You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Injustice of all sorts. Whiny diatribes and mud-slinging, character assassination.
TV/Rock obsession. Illiteracy. Consumerism.
Loud sound systems in cars. Drivers who think they bought the highway. Drivers who ignore changing lights.
Clutter and pollution.
Senseless regulations, corporate, not just governmental, let’s be fair.
Being put on hold while I’m present in a store.
Presumptuous artists.
The super-rich.
Country roads sometimes carry imaginative monikers.
Here are some ones that stand out in my encounters:
For him, that also shook up the universe.
The 150th anniversary of the birth of the American maverick takes place Sunday, the 20th, and despite his relative obscurity, he was a giant as an uncompromising modernist classical composer and as an innovative executive in the insurance industry.
Born in Connecticut and a graduate of Yale, Charles Ives’ musical transformation was certainly one of the most extraordinary cases in history, made all the more remarkable by the fact that he was forced to compose largely without hearing many of his adventurous works played by an orchestra or soloists until a half-century or more after their composition. Even the sonatas, songs, and chamber music suffered from widespread neglect.
As a matter of confession, I am quite fond of his music, from the wonderfully rich late-Romantic scores of his youth to the craggy, thorny modernist fireworks of only a few years later. I am among those who feel scandalized by the fact that this season orchestras aren’t playing even one of his symphonies in celebration, much less all four. Two of them did win Pulitzers, by the way, once they were finally aired, and riotous cheers often break out at the conclusion when the works are performed.
For a biographical overview of this American original, turn to my post, “Thoughts while listening to Charles Ives,” of November 5, 2013, at my blog, Chicken Farmer I still love you.
Today, I’m offering a Double Tendrils. Let’s start with ten quotations about music.
~*~
And here are ten Ives quotes about life itself.
Living adjacent to the tribe’s Sipayik reservation opens new perspectives in my awareness. It’s not quite osmosis, but perhaps a willingness to listen.
One of the big breakthroughs for the tribe has involved access to 36 wax cylinders from 1890, the first field recordings ever made, when anthropologist Walter Jesse Fewkes came to Maine to test the Edison equipment before he headed off to Navajo and Hopi lands.
For decades, the recordings were kept in museum vaults, unknown to the tribe. And then, slowly, they came into consciousness, first through taped copies full of scratchy static and more recently cleaned up into digitalized files that tribe historians are carefully gleaning.
As a writer, I believe in the power of stories and the importance of language itself.
Here are some of the insights I’m hearing from my neighbors.
The model in the photo I selected for the original cover of the story that stands today as Nearly Canaan was nearly too perfect. I even had to tweak the description of Jaya on the pages inside to make for a better match. Much later, I came across other photos from the shooting and was appalled.
In yoga circles, it’s what we would call Maya.
Apparently, I had shifted Jaya’s spiritual identity from Sufi much earlier than I recalled. Now that I had a solid backstory for her in my novel Yoga Bootcamp, I could turn my attention to the messy trove that had sprawled into three big books. Thanks to Cassia from What’s Next, I was now intent on distilling them back into one. Trying to compress them into the maximum 120,000 upper limit of a big novel meant having to hone more than one hundred pages of manuscript. And that’s before I decided to add a fourth section for fuller closer.
~*~
At heart, I was trying to figure out just what had gone on in my first marriage. I’m still not sure. And note I had said “gone on,” not “gone wrong.”
But I also wanted to say something about the influence of the landscapes where I’ve lived. In fact, I came to think of them as major characters. If only I could have allowed them to speak? The first was pretty bleak and, for a small town, rather petty. The second had its beauty and its rough spots. The third, their intended Paradise, initially appeared desolate and unforgiving.
Place as a character? How about the Mississippi in Huckleberry Finn? The story wouldn’t have been the same if Twain had started on the Ohio River, even though it was larger than the Mississippi where he did.
Naturally, I had to abstract real people and events and in doing so, I settled on some big flips. Jaya emerged as the older partner in her marriage, for one, which gave a fresh twist on a December/May romance.
Along the way, the story became one of overlapping couples, a contrast of marriages that were close to Jaya’s home. It’s almost like the mirrors in an amusement park house of mirrors, to my way of thinking, not that the story started out that way.
Yeah, we’re supposed to avoid religion and politics. That leaves some pretty big gaps in the meaning of life and, as I’m seeing, in relationships, too.
If you haven’t noticed, changing the novel’s name from Promise to Nearly Canaan is a Biblical nod. Well, I had previously been calling it their Promised Land.
Developing Pastor Bob and his wife, Wendy, provided a big advance for the revised novel. They might have had serious reservations about her as a heathen, but they were still intrigued and at points even supportive. That marriage also had its problems.
I definitely wanted to avoid having southern Indiana in one more of my books, so I shifted the scene of the middle section to the Ozarks of Arkansas. There are a lot of similarities, from what I’m finding.
In addition, I wanted Jaya’s career to be as volatile for her as newsroom management had been for me. She needed to work weekends and nights, too. Beyond that, I did have an experience of being paid from “soft money,” as grants are sometimes called, and having a very good neighbor work as regional director of a social action agency provided me more inspiration.
By the way, the cover photo I settled on for the revised edition did require some tweaks on Jaya’s physical description on the inside pages.
Ever have one of those days? You may have some serious reasons for concern if it includes the following symptoms.
And here I had thought these were simply symptoms of aging.
Since relocating to Eastport at the close of 2020, I’ve been posting about the place where I now live, but this may be the time to present a slightly broader perspective.
Officially, Eastport is both a small city and an archipelago. It comprises 3.63 square miles of land, mostly on Moose Island, and 8.7 square miles of water. Moose Island is extremely irregular in shape, with multiple inlets, or coves, and corresponding points, or heads, largely lined with a shore of rock walls and scattered pocket beaches. The island is 4½ miles long and no more than a mile and a quarter wide, depending.
You don’t catch much of that from land, even with the zig-zag state highway into town. That is, emphatically, the only route to or from the mainland. Viewed from the water, of course, a much different picture emerges.
Today, the island is connected to the mainland via a causeway. The roadway passes through the tribal reservation at Pleasant Point, or Sipayik. They, too, are a presence.
In an unusual twist, the Passamaquoddy name, Muselenk, is derived from the English “moose island,” so we glean no ancient nuances there. The waters, on the other hand, are varied and rich, as the Native names reveal.
As you’ll see when we peel away the layers of our old Cape, its orientation – like those of the community’s European descendants over the years – gravitates increasingly to the waters, especially the sheltered, ice-free harbor a block from the house.
Moose Island is described as being on Passamaquoddy Bay, which technically borders the island on one side while Cobscook Bay hugs the other, though both are extensions of the famed Bay of Fundy and its extreme tides. Thanks to Fundy Bay, our tides are the largest in the continental United States, as you’ve seen in some of my posts here. We do face Campobello Island, Deer Island, and a few others only a mile or two away in New Brunswick, Canada, and they shelter us from the open Atlantic. Again, you’ve met them here at the Red Barn.
Campobello, in fact, is a mere mile or two away, across the deep channel, and can be seen from our house.
Legalistically, the border between the United States and Canada slash Britain remained somewhat fluid through many of the early years. Earlier conflicts between France and England precluded permanent settlement before the end of the French and Indian wars in 1763 and few others came in until the end of the American Revolution in 1783. There were also four years from the War of 1812 when Eastport was under British jurisdiction – making the city the last location in the continental U.S. to be under foreign rule.
Perhaps that was a factor in making the harbor the second busiest in the U.S. in 1833, much of it smuggling with New Brunswick.
The line between the U.S. (meaning Eastport) and Canada wasn’t fixed until 1842. Canada and Canadian-born people play a significant role in the evolution of the town.
All of this, as I discovered, plays into the history of our house and its inhabitants, too.
I’m thinking of those ridiculous online ads that purport to be something about Maine but show us images of urban Arizona or maybe Miami, the furthest opposites to where I live yet purporting to be local for here. You know, most affordable housing or food delivery or the ten best restaurants or plumbers in Eastport. We don’t have nearly that many. Got it?
Many of them somehow zero in on tiny East Machias or, for our weather almanac, as St. John, New Brunswick, or Halifax, Nova Scotia. Do note that East Machias is not Eastport. They’re an hour apart.
There’s also the Microsoft ab that proclaims “Eastport light traffic,” which is truly baffling. There are only three or four traffic lights in the entire county, OK? Heavy traffic, apart from road construction, is usually three or four vehicles.
These are even worse than the late-night TV commercials that couldn’t come close to properly pronouncing where we lived in the Pacific Northwest.
I had expected that the deep revisions to my previously published novels in reaction to the appearance What’s Left would apply only to the ones related to Cassia’s father.
I was wrong, once again. I blame Cassia, by the way.
She had led me to present a more unified set of hippie novels and bring them more into the present. Now she wanted me to do something similar to my remaining works.
I could connect two more books through the character of Jaya. She was the center of my book that leads into the Pacific Northwest. By shifting her spiritual identity from Sufi to yogi, I could then weave her into the yoga novel, in effect creating a two-part series.
How would that work?
It all depended, I sensed, on the yoga novel. She would have to become one of the eight resident followers of the guru.
The obvious one, Swami’s right-hand disciple, was male. That shift would throw off the balance of having half of the followers being male and the other half, female. In addition, the interaction with Jaya and the guru, a female, would lack a basic tension.
Having Swami be a woman, as mine was, had presented a hurdle for many of my potential readers. The ashram was rogue enough as it was.
The gender change allowed for a more credible – and colorful – character. It also had a ripple effect through the rest of the cast.
In the end, the book had a new title and some renamed and otherwise altered characters while now leading organically into a series. Just where does she go when she leaves the ashram? You got it.
~*~
Finding the artwork that now graces the cover was a boost. Maybe it even prompted another sweep through the story to enhance the humor.
Much had happened in the yoga world in the time since I drafted the story and eventually published it. Many of the new religion organizations in America – and I’ll include yoga, despite the usual protests – had suffered serious scandals, either monetary or sexual. At least I had avoided that by keeping my story to a single day.
Bit by bit, I learned some of what happened after I had moved on. A chance encounter in a central Pennsylvania diner with one of the figures, who was waitressing on a very busy day, revealed one disturbing schism. Later, through the Internet, I heard from several key players from my residency and learned I hadn’t been ostracized, after all, but the operation had undergone a serious upheaval shortly before Swami’s death. And then I had some long phone calls with the figure who had been in the role Jaya subsumed in the revised novel. The relationship wasn’t exactly as I had assumed – or anyone else, as far as I can see. On top of that, a former girlfriend finally told me of her mistreatment when she visited. There were other dark sides I hadn’t suspected.
Repeatedly, they agreed that I was at the ashram during its glorious apogee. I missed later conflicts that erupted when the locals decided the place was a cult or events I see as fatal changes in direction, especially in terms of guru worship.
~*~
With the focus on Jaya and what she gained from her experiences on the yoga farm, I’m spared from going into an expose of a marginal spiritual community. For me, the time was a major turning point in my life, leading me to the Society of Friends, or Quakers, which to my surprise had been the faith of my ancestors.
I still believe as a nation, we could be doing much, much better. Something more like what I see in the Biblical Kingdom of God on earth.
Yoga had been a stretch for me. My preference would have been for Zen Buddhist, had a teacher appeared. Instead, this American woman in a pink jump suit came across my path. It still seems surreal. In my hippie novels, it’s Tibetan Buddhist.
A good friend who had been an Episcopal nun had her own insights on monastic life, with many overlaps to what I had experienced. I’ve long been fascinated by American Shakers, too. More recently I’ve added Greek Orthodox examples and mysticism to the mix. And, curiously, my most “hippie” identity or fullness came during those years on the yoga farm.
There are lessons I’ve carried through life, but I should also acknowledge potentially damaging instances, including things that came up in therapy years later. My denial of emotions, especially.
Novels about yoga are surprisingly few. As touchstones for his book, I’ll instead cite non-fiction: Anagarika Govinda’s The Way of the White Clouds, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, collected writings of Swami Sivananda. Ram Dass’ Be Here Now, and stray bits by and about Murshid Samuel Lewis, and Kathleen Norris’ Cloister Walk, for a Christian parallel. Surprisingly, Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha left me cold.
Not just when they call each other first thing in the morning for a half-hour chat, but also when they get together face-to-face just hours later.
We guys just don’t understand, as far as I can tell.
Jnana's Red Barn 