Opening page of the next volume has Box 16, Lima Hall, 45310 but nothing else. As a point of fact, she didn’t attend Ohio Northern until the fall semester but had that summer term as an introduction to college at the nearby state university. To her surprise, she passed that and was on to a new world.

First entry, next page, is 15:VII:73, Nikki’s birthday and Kat’s off for the summer. I was already entwined with the latter’s family. Helped Sam erect his backyard flagpole.

An entry on locking myself out of my apartment while shaking a rug over the banister. Keys left inside. Lights and air-conditioner were left on. I was in shorts, no shoes. Brady next door knew the way over the transom. Got my keys and I then headed off to her campus.

Call from Swami: “How’s that 17-year-old?” She thinks I need somebody about 24. Also, mention of upcoming New York Times piece on the ashram, by Judy Karlstad or Karlsrud: it was long and had six pix.

Mom and Dad dropped in, a surprise. They wouldn’t have found me if Kat had been home.

Coming back to my apartment at midnight Friday, saw Brady’s wife was in the street, telling me of a 17-year-old in her bed, he’s been jealous and beating her, she had him locked up. He’s been in jail since 13, she was pregnant three months at marriage, he was 18: trapped, no maturity. (You can’t make up stories like this, can you?)

Then five men in Day’s tavern baseball shirts, to her, “How’s your tomato? I bet it’s got hair on it!” Out of Holman’s, obnoxiously drunk. They went off driving and throwing eggs, twice. We, to police.

She said I talk sense, not knowing it was only yoga talk.

Monday, a call from Gene and Nikki: first conversation with her since before yoga. The same spacy, faraway.

American Swami Rudrananda killed in plane crash. (He’ll show up later in these spiralbound journals.)

Girl in laundromat, two black eyes, hoarse voice, her birthday / same as Nicki’s / no diamond, lives in trailer in the country. Though we speak, no mention of eyes.

~*~

~*~

From a letter to Len: This is the flattest, most endless land you could ever imagine, and the people reflect it, having stripped off all the trees and driven out all the deer and Indians. … The local cops think we at the paper are all pinkos. … Kat and I went to Chicago to see the 41 paintings from the Hermitage and Pushkin museums.

So we would have stayed with Iris and Luis? I thought that trip was a year or two later.

Land left spiceless.

Len came out from Gotham for a visit and left this morning, back to the City. We apparently had a bottle of muscatel, or muskadibble, which whacked me. A legacy from a wino he once learned, after asking what was in the brown bag.

Also, late Tuesday afternoon, my one and only Scuba dive: heavy, like a backpack, throws me off-balance: we suit hot in humid air, flippers hard to walk in, throw you backward but easy to swim

No hair under mask: will leak

Every breath, I instinctively raise my head above water: reflexive unthinking: “Not me, not this!”

I’d never before used fins nor snorkeled.

Minnows or darters swimming up to my mask. Gold and black streaks rim their tails.

Brown and black snake in reeds three yards away. “Let’s clear out,” Bob says, remembering ‘Nam.

3:XI:73 / Last night, deeper, our relationship transformed. Her fears, and mine, unexpected, vanished. No hurt, “It feels strange.”

Her new face, of moon mystery.

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

 

Vol. 25, green Indiana cover, begins 19 February ’73 in a Bloomington visit, then turns into the first of the Fostoria series. Some overlap with the previous volume.

A phantom follows me around in flashes of her traipsing and schlumping through campus … my real reason for the visits was to win her back, only to be thwarted in the pursuit. And then Capt. Amerika flaked on me, after all the hospitality I’d offered him earlier. Did I take the Greyhound on any of those trips?

You list an old address and an older phone number. Who are you running from? Or what? It’s funny how so little can say so much. Two friends saw you last week, about the same, with a slob-freak grad student, an older man: still seeking a father you can punish? Still seeking to punish yourself?

15:III:73 / Day in Yellow Springs: see why Fern and Cedar ran back to the ashram after moving out: security of the tribe.

“We expand through sorrow.”

The self-righteous barrier of Quaker smiles scared me off in Waynesville Sunday yet I should share through speak.

Knife in the Water: such a fine title (film by Polanski): using only three players.

Ugly Ohio: snarl of rails, grain elevators, auto parts factories, sky vast as Montana, endless prairie, 50-hour workweeks at scab pay.

(So I was mulling the job.)

Horoscope: opportunities multiply.

Associate editor = managing editor elsewhere, opportunity of editorial page column; 12 correspondents and a small staff.

Move with ideas.

Mom revealing her mother’s past [add this to my Mother’s Day perspectives!] As for the aunt divorced and smoking scandalous cigarettes?

Searching for an apartment: highway trucks shake the walls all night, a king’s ransom for not enough room to turn around in, “furnished” means crowded with junk, Grubber tells me of kicking the last tenants out for taping Playmates to the ugly walls, “Told ‘em: Out! Tonight!” And no wimmen in the room either. No closet and a terrible stench.

And then, stalking the wild auto, Morris Jones, fine rap VW salesman, delivered …

~*~

~*~

Entry of 29:III:73 introduces Kat and Ann, the waitresses, Italian and Polish.

Two weeks later, a Friday / Met a great Boddhisatva, Jesse Owens. Expected an aging jock and found a yogi who gives his energy to spur on others. He told of a high school track coach who sacrificed vacations to tell students of muscles in such clarity “You could see it” … and in response “you wanted to give this man everything you could … you learned your lessons well” A Virgo, September 12, too fast to be a Capricorn

Soon, betwixt Palm Sunday and Easter, I was calling the place Prairie Depot, but with only one “i,” a misspelling that continued a few years. One eye? Or half-blind?

Two weeks later / West Virginia white-water rafting trip. No dams upstream … Cheat River … Kingwood Albirght power station smoke Mamie’s motel and restaurant.

Cold, cold river.

And two weeks after that, a dash to the ashram. Memorial Day weekend? Swami’s first comment: “You have city pallor.”

Swami Black Cloud in hell.

Slave wages = no pride.

Small-clan Fostoria, small minds and no imagination
and divorce from nature gods.

Mid-June. Took Kat to BG today: in her brother I saw my old self: selfish, materialistic, mean, bossy; she, too, saw a difference, “You’re alive, you’re human.”

I was also teaching hatha in the apartment …

“Be a lay teacher … for laymen.”

And then poetic blasts about glaciers before I’d ever seen or heard any …

“where once flew eagles now sail buzzards” except that eagles have returned with a vengeance

By July, Troubles with Kat …

Why great monasteries are in mountains: the reaching up to the glory of the universe, versus the running out to worldly desires …

Many yoga notes, too.

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

Deep into the well of the heart is the universal cosmos.

Many items on drafting Subway Hitchhikers, though I should note it was much larger in scope, including Daffodil and the other eventual Hippie novels … “a false tone in so much of my past writing: a thin line between that neo-Baroque artifact … invoking that jerk in the sky.”

Am now realizing: With Hitchhikers, I was hoping to make a change in the world at hand; instead, I should be seeing the characters as individuals whose lives are prayers upholding the goodness of the world and keeping it from falling into Trumpism and other darkness … preservationists against the evils of global capitalism etc.

 

2:III:73 / meditation makes the whole world seem new.

Contrasts ‘tween Nikki and Fay. “That Nikki! Gnawing, grasping, devouring, desperate and destructive hunger, insatiability …”

Sunday 4:III:73: “The Friends’ meetinghouse in Waynesville perhaps 150 years old (town settled 1797): white simple brick: porch and two doors (one men’s, one women’s?) Worship 10:45.” (At least I now knew where the Quaker site was.)

Little Miami River Valley: roads: Corwin, Feedwire, McBee, Upper Bellbrook, Oregonia, Ferry Church, Chenowith, Middle Run, Old Stage (Pittsburgh-Cincinnati), Indian Ripple, Stuttman, Alpha, Trebein, Darst, Carpenter. Past places where Fay and I necked or were chased … this time, I passed a baptism in the river …

Wednesday, off to Glen Helen in Yellow Springs: drafted the Eight-Fold Path poem.

Afterward, stopped at an English prof’s from my past. She was prompting me to “adopt” Eroica, a real sex bomb, flirt, flaunting it: needs other outlets.

To drive a new car. [Was that the Bug? Or Dad’s?]

My troubles began when I was born.

From a short story by John Bart Gerald, July ’71 Harper’s, on rich girls (one of the “horrors of the world”): She may well direct her energies to pleasing some older man, possibly her father. Life will be essentially a game … seeks total moral or sexual obliteration and continually manages to survive it … Rich girls shut horror out of their lives at any cost, and someone else will pick up the tab.”

Sunday (First-day), Quaker Meeting in Waynesville: my mind very dualistic: hard to sit the 45 minutes: the Dharma is further away.

“Do you as Quakers strive to make your homes a place of peace, joy, and contentment?” (asked once a year)

Was also reading Berry’s Hidden Wound …

Listen to animals and observe the water.

Overcome sleep and master the breath.

In letter to Barb: What’s Hitchhikers about? Reincarnation. Or life. Or both. Zany and surrealistic … actually, it’s a lot about my experiences in the past five years.

Has Bharti’s 2027 Walnut noted on last page …

~*~

On a slip of teletype paper: now back to practice
4 am arise and meditate, read clear thoughts
5 am exercise and shower, cool water
6 am prasad of worship
7-11 am work sesshin I
11 am brunch
Noon to 3 pm work sesshin II
3 pm pranayama
3:30 pm work sesshin III
5:30 pm dinner
7 pm work sesshin IV
Meditate at 8 and bed

Looks brutal, though sesshins covered writing or revision, calligraphy, job applications, violin, cooking, carpentry, cleaning, packing. Also, must have been short-term focus, reflecting Zen sesshins ….

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

There was also another trip to Bloomington, probably with hopes of catching up with Nikki, a quest that fell flat.

I am surprised by how often I wound up staying with the Ostroms, East Lampkins Ridge road. Vincent, an esteemed professor, had been something of a mentor. The welcome is astonishing now. What happened to their Navajo rug collection since the two died? One piece is in the IU anthropology museum, but it is hardly the best I remember.

Two pages of notes from Wendell Berry’s Long-Legged House.

VO rose at 4 am, to write. The hour of mahabharta in yogic practice for me.

Later we discussed self-publishing book options: 4,000 copies for $3,600 before getting into distribution and so on.

Saturday night desolation of IU, Bloomington. Quicksand of Nicki, wherever.

Barbara crying, “Don’t hurt me, I’ve been hurt so much,” over and over again into the night.

The dormitories like tombs in the night.

There were no decent bookstores in town. My novel wasn’t in any of them. Even if it had been published.

“Learning Land” seems increasingly apt as a poery cluster. (Here I was, about to encamp in the former Great Black Swamp.)

More VO and responses:

Constitutions as paths through which we come to terms with the landscapes of human conflicts. Do we take easy routes or create new ones? Short cuts?

In Noam Chomsky’s view of language, surface “structures” versus deep “structures”: ellipses and elliptical speech (which he says most speaking is) intend to trigger a deep meaning and response. Snyder’s poetry: if you know, you know; if not, you cannot be told, till you have.

The search for comprehension, for order, for direction in human existence. Myth, as in the stars, to steer to known shores or beyond and back.

Ostrom: You need to rationalize the status quo before you can reform it. Meaning make it understandable before you can reshape or recast it.

The Tao: Nothing is the same, yet nothing changes.

VO brought up the problem of imperative displacement: imperative idealism, in which an ideal, “We ought to do away with poverty,” is adopted and made into an imperative manifesto, “We must do away with poverty,” regardless of its feasibility or practicability. The leads political actors into the realms of unreality and societies into futile motion.

The basis of fascism: “We must!”

Of communism: “We must!”

If inquisition and witch-hunting: “We must!”

Prohibition and drug busts: “We must!”

Does all idealism transfigured into political imperative turn into negative action?

Destruction?

Likely an image copied from northern Canada Indigenous artists.

(My journal also has notes from paleolithic rock paintings, southern France, from books I read from their shelves.)

World politics as continuation of ancient tribal conflict. “Modern history” typically glosses over those differences. Mongol hoards, a politics of plundering … nomadic movement in contrast to farm labor, the wedding of man and land … Celtic tribes, Teutonic tribes, Vikings, the British strands …

Parasites and preachers …

Pagan half-men running, screaming over the crests of the hillsides …

VO: If Ecuador, Peru etc. also allow Indigenous minorities to be taught in native languages, will that lead to a renaissance of Indigenous culture? Guatemala, residue of Maya/Mexico, true art overlay …

In Peru, 500 years after Roman Catholic-based persecution began, sun festivals were never successfully wiped out: ancient man is still heard …

Slave societies degrade labor …

In my hogan of happiness.

Ostroms’ fondness for Cape Dorset contemporary Native art, too.

VO: The problem with bureaucracies isn’t that they don’t respond to changing societies … they respond just enough to preempt other solutions … and their organizations distort information sufficiently to prevent more fitting responses.

[Any monopolistic organization: Detroit, for example.] [I’m not now certain whether I meant the municipality or the domestic automotive industry.]

He who frames the Qs frames the data response and rigs the game.

See fed regs on “community control.”

Without discipline nothing is possible.

“I like to compose much more than the music itself” – Stravinsky, on the Muse.

Carlos Castenada, paraphrased: Suppose a Navajo anthropologist were to look at modern America. He’d ask questions like “How many members of your kinship circle have been bewitched?” and we would seem incredibly odd to them. This is how we seem to them.

Multiverses: being able to see many separate realities, not just one. Try to see without interpreting!

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

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.