You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Chief Seattle, who appears in the Grilled Salmon section of this poetry collection, is an elusive figure in American history. Whether he pulled a fast one is another question, but he did get a major city named in his honor.
As for his role here?
I enjoy his company. I hope you do, too.
~*~
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You know the disclaimer, “Any resemblance of the characters to real people living or dead …” Something along the lines of purely unintentional.
But let’s be frank. The fiction is that you can create a character without having someone real in front of you, somewhere in your past or present. No, you need flesh and blood somewhere. Anything else would be a caricature.
It’s a special problem when you’re composing in a semi-autobiographical vein. You’re trying to be true to the dictum, Write about what you know. The details, especially.
(Oh? What, then, makes it fiction? Other than changing a few dates?)
Admittedly, the personalities work best when you take your inspiration and abstract it, so that a real individual would no longer recognize himself or herself – or those who were no way involved will imagine they, themselves, were.
And, by way of further confession, I’ll note that my most recent outings have led me to new characters lacking immediate introductions for me – but I’ll know them when I meet them if I haven’t already come across them here and there in pieces.
But back to the argument at hand.
I have one character, Nita, who runs through four of my five Hippie Trails novels and is a major character in the new one I’m writing, set years later. She was inspired by impressions I had of a friend’s girlfriend – or more accurately, mostly his impressions conveyed to me at the time – as I sat down to draft a half-dozen years or so later. She becomes a catalyst for much that happens around her.
In reality, we all drifted away.
And then, a few years ago, I met her again.
Nothing like I’d remembered. Or the idealized character in my fiction, now infused with another two or three people I’ve met. The lines blur.
I can say this person never did X, Y, or Z, unlike the character. Or that these two worked together on a controversial project or became known for certain accomplishments. In fact, she doesn’t resemble the other one at all, not anymore, if she ever did.
Still, it’s an eerie feeling. Something other than deja vu. Something still spurring gratitude for the inspiration.
For more on the series, click here.
~*~
Living in a temperate zone where green returns after gray slumber, I always find the leafy proliferation a wonder. It’s a festive temple, of sorts, and a comfort.
Restore your soul in its abundance.
~*~
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Rarely do you stand at the summit. It’s a lesson of life.
Even on the trail, the climax awaits, somewhere overhead.
We need something to look up to, from infancy on.
And then there are clouds – or the surrounding range.
Or the streams, threading together, below.
~*~
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The lessons remain:
Not a bad model for a poem, either. Or a whole collection to pack along the way.
~*~
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The Olympic Peninsula is an extraordinary extreme in continental United States. It juts out in the far upper left-hand corner, surrounded on three sides by ocean and inlets and featuring a jagged mountain range in its center. Much of it is lush and tangled, and there is relatively little human habitation.
It could be a land of the gods, as its very name suggests. Or as the Native Americans, with their stories still intact, will relate. Forget Zeus and Hera, then – this is a panoply arising from American roots and its westward focus.
Come along into the rainforest and then camp just in from the beach. As I did, collecting these poems.
~*~
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In the buildup of national elections, once again a major influence remains the elephant in the room. I’m referring to the legacy – make that plural, legacies – of the hippie outburst, especially in contrast to those on the Vietnam war side of the divide.
The wounds and tensions haven’t gone away. Just look at the continuing proliferation of POW-MIA black flags across the landscape, on one side.
For the other, the lines are much more hazy yet festering. As I’ve been arguing, hippies came – and still come – in all varieties and degrees, and likely nobody ever fit what’s become the media stereotype. With the end of the military draft, the movement lost a crucial motivating force and focusing definition.
Complicating the situation was the distancing many youths on the antiwar side felt when it came to politics. With its support of the military at the time, liberal politics were tainted with outdated Cold War ideologies like those of the conservative side. For hippies, radical was the label of honor. And the Democratic Party base of the left was splintered as its youthful potential allies had nowhere to turn or direct their forces in the political arena.
The horror meant going from a hawkish LBJ administration to one of Richard Nixon.
Fast-forward now to the present American landscape. Gone are the grandparents and parents of many of the now senior baby boomers – the core of the hippie movement versus the older generations. Yet political candidates still tiptoe around many of the reality issues, beginning with marijuana and other illicit substances, as if they’re too hot to touch. Let’s get real. Want to talk about litmus tests?
As we look at candidates, ask where each stands on a scale of continuing issues from the hippie stream. I find it enlightening.
Well, we have Bernie running straight true to the cause. Hillary, more cautiously so. But on the right? Let me suggest being wary of anyone in the pro-war camp who hasn’t served. Period. As for other life experiences?
~*~
All of this returns me to my Hippie Trails series of novels. I’d love for you to come along. Just click here.
It’s tune in, turn on, and take action in this tale of campus intrigue. Little does a small band in a remote college town realize its opposition to small-ante bureaucracy goes straight to the state capital. And then Washington and the Mekong Delta are another matter as the hippie movement hits tranquil Daffodil. Nothing will remain quite the same.
As the headline said:
BOTCHED DRUG BUST BACKFIRES.
When narcotics agents made an early morning knock-down-the-doors raid on the twelfth-floor of one of the high-rise dormitory towers, they turned up nothing – and were surrounded by irate residents before they could frame anyone, either.
“If you think the slaying of innocent students at Jackson State University was merely a racial atrocity,” Lakasha proclaimed, “you’re not seeing the big picture. It’s about an attack on civil rights – freedoms that belong to all of us. You don’t have to live in a big city to live in ghetto housing. Every student in Daffodil lives in a ghetto. Where I come from, we have a word for high-rise housing like these big dorms – the Projects. And the pigs who come charging into the Projects act just like those who busted in on the twelfth floor the other night. Never mind whether they find anything or not. Look, the university’s demanding that the students pay for the busted doors and busted furniture and busted walls. That’s why they call it a bust in the first place. Wake up, America! Demand the names of the ‘unnamed informants,’ the ones who were so wrong about the presence of illicit substances in those rooms. Wake up, I say! Mississippi’s closer to Daffodil than you think!”
~*~
To learn more about my novel, go to my page at Smashwords.com.
After I moved from the ashram, I spent a year-and-a-half in a small city that very much resembles one I call Prairie Depot in several of my novels. And then I returned to my university as a research associate.
While our institute was set in a town very much like Daffodil, there was one difference I omitted. By this time, the town had a large urban ashram and, for several reasons, I chose not to attend classes or other activity there but instead began sitting with the Quakers in their mostly silent worship in a country meetinghouse.
Still, as the joke went, the ashram owned a third of the town. It had a vegetarian restaurant or two, maybe a bakery by this point, a house painting company, art gallery, significant real estate, and maybe much more.
The university, of course, owned the rest.
Or so the joke went, back in the mid-’70s.
My own experience is much more along the lines of what I describe in my novel, Ashram. We barely owned anything.
Jnana's Red Barn 