Tag: Life

What do you know about jellyfish?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

With their many different species, jellyfish are found in every ocean in the world, including very cold waters of the Arctic and Antarctic. Some are even found in freshwater. Some species live in shallow, sunlit waters near the surface, while others live in the deep, dark, cold or somewhere in-between. Here are a few other points.

  1. They predate dinosaurs, bobbing along in the currents for at least 500 million years and possibly 700 million years, roughly three times the age of the first dinosaurs.
  2. They aren’t fish. They don’t have a backbone or spine, nor do they have brains, hearts, eyes, scales, gills, or fins. Instead, they swim by opening and closing their “bells.” Many scientists simply group them as “gelatinous zooplankton.”
  3. A few species have surprisingly complex vision. For instance, the box jellyfish has 24 “eyes,” two of which can see in color. It’s also believed this animal’s complicated array of visual sensors makes it one of the few creatures to have a full 360-degree view of its environment.
  4. Its lifespan depends on the species in question. Some live for just a few days or weeks, while others can live for several decades or more. One species, called the immortal jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii), is capable of reversing its life cycle and returning to a younger stage of development after it reaches sexual maturity. This means that it can essentially live forever as long as it is not killed by predators or other external factors.
  5. This ability is a major subject of research, as it could help the medical field understand how to turn cancerous cells into noncancerous cells like muscles, nerves, or skin.
  6. Jellyfish use tentacles to catch their food. These long, thin appendages on the sides and bottom of the jellyfish’s body are covered in tiny stinging cells that contain a venom to stun and capture prey. When they encounter something edible, they use their tentacles to bring it closer to their mouth, located in the center of their body.
  7. They are carnivores, meaning they eat other animals. Since they’re unable to chew their food, they usually eat small marine animals they can swallow whole, such as
  8. plankton, small fish, and crustaceans like shrimp and lobsters. They’ll also eat smaller jellyfish.
  9. The power of their stings can vary widely depending on the species. The most venomous is probably the box jellyfish, capable of killing an adult human in just a few minutes with a single sting. Each box jellyfish reportedly carries enough venom to kill more than 60 humans. To make matters worse, their stings are excruciatingly painful — it’s said the pain could kill you before the venom does.
  10. Jellyfish are eaten by larger predators, such as tuna, sea turtles, and whales. They’re even a delicacy in some places, such as in Japan and Korea. The Japanese have transformed jellyfish into candy. More often, they find their way into salads, fried into crunchy noodles, or are eaten with soy sauce like sushi.

 

A fresh perspective on the craft of poetry

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Lew Welch (1926-1971) was a Beat-era poet I’ve enjoyed very much. He was influenced by Gertrude Stein early on. At Reed College, he was a roommate of Gary Snyder and a friend of Philip Whalen – what a Trinity of fine poets! William Carlos Williams certainly thought so after meeting them in Oregon.

Here are ten insights gleaned from Welch’s take, “How I work as a poet.”

  1. All poems are translations.
  2. Language is speech. The din of a tribe, doing its business. You can’t control it, you can’t correct it, you can only listen to it and use it as it is.
  3. Speech is the most powerful single thing we human beings have.
  4. Whose kid is that? (With force!)
  5. All poetry should be that intense.
  6. It very seldom is. The few poems we praise over the centuries and across all cultures and times are more intense than this.
  7. (Discussing a copywriter, Do Not Disturb): He is in a trance. All he is trying to do is make his living writing baby-talk ads for a mail-order house. But Li Po, while extemporizing intricate lines on whatever subject the Emperor happened to throw at him, dropped, I am sure, into the same glaze-eyed state. His eyes would widen then clear, and he’d wittily speck his lines. I saw William Carlos Williams do this on a challenge from Snyder and Whalen and me back in the 1950s.
  8. Usually, of course, we don’t speak with any exactness at all. It is mostly ceremony and blather. … Exactness to what?
  9. All that trochee, iamb crap, it’s British. Forget it. It doesn’t have anything to do with us.
  10. The poet doesn’t want to be understood. He wants to be believed!

Welch left a suicide note, but his body has never been found.

 

The notebook covers themselves frame a story

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As my Bloomington/Daffodil entries in this presentation became grouped by subject, rather than chronological order, we lost a sense of the progression of the notebooks themselves. Take a look now.

  • 18, Cornell Campus Store, 90 sheets, kraft cover. Undated. The Cornell spiral-bound lined volumes have wide margins, 3½ inches. My, how I loved those wide margins! Such luxury! Poetry drafts, early ashram experiences. A few bits saved for possible current poems now.
  • 19, Cornell Campus Store, 90 sheets, kraft cover. Undated. Let me repeat, these Cornell spiral-bound lined volumes have wide margins, 3½ inches. More poetry drafts, early ashram experiences. A few bits saved for possible current poems now. (How is it I had a stash of these varied campus notebooks?)
  • 20, Cornell, 90 sheets. Undated, except one entry in late November. “Swami Jnana-Devananda into winter: ashram.” Mostly quotes: Zen, Ginsberg, Hutterites, etc. Includes Swami’s return from first India trip. The onset of my ashram residency. 23:XI:71
  • Vol 21 Winter ’72: ashram. Begins with our first week-long seminar. Some really bizarre group action, both from the guests and the staff. includes trip to Ohio for Grandma’s funeral; she died June 21
  • Vol 22 summer ’72, ashram, and well into autumn. More tracings in the water / into Sannasyn, 8:VII:72 11:45 am.
  • Unnumbered red cover stenographer book, mostly October 1972. Includes trips to New York City and Binghamton.
  • Vol 23? Starts 23:XII:72 and ends with leaving ashram.
  • Vol 24? Miscellaneous, though where the pages fit in is uncertain now:
  • 24, Yellow Varsity. Has inner cover His Holiness Sri Swami Jnana-Devananda in the middle of Erewhon 22 January 1973. So my ashram residency ended earlier than I recalled …
  • 25, green Indiana cover, beginning 19 February ’73 in a Bloomington visit, then turning into the first of the Fostoria series. Some overlap with the previous volume.
  • 26, hunter green cover, beginning December 1973. Filed out of sequence, opening with many Tibetan notes. Three-inch left margins.
  • 27, blue IU (Aristotle’s Inc.), 23:III:73 on inside cover
  • 29, hunter green, 17:I:74, Fostoria. By now I’m dating the entries, in one of the new styles (colons or periods, depending). National Blank Book Company Holyoke, Mass. Wide margins!
  • 30, BGSU, 24:VII:74, Fostoria. Verge of marriage.
  • END OF CRATE 1: the plastic milk carton cubes, which were so handy in all of my moves from place to place and then turning into instant bookshelves later. Remember those?
  • 31, Hunter Green cover, begins 18:X:74 Another wide-margin notebook. Glory be!
  • 32, avocado green Penrite 4 Subject Divider Theme Book, 98 cents, 2409 W. Second St., Marion Indiana 46952. Undated entries, mostly stabs at verse and a few other notes in closing up in Fostoria and traipsing on to Bloomington. The last three divider sections remained blank.
  • 28, green Campus twin-wire, 59 cents, product of Mead Corporation, Dayton, Ohio. Out of order.

This does have me wondering if you saved any of your college notebooks or the like in your life journey to wherever you are now. What souvenirs have you kept? Or what have you intentionally discarded? Perhaps even with regrets later? Photos, letters, cards as well?

By the way, I hate to think what a spiralbound notebook costs nowadays.

 

‘Nature lover’ doesn’t begin to cover it

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Do you require getting out in nature when it comes to maintaining your sanity and soul? I certainly do. In fact, one of my struggles living in Fostoria was the relative lack of that exposure, even though the small city was surrounded by some very productive farmland. I wanted something a little wilder and freer.

Here are ten perspectives:

  1. “In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.” — Alice Walker
  2. “I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.” — John Burroughs
  3. “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” — Lao Tzu
  4. “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
  5. “In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.” — Aristotle
  6. “Nature is the art of God.” — Dante Alighieri
  7. “There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” — Rachel Carson
  8. “If you can’t be in awe of Mother Nature, there’s something wrong with you.” — Alex Trebek
  9. “Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.” — Gary Snyder
  10. “You are a guest of nature — behave.” — Friedensreich Hundertwasser

 

A few old newsroom notes

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Reporter Jerry Handte, someone I saw as a grizzled old-timer. Threw the word “hardscrabble” at me in a story, one I didn’t know. Changed my perception of him.

AP’s middle-class conformity.

Contrived news stories, with formulated sentimental reactions: hippie story, Agnew story, dog or handicapped child story, medical/scientific breakthroughs, etc.

“Chimes,” the Evansville Courier’s wrap-up of church activities.

The Press won’t hire anyone else as long as it can slide by as it is.

~*~

The tug toward middle-class: security: keep job, get a degree, build retirement, home, house, and family. It’s gonna be so hard telling Mom and Dad I’m splitting.

I’m becoming like them: Don’t rock boat, don’t do deep fixes on stories, let it slide, why bother with better headlines and layouts, etc.

Is a job search always a tribulation?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

After reviewing old clippings: “How close my writing has come to greatness … or to babble.”

At the RT, how much our photography carried us, especially considering how thin, until the end, our local coverage was – how important our Saturday front-page feature was in setting us apart and giving the staff a fairer schedule. .

Morning on long-distance calls to Bordner, Aldrich, Swaisgood, L. Nighswander.

Other fronts, Russ called back, said Larry Hale expected an “editor’s position” in several weeks … So much confusion, would I really want to go back there?

And the letter from Tacoma, $20,000 arts and entertainment, if they get the opening … What do I make of this? McClatchy upswing versus Gannett versus a fighting crew at the foot of Pike’s Peak?

 

So what about Colorado?

Imagination still reeling with thoughts of the Rockies. A place to be at peace? Low pay may be an incentive to freelance or grow.

The West may spur a novel. I’m too boxed in here.

On the brink of Colorado. A time of despair, anxiety, and waiting through the layoff.

Early May, Colorado Springs, round-trip ticket, $189.

On flight out: half of southern Indiana is forest. Region defined the sudden shift to farmland where the hills give way to flatness.

Contrasting smoothness of disked fields next to rougher plowed.

Strip-mine lakes outside Terre Haute.

~*~

Colorado Springs Sun: Don’t feel there’s much I can do here – to many “trained incompetencies,” exhausting and routine-work hours. B.B. [the editor who was to hire me] is leaving for Detroit after eight months here.

No local color in the paper. Newsroom looks and smells like RT. Computer (VDT) may help – question is, how much?

Upon seeing first UPI lead, realized how clear, precise, and simple my own style has become. Newspaper work may destroy that – at least, I feel it slipping away.

No sense of nuance, of grace, of individual voice – that is, true style – in this news writing, which exists as stilted and artificial as any literary style. It is divorced from the human voice and from American speech.

 

Another Far West facet

All along during my stint as a research associate, I was reading technical material on Indigenous artwork. Here are some sample entries from my Bloomington journaling.

 

 

 

 

~*~

Back from the Rockies

Indiana feels too thick, too green and wet in contrast. My sinuses are acting up again. I’m out-of-place in America.

Horoscope says a month or two before big change. We’ll see.

Looking at the cons: long hours (nine to ten hours a day), ending at 2 or 3 am; low pay, publisher interference, no investigative reporting, and someone named Dana …

I’m having to admit that not getting that job was a blessing. I would have been engulfed. The trip was, though, at my own expense, devouring half of our savings. 

 

Just where might I be heading?

Doubts about “where I want to go.” Should we make the plunge into NYC? Find an agent yet? (I’d rather wait two more years.) I feel the necessity of steady income, yet also feel “duty to yourself” calling. Turned down music critic position at Herald Telephone. Hard for me to say No to any job, even with low pay. ($10/review; negotiate on features, say $50/page.) Don’t think I really want newspaper work. That’s hard to admit.

Copy editors are a kind of janitor and paid accordingly. Hence, I should concentrate on power-writing. (Like advertising?)

My own failings coming home as nobody wants to hire me, not yet, free me from the damn suspense/suspension with half of our goods packed in crates and warping corrugated boxes, the general feelings of inutility accented by this ungodly heat and humidity

Late June, returned yesterday from two days [of housesitting] at Dietz’ … and found a letter waiting from Yakima. Very exciting prospect, work split between copy editing and general assignment reporting. A nice balance, good pay, exactly where I’d like to be – the dry side of the mountains. And Kat’s very excited. Hope everything works out. (Received a formal job application to fill out and return.) Getting anxious to get the address situation straightened out and new pieces into the mail. …

Wherever we wind up, I’d like to publish a few chapbooks of my work, for free distribution to friends and critics (and some for sale). Would also like to get a typist to do final drafts of potential freelance pieces. Will need to arrange more office-type space … we need Kat’s extra income …

Already, we’re anticipating spending that extra income … new car, furniture (that’s her idea), new clothes, bigger place, airfares …

A call today from Center for Law and Poverty in Indianapolis, a job I’m not too crazy about but one that might be the springboard for the southern Indiana magazine/tabloid I’ve been pondering.

Other calls to/from Yakima, which sounds better and better but less and less likely, like an impossible dream.

Nancy Neubert saying Yakima is a very nice, good place: agricultural, wealthy, conservative, hydroelectric cheap electricity, good produce abundant and cheap, Spanish and English …

The m.e., there since March, Steve Kent, from Albany, New York, thus appreciated my Binghamton angle. A good phone conversation.

Located Snyder’s lookout towers on the map, though Sourdough was not shown. Some of the other sites he relates, though, were.

Spicer: “West Coast is something nobody with sense would understand.”

Good place to end this journal. 10:20 pm, night of new moon, unseen through the haze

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.

 

Aftermath of the layoff: anxiety and rest

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I have had the leisure of a year in these woods – some weeks, every day – to watch and learn and assume their changes. Meaning, I’m turning.

 My insecurity over income – as for antiques as a line, seems akin to Swami Rudi and his disciple (the routes not taken!) …

At least I was on unemployment compensation.

The dripping wet richness of these soils.

Meeting, with all the people I wanted to get to know better.

Electrical outage: Can’t write, can’t cook, TV won’t work, music’s silent, too dark to read. Our life has come to this?

Horses can tear up trails, too.

~*~

We lived on Leonard Springs Road, named for a ravine and at the time hidden cave beyond our home. My frequent explorations inspired a set of poems, which can be found at my Thistle Finch blog. The terrain, which included the then breached city water reservoir, has now become a public park, as you”ll find in a photo album at Thistle Finch. The woods had more than its share of trash at the time.

 

 

Images by Vmenkov via Wikimedia Commons.

~*~

Don’t remember this, must have been a Mtg picnic at the Dietz’:

Crazy sunfish, or some other board with two sails, won’t steer right, won’t steer left, the wind’s unsteady, shifting, blowing us over again and again.

We can’t go back, keep going in circles.

Two hours in May, cold lake water, chilled to bone before we run ashore on the dam.

Bill comes out in his outboard boat to tow us back.

A hot shower, group hug, and two cups of coffee couldn’t warm us from that.

Half of our goods packed, not knowing whether we’ll be here or faraway – no way to plan.

Kat upset (but trying not to show it) because her husband is a bum (she keeps wanting to see me working around the house, but I feel cramped in/crammed in) … I’m wondering how inert a human can be … she’s not working at her art, either …

 A break in the 90-degree weather: “bearable, even pleasant like Upstate bright sunlight amid small clouds.

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.

Workshop, part two …

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Plain sheet, “Session w. EO: 16 December 75”

Qs about my future direction: poetry/fiction or social science, technical editor? (Would like to pull them all together, in manner, say, of Norman Mailer.) We need to think these through.

If top-notch soc sci editor, need further methodological/statistical expertise (Tuftde’s reader?) Also, the Psychological Assn. stylebook. NEED TO EXAMINE TABLES IN OUR OWN MATERIAL. That means going beyond the text side of the work.

How does a niche writer/editor survive outside New York City/Washington? How does one get out of the newspaper game, with its dead end in the future?

Need to invest time in reflection, in serious review, in gestation of a piece (and of myself).

Schedule normal [regular] half-hour/week session with EO, putting more concerns on paper, increasing the communication between us.

With tables, I need to verbalize what’s happening: create sentences summarizing the data: check the data with the text. Haven’t been doing that.

Revisiting this, I cringe. The prophecy is on the wall.

~*~

A break, a vacation – chance to think, breathe, reflect – pushing too long, with too little success …

Notes of struggles at work, in my own literary efforts, and at home …

Pages of attempting to come to grips with editing statistics …

Induction / Deduction
Specific / general
To general / to specific (syllogism)

Probability soups, judgment soups, convenience soups, etc.

Frequency or distribution of measures: straight tables, numerical &/or percentage, as I noted.

~*~

3 feb 76: Valve blown on Omkara; engine will be torn down to see how bad the damage is. Long conversation with EO and RBP today. Feel they are half pleased, half unhappy with my work. Very frustrating. Job very demanding but feel most of the time I’m working in a vacuum. RBP wants more incision on statistical recitation, more devotion (upset at Thanksgiving trip away), more initiative (finding outlets and ways of repackaging our materials). EO needs more time to write, as does RBP. Send them memos, rather than speaking, unless in a meeting.

 Graduate Library, all the floor indication lights/numbers on the elevators worked today,

Vol. 40, blue IU, 5:III:76, opens: Layoff.

Portentous day

Kat gone to Louisville (w/ classmates?).

Meeting w/ EO & RBP expecting the worst on “the newsletter and the future” turned out to be two-months’ notice. “The time has come to realize our paths are diverging and to part while it’s still cordial.”

EO saw our different directions, the increasing math editing to come, plus the budget delays.

Pflum: “They always do it so gently.”

Looking at options for future, and whether Kat could complete her degree in a year. Freelance editing? “The insecurity scares me.” Among the scenarios I put on the plate: go to Sycamore, clean up Mom’s old place next door, learn antiques for a year or two …

“I feel abandoned and unbelievably alone. Haven’t felt this way since meeting Kat … Noz is lonely and trying to bat this pen”

I need to recapture and regenerate the joy of life, the simple contagious power to live …

WILD-ness and clarity.

 What an emotional stress the Workshop has been – the anxieties, deadlines missed, wild-goose chases; their anticipation of 60-hour weeks (yet also quality and originality), the deadening meetings and academic facades.

I sense one principal has never suffered. He lacks that depth, or didn’t learn from if he did, or else formed a shell.

These days I wonder how much the movement toward quantification in political science (statistics rather than theory or philosophy or psychology even) has led to the conundrum today: surveys and strategies for votes – an absence of moral values, convictions, or purpose.

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.

There were a few continuing trips to ashram

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I have never meditated that it wasn’t productive, even when there were no thoughts.

At times I see yoga [or real religion] as a way of preparing for death; at others, I see it as a way of intensifying life. It is one thing to acknowledge something exists or occurs but quite another to embrace it. For the unenlightened, their glance is fleeting: as soon as they’ve identified the object or movement by name, they bounce on to something else. The yogi or artist or philosopher, for that matter, looks beyond the surface and into the structure and ways it fits into the whole of the scene. It’s looking with in a sense of oneness, blending the unity and changing faces of nature. This occurs very deep in the heart, or what the Psalms call soul.

Leaving the ashram can bring a period of “awari” and “subari,” as the Japanese put it – poverty and solitude – to test and strengthen the previous lessons with the master.

Inner strength is more than an idea or a philosophy: it is an exercise, an ongoing practice. When the routine falls away, how does one keep the core strong?

Sometime in March, Kat and I visited the Poconos ashram. We helped prepare for a Seder. Here, a room half-full of young adults raised Christian in a center ostensibly teaching a strand of Hindu faith, inviting a broader Jewish community to the celebration. One Spirit! A concept of communion taking a fresh depth and joy. This was also Holy Week, and the Seder was on Maundy Thursday.

When I returned to the ashram on another visit, I heard, “The realizations have been very heavy” or “We’ve been learning a great deal.” Same thing, over and over. My insight? What is learned is not as important as the experience of learning, or perhaps relearning. Human life is nothing more than consciousness.

In contrast, so much of life in the secular world reduces and dulls one’s existence. Routine, noise, responsibilities, focus on products deflect us.

The new meditation room is gorgeous and airy, like a cloud, rich big windows, spacious exercise mats, cherry wood paneling left unoiled … Swami’s baby grand piano amid plants in the alcove … a seemingly “homemade” Dharma Hall.

Kat fasted three days

What I also realized was that moving back to the ashram with Kat in tow was not a possibility.

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.