet married.

Into Capricorn, the days grow longer as the darkness recedes.

Like Ginsberg’s description of Kerouac: Leave behind American lit and find yourself. Ditto that English novelist who writes because there are no books he likes, so he invents his own.

Levi, reminding me I am destine for the Perfect Woman / “Only a perfect woman could put up with him,” Fern retorts / “Have you met the perfect one yet?” / “I’m not married, am I?”

Cedar sensing her Karma, because of a dream, is a group marriage – one male and one other female. Expectations also produce a Karma.

“Why waste your time writing poems I can’t understand? You’re better off chopping firewood.”

“So that’s what you do: ask the same question and keep answering” – Creeley’s technique

28:XII:72: Usage of the word god or its concept in India implies a lower level of perfection that in the West or at least a wider range of “human” or “sinful” activity is permitted the Hindu deities than is Jesus or Jehovah. With all of his active fornication and imaginative lying, no wonder Krsna appears pagan in the Western mind.

Clubbed to death in the Holy City?

Who was the real Dharma heir for Jesus?

Without the sacrifice of Judas, would there have been a Resurrection, a Living Proof of the conviction of Jesus in the will of his Father or the validity of his Karma?

Thomas was strong enough to resist the wrath of the group in upholding his belief. If Peter was the rock of the Catholic church, Thomas was the root of Protestant reformation. Thomas the loner and empiricist, with faithful questioning. Jesus loved Thomas no less than Peter.

SO HAPPY CELESTE IS COMING!

(Later: announced she couldn’t make it. Her father had died and she was continuing with Marty in the med student in Virginia.)

Calligraphy slows down one’s expression. Very deliberate, each stroke a meditation. Resistance of pen and paper.

“Speak in the stillness, Lord, for my heart is silent.” – Father John’s prayer at the beginning of meditation, though often he realizes how unquiet his heart is.

And another priest said, “It is sinfulness that keeps you from God.”

Allen Ginsberg almost came this weekend.

Charles Olsen’s theory of breath control, how each poet has a different capacity and way of phrasing his lines and that a poet’s work should reflect these aspects of his personality.

But I must add there are also page poems, to be looked at, the rhythm of eye movement dancing with the lines.

Hopping along the boulders atop Big Pocono – O, to be a mountain goat! Or an eagle!

[Next day] Len and Zeezy stopped by but I kept spacing out, couldn’t relate, felt very cold and distant. (The household was fasting. Levi sez astrologically I’ll be spacing out even more.)

Baltimore trip / Jan 10-11, 73

XIT
41

With stayed with Father John Sheehan, probably in Roland Park …

[Incinerated]

~*~

From Spiralbound Yoga, with commentary from now.

Despite the seclusion, I did venture out

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

From an unnumbered red cover stenographer book, mostly October 1972, which includes trips to New York City and Binghamton.

But first: Playing my violin with new bow gifted to me.

Said Swami: “Jnana, I just discovered something about you – you’re a delightfully violent lover!”

From seclusion into the depths of Gotham.

In NYC:

Stimulation overload. Disorientation. Discomfort.

Crazy lady, not yet 30, looks 45. Newsdealer says, “She’s been here 10 times in the last hour. I’m afraid she’ll damage something. Security’s afraid of itself, won’t do no thing.”

Her friend “balled Debbie and Donna in one night, they’re sisters; said he raped one because she was toying with him. He then split for Texas for three weeks.”

~*~

Return to Binghamton on Virgo/Libra cusp 1972, traveling as Swami Jnana, a very difficult trip: everyone asks so many questions, trying to rip apart the riddle, to find out why and what I am now. “You know I can’t go back there anymore,” Joni Mitchell on the stereo.

So difficult for them to call me “Swami,” it’s always the the name no longer relate to …

My trip up? For Len’s b’day?

Hitchhiking a good omen: my first ride a Cadillac [like so many others in my hitchhiking experiences]; from Geneva, Ohio, he commutes weekly from NYC to home, and back, the weekend: once got it down to seven hours …

The second a straight sophomore [meaning non-hippie] from East Stroudsburg State College; a Datsun with many cassette tapes; Iron Butterfly and Grand Funk in the shoebox; strong wind blows us like a boat on rough water; his hair once long (for the summer) this former high school football star telling me about long hair as he heads home to see girlfriend

Take side trip with him, all over Scranton, waving and honking at his friends; I’m dropped off at Clark’s Summit. Scott’s his name.

Third ride a cigar-smoking car dealer from Wilkes-Barre – he lost all business records etc. in the flood; on his way to Upper Cayuga Lake, where he has a large cruiser. A soft, gentle man, honest. I told him I had returned to school [as the ashram could be considered, rather than a commune]. Such a beautiful crisp September day, blue with wispy clouds tearing at me like the drive Vivienne and I took stoned or the September views from the window Len and I had on Hawley street. “There’s something out there you’re not getting,” it says. The driver, meanwhile, told me of a retired couple who had finally cleared themselves of debt had lost everything in the flood – they received government relief of $5,000 – nothing. I told him it was impossible to imagine the flooding, the pain. He nodded, said it is so. People were now fleeing the city, leaving mortgages behind. You have to have a receipt for everything or the government won’t pay, which means your own labor is worthless.

He then told me about the graves exploding as the water undercut the cemetery at Forty Fort; bodies washed away. I later read that some 1,800 bodies were still unaccounted for and heads and arms were being found in people’s backyards etc. Curiosity seekers descend on the towns on Sunday.

Zizi commented that I had met so many fucked-up people and how fortunate I was in getting away … including escaping the sad-trap Press …

Celeste said that when I speak now, it’s from experience, on and of a human plane, not from things I learned in books and of books. She also spoke of being called immoral by some of her housemates. (Immoral? See it as doing anything without love)

Len’s party so dull he and I took the 10-speed bicycles and flew through the streets, downtown running red lights and singing opera at the top of our lungs like birds flying to freedom. Me, seldom so wild and happy in so long.

Out there, a system of threats.

The Bronx funeral trip:

Three knifed to death Saturday night in Upper Bronx; no reason given, no theft; nothing in the news. The mother of one victim turns this into a party; has an autopsy despite Hebraic law; does nobody learn? A gang initiation, murdering a white? Or merely cheap thrills? Going for a walk in a better neighborhood and then being followed unknowingly.

Police call at 4 am – “Come now to lineup – see if we have the man” – and they’re so irritated if the victim’s companions are not immediately out of bed for the station. Sympathy?

Yesterday I was at Len and Ise’s, next day it was Brooklyn.  Such a strange place, the city. Heading to the Bronx, we drove through Harlem, stirring thoughts of Ise. We had left the ashram at night, as soon as I got back to the farm from Binghamton.

People? More wolves than men?

I began reading Moby-Dick on 17 October – great, original, and thoroughly American … such an intoxication, a swell of language …

First mentions of my planned Tibetan novel … “a novel should retain a dream-like entrancement/reality – distortion”

The Dolly Lama, as the kids called him.

“He needs me” is a kind of possession.

Hunter doesn’t accept advice or new ideas, except later. Rigid, has his own way to do a thing (as does Swami) … their (unexpressed) joy of wrestling.

A pipe organ recital program from Tuesday, March 28, St. John Chapel noon series at Columbia University: Reger, Seth Bingham, Jean Langlais premiere performance, Vierne, Dupre.

~*~

The Delaware Water Gap and smaller Wind Gap were major features in our horizon to the east. Here’s a typical view from the neighborhood. Image by Chuck Walsh via Wikimedia Commons.

~*~

From Spiralbound Yoga, with commentary from now.

Among the wonders of nature

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When it comes to flowers, wild or cultivated, just consider …

  1. “Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth, are never alone or weary of life.” — Rachel Carson
  2. “Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.” — May Sarton
  3. “In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” — Margaret Atwood
  4. “Just living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.” — Hans Christian Andersen
  5. “Colors are the smiles of nature.” — Leigh Hunt
  6. “The earth laughs in flowers.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
  7. “The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.” — D. H. Lawrence
  8. “Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.” — Theodore Roethke
  9. “The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.” — Galileo Galilei
  10. “Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.” — Henry David Thoreau

 

Maybe it all adds up

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

At a wedding party, Harmony got an offer: “I have an extra $300 lying around if you want to spend the night” – the bride’s father.

Mirrors aren’t windows …

How flattering to get a letter from a guest who found me too beautiful. Was told by Swami, “You must not look so pure and perfect before female guests: you must do something to look muddy and imperfect.” Be hard or mean? To be real?

In a small town, when children peddle products to your door, you buy even if you don’t want to.

“He’s tense as an E string on a fiddle,” said Uncle Emerson, who never played fiddle but knew the folk expression.

At one of my great-grandma’s funeral, a man in overalls, paintbrush in hand, showed up: “I can’t say I rightly remembered the woman, but I thought I’d pay my respects.” Small-town duty.

At Grandma’s funeral, so many woodwork relatives I didn’t know: “We should get together more often.”

Sez a sailor: there’s much time to read on a cruise / most seafaring men cannot swim / 86-foot waves in the Norwegian Sea / wear beard, smoke pipe, speak Anglo / Polaris Jack the dolphin who for 20 years piloted ships through treacherous Australian reefs [Wikipedia has Pelorus Jack, New Zealand, 1888-1912, 24 years]

Self-hate = masochism.

Yesterday, I led an old-style Lakshmy hatha class: was afraid I’d kill them but they thanked me, even those who couldn’t keep up.

Pre-Oct 14: while mimeographing, watched an oak tree change from fainting yellow into majestic gold, from morning to midafternoon: the seasons flee before our eyes.

In a Zen temple, a godo [the guy with the stick] / here, Swami Cedar.

Mer de
Merde

[Incinerated]

~*~

 From Spiralbound Yoga, with commentary from now.