Field of white flowers
like snow
as the girl from Harlem
one day proclaimed
Tag: Hippie
Bouncing around in my head
As I noted, way back.
- Stare at candle, unblinking, 15 minutes. (Learning to concentrate attention in preparation for meditation.)
- My ankle hurts, my eyes do blink, my body twitches
- My tongue runs away.
- We had 108 inches of snow by April 1. (The 36-incher hit a few days later.)
- It’s funny, I should go with the daughter of a cattle rancher and come out loving seafood and chicken livers.
- Title for a poem or collection? One Thousand American Fungi.
- I walk around in a shroud of music.
- Walking with my long hair past a barber shop, I feel guilty: the barber, reading magazines, no business.
- Why do girls use paper tissues, but guys prefer handkerchiefs?
- So what happened to the entry that was here? Poof!
Look for the witness in the work, too
Cinema critic Roger Ebert was talking of the importance of the witness in every movie and pointing to the places where the character appeared in the film under discussion, mostly in a lower corner. The comment flashed me to the reality of how often the hardest thing to see is what should be the most obvious. It’s not just the elephant in the room, but also smaller things we take for granted.
One way or another, all fiction is built on the observer, who is also to some degree an outsider or misfit, too. (If there are any exceptions, I’d love to hear them.) Four of my novels, for instance, were intuitively built around a photographer, a profession that makes Cassia’s father a well-trained witness. In turn, as she investigates his archives, she, too, becomes a witness, even before she starts commenting on his earlier life.
Of course, as a reader, you also become a witness. Or even a voyeur, as Camille Paglia has contended. It’s almost like every page is a microscope slide to be interpreted.
Curiously, I now see this also at play in a long-term non-fiction project in my life. Forty 40 years ago, seemingly by accident, I became involved in trying to uncover my father’s ancestry. I thought we were simply homogenous Midwesterners who had always been in Ohio from its beginning. What I discovered, though, was that one branch was – but German-speaking and largely akin to Amish. My name-line, however, was Quaker by way of North Carolina and its slaveholding culture. Both strands were outsiders to the larger society and also pacifist. It opened my eyes to alternative histories and to a recognition that stories don’t always have to resolve nicely – three people may record their memories quite differently, and maybe all three are true, if not factually accurate.
Oh yes, the research was often collaborative, with correspondence going and coming from others working on parts of the puzzle. It wasn’t always quite as lonely as drafting fiction or poetry.
To my surprise, as my novel What’s Left was taking shape, Cassia started assembling bits about her Greek-American grandparents, who had died before her birth, and then beyond to her great-grandparents, who brought the family to the New World. Like me, she found valuable clues in the surviving snapshots and formal portraits regarding their personalities, as she also did in the letters and other documents.
None of my ancestors came by way of Ellis Island, and on Dad’s side they were all in this country by the time of the Revolutionary War. I once pondered doing a series of novels on them, but I’m still intimidated by the technical challenges – a realistic language they can speak and we can understand being high among them.
Witness, I might add, has an extra dimension in Quaker thinking. It’s not just what one sees or hears but how one lives. The goal is integrity, as in wholeness or consistency. Is that what others see in us or our lives and work? Or even as our goal and ideal, even when we fall short reaching for it?
And, as a final twist, I’m realizing that the Indigenous perspective of looking back seven generations when making decisions for the future would take me back to the birth of Orphan George in 1701.
I do find that mindboggling.
~*~
You can find my genealogical gleanings on my Orphan George blog.
The novels, meanwhile, are available in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. They’re also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain them.
A baroque twist runs through my distilled expression
Samuel Johnson and his baroque literary constructions gave a big push to my writing ambitions after high school. Let me just say I’ve loved the clarity of Mozart from my adolescence on, and Bach and Handel have risen in my estimation in the years since. The brash English master fell right into that, though I now see again just how irreverent he was, despite all of his professed orthodoxy.
What it means it that I’m comfortable reading and writing certain kinds of complex sentences that are foreign to modern readers. Perhaps I should apologize? At least it’s not the only way I put sentences in line. Still, there’s a richness that’s missing in Hemingway and his progeny.
And here I am, drilled in the newspaper journalism Papa Ernie claimed was his inspiration. Think again. (Ernie? Makes me think of Pyle, and his big desk at the Indiana Daily Student, where I once collaborated.)
But then there’s Nicholson Baker’s effortless spinning of sentences of 250 to 300 words spanning a full book page. What wonder!
My wife has noted the dichotomy between my fondness for many Old Ways and the rule-breaking, experimental edge of so much of my writing and thinking. She can point, for instance, to my fascination with the fiery writings of early Quakers in the mid-1660s placed in contrast to wild hippie extremes.
Are they really that different, though? I feel they enrich and deepen each other.
Well, to go back to the late ‘60s, let me share a personals ad I placed in the Purdue Exponent, which charged by the word.
~*~
ANNOUNCING
Dr. Samuel Johnson’s first eventful super cosmic transcendental celestial love in, incorporating the essence of mystical human enigmatic & existential psychic understanding & zodialogical causes of karmic experiences in the metaphysical process.
Syllogistic examination of cerebral chemo electrical phenomena are hitherto banished to the outermost polarities of unconscious stimulation for the duration of the aforesaid soiree.
All persons, souls, and spirits seeking admittance to the heurese beuverie must present evidence of psychological and physical preparedness & predispositions for the event. Mind blowing, seclusivenessly introverted behavior, and abstinence from mind-liberating drugs, drink, or sex, will be considered detrimental to the well-being of the sociological matrix selected for hedonistic propensities &, to avoid contamination & empoisonment of the purity of the greater society therein gathered, will be cause for expulsion.
Adoption & encasement in persona & masquerade are desired for the happening; the playwright hereby assumes no further responsibility for the roles assumed by the characters. Coming soon at your local neighborhood hanging, where all else be suspended for the duration.
RSVP
~*~
In case you’re wondering, she wasn’t impressed.
I have come a long way since then, in more ways than one.
My, that is embarrassing.
That said, you can find my novels in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. They’re also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain them.
As for fireworks
Let’s start with a pitch I once considered using.
“Hi, my name is Jnana Hodson and I’m a retired hippie. One of millions and, unlike many, I’m not embarrassed to admit it was a time to remember, no matter how short we’ve fallen from its potential. What is often overlooked is that the central element was the hippie chick. My novel, Hippie Farm, celebrates her in her many guises, even if you can’t even use the term “chick” anymore without being corrected. At the time, though, it was a badge of honor and invitation – one leading, in this case, to a rundown farmhouse in the mountains outside a college town. May I introduce you to the full story?”
Well, that attempt has now been woven into what stands as Pit-a-Pat High Jinks. Still, as I also proclaimed:
“In many of my novels, the hippie movement opened their minds. Or at least their horizons. Or even a few hearts. What’s most opened yours?”
That led to these points:
- Crucial to the outcome were personal transformations that few today will speak of.
- We’re still caught between two worlds (or) unfinished business. I wanted to present my work as letters from a retired hippie or letters to youth and a call to action.
- I wanted to tell them I’m sorry about what you’re inheriting. I’m sorry about the parts we messed up.
- And yet, it wasn’t all our fault. We were too trusting, for one thing. And so green, as in naive.
- Looking around, there are the old losers and the sense of hippie as essentially a girl thing.
- It was a youth movement. What you need to know about its legacy is this.
- Economics:. globalization and digitalization versus small-is-beautiful. As for the tax base? And the kleptomaniac One Percent? How about selling yourself into slavery?
- Relationships: the restructuring of marriage and family (dare we consider ashrams and similar shared householding).
- Environment and the earth: Global warming is a reality, despite years and millions of dollars expended in its denial.
- Justice and equality. Dare I say more?
- Alternative lifestyle. Think of clothing, the arts (Edge City), food, even basic skills such as use of a broom or hammer.
- Drugs, alcohol, etc. Legalization is one thing, appropriate usage another. Jail is not the deciding point. Oppressive life situations, however, are.
- Yup, the whole system of shaping our children.
- I’m not going there today, other than to say deep readjustments are in order. I hope they get to the bottom rather than enrich the most elite of society.
- Discipline and self-discipline. For me, that leads to the next.
- Spirituality and religion. Personal experience of something divine and then holy community.
Now, back to those contributor’s notes possibilities:
- As an unabashed political liberal, Jnana despairs for public sanity.
- He knows nothing good can come from a politics of hate.
- Jnana is a Lincoln Republican who votes Democrat by default.
- I was UPROOTED, repeatedly. In location, relationship, my career, even faith.
- The undertow or rip current, pulling me away. I expected to live in large cities, my life filled with opera and symphony performances. Instead, it’s been mostly small cities in rural conditions.
- My life journey has had little resemblance to what I anticipated from college on. Repeatedly, it seemed I was uprooted – in location, career, relationship, and even spirit – just as I began to address a situation fully. Outwardly, the result has been fragmentary, unified only in the mind and heart that embrace its many facets.
- In recent years, much of my experience of wandering and sojourn has constellated in an investigation of the metaphors of Light and Seed as they were expressed in the early Quaker movement. I now perceive a semblance between the Dharma bums of Asian religious practices and the vagabond ministry of itinerant Quaker ministers, and find comfort in their legacy, with its parallels to my own movements.
- After throwing myself into business crusades and tumultuous relationships, I consider myself a survivor. I love classical music and opera, mountaintops and the North Atlantic, Quaker Meeting and New England contradancing.
- For me, poetry is a state of mind. Its essential element is silence, linking it to sacred (An impossibility, of course, considering the nature of words. And yet!)
Or, to reconnect with Ezra Pound, literature is slow news, something allowing some breathing space and reflection, rather than the minute-by-minute confusion before us.
Which takes me back to Scripture, diving into antiquity for parallels to today.
Now, let’s sit back tonight for some gloriously fleeting pyrotechnics. Something that might inspire and awe almost everyone.
There’s even a Summer of Love
The places I lived in the settings covered in my novel Pit-a-Pat High Jinks long ago fell to the wrecking ball, yet the memories live on. The fictionalized story covers friends and lovers, along with near-misses and poverty-line entry-level work life in an out-of-the-way town and surrounding countryside while venturing out on one’s own after college. It had its downs and ups, including a Summer of Love that included a remote mountain lake.
Believe me, you can’t make up details like these, though you can amplify or reshape others.
It’s one of five novels I’m making available for FREE during Smashword’s annual end-of-the-year sale, which ends January First. The ebook comes in the digital platform of your choice. Do note that it includes adult content, so you may have to adjust your filters when ordering.
Think of this as part of my after-Christmas sale, except that these items are FREE! Remember, you risk nothing in acting now.
For details, go to the book at Smashwords.com.
These were some fun times
Maybe you remember your first year or two after college and trying to get your feet on the ground.
My wild novel Pit-a-Pat High Jinks relates, more or less, how it went for me way back when. It wasn’t always high, either, despite the stereotypes. These days, I see the episodes extending into the forties for many younger adults and their friends. Do check it out and see how it relates to your own experiences.
It’s of five ebooks I’m making available to you for FREE during Smashword’s annual end-of-the-year sale. You can pick yours out in the digital platform of your choice. Do note that it includes adult content, so you may have to adjust your filters when ordering.
Think of this as my Christmas present to you. In the meantime, be cool and stay warm.
For details, go to the book at Smashwords.com.
Pick up your free copy now
Celebrity writer Tom Wolfe lamented that nobody had written the big hippie novel, something akin to the Great American Novel, but he was wrong. I’ve said so in some previous postings here.
For my part, let me invite you to Daffodil, Indiana, as its tranquil – some might even say dopy – campus goes radical. No outside agitators are needed in the face of the ongoing repression. The Revolution of Peace & Love is its own calling.
Daffodil Uprising is one of five novels I’m making available to you for FREE during Smashword’s annual end-of-the-year sale. The ebook is available to you in the platform of your choice.
Think of this as my Christmas present to you. Or, as we used to say, If it feels good, do it!
For details, go to the book at Smashwords.com.
I’ve never done this before
This may seem crazy, but for Smashword’s annual End-of-the-Year sale, I’ve decided to offer five of my novels to you FREE.
It’s your chance to pick up these ebooks at no risk. If you like the stories, perhaps you’ll leave a brief review and five stars at the website, just to encourage other readers who come along in the future.
The titles are Daffodil Uprising, when youth across the country went freaky; Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, with lovers and friends setting forth in premature adulthood; Subway Visions, with wild rides through the Underground; What’s Left, as a bereft daughter tries to make sense of her bohemian parents and close-knit Greek family; and Yoga Bootcamp, where Asian spirituality sizzles in a back-to-the-earth funky farm not far from the Big Apple.
Think of it as my Christmas present to you. I hope you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
The sale starts today and ends January first. Please don’t delay! Go to Smashwords.com for more.
Acid test novelist and poet: Richard Brautigan (1935-1984)
Fairy tales for adults. That’s what I first thought on encountering Brautigan weeks after I graduated from college. More accurately, playful children’s stories for young adults of a hippie leaning.
With his surrealistic or perhaps warped vision taking a simple voice, and his fondness of simile and imagery, his was a unique voice that amused many of us and annoyed many others.
Trout Fishing in America barely touched on fishing of any sort. Confederate General at Big Sur and In Watermelon Sugar were about, well, shyness and innocence as much as anything.
His usually very short poems were mousetraps of longing and loss.
Their freshness still beat 99 percent of the literature that surrounded them.
If only his sweet sadness weren’t soured by the pressures of success.
Jnana's Red Barn 