Category: Arts & Letters

MINDING THE FAITHFUL LIGHT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Living in New England, I’ve become enamored with lighthouses. My fascination has nothing to do with the quaint impression many tourists carry but rather an awareness of the ways these now antiquated emblems of peril define our landscape. Along the water, if you can identify the light, you know where you are. Believe me, there are places that would otherwise be difficult.

The night ocean, as I’ve also discovered, can be anything but romantic. It’s a different world from the one visitors encounter during the day. Cold, windy, wet, threatening, even on many summer nights. Yes, on a balmy evening, especially with moonlight, it can be magical. More often, a night ocean can be downright spooky.

Along the dark coastline, the flash of light can help you place yourself in the scene. You triangulate your position using the lights. Each lighthouse beacon has an identifiable pattern – one flash every five seconds. Or ten. Or two flashes. Their colors may be unique in that place, too – blue, green, or red, instead of clear.

The most powerful beams reach out 20 miles or more over the water. Think about that – the light doesn’t scatter but holds together using a technology that predates the laser. How much we take for granted!

And to think, in the old days the illumination came from whale oil or similar fuels.

These days it can be a 110-volt bulb the size of your thumb.

The mechanism that shapes the beams is itself a remarkable piece of technology – the Fresnel lens. Developed by the French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel in 1823, it’s a large sculptured glass cone, where each overlapping leaf joins to focus the ray into one. The larger ones are the size of a child, with the light from inside. Remarkably, these are much thinner than a conventional lens for the job would be – thus allowing more light to pass through and the lens to be mounted in a rotating base. (One we’ve visited floated in a 500-pound pool of mercury.)

A section of a 4th order Fresnel lens is featured on the cover of my booklet.

Just as incredible can be the tales of the lighthouse keepers and their families – lonely work, often tedious, cold, staying awake through the night, put at risk by the storms. Nothing nostalgic there, being faithful.

As I look at the light and its tower, my mind leaps to the universal application of light as a metaphor of religion and spiritual experience. It’s especially prominent in the writings of Quakers (Society of Friends), where it frames an understanding of an alternative Christianity – one earlier generations never dared voice completely. Still, the Light led them in fresh directions – and can still do the same for us today as it reaches far, including into the human heart and mind.

Light 1~*~

For your own copy, click here.

AN ESSENTIAL ROLE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Within a religious tradition – I’m tempted to say any religious tradition – there are wise, seasoned guides. The ones who know from their own faithful practice what temptations and struggles the aspirant will face and how to overcome them.

Known in the various traditions as guru, swami, roshi, rinpoche, abbot, mother superior, bishop, or simply elder, among others, the best of these are adept at listening and then asking the right question.

In doing so, they hold the individual and the spiritual teachings together. As I know from my ongoing Quaker practice and earlier training.

These poems pay homage to that role.

Elders 1~*~

For a free copy of the chapbook, click here.

ON MY BOOK COVER DESIGNS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Much of my career as a professional journalist involved designing newspaper pages, looking for ways to attract a reader to a story while also fitting the headline, text, and accompanying photo into what were often challenging spaces around jagged stacks of ads.

With a solid high school background in visual art itself, I came to the graphic side of design with a deepened appreciation for illustration, logos, advertising campaigns, letterheads, magazine covers, and, of course, book jackets – and I could be sharply critical of what I saw presented to the general public.

As I remember photojournalism guru Chuck Scott scoffing as he looked at a prissy photo-essay page, “That looks like art director work! Give me something more direct!” Or something like that. The point was, he didn’t want fussy or cute.

I’m the same way. Keep it clean, for starters. Have a strong graphic image. And keep the type to a minimum.

The cover to my first published novel suffered from the cut-up approach. It just looked klutzy, despite the best intentions of the lotus pattern imposed over a photo. And the second entry, from an early ebook venture, never really had a cover.

So the opportunity to work with Jeremy Taylor on my Smashwords edition covers gave me a chance to put my concept into play. A strong photo with little more type than the title and author.

The photos were purchased from inexpensive stock collections and selected as an indirect homage to Richard Brautigan’s playful portraits from his Avon series back in the hippie era. His covers remain some of my favorites.

Let’s not forget ways ebook fronts differ from regular paper editions. They’re smaller, thumbnail size, really, with little room for blurbs or the like. It’s one quick look rather than turning the volume around in your hands and reflecting, however briefly.

So that’s what we have there.

When I reinstated my own Thistle/Flinch imprint as a PDF ebook line here at WordPress, the cover design fell to me, for all of the budgetary reasons you’d expect in offering free editions.

Again, I’ve stuck to the basics – strong graphic image, minimal type.

What’s been fun for me is working within a Word program rather than venturing out, say, into Gimp or beyond. That is, in light of the constraints on my time, I’m sticking with basics.

As a writer, though, I’d had no need to play with colored type or pages, much less insert photos. I’m old-fashioned that way, viewing this action as a typewriter, mostly. Even my WordPress blogging fits closely with my print-publishing orientation.

Well, you can see what I’ve done. I rather like it. And it’s been fun. Care to take a look at the full lineup?

~*~

See what’s available as Smashwords and Thistle/Flinch.

 

BEYOND SUPERFLUITY AND VANITY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In college, I went through a soul-searching crisis that questioned whether we could justify subsidizing symphony orchestras or opera companies or art museums and the like in light of the economic inequities in our nation and world. And then I noticed how much of an entertainment industry flowed through the ghetto and Third World, too. That is, everybody has art (even those old Quakers, in a few restricted forms) — it’s not necessarily about money but a need for expression. And all of the emotions and aspirations that go with it. As well as the big bucks, for the big jobs.

In my trials after college, I eventually found myself moving among Friends and then, in time, a few who had grown up under the old restrictions that banned fiction, theater, and even music. Harsh as the old discipline was (and I could have never lived under it), there was also a valid criticism – especially of the superfluous nature of so much of the artistic effort and the egotism so rampant in its ranks.

Maybe the early Friends saw, too, how much the arts were a function of the royal court and its fashions. Or a gilded church. Even the way arts were used to veil the upper crust from the populace and its labors. It turns outs the original Quakers were also picking up on a dialectic from the earliest days of the Christian church, one that contended acting arose in counterfeiting thoughts and actions, many of them of an evil nature.

Within the memory of Quakers, at least, the fine arts have come a long way from the 1650s, pro and con.

Still, proscribing many of the arts did focus Friends on other matters, including abolition and nonviolence. It channeled creative energy into mathematics and science, architecture and industry, poetry and journalism (“We Friends only read true things,” as one Quaker purportedly said, regarding a neighbor’s stack of novels). Go ahead, tally the other fields.

On the other hand, how much of our own focus is deflected by our apparent indulgence? Or how much of it is enriched and deepened?

So how do we make peace with that seemingly artless side of our legacy? Let me suggest we begin with a consideration of “only true things” in our practice. Back to the deeper expression, the part that reflects Truth that goes beyond quantifiable facts. We might even begin with questions of quality or justice or compassion. And then, as they say, the plot thickens.

HERE COMES THE TRAIN

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Think of passenger rails and unless you’re a rare daily commuter, you’re likely to envision earlier eras. Steam powered locomotives, for starters.

And then great journeys across the landscape.

Now keep going. Deeper into history. Trips onto the frontiers of knowledge. The edge of the known world.

You might run into genius in the most unanticipated haven.

Like this.

Train 1~*~

For your ticket, click here.

RAILSCAPES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

From the rails, the landscape threads together quite differently than it does from a highway or water passage.

The tracks pass sidings, graffiti-tagged warehouses and low factories, storage yards of all varieties, rundown housing, apartment clusters – and once out into the farmlands, grain elevators as well.

Clicking along, you can’t help but wonder how many of the enterprises are legit or how many, in their decrepitude, cover questionable activities.

For a maverick intellectual gone incognito, they might even be an ideal location to go underground for a while – a place to work uninterrupted.

In my novella With a passing freight train of 119 cars and twin cabooses, English Bible translator John Wycliffe shows up in a railroad crossing on the American Great Plains, where he’s soon joined by Hieronymus Bosch.

As they discover, once you’re lost in time and space, anything just might happen.

~*~

Train 1For more of the fantasy, click here.

HOW MANY FAVORITES?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Looking at a volume and realizing it’s one of my “keepers,” meaning the ones I keep close at hand, had me wondering if I could name a Top Ten list of books.

Nope, definitely not.

How about Top Hundred?

I turned to my mostly Quaker bookshelf and realized it has more than that alone.

So nope, definitely not.

Five hundred? Maybe, but it would be tough.