Category: Arts & Letters

Acid test mystic: James Nayler (1618-1660)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The most powerful of the public ministers in the early Quaker movement, Nayler remains unjustly tarnished by what I see as a street theater event that erupted into scandal and his conviction by Parliament (not court) on blasphemy. His shameful treatment by Quaker leader George Fox afterward furthered the sleight.

He’s seen as the most systematic theologian of the emerging movement, as I’ve written elsewhere. What fascinates me the most, though, is his articulation of the Light, as early Quakers experienced Christ. Nobody has written more insightfully in its wide-ranging appearances.

One difficulty is that the experience isn’t “like” anything else. What, for instance, is light itself like? Or the color green? Nayler’s writing, then, can make full sense only to others who have experienced a spiritual Light inwardly. Logically, we’re stuck in a tautology.

His text, though, works and sounds more like contemporary poetry than you’d expect from 17th century English prose. Well, Ezra Pound did describe literature as “news that stays news,” which I think fits here.

 

Acid test poet: Jack Spicer (1925-1965)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

His wild poetics drawn on linguistics theory broke ground for a number of us. Quite simply, the narrative within a poem – or a series, as Spicer soon turned away from the single-page model – no longer had to conform with factual reality. I can only imagine what he would have done with Donald Trump as a figure. An image, however, took on a life of its own.

I didn’t realize how central the Los Angeles born character was to the West Coast poetry world. He was co-founder of the Six Gallery in San Francisco, where the Beat movement burst forth, and later in the Berkeley side of the Bay Area literary scene.

His collected poems, published posthumously by Black Sparrow and Grey Fox presses, remain core works on my bookshelf.

I also loved the way Ed Dorn picked up and continued Spicer’s stream.

Acid test novelist: Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My introduction to Kerouac was the 1968 Paris Review interview he gave to Ted Berrigan (accompanied by Aram Saroyan, if I recall right – they did have to crawl through a bedroom window to get around Kerouac’s watchdog wife). The idea of typing on long scrolls of teletype paper was something I certainly took up after graduation from college – many mornings I had to go into the newsroom before dawn to attend to the teletype machines and replace the rolls of paper. Nobody else was interested in the discarded bolts.

I’ve never been able to get through On the Road but have read about everything else he wrote, especially Dharma Bums. What appealed in the hippie experience of the early ‘70s was Kerouac’s narrative of similar questing for transcendental awarenesses in music and poetry, music, travel, spirituality/religion, and romantic love – often in the realities of borderline squalor. His experiments with Buddhism resonated with my early yoga, though I now see how much it was more an exploration of French-Canadian Catholicism. The jazz details the excitement of the transformations of the ‘50s and its Beat movement, history as it happened.

At the time, I didn’t realize how much Binghamton in upstate New York resembled Kerouac’s native Lowell, Massachusetts, but without the French-Canadian dimension. The rawness of his freeform narrative was nevertheless entrancing.

Eventually, when I moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, I encountered the Quebec element in the city’s West Side and then in the mills of Lowell itself. We even had obituaries for some of his distant kin who spelled the name Kirouac.

For a fact-oriented journalist like me, his dark and cloudy and openly emotional approach to a story was a revelation. As an aside, I must confess that I now see Henry Miller’s earlier stream-of-thought fiction is superior.

As for Kerouac’s celebrated and lamented Cody? I seriously doubt that he measured up to his image. But that’s a matter of being human, too.

On photographer Francesca Woodman

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Is she daring us? To what? Her self-portraits from her intense, brief life burn with some secret hunger. Do her images contain clues for answers? How I wish she could speak or at least listen.

In contrast, she leaves us baffled by her short career, ended when she leaped to her death from an open window at age 22.

She can be seen as fascinated with death itself. A few images, such as those with her arms wrapped in bandages or holding a knife, may be from a suicide attempt that’s mentioned in passing.

Her images are infused with a gothic premonition of death – the Romantic obsession with tragic, youthful demise, and lost opportunity. To speak of an eroticism of death is eerily heightened by knowing of her suicide to come – the images of her holding a knife or extending her bandaged forearms or climbing (sometimes naked) through Victorian gravestones become eerily chilling, leaving the viewer with a morbid fascination.

Her shots appear to surface from the birth of photography itself, an homage enhanced by black-and-white – often scratchy – prints.

And then there’s the matter of her family – both of her parents and her brother were artists, each in a different medium.

Consider the sense of self-entombment in her photographic legacy.

As I delved into the images her family had released (there’s criticism they’re withholding much more), I pondered alternative directions my What’s Left novel could have gone. These photos, to me, could have been by Cassia’s father if he hadn’t taken up the Tibetan Buddhism and then been granted the support he received from his wife’s family.

In contrast, I encounter her after three of my novels followed a hippie-era photographer, and the newest tale picked up on his legacy nearly a half-century later. This time, it’s told by his daughter, Cassia, who’s trying to uncover his essence after he vanished in a Himalayan mountains avalanche when she’s eleven. Her biggest evidence as an investigator stems from his cache of photographic negatives. The way we do with Woodman.

Cassia’s research paradoxically forces her to reconstruct her mother’s side of the family in depth and all of the reasons her father found refuge among its members.

His, I’ll presume, are professionally competent and moving increasingly into color as the technology advances. Woodman’s work turns inward; his ranges outward, through the changing times around him. His death comes unexpectedly, in a period of blissful encounters, among the monks and mountains who expand his vision.

So I return to the darkness of her vision and the imagined brightness of his. Both, in their own ways, tragic.

Care to look at people around you carved in stone?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

What would your obituary say about you? What would you say there, if asked? Before you reply, pay attention to everyday stuff and your aspirations, especially what you love. Note as well how others see you. Besides, how do you fit into your neighborhood or wider community? Feel free to exaggerate, reflecting everyone else.

As a human, you assume a cluster of identities – some of them chosen and changeable, others immutable. My grandfather, for example, proclaimed himself Dayton’s Leading Republican Plumber, invoking a host of other identities as well: Protestant, Freemason, middle-class, married. “Grandfather” wasn’t high up in his awareness, from my perspective. Being male or female or teenaged or elderly, on the other hand, are simply givens. And the history of what we’ve done or failed to do cannot be altered, except in our own perceptions and retelling.

The range of identities is astounding. They include but are not limited to race, religion, nationality and locality, occupation, family (household and near kin to genealogy itself), education and educational institutions, athletics, hobbies and interests, actions and emotions, even other individuals we admire, from actors and authors to athletes, politicians, and historic figures. They soon extend to the people we associate with – family, friends, coworkers, neighbors. And, pointedly, our phobias and possessions.

Curiously, it becomes easier to say what we are not than what we are specifically. That is, set out to define yourself in the positive and you’ll find the list rapidly dwindling, while an inexplicable core remains untouched. Turn to the oppositions, however, and the list becomes endless. I am not, for instance, a monkey. At least, most of the time.

Sometimes, moreover, a specified negative becomes truly revealing: “I am not a crook,” for instance, as the classic revelation.

Behind the masks of public life – our occupations, religious affiliations, social status, economic positions, family connections, educational accomplishments, and so on – each of us engages in another struggle, an attempt to find inner balance and direction for our own life. As we do so, we soon face a plethora of interior and exterior forces that must be reconciled. We get glimmers into this struggle – both within ourselves and within others – in statements that begin “I am” and “I am not,” as well as “I have been,” which recognizes the history and habits we accumulate and carry with us. There are also the voices – “he remembers” or “she insists” – that also recur in our lives, defining and redefining ourselves both within, as conscience or the angel or devil on our shoulders, and without, as any of a host of authority figures and friends or family members.

All that brings us around to my latest poetry collection, Hamlet: A Village of Gargoyles. There, many of the imaginary individuals profiled are identified by occupation while their confessions typically reflect the more  intimate concerns of their lives – relationships, activities, even the weather. These are, then, overheard snippets more than public proclamations.

Hamlet, of course, is a small town or a village as well as a famed play. In this collection, the inhabitants are profiled in five acts of two scenes each, plus intermissions and intermezzos. They’re even exaggerated, the way a stone carver would in creating gargoyles and grotesques.

Listen carefully – especially when others talk of their romantic problems or other troubles – and another portion of a mosaic appears. This collection of poems builds on such moments, constructing a community as a web of each its members. Sometimes, a place appears; sometimes, a contradiction; sometimes, a flavor or sound or color. Even so, in this crossfire, we may be more alike than any of us wishes to admit. We may even be more like the part we deny. Our defenses wither. Our commonality, and our essential loneliness, are revealed.

Just think.

Having originally appeared in literary journals around the globe and then as chapbooks at Thistle Finch editions, this collection of poems is now available in your choice of ebook platforms at Smashwords.com and its affiliated digital retailers. Those outlets include the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, and Sony’s Kobo. You may also request the ebook from your local public library.

The move unites the poems in a single volume, rather than a series of ten smaller chapbooks and ten broadsides, and makes them available to a wider range of readers worldwide.

Welcome to town, clown.

Acid test novelist: Ishmael Reed (1938- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Assigned as part of a contemporary novels course in the spring of 1970, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down was unlike anything I had previously encountered. The lively tone and style were a kind of pre-rap, I suppose, as were the content. He was amusing in a way Leroi Jones wasn’t and also an example that we can be free of having to “write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago,” as Kurt Vonnegut put it.

He certainly introduced a new world to my essentially suburban Midwestern nature.

Reed was, as critic Anita Felicelli wrote of a later novel, a firebrand, crackling, overflowing, pugnacious, “someone who doesn’t care about genre boundaries any more than he cares about historical boundaries, but who does care deeply about innovating.” In other words, right up my alley.

The novel Mumbo Jumbo confirmed my impression, but, somehow, I haven’t encountered him since, even though he’s written and published prolifically. Note to self: Rectify ASAP.

Acid test mystic: Isaac Penington (1616-1679)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Unlike many of the early Quaker voices, Penington was well educated and respectable, the eldest son of a Lord Mayor of London. He even became William Penn’s father-in-law. But his joining with Quakers led to harsh persecution, including imprisonment six times, as well as intense spiritual experiences he described in various writings, including his letters.

A critical reader will recognize that articulating what is ultimately non-physical or confirmable is a difficult challenge. What Penington achieves remains insightful, personal, yet universal. There’s nothing dogmatic or doctrinaire or theoretical or speculative, not when grounded in personal practice.

His style fascinates me, long sentences that coil around and around as they move toward a core. Pulling a short quotation from them proves difficult without losing the wider field of wonder. As an example, “Give over thine own willing, give over thy own running, give over thine own desiring to know or be anything and sink down to the seed which God sows in the heart, and let that grow in thee and be in thee and breathe in thee and act in thee; and thou shalt find by sweet experience that the Lord knows that and loves and owns that, and will lead it to the inheritance of Life, which is its portion.” Eighty words, in all – typical.

Somehow, I find myself contrasting him to the Muggletonian William Blake a century and a half later, who struggled with similar challenges for a much different result.

Acid test novelist: Gurney Norman (1937- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Returning to Tom Wolfe’s charge that no great novel sprang from the hippie counterculture, it’s clear that he overlooked Divine Right’s Trip, which originally appeared in the margins of the Last Whole Earth Catalog. (Far out, indeed.)

Rather than taking place in any of the celebrated hippie havens, Norman’s pilgrim figure finds himself in Cincinnati, a largely redneck habitation I’ve heard described as a place of perpetual Lent, before heading on into the strip-mined mountains of eastern Kentucky. Yes, hippie did indeed take place in seemingly unlikely locales. It was also often drab and lonely. And then, as Norman illustrates, it also drew nurture from some very unlikely sources.

If anything, there’s widespread lament that Norman didn’t write more. Divine Right’s Trip is humbly beautiful.

Acid test poet: Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)

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Whittier is a poet I’ve come to know largely through Dover, where his maternal grandparents and an uncle and cousins on his father’s side lived. His parents in fact, married in our Quaker meetinghouse.

His poems aren’t about himself but rather a greater faithfulness. While he’s self-effacing, many of his works are deeply felt political and social protests that remain biting and land on-target.

Despite the seeming simplicity of his rhyming form, his lines are sharp. When you read his poems, don’t stop at the end of the line but keep moving onward as a full-sentence thought. There you can breathe. Robert Frost follows in Whittier’s footsteps.

His poem, “How the Women Went from Dover,” commemorates an important event that appears in my Quaking Dover as well.

Acid test novelist: Grace Metalious (1924-1964)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One of my colleagues at the New Hampshire Sunday News insisted that Metalious was a much better writer than the tabloid image that plagued her and her notorious book.

After reading Peyton Place, I have to agree. The realities it exposed are no longer scandalous but widely acknowledged. The novel, meanwhile, is skillfully accomplished and hints at more that could have been accomplished under other conditions. She certainly understood the unspoken skeletons of northern New England as well as anyone else I could mention, and she took the risks of admitting the dark undercurrents of survival in a small town anywhere in the country.

Her personal life, on the other hand, is an American tragedy.