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.

 

Falling into a time warp

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

 When Adam came downstairs with this, I felt it was validation for a bit of history I had just come across online.

This was the backside of a baseboard.

He does look like something of a space alien here, adding to the time machine impression. But a full dinner for $1.50 and up? That does seem surreal today.

The sign was one of several he had uncovered while removing baseboard upstairs. The writing had faced the wall. Yankees are notorious for frugality of the sort that wastes nothing, if possible.

I had just started researching the history of our house, starting with the property deed transactions at the courthouse in Machias. One of our predecessors had owned and operated a well-known restaurant. Her obituary also described her as an exacting carpenter, so here was a piece of evidence.

I’ll save her full story and those of the others for later in this series, but let’s just say, the house was beginning to look a lot older than we’d suspected when we bid on it.

For example, hand-split oak lathing like this had gone out of use by 1830, or so we were told. This piece was extracted when carving out space for the toilet and bathtub.

Hand-split oak lathing went out of usage by 1830, I’ve been told. Ours was also charred by a house fire, possibly one from a nearby chimney.

The burn marks on the underside of the flooring also suggested another serious house fire.

Another detail is the molding on the side of our stairs. The same pattern is found on other houses in town from the 1830s and 1840s.

I’m assuming this was from an update to the house.

And, from a technical point of view, ours wasn’t a post-and-beam house but rather timber framed, meaning wooden pegs held the big pieces together – and the weight of the structure didn’t come down the inside walls.

The old wood was denser, too, than what you’d buy today.

Cross-section of our old rafters.

I do love daffodils, by the way

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Having Subway Hitchhikers come out first did throw a ringer into the sequence of what would emerge as a kind of series. For one thing, it was out of print when the ebooks came along.

For another, I needed to tone down some of the hippie excesses.

As I’ve said, it started out as a nice, thin book. I completed the first draft shortly after leaving the ashram. But somehow, before I could land a publisher, it started growing. And growing. It gained a sizable back story as well as a parallel out-in-the-sticks hippie existence.

Getting to what would be published as Daffodil Sunrise leaves me in somewhat of a fog. Chronologically, it’s the earliest part of the story, detailing the transformation of a straight young photographer from Iowa into a hippie on a state university in Daffodil, Indiana. OK, no secret, it’s an abstraction of Bloomington and Indiana University, embodied the emergence of the character who started out as Duma Luma but now goes by Kenzie.

From what I’ve seen, very little fiction has been published about today’s American Midwest, at least in contrast to Manhattan or Los Angeles or even the South. Who’s speaking up for that part of the country, relating a viewpoint its natives might feel is theirs? It is vastly misunderstood.

Within that, Indiana stands as a crossroads, one with a strong Southern influence as well. I’ll argue it’s even a kind of symbol of middle America. It’s the only Midwestern state, by the way, not to carry a Native name but rather the generic Indian-a. It also is largely farmland with big cities at its corners: Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati.

Kurt Vonnegut strongly resonated with me as a missing voice, a straightforward one with biting humor. As I turned to drafting and revising, he definitely felt like a clarion in the wilderness. Especially his novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Do I have do explain what growing up as a Goldwater Republican was like?

To get closer to the hippie vibe, add Tom Wolfe, definitely not a hippie but someone I first read when he was a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, my favorite newspaper of all time. His supercharged prose fit the sensation of the surreal and vibrant new world the Revolution of Peace & Love was unleashing. Or so we thought.

Other influences I might throw in are Abby Hoffman’s Steal This Book, though I didn’t buy any of it, or Jerry Rubin’s political entreaties, or Herman Hesse’s shining ideals. As for love, though? I’m drawing a blank. At some point Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me caught my fancy, along with Thomas Pyncheon’s V, which finally made sense under an altered state of mind.

Perhaps Genji and Monkey, too?

Bloomington was seen as a wild and somewhat threatening place throughout the rest of the state, yet seemed to be so backward compared to, say Yellow Springs and Antioch, which in turn would seem so far behind the radical curve once I got to the East Coast.

I didn’t want to see any of what I was writing as a rite-of-passage tale, not even for an entire generation of my contemporaries in a Vietnam era. And yet?

I wasn’t seeing the experience, mine or that of those around me, anywhere in the public eye. What was appearing in the spotlight was San Francisco, the Manson cult, the Kent State shootings, and the later circle that abducted heiress Patty Hearst, which originated in Bloomington after I left.

Activist Saul Alinsky, among others, was right in his criticism of hippie political and social action, by the way.

Back to my story. What we think of as the hippie movement really revolved around university campuses. Think about that. It was no longer destitute runaways in San Francisco but legions in enclaves around the country.

Here I was, writing furiously in 1986-87, wondering where it had all gone. Or, I should say, is going.

The big issues still remain, bigger than ever, from climate catastrophe on down.

How could we have gotten this so wrong?

Well, Flower Power did have a lasting impact, though it’s largely taken for granted. The best I could hope for, then, is a reminder or better yet, to rekindle the flame in a younger generation.