The next volume, another wide-margin notebook, included our preparing to relocate from Fostoria to Bloomington: much rough verse but, to my surprise, many riches, too: a fertile profusion. I’m so glad I didn’t incinerate this stretch before the final gleaning.

I am surprised how little I have regarding my boss, Doc Bordner, who was quite an original. Perhaps sometime?

Instead, I was preoccupied with the suffocation by conformity.

The poison here is unbearable; I wish we were long gone; am counting the days till we move

As I walked in autumn leaves bordering a savage Scout jamboree, the words, “Look, Mrs. Smith, there’s an Indian,” meaning me, in my headband.

Two fine lines from Snyder’s Japanese lesson:

“It is unspeakably wonderful to see a large volume of water falling with a thunderous noise.”

“Sparrows entertained me singing and dancing, I’ve never had such a good time as today.”

Reopening Snyder (now is the time), am struck by how much larger his vocabulary is than I had thought: not just accurate and clear, but broad and sometimes academic.

High blood pressure wears away the organs, leading to failure in 20 years, may explain my headaches, eye trouble, need for more sleep: must reduce salt intake sharply (Sivananda’s day without salt each week) [much less a true fast, food or speech].

Sometimes, deep in memory-desires, making love turns not to the finite body with me but someone else even fresh from the street adding to her thousand faces and shapes into a new woman as my lover-wife

Always that heart, with the million clouds of emotions, expressions passing over.

Here, I thought I was rejecting / renouncing newspaper journalism as my life’s calling, leaping beyond the gossip and fashionable tides that sweep the barroom, clubroom, of deluded masses …

They forget what they read, discard it all …

As for me, on to Cold Mountain?

Except that was his destination, not mine. And I was still ensnared in Maya’s web.

Communism capitalism?

Too much stress on the supporting THINGS.

Far too little on the SOUL.

Either way, everyone is reduced to objects, without loving brotherhood or broader community support.

~*~

“Dolly? What can I do for you,
Dolly?” Always, Dolly.
Owner/manager of art/health food store in Findlay.

~*~

~*~

The modern “leisure” classes, those with education working in professional or managerial roles, are those with the least amount of free time. Many work 50- to 60-hour weeks, leaving little time for culture.

As for the novel? I thought my biggest potential readership would be in students or those just out before responsibility is foisted on them.

It’s success, of course, would be my escape out of all this. Maybe in four years or so, from Bloomington.

My railing at “they” can more recently be seen even within my own congregation!

“For when the will fails, so do the hands, and one lives at the expense of life” – Wendell Berry, Farming.

Harvard president on the quality of a leader: His ability to inflict pain.

Japanese children are taught calligraphy as inculcating composure

Wondering how we’ll define ourselves in Bloomington … late hours, attending concerts etc.? Or early mornings, meditating and getting simpler? Dharma Bums or Down So Long artists?

A note on card systems for scholarly mags etc. … for the Workshop or my own poetry submissions? Or both?

What did happen in the upcoming Bloomington sojourn was aligning with Friends, finding a poetic voice, and renewing my hiking in nature time. I am surprised I didn’t partake of more cultural performances, but my early rising and personal writing can be blamed more than Kat, perchance. Lifestyle definitely included gardening and organic funky.

After handing over my desk in the newsroom, I went through all of my front pages and editorial pages, felt very good: so much solid work after all, especially with Marcy. There is goodness and sweetness in all her work.

And then, in moving, came the first snow since we married, as Kat said.

Do note that one of the paradoxes in this practice is that when life’s going well, there’s often very little time for journaling.

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

This point in our review coincidentally comes on the cusp another job relocation and has me curious about whether you’re somehow fascinated by the staccato pace of the entries or are instead questioning the bigger picture, specifically alternative ways my career and life could have gone from here.

The newspaper industry was notorious for requiring young talent to slave away in small settings like Binghamton (which wasn’t so small in retrospect) and Fostoria (which definitely was small), training grounds where we had to “pay our dues” in moving up to more respectable – and better paying – metropolitan dailies. It was something like minor league teams in baseball. A variation on that was moving up into management on papers in medium-sized markets, meaning the majority of papers across America.

Returning to the spiralbound notebooks had me trying to envision myself continuing at each place rather than moving onward or away. Would I have actually been satisfied as managing editor in a modest city, attending my kids’ softball games or being active in Kiwanis or Rotary community service? Something within me obviously yearned for more.

Or, had the Wall Street Journal followed up on its interest in me just before graduation, would the big city life of Dallas or Detroit or some other bureau have ultimately led to a life as rich, in its own quirky way, as the one I wound up with? There would have been no yoga with its reconnecting me to my body and fitness, no Society of Friends (Quaker), probably no poetry, either – things that are so much of who I am today.

There are also the questions of why I didn’t pursue an academic path or become a lawyer or find some other profession. The best I can come up with was that I had “ink in my blood,” or at least was addicted to writing and publishing. The route I sought beyond journalism was book publication. Other posts here at the Red Barn carry on in that vein. So be it.

 In Fostoria, I really had no support system beyond my new girlfriend slash eventual bride, distilled here as Kat, and her family. Beyond that, those of us in the newsroom weren’t paid enough to be part of the community, especially on the six-day week the absentee owner had us working. Let me extend that to all employers of minimum-wage labor; they impoverish a community, period.

Now I am wondering how I would have grown had I become familiar with one of the town’s churches besides St. Wendelin’s or maybe taught yoga at the Y rather than in my loft. Meaning other circles where I might have discovered a deeper level of the community. Or even the community theater, no matter its taste for conventional fare.

Despite my negative portrayal of the town in my journals, something others confirmed over the years, there were some bright lights all the same.

Joe Dell, whose family owned and operated the corner restaurant where I met Kat, was one. He found a niche and he and his wife and brother and sister-in-law flourished within it despite the brutal hours.

As were my landlords, Judge John and Kathleen Bender, whose son Thomas Guernsey Bender, as I later learned, pursued many of the Asian awarenesses I was but applying them to architecture, ultimately in Oregon.

I’ve already touched on the insightful librarian, Dan, whose last name I’ve lost, someone I would definitely hold up as a paragon of selfless public service, no matter the cost. The library’s board, for that matter, should be included.

Nor should you rely on the earlier entries of Kat for her full portrait. She was often sparkling, very funny, original, a “stone fox” in the view of a friend of a close friend to whom I had sent a photo. There are good reasons I married her.

In this review, I’m sensing so much that I wasn’t aware of or at least didn’t inscribe. If I had stayed longer?

Yet much of the negative observation of the people and place as poisoned may be more prescient than I’ve been giving credit: Think of Trumpian acceptance across the Midwest in places that economically were dead-ends, even before the hostile corporate vultures who swooped in to raid healthy small-town businesses as Brian Alexander details in Glass House: the 1% economy and the shattering of an all-American town. (A book I highly recommend.)

I wanted symphony and opera and, well, something more akin to respect and power. I mean, had I settled somewhere and had the resources, I might have taken splurges in New York or San Francisco or Chicago to indulge in those.

Yet as I review these journals, for the last time intact before incinerating them, I am struck both by a sense of inevitability in their seemingly unlikely episodes and by wonder that I survived at all.

The path wasn’t one I would have charted, yet each stage provided unique lessons in my evolving awareness.

Somehow, a trip to the Ostroms in Indiana in early November.

“Both liberals and conservatives are intellectually bankrupt at this point.”

w/ VO walked in early morning fog reminding me much of the Poconos, rolling terrain, birds chirping, sun glowing off rosy cirrocumulus clouds.

From “general fog” to “low fog,” as Vince says, in that shift, the temperature drops two or three degrees, or in retrospect, perhaps rises. Was this something he learned growing up along Puget Sound?

Everything changed on our way back to the house. As the fog began burning off, distant trees and field tops appeared where earlier we had only treetops.

VO telling of Indian “blankets” as they were still being called by a few. They were used that way by tribesmen until Pendleton Mills (Washington state?) came out with more comfortable blankets, so traders got the idea of using the older weavings as “rugs” and shifted the emphasis.

 

 

 

They used color postcards to promote their wares. Along rail stops, their outpost trading outposts offered different colors and patterns, and thus a particular style became known by the trader’s station.

Met their carpenter and woodworker Paul Goodman, a character. “Don’t let them lead you astray.” “Too late, they brought me here.”

Their new house, wide-open basement, has 15-inch beams from an old hotel: “Yeap, guess if they held up five stories all that time, they can bear my house,” all solid wood.

“That there’s my boar’s nest I just ain’t fancy enough to have a den.”

No Smoking sign as a placebo.

~*~

I was no doubt sending out feelers to other papers about this time, but I did want to land someplace my bride could resume her college program …

That’s where my political science mentor and his wife came through with an unanticipated invitation to join them in the creation of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis in Bloomington.

This would mean stepping out of the daily news business for a second time, but the workshop’s largest grant was for a groundbreaking, comprehensive study of how police services were actually delivered in the U.S. in what might appear to be a chaotic overlap of agencies.

~*~

If a Saturn transit (in this case, over my house of communication) is also a time to grow and learn (Saturn is The Teacher), it will be a period to set the pace and direction for my next 30 years. This proposed move to Indiana may very well be right.

I know both the place and the people.

The leap would again force me to utilize my mind, tap my creative abilities, and submit myself to a group cause. There will be no nasty women or men phoning simply to harass. I’ll have time to refine and reflect on our work.

It would be our first new home: Quakers, lakes, and hardwood forests rolling over hills and ravines.

[Again, am surprised to see the Quaker awareness – not the local ashram!]

The next volume has some overlap. Be it what it may.

Radha phoned, jubilant as usual, to congratulate and share.

“You’ve been to bed together, haven’t you!”

Smiling on the other end.

~*~

My one prayer in accepting a church wedding was for a self-realized priest.

A new father came to town.

Priests were unnecessary in weddings prior to the Council of Trent, 1560. That is, after the Protestant Reformation.

Marriage is an initiation.

“Before, we were only playing.”

Whether it goes by plan or accident, it goes right.

An organist who cannot play Bach, will trip on Mozart. As ours did.

Who are these brown eyes searching my face?

This makeup for the first time.

Hinayana
“small vessel”
you and me

plus all the others

“You’re too good for me,” repeated.

I really needed to get down and dirty, for the hell of it.

Haven’t played violin much since we married.

~*~

~*~

8 Aug, Nixon out, for the sake of the country, it’s such a shame” but also euphoric to see “that bastard get it.”

“What are we going to do for news now?”

~*~

When you’re relaxed, it’s easier to have faith.

Without inner tension, we’re more inclined to submit to Divine Will.

Many of our obstacles are of our own making.

Use one part of your mind to overcome another part.

That steamer trunk hasn’t been used in so long it must be filled with bugs and snakes.

Down so far “I want to die.”

Next day, so alive.

“I can’t believe it’s only morning.”

Fostoria, this junkyard on the prairie [unlike the land around me these days, where forest covers up so much and water most of the rest].

In a dream, I feasted at the ashram in a circle of smiles.

I woke full of joy.

Swami, reading our charts:

Don’t change jobs this year! Wait till June ’75. In June/July ’76, I’ll have my final cleaning out. Very rough, must now learn to live with Saturn. [Note the big move to Yakima ahead]

Kat must grow up. I can’t do that for her.

By not getting upset, I’m not being very honest and she knows it.

Barn: a three-rod job, considering lightning

Already she was speaking of divorce.

She admitted she was jealous of me, my resolve or strength.

In the night, I asserted myself upon her
And because seeing me strong,
she was excited to be a woman.

Remember when Cedar said, “When you open up, it will be fantastic.”

Well, looking back, those times of opening up are rare.

In pictures of Kat, one thing stands out from childhood on: the intensity of her eyes, usually looking straight at the camera with an unquenchable hunger, the eyes of madmen or spiritual masters, the thirst for that alone which quenches, that special security, deepest of drives: this is my woman, may I help her find that peace.

Blew my cool today, fricking proofreaders who don’t catch copy as marked. Bessie reads my stories, “Oh, my!” rather than typos. Don defending her, “For every 12 errors you make, we make one.” There’s no excuse for changing an obituary, though.

Moon’s chart: I still don’t see him as a double Leo … his love life fell in Gemini.

As a swami, “You’re just a friend, not a lover” when it comes to feeling the love in the ashram …

I can’t say I wasn’t warned.

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

Am surprised by my trips to ashram in this period, considering this visit may have been that pivoting vacation just before taking the plunge into marriage.

Swami, after much illness, short hair: (shaved, looks like Sivananda): accentuates her features, age of wisdom.

“I thought you were married. … Is she a yogi?”

Then I head, with Swami’s son, to some mountain climbing in New Hampshire for a last round of deep consideration.

Parnelli Kid: “New England towns will freak you out”

village greens (commons)
largest houses I’ve ever seen
framed, four-stories
stretching to barns

as for your dreams?

~*~

Back in Prairie Depot:

June 29, told Kat’s dad.

June 30, talked to the grandmother and also Father Gorman.

July 1, her parents’ turn to talk to him.

Asked her brother to be my best man.

Looked at dresses (like a funeral).

Kat appointment with her dad.

So much so fast …

The gauntlet to run: good thing we didn’t stretch ours out any longer.

We undertake all of the ritual steps pretending they’re for us, rather than marrying into the family.

Somehow contrasting guru/chela, Shiva/Shakti.

Father Gorman telling Kat we should live together instead.

The priest making me feel for the first time the poverty of Sannyasa.

~*~

Service officiated by the Reverend Father Stephen Paul Cairns.

Stephen, as the martyr stoned to death.

Paul, as the principal persecutor.

Cairns, as in piles of rocks.

I see now he died in 2012.

“I don’t even know if I’ve had a virgin come down the aisle,” yet all dressed in white an acquaintance, displaying the photos. As one said, “I was getting pretty far into motherhood at that point, but I covered it up pretty well.”

And then, despite the bed and books and her possessions, there’s no claustrophobic sensation. Rather, a feeling of the luxuriousness of Swami’s room. Tea master grace of the proper casual stroke: everything looks right, only half by design.

My thoughts return to Farina’s Been Down So Long, just the funky flavor of it.

Faces on my altar not to be worshiped but to be honored as examples, guides.

Homage to the Light: let it grow within.

I was still writing Prairie with only one “i”: remember my shock in realizing I had been misspelling it all along.

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

 

Somewhere along the way, I had begun dating the entries, in one of the new styles (colons or periods, depending).

The next volume, one with wide margins, had me realizing as I keyboarded how little I’ve traveled as a vacationing American in my adult years but rather relocated: the syndicate years that came in the mid-‘80s would be a variation on this.

~*~

Inside cover:

into Aquarius 1974
May my strength increase
and my wisdom multiply.

Ordained not with words, which are fragile, but with observation that detects proper hidden motions … changes that occurred perhaps in October, I’m not really sure.

My shakti has appeared, and I am grateful

My typewriter has come home! (from the shop). Back to work on the hard-copy draft! [Meaning perfect typescript]

There were no streams to speak of in Prairie Depot, a few drainage open sewers, perhaps, brimming over with their chocolate filth.

Her big self-discovery, that she awaits the approval of other people or fears their censure … now, to make the effort into self-assurance.

A long work of writing requires a much wider variety of sentence construction, arrangement, timing, than normal press writing calls upon … reading to her aloud, I saw so many typing mistakes, clumsy sentences, too much attribution (it breaks the rhythm and flow too much).

Typing is very uneasy: need new typewriter, all I need is the $.

Being under a bug, I left the office at noon and slept two hours. Missed pizza party for me b’day … “We wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for your dumb girlfriend.”

Heavy into Snyder, including Dharma Bums [Kerouac] …

We had a guy at ashram before I moved in who delighted in doing hatha exercises nude. Ran around in rain with only shorts on; barefoot in snow as well. Very stoic: would climb three flights on wood-rung ladders barefoot, balancing 100-pound rocks on his shoulders, no hand on the stone. He quit, became a Pentecostal preacher. Never understood the Dharma nor his nudity.

Kaubisch Memorial Public Library, with its translucent marble front wall.

The Dictator of Forsythia.

Hitchhikers needs a good, long Baroque subtitle!

On my 22^nd b’day, Nicki and I had big fight over transcendental meditation and broke up. And here I am, a swami.

And yet:

“She’d only known him four weeks when he popped the ring on her. It’s too fast. They’ve only known each other two months and they’re getting married in a month.

“Pam and I had been going together two-and-a-half years before we got married. I couldn’t of got a better wife, but if I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t have done it. There are just too many opportunities out there.”

Same day I convinced Kat we’d get married come summer.

~*~

~*~

At Reservoir 5, very cold, windy.

Kat, angry: “Leave me!”

Left alone, she gets better.

She doesn’t see what she has to offer. Thinks she’s bad for me.

Looked at electric typewriters, will get an Olivetti Editor 2. Was so nervous at the store I couldn’t type. Then sat in the car in rain at Van Buren Lake. A kind of morning I almost drove many miles in search of “something.”

7:IV:74, we bought the ring Saturday, now she’s feeling scared.

“You don’t know what you’re getting into,” her mother said.

Don’t know now whether it was to me or my bride-to-be.

TV host Lou Gordon’s guests Sunday night were the Kidnapper for Christ and a deprogrammed Krishna freak.

Kat’s mother believes him and is shocked I lived in one of those “communes.” Sez she, “They ought to be investigated.”

By whom? Greedy senators, bloodstained, potbellied generals?

If these “cults” brainwash kids and “hypnotize” them, what does “civilization” do? All the television commercials? As for the parochial schools, the biggest and blackest culprits? (And this is well before Trump and Fox.)  

Today, the original Christian disciples would have been the “brainwashed” by Jesus and Pontious Pilate the savior. Our bankrupt, spiritless society could not see the difference.

Who can truly identify the self-realized but the self-realized?

“If Kat went to one of those places, her father would be the first to come and get her.”

Also: “She’s too young to get married,” before attacking Debbi’s parents for “pushing” elsewhere on the family.

Slave labor? How much do you pay your wife?

Su Tung Po:

“the beauty
of the evening cannot
overcome my sorrow”

“the gentle breeze over ten thousand acres
makes a fine brocade of the waters”

As for an awkward moment, ran into her mother in Ada tonight. She’d seen the packed suitcase. “Well, if she doesn’t want to come home, that’s OK.” Wrecking our plans, all the same.

Completed five sections of The Thunder Cloud this week. From Asian back to more Western formal, via late Plath: mocking, histrionic, direct first-person address …

As I wrote to Kat, I’m feeling compromised here, so that my beliefs become hidden.

As I was asked, “Why do you wear those beads?”

If only I had replied, Sometimes they’re a rosary, for prayer.

Kat wants someone who knows what he likes. Poor me!

After all of this, I have no photos of Sam and Jeanice, nor of Helen Moran …

~*~

JOHN CHAPMAN

“Johnny Appleseed”
Swedenborgian minister
“He lived for others”
per tombstone
and engraved Bible

~*~

A declamatory style suits me best.

Two or three syllable end-line tugs, so typical!

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

The next volume, beginning in December 1973. opens with many Tibetan notes and has 3-inch left margins, a touch I still love.

Coincidentally, I revisit these after perceiving how much Kurt, from our Yakima years later, eventually photographed Tibetans in America and gained their respect, leading in time to the Dalai Lama’s.

To my delight, the local library had a solid selection of Tibetan Buddhist books, which I devoured in developing Subway Hitchhikers. Even in diluted form, you can see why in my novel Subway Visions. All thanks to Dan, the consummate librarian. He often bought paperbacks and had them bound, which was cheaper than buying hardbound. He also bought only one copy of a bestseller and had those readers on a waiting list, rather than buying multiple copies. That freed up funds for a deeper collection.

Research, research, research, and then follow your intuition.

~*~

 

~*~

Bonsai notes, not that I ever pursued that …

Sunday, 17 March ’74:

“If you keep walking in circles, you’ll never hit the center.”

Asked Kat’s mother for advice on how to approach Sam. “It’s about time! I was about to ask what your intentions were. … Did you tell your parents?”

“Not yet.”

Afterward, Kat was stunned that I had actually done it.

“Shit, looks like you’re going back to school.”

“Bird calls are so monotonous,” sez famed pianist …

Winter: when the skies are flat clouds over muddy fields / no escape for the eyes.

Well, she was flat, too.

Let’s leave it all ambiguous.

Some yellowed clippings of Howard Hintz “Nature Hints” column, one of my better additions to the paper.

Other entries became sourcing for my novel Nearly Canaan and the first novella in The Secret Side of Jaya.

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

 

Must have been after a trip to visit Celeste at her brother’s. Returning from Detroit, meteor to 15 degrees above horizon, toward Bloomdale just before I entered Fostoria

Celeste: “If you weren’t so expressive, you’d have an ugly face. Your features? You still have the eyes of a madman.”

Kat’s ceramics teacher had the students make a pot with their eyes closed and then destroy it in their fists. To teach them that in art the doing is more important than the product.

Celeste, after kissing and caressing: “I approve of Kat.”

Her surname translates = Lion!

From a novel: “You have a very, very fine piece of literature here.”

Rejection slip: “These have a truly interesting bullet-like form and some very powerful movement/section. Sorry we can’t use these.”

Kat: You never tell me anything important. LIKE YOU LOVE ME WHEN I’M NOT EXPECTING IT.

Someone, talking about wrestlers’ well-used trunks: “Yeah, and I mean well used. You didn’t hear about the match in which he had diarrhea. His opponent grabbed him – and he lost.”

A girl gushed out of Dells’, yelled my name with what I thought was the enthusiasm of familiarity. I turned, crossed the street and walked a half-block to meet her.

“You look different,” she said.

“Just washed my hair,” said I.

I couldn’t place her. A yoga student or chance acquaintance from another city?

“I thought you were in Florida,” I ventured.

Her anxious eyes queried my face.

“Who do you think I am?” I responded.

“John Paul. Why you?”

“No, I’m sorry. I’m known as Jnana, not John.”

Mary, in the restaurant window, knowing of my true love, nods at me and winks her finger, seeing only the warmth of boy-girl games.

~*~

Pennsylvania Dutch masonry details:

 

 

~*~

Slip of poetry draft on heavy paper: how much I was doing straight at the keyboard.

Boarding an elevator, can’t get off. Instead of numbered floors, there are bones by the buttons. The second bone opens on a restroom where two people want to give him/her a shower. Further up, the door opens on a big hole. “Go ahead,” a voice urges. “Walk on across.”

Yesterday, in middle of teaching a hatha class, I realized it was the anniversary of my leaving the ashram.

Here there is not enough time for anything.

Every day, I walk the same two blocks to work. Always different.

Doc drives to the office and sees nothing but traffic lights. It’s only a few blocks.

~*~

The Foster Block, 1856, is coming down. Along with the town.

Categories, genres: what is Hitchhikers? I don’t care. It’s a WRITING! That should be enough.

As for Shakespeare’s novels?

A scripture that unrolls on its own singing. A Senate, perhaps. Or sonata.

As for the worn-out art forms, still awaiting the new great novel, short story, poem, play, symphony or quartet. Back to origins, meaning springs.

~*~

Blue paper typed insert: Note how Snyder takes stories, dreams, and journal stuff and weaves this long discourse as longer poetry, not as short stories. (See Carlos Williams’ fictional prose for contrast.)

~*~

The six-day, 50-hour race at work is unsustainable, too exhausting for all of us.

July 4, in Vermillion, hearing from my future brother-in-law, principal of Bhaktaraj’s elementary schoolteacher mother, how the kid was off somewhere running a yoga temple all by himself and he didn’t get paid and had to write home for money. But then Steve piped up about how his wife conned her mother into enough money to fly to Florida or some such.

Brown rice with chop sticks is a good way to slow down on a busy day.

Kat’s roommate is from New Jersey. Asked if she knew Doris Kramer, the answer was yup. Small world. [Now, who on earth was Doris?]

Amid the flames, the Lord called between the logs and said, “Speak to the people of America and say unto the them.”

Who was Matthew Peacock?

In my journaling, rather than writing about what yoga can do for a presumed reader or student, I should have tried writing about what it was doing for me, at least more directly. There are mentions of difficulty sitting or concentrating, but those appear as failings rather than natural challenges in the discipline.

As for all of my railings against the perceived pressures of the conformist majority, if I could have only gotten around the casting of blame …

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

 

Seven days later, I’m struck by the whole concept that if one suffers enough, he (or she) will pile up great spiritual beauty and become a martyr. This approach seems to mark the principal thrust of Christianity; reflects a hatred of life, and breeds gloom. (So I observed at the time.)

Meditative action spiritual practice, in contrast, has God found within rather than above; life can be light and compassion.

“Have you been saved?”

“Yes. Have you been liberated?”

How to befuddle a Jesus freak.

The experimental aspect of yoga/Zen excites me: the practitioner is not ordered to embrace any dogmatic dictates but rather told to observe how he reacts: what he (or she) feels, tastes, hears, and intuits in a set of carefully ordered settings. The adept suspends  judgment long enough to experience first-hand.

Tonight in hatha class Bev was bewildered by the possibility of her own divinity, as introduced through Sivananda’s Practical Lessons.

Knocking down walls? “What do you have left? It seems like you are denying life.”

~*~

~*~

Thanksgiving Day: I used to think there was a glory, a kind of permanence to newspaper work: I valued craftsmanship and perfection. Now, regarding a faded, brittle 1952 clipping sent to the office last week, my feelings of temporality are reenforced. It is as permanent as an ocean wave on the shore.

Are modern civilizations, as the Club of Rome suggests, headed for THE GREAT DARK AGES within a century?

Joe Dell: “There’s no excuse for making a bad cup of coffee. Keep your equipment clean, buy a good quality coffee. Now you take these chain restaurants, they have these modern management techniques. If you’re gonna eat a chain restaurant, do it at the beginning of the month. About the middle of the month, they have to start cutting back to meet their quotas. They even buy a cheaper brand of coffee. That’s what the salesman said.”

Capitalism, not labor unions, is the ruin of the country.

Sometimes American society seems to break down into crooks and Quakers. [Now I just hope they never overlap.]

I am not at home here. I will never be.

Always the missionary.

I am my best, moving with the bright lightning bolt from deep within.

I must publish [in literary journals] within the next year.

The first American to perform magic in Europe called himself Philadelphia.

American Indians kept their magic private: make snakes appear and acorn and beanstalks grow.

The catching the bullet-in-the-teeth trick finally proved fatal to Chung Ling Soo.

Typhoid suicide.

Madness “made idiotic by the use of tobacco” with a frog in the stomach the real cause.

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

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.