I’ve been on a flippant streak.
Hope others have seen it as light-hearted or even funny rather than offensive.
Category: Personal Journey
Vacuuming in the greater scheme of the universe
Usually, it’s to get either the spiders she fears or the dust she’s allergic to.
Yes, some chores can be seen as acts of love or devotion.
Even if I would rather avoid housekeeping altogether.
In the larger span of time
Being a classical music fan induces a peculiar sense of history. If you love fine paintings or theater or literature, you may encounter something similar.
I found some of this being stirred up while sitting through a concert where Debussy was the oldest music performed. He was still considered “modern” when I began attending concerts in 1959 or so. He died in 1918, shortly before my parents were born. Not that far back, then.
For additional perspective, some major Romantic-era composers like Tchaikovsky, who died in 1893, or Saint-Saens, 1923, or Puccini, 1924, weren’t all that distant from me at the time, though it seemed they were much more ancient, say closer to Mozart. The span between them and me at the time would fit into my own life now.
I do recall hearing a live performance of the Tchaikovsky fourth symphony under Lukas Foss and the Buffalo Philharmonic and during the rapturous applause afterward have the gentleman sitting beside me lean over and say, “You should have heard it under Reiner in Cincinnati, as my wife and I did.” That would have been only 50 years after its composition, and this was 30 or so years later.
What is striking me is how much harder it’s been for new music to catch on since then. I don’t think it all has to do with the attempt to write in more original – and often strident – styles.
There’s also a looping of generations, as would happen when a ten-year-old heard something from someone who was 80 relating something he or she had heard at age ten from an 80-year-old’s encounter at age ten with an 80-year-old from age ten. It wouldn’t be hard to have two-century span at hand.
Now, as for naming compositions from the last 50 years that have entered the standard repertoire, it would be a shockingly short list.
How’s your interior sense of time working?
This thing of feeling a day off, morning after morning. You know, thinking it’s Wednesday when it’s Tuesday … or the other way around.
Or feeling you’re a month behind the calendar. You rarely feel you’re ahead, do you?
Sometimes we’re even on the same page that way.
If we were ever to speak again
You’re not the artist you thought you were.
Or musician.
Often, you were much better.
Or my standards were too low.
My secret occupation?
Mapmaker of the Spirit.
Who said anything about my fiancée?
My question was only, “What’s going on with someone who has” a certain sun sign with these rising and moon signs.
The astrologer, Hollywood actress, then told me, “Let her go. She’s trouble. You love her very much, don’t you.”
I had witnesses who were astonished. My question had been gender-neutral.
More bits from one writer’s journey
I am one of the few poets and novelists who has spent the bulk of his career editing daily newspapers, rather than teaching literature or creative writing. Still, when it came to creating a contributor’s note for a literary journal, I had to think of myself in the third-person.
Here are some of those contributor’s notes I don’t think were published … until now.
- In a typical year, Jnana drove enough miles to circle the globe, yet rarely ventured far from his relatively small state.
- Jnana admits there’s something quite frightening in any occasion of encountering a dragon, much less being carried off by one. He’s been scorched more than once.
- In his lifetime of writing, Jnana has found himself addressing issues of PLACE as much as character or social conflict or even religion and ethnicity. Place, of course, intertwines with history and the natural sciences. In examining where he lives – where we live – and have lived – he also examines movement, change, home, and community.
- When Jnana graduated from college, the economy was in a tailspin. The hippie movement was flourishing. He was too skinny to be drafted for Vietnam.
- Jnana once spent a week at an ecological workshop in Port Worden, Washington, where Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder, and Howard Norman were joined by biologists and anthropologists. It’s as close as he’s come to a writing seminar.
- As copy desk chief, Jnana was a glorified secretary rather than the top grammarian.
- Jnana began his professional journalism career as an Action Line research assistant.
- As a homebrewer, Jnana handcrafted more than 2,500 bottles of fine ales and lagers.
- Jnana’s elder daughter wanted to raise chickens, ducks, and bees at their small-city homestead. He wondered about the neighbors’ dogs and cats, as well as the possums, groundhogs, and skunks. He didn’t want the misery of another henhouse raid.
- His wife thought Jnana would have fit the mid-1800s better than contemporary America. She wondered how someone engaging an Anabaptist religious line could be so unorthodox in his art.
- As a daily newspaper editor, Jnana sensed he was among the last to uphold a vital blue-color trade. He wondered how democracy could survive without independent reporting or clear writing.
- Considering the brevity of New England summers, Jnana had hoped to launch a line of Hawaiian sweaters.
- Jnana hates onions but loves a good martini. (Gin, not vodka.) With or without olives.
- As a journalist, Jnana lived in the trenches of community life – in the tensions of industry and finance, retail commerce, social inequalities and prejudices, and reactionary politics. He admires the progressive activists who have maintained their optimism in spite of it all.
- In management and as an editor, Jnana had his head and heart handed to him on a silver platter more than once.
- He hopes he never has to load or unload another U-Haul as long as he lives.
- Jnana is quite grateful his younger daughter gave up rugby for crew as her first college sport.
- Jnana senses rural values are rooted in his soul. His dad was born on a farm.
- Jnana’s mother was born in St. Louis. She loved taking him to the zoo.
I prefer, should you wonder …
a shower to a bath, but indulge in hot tubs.
a hot tub to a sauna in the snow, not that I haven’t delighted in the latter.
religion that relies on questions more than answers.
discovery to fabrication. Accuracy more than cleverness.
Chocolate or candy?
White chocolate. Or dark, bittersweet.
Waffles or pancakes?
Either one, awash in melted real butter and local maple syrup. Better yet, a classic cheese omelet. Or baked pears or baked French toast.
When elk move through my mind these days
They are a memory, more as an emblem and ideal than creature. I never tasted elk flesh, though I heard praises. Nor have I stroked the fur. What I’ve known has appeared only on the forest floor as track and scat – no ticks on the neck or patchy summer skin like the moose where I now live. That, and winter encounters viewed from a distance.
The deer who frequent our yard these days are so small by comparison.
Will I ever revisit the Pacific Northwest where I lived? Would I even recognize most of it?
Or was it all gone in the divorce?
Jnana's Red Barn 