You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
As I said at the time …
To what extent can we break free of prose narrative cloaked in verse form? (What the critic Paul Chowder calls “slow prose.”) Sing and shout! Chant! Evoke incantation! It’s always comforting to know of others who feel the same way! Keep it up! The night is friendly, indeed.
~*~
Sometimes, even the galaxy seems to drum along with the crickets.
When it comes to my novels, any resemblance to actual persons is greatly exaggerated … meaning it’s truly fiction, not fact.
Of course, they way they see themselves, or did, is also far from any reality.
The places, of course, are rendered with perfect faithfulness.
~*~
For a free copy of my latest novel release, click here.
Jaya, in Promise, isn’t the only character in my fiction to address a concept I’ve dubbed the DLQ, or Dedicated Laborious Quest. But she does, I’ll argue, come closest to aspiring to an artistic expression for its encounters.
The DLQ, as I envision it, is the long-range discipline of spiritual pursuit, one that can be found in any number of variations in any number of religious, artistic, social activist, or even athletic lines of action. It’s a blending of heart and head, body and soul, awareness and discovery – the poet Gary Snyder refers to something similar as the Real Work, for instance, or maybe simply “daily practice” will touch on it as well.
One of Jaya’s concerns is a search for a fitting vehicle to embody the experience. Essays are too prosaic. Poetry? Sometimes. Drawings or paintings? To a degree. Maps of a kind? Getting closer, I’d hope.
Even so, I’ve wanted to leave the ultimate form she uses open to the imagination.
And then, more recently, I came across something that comes closest. An exhibition of Shaker art and artifacts at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockport, Maine, introduced me to what are called Gift Songs or Gift Drawings or Gift Paintings, which take their name from the faithful artist’s position as a medium receiving the song or design from a deceased member of the sect (that is, given) to be conveyed to another, living member of the sect (also, as given). To be appreciated, these must be seen in the original, full size, since much of the detail gets lost in reproduction. Sometimes the words are in a secret, private language and alphabet. Sometimes they blend. The lines flow, turn upside down, sideways. The works are sprinkled with artwork as well as words. Are they magical? Or simply mysterious?
Whichever, they spring from a tradition and discipline and practice to utter something deep in the heavenly desire and earthly community of a particular recipient.
I can tell you Jaya would have been most impressed. Definitely.
~*~
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As I said at the time …
For too long, there’s been a huge gap between the blockbuster superstars and the rest of the practitioners, many of them far more innovative or penetrating.
Paris for American ex-pat writers? Again, I smile. By the time you and I came along, the destination was Seattle or San Francisco or Greenwich Village. Or some mountainous terrain, for those of us who couldn’t afford anything better. (Or thought so.) And then Minneapolis and, of all places, San Antonio. As it turns out, New Hampshire has far more than its share of authors, probably because of its proximity to both Manhattan and Boston, in addition to its tax structure – so again, I’m in a decent spot.
Especially compared to many of the others.
Three hundred sunny days a year in a fertile land may seem like Paradise.
But it’s surrounded by desert.
~*~
Desert turns everything to bone. That, or to stone. Even the scattered tufts of cheat grass and the isolated clusters of flowers turn into straw skeletons. Social conventions, too, dry away. In pursuing clarity, which parched spreads possess abundantly, I also enter an order of madness. Paradoxically, to preserve my sanity in dealing with people, it becomes periodically necessary for me to revisit this incomprehensible delirium. Settle back on this my bedrock, readjust to my own frame. Here, then, I return afresh to spaces within and without. Wait. Listen. In this place, wind is a clearing, spiraling on itself. Then, when this twisting reverses, screwing into bony alkaline soil, we give praise. At times, I even see my own heart clearly. As I come to know my way around more securely, I lift a cup of clear spring water and pour it on bleached parchment at my feet. Selah. The next day a bouquet of tiny flowers rises like fingers bent by wind. Always somewhere, wind.
~*~
For a free copy of my newest novel, click here.
With its cloudless skies, it could be an ideal agricultural cornucopia. If you had water.
~*~
In other climates, you commonly overlook the element of space, unless looking into the heavens on a brittle night. You observe objects, and space becomes the measure of distance between an object and you, or else some arrangement of objects. In contrast, desert appears more as a vacuum — a juxtaposition of surfaces, of sky and earth extending outward not to some imaged convergence (such as the perspective point where the twin rails of a train track become one) but rather away from any focus, and thus outward around both of the observer’s ears. Here, space itself becomes obvious, as if turned upright, like a wall in your face. So often in life, what should be most obvious is the hardest to see. The spider is on the window; the spider is on this page.
~*~
For a free copy of my newest novel, click here.
One of the biggest lessons I carry from backpacking as a kid is the importance of traveling light. Take no more than you need. Be resourceful.
In those days, I should add, everything weighed more than today’s high-tech, lightweight gear and dehydrated food packets.
On our week along the Appalachian Trail, I was a 12-year-old hauling a 60-pound pack in what seemed endless uphill marathons.
It’s a lesson you don’t easily forget, even when you’re going by airplane.
~*~
To learn more, click here.
Making the orchards bloom was a labor of irrigation. No matter how fertile the volcanic soil of the valley, water was the missing element man worked to provide.
~*~
There’s good reason the rattlesnake-infested, corrugated humps encircling the orchard valley are pale brown: they receive none of the snowmelt impounded from late March into July in the high mountains. Agencies release and distribute that water through blazing summer into October. Green agriculture parallels the river and irrigation canals, defying the tough, roasted inclines above, where sagebrush and bunchgrass stroke tawny eternity. In this compass, wind rarely precedes rain. Beyond lucrative strips of orchards, the principal agriculture involves herds or hay; because of irrigation and unfettered sunlight, five mowings a year are common; bales are trucked to dairy cows and pleasure horses on the rainy side of the tall mountains. Desert has few chickens — and no pigs to speak of. Somewhere out there, Basque shepherds elude the heat. Forests begin at the top of high ridges observed fifty miles distant.
~*~
For a free copy of my newest novel, click here.
Curiously, growing up in Ohio, I was nonetheless somehow fascinated by mountains. They arose in my early drawings. On family trips, it didn’t take much for a wooded hill to become a mountain in my mind. An astrologer might argue it has something to do with all the air signs in my chart. Whatever the reasons, a ridge line or summit calls to me.
There were a few tantalizing early encounters in childhood trips to the Great Smokies and eastern Kentucky. My true initiation, however, came at age eleven with a week of backpacking on the Appalachian Trail in Tennessee and North Carolina. It was miserable and magical, and left lessons for a lifetime.
Still, it wasn’t until after my college graduation that I came to fully appreciate mountains – living, by turns, in the Southern Tier of Upstate New York, the Poconos of Pennsylvania, the Cascades and Olympics of the Pacific Northwest, as well as Maryland (with its Catoctins and access to the Shenandoah Valley) and finally New Hampshire.
Many of my poems arise in some of those experiences over the years.
We could collect them as “By Gully,” playing off Louis Ulrich’s vow to climb Ulrich Couloir to the summit of Mount Stuart (9,415-foot elevation) one final time – “my gully,” as he referred to the trajectory more than four decades after he and two partners established the now basic mountaineering route in July 1933. A climber explores a slope, recognizes the avalanche chutes along the higher crests, approaches summits themselves via passes, gaps, or notches, usually following a streambed. The connection of gullies and mountains is established. By Gully.
Yet that is only half of the equation. Mysticism, as I’ve known it, keeps a foot to the ground, and often a hand or the butt, too. The spiritual journey leads to the mountaintop and back – if you don’t run ahead of your Guide.
~*~
It’s the background for some of my novels and poetry now appearing at Thistle/Flinch editions. To read more, click here.
As I said at the time …
So you’re moving out – congratulations! For one thing, it puts you on much firmer ground when you do commit to a live-in relationship – rather than jumping from your parents’ care into the care of another. Yes, your parents are much more liberal than mine were, but I too was forced to spend my first year-and-a-half of college at a local commuter school (fortunately, it had an excellent English department) and to live at home – something that deeply stunted my emotional growth. Getting away to Bloomington was a lifesaver, even if I wound up in political science and urban studies instead.
Well, I have another reading coming up Tuesday, same venue. This time, plan to read one poem – a longpoem in thirty-seven sections. Should take just under an hour. A piece that was nearly published by a highly regarded press twenty years ago – and was withdrawn because of deep cutbacks in federal funding for the arts. When I began to submit sections to journals a couple of years back, acceptances quickly followed. Now, to get the full piece out!
So here I am, wishing you could be with me in that smoke-filled room – have you on as the next reader, in fact, unless I gallantly step aside to let you wow them with an extended reading of your own. Or, more intriguing yet, share the stage, alternating pieces. Yes, I like that!
Oh, yes, you start to apologize about talking so much about him and that love poison. But I wonder, unless we are blessed enough to have a fulfilling life with our initial childhood sweetheart, whether a great deal about any current affair is actually an attempt to work out the failings of the previous hot fling. For one thing, we really do become attuned to the other person’s touch, timing, interests, movement – everything that makes him or her distinct. Nicolas Mosley, an English novelist, has argued that every coupling is actually a triangle – or more accurately, two triangles, with each partner having a side affair, a past, a demanding career, or whatever attached here. I’d agree.
Now, if you decide to hop on that bus and head off to some escape, what can I do to lure you here? (Just phone ahead, to make sure I’m not seriously involved with a very jealous girlfriend by then.) As I was saying, how do you like your coffee? Ever gone contradancing or English country dancing? And you wouldn’t be the only person in this neck of the woods dressed in black and stainless steel or exhibiting striking jewelry piercings, unlike New Orleans. In fact, a number of years ago, Donald Hall once wrote that there’s something Gothic about New England. I was living in the desert of Washington State when I read that, and it intrigued. Even more so, now that I’m living here. But that’s another conversation.
Well, it’s my turn to be up way too late – and to write disjointed stuff. Hope it makes sense. Now, for me, off to engage in, hopefully, some sensual and sensational dreams of my own. Care to bet if you’re starring?
Keep sizzling!
~*~
For a free copy of the complete American Olympus, click here.
Jnana's Red Barn 