More notes:

A work gains coherence through its own definition almost independent of me yet unquestionably me also me.

Initially puzzling, a dozen or so pages in: “Binghamton, after Stroudsburg, before Day-town again.”

Was this in Dad’s car to pick up my goods? I have no idea what model he owned at that point. Or had I bought the green VW Bug?

A year and a half here, and after June, I will know no one save the Wormans (who want to leave, too).

With Celeste, again, the tenderness of breaking up: why not me and why Smarty in 3½ years?

“You’re not critical enough.” (Huh?) “You’re too intolerant.” (What’s the difference?)

“Critical is when you know somebody can do better but isn’t trying. Intolerance is when you don’t like the person for something he’s doing.”

Later, she said she doesn’t like the side of her I bring out as much as the person she is with Smarty, that she could never tear all my clothes off and rape me. (Which was explained the next morning.)

Where he asks her to help dissect – to skin a human cadaver chest – I’d be selfish.

She yells, to my surprise, “Cat! Shut the fuck up!”

Visiting Tom S. and Bill, some tender talk. Bill tells me that when he left the Gurdjieff group, he suffered for five months but now he’s Bill, only more so. When Polly and Ajax and he were reading our yoga newsletter, they were confounded, amazed. Tom uttered, “This is Hodson!”

With D-Man and Helene and a strange rapport over Friday night dinner, I thought of the night on Brown Road. Turns out that apart from him and me, everyone was a water sign. The quiet mysterious smiling and watery eyes.

Celeste says my eyes have changed. “They used to be flowerchild eyes, soft and gentle. But now they’re hard, mature.”

Something is missing, we’re backing away and less affectionate.

She hates to swim, except in the ocean, and dislikes movies. How could we ever make it together?

Sleeping with her, I dreamed I was holding Nikki. Awoke, and her back looked like Nikki’s. Here I was, with a newly departing partner.

Later, in a letter: “I can picture you playing with your children someday. I think you’d like the chance of being one again, and you’d share your toys.”

That’s what she wrote telling me she would not be my wife nor mother of my children.

And now, paleo-writing?

Work on finding that “Montana Lady.” (So I already had a desire to relocate to the Northwest.)

Driving home, with sadness and satisfaction. The strange paradoxes of this life.

Each fantasy prevents seeing the other as a person, as someone to respond realistically to.

Mad River University. (For Wright State?)

A two-part collection: OBJECTS and OBJECTIVES. Both fragments.

D for Demons or Dreams.

Loading an antique steamer trunk full of books, like lowering a corpse in a coffin and closing the lid.

When we were building the stone fence at the ashram, we accidentally buried the irises beneath the wall. Had to tear rock away and replant the bulbs. The next spring, the only ones to bloom were yellow.

Iris? Greek for rainbow.

~*~

Met Zilch for a drink, spent four hours together. When he gave Richardson my ashram address, Richie-boy was impressed that I had the balls to up and do it … pull up roots … Zilch was impressed by the stonework, gardening, and bread baking: “Shit, you do it all.”

And then I turned 25. “A half or a third of my life expended or lost now and what have I got to show for it? A pile of sorrows, a chest of empty expectations, no place to call home, no wife or mistress to rest my head. This freedom! … It’s time to stop getting it all together and do it! Before the hour is gone.”

Other entries on rediscovering my corner of Ohio. Yet when home, she’s “no longer virginal.” No idea who, though.

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

The journaling picked up with a new notebook with the inner cover inscribed, “His Holiness Sri Swami Jnana-Devananda in the middle of Erewhon 22 January 1973.”

So my ashram residency ended a month earlier than I’ve vaguely recalled.

The notebook begins in Yellow Springs, with a reference to ashram: “We’ve been watching you strangle yourself.”

Yellow Springs, “a certain atmosphere … eclectic earth of 1850s’ utopian dreams reflected in brick and glass.” Still the home of Antioch College, the village and its access to woodland reserves were one corner of freedom for me and had been since I first learned to drive.

Other notes:

At Dayton Art Institute, “a little out-of-the-way Rothko and the immortal worm-devoured Korean Buddha.”

In Midwest
everybody pushed to be other
than what they are

leveling everybody to this flatness

two beers and a pizza at Marion’s

Midwestern accents flat, nasal, drawn out …

Round of discarding old love letters and friends of predictable concern or affection

The plastic masks of mannequin people with cheerleader smiles

Homes with Chevy super-sport bucket seats / fuck it seats / watching the world go by their windshield TV screens.

Should I turn Hitchhikers into the loveliest love-offering short story ever? Letting her know my pain? (Meaning Nikki? It was her hometown, too, never mind her whereabouts at the moment.)

Every time the window is clear: Behold!

Whatever rings true
touches God

the river, clapping

Clifton Gorge

relatively quiet

overhead a few airplanes rumble

the Cincinnati-Pittsburgh stage coach road ran this far north

In rockface rope, fingerholds and stretches up a crack in two months, 30 feet gain of cigarette and concentration to live at the limits of existence better than a lifetime of dead. Maybe this was his temple.

And then, his friend standing watch adds, “Mitch is more daring than I am very cautious after a friend died, bad accident, not his fault, bad rock. Mitch is in fine shape despite those cigarettes. He ignores a lot of safety precautions but he moves quickly and with sureness, and that inspires me.”

“Remember how Larry freaked out rappelling!”

~*~

The worst part of loving you
nobody is your equal
and being alone
in a different country
I am lonelier than ever

Something more than a supple body requires me.

To love
searches the depths of sorrow
hers, mine, humanity’s
or is that yours, mine?

Damnit Celeste – You’re the only one who sees they’re not the artist’s eyes or lover’s eyes but the lonely terror-struck mocking eyes of craziness …

A city noisy
so it’s hard to meditate
yet a sun’s rising

Eyes, always the eyes … in history along with skeletons …

PASSIVE EMISSION afraid to love, afraid of sex, of being vulnerable, let down, betrayed, losing (again) as in a game.

Growing soft in what it wants so much defeats itself.

Oriental suggestiveness = lightness!

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

Reentering “the world” after more than a year in relative seclusion felt like being thrown into space and then falling, falling, falling into an endless  pit within the earth.

After the first burst of euphoria, when I stayed with Celeste and her mother in Brooklyn, followed by the long Greyhound ride back to Ohio, there was nothing to hold on to.

I was no longer in a nest of kindred spirits, and meditating alone is more strenuous than when sitting among others.

There had been moments in the ashram when I had wondered if there was a potential career path as a professional swami. Ponder that. Perhaps combined with poet.

Back home, I saw how far I had come from my upbringing in a straightlaced mainstream Protestant milieu.

There was no going back.

In the meantime, I had to see if I could reconnect to working in the news biz again or whether I could venture into fresh fields. Whatever developed needed to happen soon.

~*~

The time with Celeste was intense, passionate, somehow heightened by knowing we were heading in differing directions. I recall our time in the Brooklyn Museum, especially in its fabulous Asian art galleries. There were also the bagels from a grimy store under elevated MTA rails and I had to agree that those were the best, anywhere, despite appearances. And the next morning, when we rode the subway into Manhattan for parting, I saw something ahead on the tracks that became the prompt for my first novel, Subway Hitchhikers, now revised into Subway Visions. She then caught a bus to Virginia and the new principal guy in her life. (How she was able to be so open with me continues to amaze.) I spent the rest of the day wandering around Gotham, the Cloisters art museum, especially, and then took an overnight bus of my own west. It was a wild ride.

Looking back, I was molting or perhaps hypersensitive to everything. Even listening to my beloved classical music had to come in steps of reacclimatizing.

~*~

Trying to write anything in my hometown was difficult, though I did start with drafting the subway fantasy.

In my journals review, I’ve been surprised how few entries actually existed. We didn’t have much privacy or personal time, for one thing, which may be the reason that so much of what I did record was during trips out from the center.

I did find that some notebook pages had been ripped away, not by me, indicating snooping. Now I’m wondering if entire journals had been deep-sixed by interlopers.

Still, somewhere, I had enough to draft my novel Yoga Bootcamp and its predecessor, Ashram.

Frankly, I never found the Poconos as magical, beautiful, or spiritually high-vibed as Swami did.

Much of the perspective that has turned up since, in personal encounters, Facebook exchanges, or long phone calls, has made me feel right in limiting the scope of the novel to a single day. As one fellow disciple told me, I was there at the golden moment before many complications arose.

I do feel vindicated in my observation that Swami’s declaring herself a swami and then ordaining us was a mistake. I didn’t know how sharp her break from her beloved guru was.

In posting these, I also sense a rightness in my decision to change most of the names away from our Sanskrit yogi names.

I have had some rich conversations with people who have resided in other monastic communities, including an Episcopal convent.

Quite simply, the experience changed my life’s course.