Must have been after a trip to visit Celeste at her brother’s. Returning from Detroit, meteor to 15 degrees above horizon, toward Bloomdale just before I entered Fostoria
Celeste: “If you weren’t so expressive, you’d have an ugly face. Your features? You still have the eyes of a madman.”
Kat’s ceramics teacher had the students make a pot with their eyes closed and then destroy it in their fists. To teach them that in art the doing is more important than the product.
Celeste, after kissing and caressing: “I approve of Kat.”
Her surname translates = Lion!
From a novel: “You have a very, very fine piece of literature here.”
Rejection slip: “These have a truly interesting bullet-like form and some very powerful movement/section. Sorry we can’t use these.”
Kat: You never tell me anything important. LIKE YOU LOVE ME WHEN I’M NOT EXPECTING IT.
Someone, talking about wrestlers’ well-used trunks: “Yeah, and I mean well used. You didn’t hear about the match in which he had diarrhea. His opponent grabbed him – and he lost.”
A girl gushed out of Dells’, yelled my name with what I thought was the enthusiasm of familiarity. I turned, crossed the street and walked a half-block to meet her.
“You look different,” she said.
“Just washed my hair,” said I.
I couldn’t place her. A yoga student or chance acquaintance from another city?
“I thought you were in Florida,” I ventured.
Her anxious eyes queried my face.
“Who do you think I am?” I responded.
“John Paul. Why you?”
“No, I’m sorry. I’m known as Jnana, not John.”
Mary, in the restaurant window, knowing of my true love, nods at me and winks her finger, seeing only the warmth of boy-girl games.
~*~
Pennsylvania Dutch masonry details:
~*~
Slip of poetry draft on heavy paper: how much I was doing straight at the keyboard.
Boarding an elevator, can’t get off. Instead of numbered floors, there are bones by the buttons. The second bone opens on a restroom where two people want to give him/her a shower. Further up, the door opens on a big hole. “Go ahead,” a voice urges. “Walk on across.”
Yesterday, in middle of teaching a hatha class, I realized it was the anniversary of my leaving the ashram.
Here there is not enough time for anything.
Every day, I walk the same two blocks to work. Always different.
Doc drives to the office and sees nothing but traffic lights. It’s only a few blocks.
~*~
The Foster Block, 1856, is coming down. Along with the town.
Categories, genres: what is Hitchhikers? I don’t care. It’s a WRITING! That should be enough.
As for Shakespeare’s novels?
A scripture that unrolls on its own singing. A Senate, perhaps. Or sonata.
As for the worn-out art forms, still awaiting the new great novel, short story, poem, play, symphony or quartet. Back to origins, meaning springs.
~*~
Blue paper typed insert: Note how Snyder takes stories, dreams, and journal stuff and weaves this long discourse as longer poetry, not as short stories. (See Carlos Williams’ fictional prose for contrast.)
~*~
The six-day, 50-hour race at work is unsustainable, too exhausting for all of us.
July 4, in Vermillion, hearing from my future brother-in-law, principal of Bhaktaraj’s elementary schoolteacher mother, how the kid was off somewhere running a yoga temple all by himself and he didn’t get paid and had to write home for money. But then Steve piped up about how his wife conned her mother into enough money to fly to Florida or some such.
Brown rice with chop sticks is a good way to slow down on a busy day.
Kat’s roommate is from New Jersey. Asked if she knew Doris Kramer, the answer was yup. Small world. [Now, who on earth was Doris?]
Amid the flames, the Lord called between the logs and said, “Speak to the people of America and say unto the them.”
Who was Matthew Peacock?
In my journaling, rather than writing about what yoga can do for a presumed reader or student, I should have tried writing about what it was doing for me, at least more directly. There are mentions of difficulty sitting or concentrating, but those appear as failings rather than natural challenges in the discipline.
As for all of my railings against the perceived pressures of the conformist majority, if I could have only gotten around the casting of blame …
~*~
From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.
Jnana's Red Barn 