You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
In Quaker practice, elders are what other denominations call bishops, except that in ours and other Anabaptists (Amish, Mennonite, Brethren), they’re found within the congregation, rather than over it. And elders can be young folks, if they’re so gifted.
For a free copy of my poetry chapbook, Elders Hold, click here.
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 With its support of the military at the time, liberal politics were tainted with outdated Cold War ideologies like those of the conservative side.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.
More than zoology prompts these poems. The human imagination runs wild across the range. Up the mountain. Into the sky. Down in the sea. Under the earth.
To run along, fly along, swim along, sing along, crawl along, click here.
It’s all in our nature, too.
~*~
In college, I went through a soul-searching crisis that questioned whether we could justify subsidizing symphony orchestras or opera companies or art museums and the like in light of the economic inequities in our nation and world. And then I noticed how much of an entertainment industry flowed through the ghetto and Third World, too. That is, everybody has art (even those old Quakers, in a few restricted forms) — it’s not necessarily about money but a need for expression. And all of the emotions and aspirations that go with it. As well as the big bucks, for the big jobs.
In my trials after college, I eventually found myself moving among Friends and then, in time, a few who had grown up under the old restrictions that banned fiction, theater, and even music. Harsh as the old discipline was (and I could have never lived under it), there was also a valid criticism – especially of the superfluous nature of so much of the artistic effort and the egotism so rampant in its ranks.
Maybe the early Friends saw, too, how much the arts were a function of the royal court and its fashions. Or a gilded church. Even the way arts were used to veil the upper crust from the populace and its labors. It turns outs the original Quakers were also picking up on a dialectic from the earliest days of the Christian church, one that contended acting arose in counterfeiting thoughts and actions, many of them of an evil nature.
Within the memory of Quakers, at least, the fine arts have come a long way from the 1650s, pro and con.
Still, proscribing many of the arts did focus Friends on other matters, including abolition and nonviolence. It channeled creative energy into mathematics and science, architecture and industry, poetry and journalism (“We Friends only read true things,” as one Quaker purportedly said, regarding a neighbor’s stack of novels). Go ahead, tally the other fields.
On the other hand, how much of our own focus is deflected by our apparent indulgence? Or how much of it is enriched and deepened?
So how do we make peace with that seemingly artless side of our legacy? Let me suggest we begin with a consideration of “only true things” in our practice. Back to the deeper expression, the part that reflects Truth that goes beyond quantifiable facts. We might even begin with questions of quality or justice or compassion. And then, as they say, the plot thickens.
So there on page 41 of Jeffrey Eugenides’ third novel, The Marriage Plot, I find he’s cribbed one of my fundamental arguments, the one about how the older you get, the faster time goes. Or, as he puts it, seems to go. And he didn’t even give me a footnote. Alas. (Where, oh where, by the way, has the year gone?)
At first I was going to say nothing new really happened this time around, but that’s not quite accurate. A stranger in one store did approach me to ask, “Has anyone told you how you look just like the drummer in Fleetwood Mac?” Could it be my ponytail? The one that would finally tie in the back?
And then, thanks to one inspired Christmas present last year (and wondrously repeated a few days ago), I’m swimming a half-mile daily in the city’s indoor pool. I wouldn’t say I enjoy it – laps are strenuous, after all – but the effort’s somehow refreshing and invigorating. Maybe it will also give my pun-prone physician a smile at my next physical. Could it be the giver’s in cahoots with him?
We did enjoy some all-too-short getaways through the year. Camden, Maine, in deep winter, instilled in me a fondness for tulips, thanks to a devotee’s store; Cape Cod in early summer included a panorama from the lantern room atop a lighthouse; Vermont in late summer, before the foliage turned, felt perfect.
Quaker activities have me hopping around New England, and with the Revels Singers, I performed in five concerts this fall, on top of weekly rehearsals. Add to that the release of four of my (experimental) novels and a brace of collected poetry as ebooks, which comes as a relief, and several public readings.
In addition, the Red Barn frequently draws readers from five continents, even if we’re still waiting for Antarctica. I even made my YouTube debut as the subject of an hour-long interview, as you may recall. As for the weeds in the garden or the snow in the driveway, well, can we get philosophical?
The one thing that’s been going all too slow is renovating the bathroom, which finally began before the bathtub could fall through the ceiling to the dining room. We’ll spare you the details. Could it be because everyone’s being paid by the hour? Or just the realities of trying to cope with a century-plus house? (The latter, mostly.)
So here we are, with the new year bringing us another presidential primary, the payoff on our mortgage by midyear, and my 50th high school reunion. If we survived a Social Security payment snafu at the beginning of last year, well, here we go again. Wishing you and yours all the best.
I dream of a kind of writing that approaches, well, dreaming. A narrative of free-floating, widely associative surrealism that’s richly informed by fomenting emotions.
So the other morning I was somewhere in the vicinity of what I report in my novella, With a Passing Freight Train of 119 Cars and Twin Cabooses, and having coffee with an ex-boss, maybe even at the same cafe frequented by John Wycliffe and Hieronymus Bosch in my book. We were too far from the ocean to be considering his sailboat, so we must have been discussing a story in the works. Or maybe politics or updating him on office gossip, now that he’s moved on.
Next thing I knew, we were joined by Jerry Seinfeld – as he was on the show, who knows what he looks like now – and an invisible stranger. Jerry started telling me that’s not how he would have constructed the scene under consideration in my new story.
“When it comes to going to the dentist,” he said, “I would make it as awful as I could. Everything has to go wrong.”
But that’s not how it happened, I want to reply. It’s not true – not true to the facts.
“So?” I can hear from his end. “Wouldn’t it be true to the dream? And much funnier?”
He’d have a point. I’m still thinking about it.
For the record, let me say – there are no scenes with dentists in my novels. And maybe just two or three poems with the hygienist.
~*~
For this volume and more, click here.
From the rails, the landscape threads together quite differently than it does from a highway or water passage.
The tracks pass sidings, graffiti-tagged warehouses and low factories, storage yards of all varieties, rundown housing, apartment clusters – and once out into the farmlands, grain elevators as well.
Clicking along, you can’t help but wonder how many of the enterprises are legit or how many, in their decrepitude, cover questionable activities.
For a maverick intellectual gone incognito, they might even be an ideal location to go underground for a while – a place to work uninterrupted.
In my novella With a passing freight train of 119 cars and twin cabooses, English Bible translator John Wycliffe shows up in a railroad crossing on the American Great Plains, where he’s soon joined by Hieronymus Bosch.
As they discover, once you’re lost in time and space, anything just might happen.
~*~
For more of the fantasy, click here.
Looking at a volume and realizing it’s one of my “keepers,” meaning the ones I keep close at hand, had me wondering if I could name a Top Ten list of books.
Nope, definitely not.
How about Top Hundred?
I turned to my mostly Quaker bookshelf and realized it has more than that alone.
So nope, definitely not.
Five hundred? Maybe, but it would be tough.
We know someone who ordered a book online but was confused when a much different volume was delivered. Not the right title or shape at all, much less the anticipated title. The seller was quite perplexed, too.
So the order was placed again, with another supplier, only to produce the same mistake in delivery. The very same wrong title, in fact.
Only after checking the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) did anyone notice the two titles – the one ordered and the one delivered – had identical numbers. I thought this was supposed to be a fool-proof system. How often does this happen?
As for the warehouse, I’m left wondering: Doesn’t anybody read the title anymore? A double-check for accuracy. And that was well before the Christmas rush. For the sellers, this was a costly error.
The tradition of art inspiring art is a long one. Perhaps we might even see a redundancy there and shorten the sentence to “Tradition inspiring art is a long one.” Or more accurately, “Traditions inspiring art are long.”
At the moment I’m reflecting on my poetry collection, 50 Preludes & Fugues, which springs in part from Dmitri Shostakovich’s 20th century homage to Bach. There are, we should note, two sets each with 24 preludes with fugues. I became acquainted with some of these piano pieces in college, via a budget LP recording apparently with the composer at the keyboard. (Memory had a young American pianist, as it is, but now I think it was the composer himself at the keyboard.)
And then these engaging, sometimes haunting, works disappeared from general public awareness.
Decades later, a Naxos CD set of the complete cycles by Konstantin Schebakov allowed me to rediscover their range – the discs were often playing as I drafted and revised the new poems. Still later, through a Christmas gift from my younger stepdaughter, I gained the opportunity to closely examine Keith Jarrett’s exploration on the ECM label, after hearing selections of his performances on public radio broadcasts.
What continues to amaze me is how different the two interpretations are. The Russian Schebakov is crystalline, restrained, centered on each chord and its ringing. The American Jarrett, in contrast, develops the phrasing – these pieces sing. Which version do I prefer? Or which is, in some way, “better”?
I can’t say. Instead, I’d argue that each is a counterpoint for the other, both springing from the same root. And that as a consequence, we’re all richer for their advances.
In the arts and if faith, we all build on deep roots that have come before us.
Jnana's Red Barn 