Author: Jnana Hodson

In downsizing to a remote fishing village in Downeast Maine, this eclectic writer feels everything's coming together.

NOT QUITE SILENT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

We speak of silent Quaker worship, though it’s not exactly silent. If I refer to it as meditation, or even group meditation, others may quibble. Let me explain.

First, within the gathered silence of traditional Quaker worship, someone may begin to speak or, more rarely, sing or pray. It’s a response we call vocal ministry, and it’s usually brief. Ideally, it’s a prophetic response, a Spirit-led message that takes the assembled body deeper into the mystery. At others times, the message is not in the stream of the day’s worship, and the sounds can disrupt that flow. In larger or more established meetings, including Dover, the individual rises from his or her seat before speaking; in smaller circles, the Friend may remain seated.

Second, the understanding of meditation, especially from Asian religious tradition, has it being an intensely personal practice. In one branch of Zen Buddhism, for instance, the sitters face the wall and away from the middle of the room. Typically, any physical movement is prohibited, and the practitioner’s focus is increasingly inward, leaving the physical surroundings behind. While Quaker worship demands a similar personal engagement, which we call centering, there is an expectation that it will open into a group experience involving everyone in the room, even if not one word is spoken. Not everyone centers through meditation, as such – some may sit with an open book, others may simply drop into deep reflection; some may sit with their eyes closed tight, while others gaze softly across the room. Whatever the individual approach, the result is Quaker meeting.

Actually, this blending of inward and outward might not be all that far removed from some of the Asian disciplines. There, the period of group meditation itself may run between twenty and thirty minutes, and be followed by scripture reading, chanting, or a lecture from the teacher. In Quaker practice, the first half-hour often – but not always – remains silent, with vocal messages appearing in the second half of the hour.

Still, with or without any words uttered, it’s group meditation, in my book.

I love the simple elegance of old Quaker meetinghouses.
Touches of good design, reflecting care, without ostentation.
How beautiful the wood itself can be, left unimpeded.
Elements we see echoed in the most exemplary architecture of our own era.

THE DISAPPEARING INDIVIDUAL

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Not too long ago, the pharmacist owned the drug store, the corner bank had its own president, the local publisher owned the newspaper, and so on. Each one knew the community, and each one could make independent decisions. Each one also had a desire to be respected by those he or she served. Often, too, it was a family affair.

Now, of course, the pharmacy is headed by a manager who reports to a district supervisor who may report to an assistant vice-president somewhere who reports to a president of a subsidiary who reports to another vice-president of a conglomerate who reports to a president who reports to a CEO who probably has little real decision-making power, thanks to all of the policies that must be followed, thanks to a board of directors beholden to the major stockholders. As if you could name any of these people. Ditto for the bank and the newspaper and what used to be the local department store.

At each level of hierarchy, there’s little room for discretionary action – it’s all a matter of enforcing policy, especially as it relates to maximizing short-term profit.

Important local leaders have been reduced cogs following orders from afar. And the big money follows. Note, too, that the emphasis is on stockholders, not shareholders, who would include the workers, their communities, and even the faithful customers.

How, then, do we reclaim our full community, and heal the damage? It’s a basic question for democracy, after all, if the American Experiment is to continue, especially with any sense of equality and fairness.

BIAS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Pejorative labels do nothing to advance public discourse. Rather, they’re intended to stifle it. Even worse, they inhibit clear thinking or positive outcomes.

Consider the charge of “liberal media.” Or even “the media,” especially when used in the singular rather than the plural. In reality, American newspapers, magazines, and commercial broadcast stations have long been corporately owned, with the focus on some very profitable bottom lines. Corporations, as the epitome of capitalism, rarely fit neatly into the liberal end of the political spectrum. And so “corporate media” would be far more accurate than the “liberal media” mirage. A closer look would also find most of the editorial pages are of a conservative slant – and nearly all of the political and economic columnists syndicated in the past quarter century have been openly conservative. I’d like to hear of any liberals. In addition, in my experience, the media are highly competitive – there’s no collusion or conspiracy regarding what we’ll cover or ignore, Fox News excepted. For that matter, the media extend into the entertainment media as well – Hollywood, Nashville, Madison Avenue, and Broadway, among others.

Professional reporters and editors, meanwhile, learn to keep their own political and social views out of the way: the goal is to listen carefully and respectfully to all relevant sides of the issue and to present that as clearly as possible, especially in determining what’s new in the event being covered.

I’ve come to the conclusion that those who accuse news organizations and personnel of bias actually have no interest in objective reporting – what they want is bias, of their own right-wing persuasion or even more blatant propaganda. Ideology, rather than fact. The truth be damned, in their hearts.

Perhaps nothing should be more telling than Spiro Agnew’s rabid attacks on a free press, especially when we consider he had every reason to keep reporters off the track of his own criminal actions – and those of his boss, Richard Nixon, all the more. All the while, we covered his attacks on us verbatim and uncontested – had we been anything like he accused us of being, his words never would have seen the light of day, or blasted by critical comment as he spoke them.

If anything, I think of all the years when I willingly suppressed my own convictions – and the price that’s imposed. At last, finally out of the trade, I can truly speak and write freely.

ON TURNING SIXTY … FIVE!

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

The milestone demands some acknowledgement, or at least a hard assessment of my life to date. To be honest, when I graduated from college, I hardly expected to survive past my mid-thirties, and the way things were going, maybe I wasn’t far off the mark. On the other hand, I never anticipated the turns this journey has taken.

For one thing, I rarely thought of journalism as my lifetime career, but rather as a steppingstone to something else. While the field could be exciting at times, getting caught up in the management side of the business took a toll, and the more recent downward spiral of the professional publishing industry in general is downright frightening.

I had envisioned myself either returning to my hometown and writing for a newspaper that no longer exists, or else working in the heart of a large metropolis with its range of concerts, galleries, lectures, and theater, possibly after going back for a law degree. Of course, neither way opened, but the ashram route did. And I, who started adulthood somewhere between agnostic and logical positivist, was now on a spiritual pathway that would lead me to Quaker practice.

As I look back on my adult life, the only thing that has made sense has been this spiritual evolution. Each of the geographic moves, ostensibly in pursuit of a career, actually introduced the next step in an expanding faith and practice. Now my generation is having to move into places once filled by the “mighty old oaks” who came before us – the most troubling aspect being that we are, all these years later, still the younger members of Meeting or, for that matter, much of literature and the fine arts.

The craft of writing has itself has taken its own curious twists within this; while the poetry and fiction have often arisen in the discipline of keeping my skills sharp in the face of the daily grind, and thus have often veered toward the “experimental” side of literature, they’ve also served as a tool for investigating the unfolding experience – something quite different from trying to “create” a poem or story. Examining a situation honestly and directly, rather than trying to be ironic, cute, entertaining, or ideologically correct, is one of the consequences; on the other hand, you’re constantly measured against some standard of innovation. It ain’t easy, balancing the two.

Nevertheless, I’ll confess to a lot of remaining frustration. All of the unfinished work before me, for instance, or the difficulty in achieving successful book-length publication, despite having more than a thousand poems and short stories published in literary journals, at this point, on five continents. On a more personal level, I could look at all of the social skills to be fostered, to say nothing of a round of grandparenting, should that happen.

Even so, as I told my wife a few months back, I have nearly everything I’ve wanted, though it resembles none of what I imagined. The crux here is in being receptive and grateful, which proves surprisingly elusive when we’re in the middle of the usual swirl.

*   *   *

This is something I wrote for myself at sixty. And here it is, with a few tweaks, five years later. Just as applicable.

LONG-DISTANCE MEMORIES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In the email age, the personal letter has become a cultural artifact. Here’s what might be an example from someone or another wandering, perhaps in a private desert of Sinai.

*   *   *

Greetings on this sunny but nippy Valentine’s Day! How much nicer it would be to still be abed, next to you, both of us pleasurably sated and, well, how do you like your coffee? (A local roaster makes a savory version it markets, tongue-in-cheek, as Charbucks – “You told us you like it dark.”) But now, does that mean I have to untie those silk scarves? Or go find those tiny keys again? (Dream on, old man!) Here I am, on the first full day of my fifty-first year (gads, even saying that feels a bit like coming over the first crest on the Cannonball wooden coaster at Canobie Lake!) trying to recover from another grueling double-shift Saturday at the office – the weekly 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. no-letup newspaper editor’s nightmare. So I decided to stay in from worship this morning to try to catch up on some personal affairs, including setting down that letter I’ve been composing in my head the past several weeks – and which, now that I’m at it, I can’t even begin! Which thread should we pursue first? (Fact? Or fiction?) Yikes!

Suppose we should start off by saying how much I’ve once again enjoyed all of your confessions of the journey of the emerging psyche. One of the remarkable things you are doing is giving voice to experiences in a rite of passage for a generation coming of age but who remain so incredibly tongue-tied.

One of the incomprehensible elements is the psychological pain so many teens and young adults in America carry – this, from a generation that has received more physical comforts and leisure than any other in history – food, education, fashionable clothing, shelter, cars of their own. You admit the “emotional demons, trying to survive in the face of my fragile nerves and emotions.” I wonder how that involves the essential nature of being a creative person, someone drawn to the arts, who craves a deeper experience and more fulfilling explanation of life than the material/materialistic surface can ever provide – and how much reflects a very serious and deep breakdown in American society itself, one in which the pursuit of individualism at all costs and the ever-accelerating accumulation of more and more wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands simply leaves fewer openings for most of us to come together as meaningful community. Positions that once allowed genuine opportunities for decision-making and personal expression – like the local bank president or newspaper publisher – are now just mid-level bureaucrats. And physicians and surgeons are just beginning to be sucked up in this process, thanks to HMOs or hospital conglomerates. (As one was recently quoted: “I used to be a physician. Now I’m just a health care provider.” Or as I sometimes say, not entirely in jest: “I used to be a newspaper editor. Now I’m a copy processor.”) The field – and life opportunities – have certainly changed since I set forth, and not for the better, I fear.

So pains, yes.

Wish you were here.

CELLARS VERSUS BASEMENTS AS A DIMENSION OF NEW ENGLAND

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Where I grew up, we had basements. They rarely flooded. Some were even finished into spare rooms, with TVs, carpeting, or best of all, a pool table. Here in New England, most of us instead have cellars, where water seeps through the walls after heavy rainfall (some even spurt).

And so, under the house, confusion. Mold. Dampness. Leakage. Not the order of a basement, with dry walls and solid floors, but a cellar. With small garden snakes and a sump pump. Rick, our carpenter, says you find the soul of a house there. Its support. The wiring – we’ve removed many strands of stray threads overhead, each staple a bear of resistance. It wasn’t the same as the secrets we found in the kitchen walls, the 1928 newspapers, during that renovation, but secrets all the same. You sometimes read about bodies being buried in the cellar. Instead, we have trenches along the wall – and maybe some stray tree roots. I need to replace the bottom stair, the one broken from rot. And soon, I would hope, the sump pump itself with something smaller, more powerful, and more reliable.

Yes, an old New England house is always a project. Even one only little more than a century old.

ABOUT THAT ADVANTAGE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Where I live, you’ll often hear about the “New Hampshire Advantage,” which argues that the state’s economic growth is a consequence of its lack of income and sales taxes. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy not paying extra at the store. But I also know that the sharp difference in my rent in Manchester, when I arrived, and what I was paying in Baltimore was caused by the property taxes here. When I added my Baltimore and Maryland income taxes to my rent there, it equaled what I was paying here. Voila! You’ll pay one way or another. The question is where and who bears the brunt of the cost.

The real New Hampshire Advantage is its proximity to Greater Boston and the economic powerhouses connected with the Harvard Business School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nearly half of the New Hampshire population that has a job commutes south each morning to workplaces across the border. The better-paying jobs, in fact. It’s largely a one-way flow, too. If lower taxes were a real stimulus, the entire Granite State would be booming, which is hardly the case in our economically depressed North Country or the Connecticut River’s Upper Valley. Just take a look around Berlin or Claremont and all their devastation.

Still, public services cost money, and the dynamic is that anything requiring labor is going to cost increasingly more. In economics, it’s called the Baumol effect, after a study of performing arts institutions.

New Hampshire is no exception. The real question is just where the additional state revenue will come from, and that always returns us to ill-fated proposals for an income or sales tax.

But complicating any income-tax discussion in the Granite State is the matter of reciprocity: normally, you pay a state income tax where you work rather than where you live. And normally, there are roughly equal numbers of workers commuting between two states to balance the equation. But that’s not the case in New Hampshire. So an income tax to lower property tax bills, as it’s usually framed, would mean either that the cross-border commuters would have to pay twice, both at the workplace and then at home, or that those folks who both live and work within the Granite State would have to subsidize the break given to the others.

It’s a genuine conundrum. Advantage? Beggar-thy-neighbor works only so long.

30

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

Sometimes it’s hard to believe how much has changed since I entered the field of journalism four-and-a-half decades ago. Even as a high school student editor, I was engaged in a craft that was pretty much as it had been for the previous eight decades, in the long shadow of the introduction of the Linotype machine. We could see ourselves rooted in an even longer tradition of newspapering arising in the handset type era before that. Think of the New York Times dispatches during the Civil War. Printing was still mostly by letterpress, even though the newer offset method with its superior reproduction of photographs was making inroads. Every other week, I would trot down to our printer’s with our latest round of stories and pictures, get correction proofs a few days later, and then release the edition for publication.

We were quite limited in the typefaces available to us. I wanted what was then an elegant new typeface that our shop didn’t own — Times New Roman. Hard to believe how ubiquitous it’s become, or how much further we’ve come as well. But he did have Caslon, which became one of my favorites — in part because of its use in the Sunday editions of the New York Herald Tribune. And Bodoni, in part because of its indestructible nature, was the standard headline choice; try finding it on your computer selections these days. Photos were another matter altogether, as were student photographers. Polaroid shots were a radical leap into the future, and usually far more reliable. Polaroid?

Writers, of course, used typewriters. Not just reporters, but almost everyone except for the select few writers who could still write in longhand and have a secretary or typist service transcribe the results. Secretaries? Typewriters? Typists? And what often astonished me was how antiquated the typewriters in most newsrooms were — clunky old uprights, unlike the elegant (and electric) IBM Selectrics I’d see while passing the local jeweler’s, where they were rarely used. (Unlike those of us who were writing for a living.) The Selectrics, I might add, came into newsrooms later, only with the advent of text scanners, which was a huge setback for the written word. But that’s another rant.

Typewriters introduced their own traditions, especially on deadline. Reporters would finish the first page of a story with the line, MORE, and then begin their next page with a slug line for the story, say CITY HALL, followed by the notation, TAKE ONE or ADD ONE, and then continue. This would go on for however many sheets of paper were needed until the story was finished. And then the reporter would add the line: 30. Perhaps as — 30 — or #30#. But always thirty.

And that’s even without mentioning the carbon copies. (The what?)

We can argue where that tradition began, but it was universal in the trade. If the reporter was working on a breaking story, the first page could be sent to the copy desk, be edited, and even sent to the composing room while the rest of the story was being drafted. A headline could be written and set in type, for that matter. Minutes counted. The first part of story could even be set in hot lead type while the reporter was working toward the ending.

Editors, meanwhile, would be writing headlines using an elaborate tradition of their own. These were all valued skills. And the result mattered.

Sometimes, I can almost smell the newsroom where I became a professional, thanks to Glenn Thompson. Or his advice about keeping a journal. Or some of the others since. Still, it’s hard to believe how far I’ve come over the years.

These days, a news story comes as a single take. A computer file you scroll through. We paginate on a large computer screen, designing a page for publication. All of the highly skilled typesetters, compositors, engravers, proofreaders, and more I admired — and who provided me a safety net — are long gone. Am I getting misty?

There’s an additional reason. When it’s come to my professional career in journalism, the time has come to write:

30

WILL THE REAL ME PLEASE BRAND UP

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Branding, we’re told, is everything. It’s not just marketing, or even just a product. It’s the whole lineup. A slogan for differentiating one Big Box Store or high-end boutique from another (including everything inside). Even academia wants a label as a way to file a writer or artist away for easy reference, however awkwardly into one slot or another. It’s ultimately a word game, with or without an actual referent. But what if you’re a misfit, as many truly are?

In literature, the labeling relates better to those who stay within a genre or stick to a manifesto or particular technique or remain in a specific locale – an Oklahoma gothic mystery crime writer, for example – than to my favorites, especially those whose work ranges over many subjects and forms and continually grows. Likewise, I’m bewildered by how often the labels applied to them are downright erroneous, if not simply glib. Or matches one part of their output while ignoring all the rest.

This turns up repeatedly when I attempt replies for those who wish to pigeonhole me. I do what I do. The writing goes where it goes, and the revisions follow. I try to be faithful. So far, I’ve been a part-timer and non-commercial. Neither by choice, but both by fidelity. My opportunities for literary writing (in contrast to the daily journalism that’s paid the bills) have never been that easy or as sustained as I’d wish. I’ve envied those who set out knowing the direction they would pursue for a lifetime, those whose work presents a continuous focus and tone. Especially those who mature as they progress, rather than repeating a facile formula.

Looking back over my poetry and fiction from across the years – and, for that matter, across the continent – I’m struck by the ways so many of the pieces differ, at least outwardly. How varied the subject matter and approach. Here I keep intending the plainspoken, direct, clearly focused piece, and keep winding up with Mixmaster compounds and distillations. Maybe my mind’s rarely that unified; instead, a multitude of mental and emotional activities have kept occurring simultaneously and the most I could hope for is some convergence. Besides, so much of my writing has arisen in some opposition to my daily employment, with all of its own dulling repetition – my writing keeps veering toward the “experimental” fringe, if only in reaction to the daily grind of news stories and headlines. Or, in the past decade, obituaries. Through much of my adult life, I’ve felt torn and uprooted, from Ohio and Indiana to the East Coast and then Washington State and back again. To say nothing of my love life and social environment. The nature poems stand in contrast or discord with the police blotter love poems or, in turn, with my current home setting. That, before I even consider my fiction or the genealogy or Quaker expressions.

(Have I performed the daily journalism to pay the bills while I pursued my literary endeavors? Or had I pursued the literary work as a way of keeping my journalism skills sharpened? What started as one wound up the other, and then shifted back again.)

The writing, in turn, has been an attempt to bring some understanding to all the eruption I’ve experienced. The turns in the road, the setbacks, the advances. A quest for understanding and, if not clarity, some meaning or permanence. I tend my personal journal because I forget so much, and often record observations I will not comprehend until years later. Am baffled, because I have yet to define my mission with a label that sells. Write, then, to discover myself in this morass.

Still, I’m open to suggestions. If you can.

FROZEN FISH

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Our antique fish weather vane has long been something of a puzzle. It’s a rather attractive piece of copper, but these things don’t come with instructions, and the parts didn’t quite seem to come together. So it’s sat around in a corner of the barn just waiting for the day it could swim in the air again — or maybe simply on an indoor wall as an ornament. Still, finally getting the roofs over the barn and kitchen re-shingled this fall before the weather turned bad provided a stimulus for action.

The first challenge was trying to figure out how to connect the rod to the roof. As I inquired at one hardware store after another, I kept getting the same response. “I don’t know, it seems like there should be a simple way to do it. But we don’t have anything like that.” A few clerks suggested places that turned out to be dead ends. And as I looked at all the cupolas under many of the vanes around town, I realized that even with a cupola, you’d still have to have some way of attaching the vertical rod.

Finally, after a bit of online surfing, I came across an answer — a store, in fact, we’d passed many times in the coastal town of Wells. Weathervanes of Maine turned out to have a nifty little adjustable roof mount for $30 that fit our needs quite nicely. The store, by the way, has row after row of shiny new weather vanes — roosters, horses, eagles, moose and bear, ships, dragons, pigs (yes, flying pigs), and many more. If you’re ever driving along U.S. 1 there, stop in — it’s quite the destination.

Still, the connection to the fish itself still didn’t seem right. And again, nobody could give me a satisfactory answer. So it was back to Wells, where a fancy soldering job did the trick. Our fish could now face the wind. And, as you can see, more.

Where we live in New England, vanes are useful predictors of weather. While our prevalent wind is from the west, wind from the east or the south comes in over the ocean, where it loads up with moisture we encounter as rain or snow. From the north, of course, means colder than normal — a pleasant touch in summer but a nasty bite this time of year.

I’m quite happy to have the fish provide a modest and useful crowning touch to the barn. Or, as I sometimes announce, “The fish has turned.”