Category: Personal Journey

NOT WHAT YOU THINK

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

I’ve always been a visual person. Had even considered a career in art before the writing took over. As further evidence, remembering a story or argument I’ve heard has always been more difficult to recall than one I’ve read. As for names, I’m hopeless unless there’s been a name tag.

Somehow, though, I can remember a musical line much more than I can any lyrics, including those we’ve been working on in chorus. So I’m not memory deaf, exactly.

As a visual person, I’ve found the point-and-shoot digital camera entries you’ve seen posted in my blogs to be a wonderful way of sharing the way I look at the world and many of the details that catch my attention.

But there’s another range of experiences I can’t begin to describe. Often, especially while watching people, my vision shifts from photo-realism to real-life cartoons. I hope I’m not staring, but the transformation is incredible. R. Crumb had nothing on me, other than technique. Sometimes they’re squiggling black-and-white line drawings. Sometimes, baroque etchings. Other times, wild blobs of color.

Even before they start moving.

GODDESSES IN SUBURBIA

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I mentioned to her sometime back, I’d spent much time in a recent year reflecting on the jagged pathway that landed me here. Often I’ve felt I took one took many turns somewhere back there, and on some mornings after we moved into this house – well, some moments in my homes before that, too – I’d find myself wondering just where the hell I was, after all. In a bigger sense, I’ve been trying to envision how it all adds up. Guess it’s another version of the old “What is the meaning of life” conundrum. At least I finally figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up … retired! Meaning free to concentrate on the Real Work. (Now that I’m there, I’m finding more questions.)

In the round of reflection I’m discussing, I concentrated on high school and college – the emotional side, especially – meaning the time before I actually started keeping a journal, and a period that’s largely been a fog in my memory. I uncovered some wonderful prompts for revisiting this, especially letters from the sophomore high school English teacher who put me on the writing/strict grammar path, as well as a confession that despite all the contrary efforts, high school was a bummer. Unlike yours, my public school system was geared largely toward instilling conformity and retarding the growth of gifted students, unless you were a male athlete. Still, much has come back, making me wonder how I survived at all.

This round, I kept asking “What if” … for instance, one of those I saw as goddesses in high school had swept me away (or, more realistically, if I’d been able to say something close to what was really on my heart, or hormones, leading to some, shall we say, quality time together). Would I have continued at Wright State, rather than transferring to Indiana, and eventually stayed in Dayton, maybe even as a Republican? Or if either of my two girlfriends through the college years had led to marriage and home … both of them from Dayton, though neither ended up dwelling there, from what I can tell. Most of those goddesses wound up settling into mundane adult suburban lives, as I find from the class website and Internet – including our online class reunion site. I’m not kidding. (Who are all those old people in those silly photos? The ones holding beer bottles, especially.) (Note to self: Do not allow yourself to be photographed holding a beer bottle. Ever.)

On my part, what I keep finding is a sense of inevitability. Or, as Friends say, “As way opens,” if we’re faithful. There are good reasons I’m where I am, and for that I’m grateful, after so many seasons of sojourning. Even so, when your note arrives, there’s a tinge of sadness or gentle envy, as you live out what appears to be so close to what I had desired when I dreamed of being an independent writer living in my Promised Land, with a house full of my children and visiting friends and a quiet studio hut on the ridge behind. (My wife finds that vision humorous, by the way – finds holes in it all the way around, beginning with who’s going to clean up after the big parties I intended.)

Still, looking back, there are many things I don’t understand, and too many points where I’ve looked away or accepted a glib answer, rather than probing. I’ve always been prone to seeing what I want to see and overlooking the rest – usually, the warning signs and difficult details. (Again, my wife is good at bringing me back to the wider range of questions.) I’d say that trying to answer the inquiry of why you and I didn’t wind up together would be one of those. The astrological answer that you and I would never wind up together but remain prime friends fails to ask why. I believe there’s far more to be uncovered there, if we’re willing. Just why have you always made me feel better, for starters. Or feel special and elated.

 

SOCCER MOM, RUGBY DAD

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As I said at the time …

So here we are. Who would have thought we’d be attending kids’ soccer and rugby matches? Not us!

Or dealing with declining parents. Your mother’s dementia must be difficult. You mention that she still remembers people and is in a wheelchair, which makes me wonder if she’s afflicted with Alzheimer’s or something different. My wife and the girls talk fondly of Grandpa Marion and how his Alzheimer’s brought out a sweetness in him, while another, with episodes in the past years, turns mean and paranoid. Parkinson’s is rough, too, with its long decline; I lost a dear Mennonite mentor last January, in Virginia, and one of my best friends here is in the early stages – so far, controlled by medication, when they get it right.

Galapagos? My elder girl will be very envious. At age 11, she went on a big Darwin kick, a passion that has never abated. A few years ago, we went down to the Boston Museum of Science for a special exhibit they had, and it was quite impressive. In all of the historical debate over his insights, I’m surprised we don’t hear more about the religious roots of his work – most of his encouragement and support seemed to come from clergymen. Me, I’m quite fond of his later affection with earthworms. Maybe it has to do with my monster composting.

Now I still want to hear how you distinguish between mystery and magic. I have a few ideas, but I doubt they’re as expansive or insightful as yours.

In the meantime, I’m hoping to get back to poetry by early fall. Why can’t I stick to just one kind of writing? Or be somehow easily identifiable? A good friend’s son, who is a successful serious novelist, seems to have the same problem. He, too, wants every book to be unique, rather than a continuation of or variation on his others.

Gotta run … time to commute, again. And tomorrow, another birthday. How can that be?

WATER SIGN OR ELSE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

It’s hard to think 17 years have gone by since this correspondence! As I said at the time …

Your first letter had me repeating to myself, “She has to be a water sign — or at least have a lot of water influence prominent in her chart.” Now you blithely inform me you’re a Pisces. Ah-ha! Figures! Could that be why you’re so alive in your emotions, as astro-informed friends from my past would insist? (For Aquarian me, meanwhile, aloft in encyclopedic data and logical constructs, staying alert to my own emotions can be a real challenge — especially when retreating into my brainiac self became my way of surviving some pretty intense emotional abuse way back when.) So, in some wonderful ways you help me tap dance into some chambers  of my soul. (Molto grazie!) As for the writing skills: do the nuns at dreaded Mother Theodore Guerin get any credit? (Mother … Theodore? And I doubted your age?)

And you wish you look older? Na-na-na-na! Listen to Swami Jnana, kiddo. Do you have any idea how … thoughtful you appear in that photo? It doesn’t get any better than that. Why can’t any of the women I know/have known appreciate being they way they are — which inevitably is much, much lovelier than they presume. (Assignment for future edition, probably when you’re ensconced in that high suite overlooking the Loop and Lake Michigan — I know that view, having been in Jeff MacNally’s eerie in the Chicago Tribune tower a time or two: interview Cindy, Nicky, Cristy, and the rest of the supermodel cult and see if you can find anyone truly satisfied with her looks; bet, deep down, they aren’t.) Ergo: enjoy your current condition while you can. (And may that be for a long, long time!) Most women I know would kill to have the body or the looks of an eighteen-year-old, or so they say. You have the rest of your life to look older. (And may you age gracefully, like Sophia Loren or Joan Collins.) Maybe it’s not really a matter of age, after all, but of self-confidence. Those who are radiant, no matter what, versus those who are wrapped up in their misery. Watcha think?

As for feeling one’s chronological age, you’re an excellent writer: that automatically makes you middle-age. (I know: part of me’s always felt old, too. Maybe it’s just ancient soul.) (My age, by the way, is ninety-two.) But, because you’re an artist, you’re also going to have to find ways of remaining fourteen or fifteen forever. I wouldn’t recommend adult orthodontics as a strategy, although it is an interesting trip and seems to be an good way to open conversations I wouldn’t otherwise have. (And you said something about rambling? Heavens!)

So here I’m looking through some Diane Wakoski volumes for a great insight on adolescence and find instead: “My search for the perfect man, the perfect love, Romance, sexual life, has always been emblematic of my search for something else, you know. In Pretty in Pink, a wonderful character played by an actress who must be thirty but still looks like she’s eighteen, the wise older woman in the film is nostalgically wearing her old high school prom dress and dancing to some golden oldie with the star of the movie (Molly Ringwald) and she says, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could start old and get younger every year?’ I recall my elders always saying that ‘youth is wasted on the young’ … “

I very much enjoyed both the batch of poems you sent along. Do you write as effortlessly as it appears? You have some real knock-‘em-dead connections here: “sometimes she’s a ballerina/hanging by her neck/from the rafters/of some wretched dollhouse//sometimes she’s a little girl/with treasure chest eyes/and a bowl-of-pudding smile” is astonishing. Brava, brava, brava! (Envy, envy, envy!) Ditto: “the sky is pink lemonade.” And the line, “trees singing,” keeps triggering to my ears Isaiah 55:12b, “and all the trees of the countryside clap their hands.”

I, too, prefer direct language — although in my writing, it sometimes seems that by creating a deliberate short-circuit, I’m more able to get down into that painful raw nerve you talk about. I wonder if some of the “trying to hide behind huge words and flowery language” you object to (rightfully so) has more to do with a lack of a real emotional underpinning/experience. A few days before your big package arrived, I received two hardbound prize-winning volumes by those “professional poets” we’ve already defined—and I found myself annoyed. You’re right: there is a lot of hiding going on. And it feels like WORK, both the creation and the reading of it.

Then your latest edition came, and I found myself often laughing aloud with delight, because the pieces were coming from another place in the psyche. (Pieces I checkmarked: “Dead Horse,” “Yes, There Still Are Some Good Ones,” “Sam I Ain’t,” “I read a book about a woman …,” “Sardines,” “The Painkiller,” [hey, is that true about the Walibri???], your centerfold [sick! heh-heh!], your on-going adventures [really fine line: “my feathers are slowly being replaced by rocks … being covered by cold, gray cement”] — and the insights in the paragraph beginning, “i have always been on another planet.”

Please, please, please, send a copy of your chapbook. (What a marvelous title — I can almost taste it. A turnabout on Psalm 34, “O taste and see,” which Denise Levertov uses as a title for a wonderful collection of her own poems — so delicious it opens your eyes.) Watercolor nights, what a vivid linkage, almost a micropoem itself … softness, yet I wonder if night scenes can be done in watercolors: now you make me ask a watercolorist I know.

Was kinda curious about where your neighborhood is — thought maybe it was around Hyde Park, or some other brainy neighborhood. Was surprised to find it on my road atlas as being out toward Mother O’Hare instead. So I asked my boss, who says he’s spent a lot of time in Chi’town (he’s from western Michigan), and he said he thought it was mostly duplexes and bungalows out that way. And then Sunday night I was zoned out in front of the tube, not quite watching some dumb detective story set in Your Fair City, and there they went, ripping onto — you guessed it, your fair street, which may have been filled with some fair number of criminals by then or a fairly high-speed chase. Is life weird or what? Looked like ‘50s ranch houses, mostly. Some trees. Short front yards. Many bathtub Madonnas? (Couldn’t tell.)

I’ve done a lot of travel on maps. Some places I’ve never been I seem to know better than some people do who have actually been there. As Howard McCord has written: “A chest of maps/is a greater legacy/than a case of whisky.//My father left me both.” Another quote: “or what my father said/‘go along the coast as far as/you can without getting killed’/my saint is Hsuan-tsang/who got    _  back.”

Well, hope you’re still enjoying that big old Dodge Diplomat (go along as far as you can and then come back). Assume college has started. Took me three-and-a-half years to figure out how they rig the game against you: the moment you walk into a classroom, you’re already a hundred pages behind. (Wright College? I went to Wright State University, then transferred to Indiana University in Bloomington.)

So here’s to a rewarding and eccentric friendship. None of my other editors get long letters like this. Actually, they’re lucky to get cover letters. But then, they rarely reply with more than a marginal scrawl, either. I wish I were having as much fun with the newspaper as you’re having with Indigo, but, hey, we don’t have centerfolds, either.

Good thoughts to you, always.

Your midnight rambler.

SAGEBRUSH AS A STATEMENT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The diamond hitch is a top-of-the-line knot, especially useful in cowboy, mining, or logging country – or, as I apply it, the desert foothills of Washington state found east of the Cascade mountains. Forefront in my related set of poems is the unspoken recognition of diamond hitch as marriage, with its implied images of diamond ring and getting hitched. In the background, also unvoiced, is the diamond symbol of the clear and enduring heart – further extended to intense spiritual quest, as The Diamond Sutra (Vajrachchedika in Sanskrit) demonstrates, found also in the Buddhist linkage of diamond to Dharma. In addition to serving as an emblem for the open range of the American Far West, sagebrush, moreover, suggests wisdom, spice, even the Burning Bush of Moses – the profound influence desert has upheld for prophets and mystics over the millennia.

CORNFLOWER EYE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

The sky of America’s interior West is a dry eternity – an intense blue I see reflected in the cornflower bloom, or certain other blossoms, such as flax.

Curiously, the flower itself has no direct relationship to the cornstalk or ear. Its naming presents a mystery, to the modern ear, at least.

Now that I dwell under the commonly milky skies of New Hampshire, I find the blooming cornflower celebrates that vibrant blueness in my memory, and locales suddenly overlap in my mind, making me grateful to once again acknowledge that fullness and contrast. By extension, the cornflower blue sky extends to open spaces reaching westward from the Great Plains, with another set of experiences within me.

Gaze, then, into such deep color, undiluted, and its inexplicable essence.

CHANGING STYLE, CHANGING TASTE, CHANGING DIRECTION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Driving any of my back routes to the beach, I pass impressive houses that have views of the water. Often, they’re old estates reflecting established money. Some are infused with history. Some are large, with four or more chimneys. Others are cozy cottages with four-season porches.

For much of my life, I would have dreamed of owning such a place.

Lately, though, there’s been a sea-change in my perspective. Part of it is no doubt my arrival at a point in life called retirement, although for me it’s been more a matter of culminating focus on the Real Work, as the poet Gary Snyder calls it. Another part of it has to do with stripping away all of the competing visions of where I thought my life might have been heading. The two dovetail, actually.

When I was starting out, I held often contradictory goals. As one date once admitted, she couldn’t decide whether I’d been in a corner office in a Manhattan tower or in an artist’s garret 10 years hence, and she wasn’t far off the mark, even before the ashram intervened.

Of course, the corner office and the house overlooking the water both assume a sizable income, and that was never in the offing for a journalist unless I somehow became publisher at a young age. Unlikely from the outset, but all the more so once the hippie movement kicked in.

Even so, as a writer, there was always the dream of the blockbuster novel that became a hot movie, but my work kept veering more and more toward the experimental while the publishing industry kept constricting. You get the picture.

You could add to that the possibility of a wealthy girlfriend or the talented one whose career took off big time, but both of those went up in smoke. Or whatever.

Come to think of it, the dream wasn’t just about houses. You could figure in the shiny cars, too, or a sailboat or global travel.

The vision, as it turned out, included an entire lifestyle. An exteneded family with a handful of my own kids, at the least, running around. Many friends and business acquaintances, along with political connections, all coming to stay in the guestroom or guesthouse. A fully stocked library with an impressive collection. An art collection, too.

What it didn’t include was the life I’ve wound up living. Much smaller scale. As a writer, what I really require is blocks of uninterrupted time and solitude. Let’s be honest. A studio can be not much larger than a closet, for that matter.

As for the big place? It would need household staff, for one thing. And a long list of handymen.

What I have instead is an old house and its barn in a small city, along with a common car with 250k on the speedometer. It’s more than enough to handle, even before adding the family.

On top of it all, I also have a shelf of books with my name as author.

WITHOUT A DOMINANT LEADER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As I wrote at the time:

My spiritual work from my Yakima years on has always been within a collegial circle, rather than with a dominant leader. In this, much of my reading/study of Scripture has been along the lines of Arthur Waskow’s book, Godwrestling, a Jewish communal tradition of arguing with the text, asking if the writers had it right, if there were alternate outcomes, and so on. This is quite different from the legalistic approach taken by fundamentalists of all stripes or even much of the mainstream.

Quaker Theology has published my piece, “The Quaker Enterprise of Metaphor,” laying out an alternative way of thinking, one based on personal experience more than speculation or splitting hairs. Your mention of Kaballah reminds me of a volume I got as a present, The Jew in the Lotus, about an individual who discovered the mystical and varied sides of his heritage while traveling in a small delegation to the Dalai Lama, who was curious not just about angels being everywhere but also about keeping a faith alive in Diaspora.

Over the past few years, I’ve been connecting the dots of an alternative Christianity, one that apparently flourished before the Nicene Council in 325 C.E. and resurfaced in the early Quaker movement, which had to couch its articulation because the Blasphemy Act still included capital punishment. This line of reasoning remains controversial, and I hesitate to say too much too early in my writing. Essentially, “Christ” is something other than the historic person known as Jesus – more along the lines of the Judaic Sophia and the Greek Logos concepts or principles. (So I had to laugh when you reminded me, regarding the spelling of Chanukah, of Jesus’ last name! No, it’s not Christ! It would have been Joshua bar Joseph!) This version also points away from the conventional teaching of Trinity, or of Jesus as God incarnate, and toward a different framework. Just don’t try this on your more conventional neighbors, even with chapter and verse from the New Testament. They’d be really baffled by the short version: Christ is bigger than Jesus.

In all of this, I recognize that something happens in the meditative silence, or “waiting worship,” no matter how we try to define it. In sitting, especially among others, I’m somehow reconnected to intuition and deep emotions, as well as to the other people in our circle. And without it, I really can’t write poetry. (Prose is another matter.)

Still, as my wife asks, how does this make me a better person? I hate to think what the replacement would be!

WORKING BEHIND THE SCENES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

For me, one line of career growth involved a growing recognition of the importance of working behind the scenes. As I watched the conductor Max Rudolf eschew stardom and New York for music-making in Cincinnati, I perceived something quite different from Leonard Bernstein or Herbert von Karajan’s being in the celebrity spotlight. Similarly, Glenn Thompson, the first editor to hire me, had a knack for giving other people credit for his own ideas and visions, and then pushing them forward to completion – including the new Wright State University I attended my first year and a half of college. Glenn, too, was the one who impressed upon me the importance of keeping a personal journal.

Another line stemmed from the illustrations accompanying profiles of serious authors that showed intensive revision of a single page of work. This was much more complex than daily deadline writing, even when the copy desk had finished its round on the text itself. Extended interviews, such as those in the Paris Review, demonstrated how vastly different individual writers functioned, too: fastidious Nabokov, for instance, contrasted to runaway Kerouac.

Still another line reflected economic changes. A few months before my graduation from college, the Wall Street Journal, which had expressed interest in hiring me, instead laid off several hundred reporters and editors. Rather than moving to a big city, as anticipated, I wound up laboring in out-of-the way communities, which presented me with other experiences and insights. As my career grew, I worked largely behind the scenes, editing other people’s writing and presenting the day’s stories and photos for our many readers. I was fortunate to have a series of bosses I admired and respected, and making them look good was also one of my priorities. Again, it was working behind the scenes, an approach I later realize had also been my father’s. In the long run, the economic changes have continued to buffet the publishing industry, from books and magazines to newspapers themselves, all struggling against decline and marginalization. Over the years, we’ve watched the declining importance of reading and writing among the general populace: the term “famous novelist” going from Hemingway and Faulkner to Mailer and Heller to Stephen King and Anne Rice, for instance. Or who now can name a newspaper editor or publisher, after the likes of Scotty Reston, Ben Bradlee, or Vermont Connecticut Royster? Or a major poet, after Ginsberg or Plath?

From my college years on, I’ve taken a route tempered by the hippie influence, which initially challenged many of my assumptions and goals and led to the yoga ashram instead of graduate school – or even law school, which had once appealed. The ashram practice worked to crush much of my ego, instilled a degree of humility, and opened me to spiritual awareness and discipline, before sending me forth again on a journey that eventually brought me into Quaker circles, or the Society of Friends, which I much later discovered was the faith of my Hodson ancestors. Crucially, the practice of meditation – first as a yogi, and then as a Quaker – also opened an appreciation and understanding of poetry for me in ways the classroom could not. Maybe it was just the silence as a breath of light.

In my personal writing, what has unfolded is more a practice of meditation, reflection, collection of otherwise random thoughts and feelings, and inner playfulness, than a quest for any “finished” product. Not that a set of poems or a polished novel in hand does not also give pleasure.  So here we are, backstage, as it were. Or, with the blog, in the loft. Not a bad place now, is it?

AN EXTENDED VIEW OF MY OWN VOLUMES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

It’s now been 12 months since my first ebook appeared at Smashwords – a list that now presents six of my novels and a full-length poetry collection. That’s in addition to my poetry chapbooks appearing at other presses.

First, I want to thank all of you for your support and encouragement. What you’re seeing is the fruition of a lifetime of writing that’s now, finally, coming to light. I cannot imagine trying to write seriously without a desire to share it with others – especially when I hear you tell of ways it speaks of your own experiences or sparks related memories.

I also want to acknowledge the fact that these are not works I could write today, not for a decline in ability but rather because each of us evolves and changes over time. My energies, inspirations, perspectives, and focus are different now than they were 10, 20, 30, or 40 years ago. I look at these works and find much that is wonderfully baroque or surreal or passionately intense and realize I’m in a much different sensibility today – yes, I’m happy to have these souvenirs from the journey, these touchstones and treasures, but they come from my younger years and their visions and even the different companions who shared my life back then, in contrast to the household I cherish now. More than ever, I’m ever-so-grateful I set aside the time over the years to draft and revise then, rather than waiting for my retirement years as so many wannabe writers do.

Let me just say there’s much more coming in the next 12 months.

And thank you.