Am surprised by my trips to ashram in this period, considering this visit may have been that pivoting vacation just before taking the plunge into marriage.

Swami, after much illness, short hair: (shaved, looks like Sivananda): accentuates her features, age of wisdom.

“I thought you were married. … Is she a yogi?”

Then I head, with Swami’s son, to some mountain climbing in New Hampshire for a last round of deep consideration.

Parnelli Kid: “New England towns will freak you out”

village greens (commons)
largest houses I’ve ever seen
framed, four-stories
stretching to barns

as for your dreams?

~*~

Back in Prairie Depot:

June 29, told Kat’s dad.

June 30, talked to the grandmother and also Father Gorman.

July 1, her parents’ turn to talk to him.

Asked her brother to be my best man.

Looked at dresses (like a funeral).

Kat appointment with her dad.

So much so fast …

The gauntlet to run: good thing we didn’t stretch ours out any longer.

We undertake all of the ritual steps pretending they’re for us, rather than marrying into the family.

Somehow contrasting guru/chela, Shiva/Shakti.

Father Gorman telling Kat we should live together instead.

The priest making me feel for the first time the poverty of Sannyasa.

~*~

Service officiated by the Reverend Father Stephen Paul Cairns.

Stephen, as the martyr stoned to death.

Paul, as the principal persecutor.

Cairns, as in piles of rocks.

I see now he died in 2012.

“I don’t even know if I’ve had a virgin come down the aisle,” yet all dressed in white an acquaintance, displaying the photos. As one said, “I was getting pretty far into motherhood at that point, but I covered it up pretty well.”

And then, despite the bed and books and her possessions, there’s no claustrophobic sensation. Rather, a feeling of the luxuriousness of Swami’s room. Tea master grace of the proper casual stroke: everything looks right, only half by design.

My thoughts return to Farina’s Been Down So Long, just the funky flavor of it.

Faces on my altar not to be worshiped but to be honored as examples, guides.

Homage to the Light: let it grow within.

I was still writing Prairie with only one “i”: remember my shock in realizing I had been misspelling it all along.

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

 

Somewhere along the way, I had begun dating the entries, in one of the new styles (colons or periods, depending).

The next volume, one with wide margins, had me realizing as I keyboarded how little I’ve traveled as a vacationing American in my adult years but rather relocated: the syndicate years that came in the mid-‘80s would be a variation on this.

~*~

Inside cover:

into Aquarius 1974
May my strength increase
and my wisdom multiply.

Ordained not with words, which are fragile, but with observation that detects proper hidden motions … changes that occurred perhaps in October, I’m not really sure.

My shakti has appeared, and I am grateful

My typewriter has come home! (from the shop). Back to work on the hard-copy draft! [Meaning perfect typescript]

There were no streams to speak of in Prairie Depot, a few drainage open sewers, perhaps, brimming over with their chocolate filth.

Her big self-discovery, that she awaits the approval of other people or fears their censure … now, to make the effort into self-assurance.

A long work of writing requires a much wider variety of sentence construction, arrangement, timing, than normal press writing calls upon … reading to her aloud, I saw so many typing mistakes, clumsy sentences, too much attribution (it breaks the rhythm and flow too much).

Typing is very uneasy: need new typewriter, all I need is the $.

Being under a bug, I left the office at noon and slept two hours. Missed pizza party for me b’day … “We wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for your dumb girlfriend.”

Heavy into Snyder, including Dharma Bums [Kerouac] …

We had a guy at ashram before I moved in who delighted in doing hatha exercises nude. Ran around in rain with only shorts on; barefoot in snow as well. Very stoic: would climb three flights on wood-rung ladders barefoot, balancing 100-pound rocks on his shoulders, no hand on the stone. He quit, became a Pentecostal preacher. Never understood the Dharma nor his nudity.

Kaubisch Memorial Public Library, with its translucent marble front wall.

The Dictator of Forsythia.

Hitchhikers needs a good, long Baroque subtitle!

On my 22^nd b’day, Nicki and I had big fight over transcendental meditation and broke up. And here I am, a swami.

And yet:

“She’d only known him four weeks when he popped the ring on her. It’s too fast. They’ve only known each other two months and they’re getting married in a month.

“Pam and I had been going together two-and-a-half years before we got married. I couldn’t of got a better wife, but if I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t have done it. There are just too many opportunities out there.”

Same day I convinced Kat we’d get married come summer.

~*~

~*~

At Reservoir 5, very cold, windy.

Kat, angry: “Leave me!”

Left alone, she gets better.

She doesn’t see what she has to offer. Thinks she’s bad for me.

Looked at electric typewriters, will get an Olivetti Editor 2. Was so nervous at the store I couldn’t type. Then sat in the car in rain at Van Buren Lake. A kind of morning I almost drove many miles in search of “something.”

7:IV:74, we bought the ring Saturday, now she’s feeling scared.

“You don’t know what you’re getting into,” her mother said.

Don’t know now whether it was to me or my bride-to-be.

TV host Lou Gordon’s guests Sunday night were the Kidnapper for Christ and a deprogrammed Krishna freak.

Kat’s mother believes him and is shocked I lived in one of those “communes.” Sez she, “They ought to be investigated.”

By whom? Greedy senators, bloodstained, potbellied generals?

If these “cults” brainwash kids and “hypnotize” them, what does “civilization” do? All the television commercials? As for the parochial schools, the biggest and blackest culprits? (And this is well before Trump and Fox.)  

Today, the original Christian disciples would have been the “brainwashed” by Jesus and Pontious Pilate the savior. Our bankrupt, spiritless society could not see the difference.

Who can truly identify the self-realized but the self-realized?

“If Kat went to one of those places, her father would be the first to come and get her.”

Also: “She’s too young to get married,” before attacking Debbi’s parents for “pushing” elsewhere on the family.

Slave labor? How much do you pay your wife?

Su Tung Po:

“the beauty
of the evening cannot
overcome my sorrow”

“the gentle breeze over ten thousand acres
makes a fine brocade of the waters”

As for an awkward moment, ran into her mother in Ada tonight. She’d seen the packed suitcase. “Well, if she doesn’t want to come home, that’s OK.” Wrecking our plans, all the same.

Completed five sections of The Thunder Cloud this week. From Asian back to more Western formal, via late Plath: mocking, histrionic, direct first-person address …

As I wrote to Kat, I’m feeling compromised here, so that my beliefs become hidden.

As I was asked, “Why do you wear those beads?”

If only I had replied, Sometimes they’re a rosary, for prayer.

Kat wants someone who knows what he likes. Poor me!

After all of this, I have no photos of Sam and Jeanice, nor of Helen Moran …

~*~

JOHN CHAPMAN

“Johnny Appleseed”
Swedenborgian minister
“He lived for others”
per tombstone
and engraved Bible

~*~

A declamatory style suits me best.

Two or three syllable end-line tugs, so typical!

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

The next volume, beginning in December 1973. opens with many Tibetan notes and has 3-inch left margins, a touch I still love.

Coincidentally, I revisit these after perceiving how much Kurt, from our Yakima years later, eventually photographed Tibetans in America and gained their respect, leading in time to the Dalai Lama’s.

To my delight, the local library had a solid selection of Tibetan Buddhist books, which I devoured in developing Subway Hitchhikers. Even in diluted form, you can see why in my novel Subway Visions. All thanks to Dan, the consummate librarian. He often bought paperbacks and had them bound, which was cheaper than buying hardbound. He also bought only one copy of a bestseller and had those readers on a waiting list, rather than buying multiple copies. That freed up funds for a deeper collection.

Research, research, research, and then follow your intuition.

~*~

 

~*~

Bonsai notes, not that I ever pursued that …

Sunday, 17 March ’74:

“If you keep walking in circles, you’ll never hit the center.”

Asked Kat’s mother for advice on how to approach Sam. “It’s about time! I was about to ask what your intentions were. … Did you tell your parents?”

“Not yet.”

Afterward, Kat was stunned that I had actually done it.

“Shit, looks like you’re going back to school.”

“Bird calls are so monotonous,” sez famed pianist …

Winter: when the skies are flat clouds over muddy fields / no escape for the eyes.

Well, she was flat, too.

Let’s leave it all ambiguous.

Some yellowed clippings of Howard Hintz “Nature Hints” column, one of my better additions to the paper.

Other entries became sourcing for my novel Nearly Canaan and the first novella in The Secret Side of Jaya.

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

 

Must have been after a trip to visit Celeste at her brother’s. Returning from Detroit, meteor to 15 degrees above horizon, toward Bloomdale just before I entered Fostoria

Celeste: “If you weren’t so expressive, you’d have an ugly face. Your features? You still have the eyes of a madman.”

Kat’s ceramics teacher had the students make a pot with their eyes closed and then destroy it in their fists. To teach them that in art the doing is more important than the product.

Celeste, after kissing and caressing: “I approve of Kat.”

Her surname translates = Lion!

From a novel: “You have a very, very fine piece of literature here.”

Rejection slip: “These have a truly interesting bullet-like form and some very powerful movement/section. Sorry we can’t use these.”

Kat: You never tell me anything important. LIKE YOU LOVE ME WHEN I’M NOT EXPECTING IT.

Someone, talking about wrestlers’ well-used trunks: “Yeah, and I mean well used. You didn’t hear about the match in which he had diarrhea. His opponent grabbed him – and he lost.”

A girl gushed out of Dells’, yelled my name with what I thought was the enthusiasm of familiarity. I turned, crossed the street and walked a half-block to meet her.

“You look different,” she said.

“Just washed my hair,” said I.

I couldn’t place her. A yoga student or chance acquaintance from another city?

“I thought you were in Florida,” I ventured.

Her anxious eyes queried my face.

“Who do you think I am?” I responded.

“John Paul. Why you?”

“No, I’m sorry. I’m known as Jnana, not John.”

Mary, in the restaurant window, knowing of my true love, nods at me and winks her finger, seeing only the warmth of boy-girl games.

~*~

Pennsylvania Dutch masonry details:

 

 

~*~

Slip of poetry draft on heavy paper: how much I was doing straight at the keyboard.

Boarding an elevator, can’t get off. Instead of numbered floors, there are bones by the buttons. The second bone opens on a restroom where two people want to give him/her a shower. Further up, the door opens on a big hole. “Go ahead,” a voice urges. “Walk on across.”

Yesterday, in middle of teaching a hatha class, I realized it was the anniversary of my leaving the ashram.

Here there is not enough time for anything.

Every day, I walk the same two blocks to work. Always different.

Doc drives to the office and sees nothing but traffic lights. It’s only a few blocks.

~*~

The Foster Block, 1856, is coming down. Along with the town.

Categories, genres: what is Hitchhikers? I don’t care. It’s a WRITING! That should be enough.

As for Shakespeare’s novels?

A scripture that unrolls on its own singing. A Senate, perhaps. Or sonata.

As for the worn-out art forms, still awaiting the new great novel, short story, poem, play, symphony or quartet. Back to origins, meaning springs.

~*~

Blue paper typed insert: Note how Snyder takes stories, dreams, and journal stuff and weaves this long discourse as longer poetry, not as short stories. (See Carlos Williams’ fictional prose for contrast.)

~*~

The six-day, 50-hour race at work is unsustainable, too exhausting for all of us.

July 4, in Vermillion, hearing from my future brother-in-law, principal of Bhaktaraj’s elementary schoolteacher mother, how the kid was off somewhere running a yoga temple all by himself and he didn’t get paid and had to write home for money. But then Steve piped up about how his wife conned her mother into enough money to fly to Florida or some such.

Brown rice with chop sticks is a good way to slow down on a busy day.

Kat’s roommate is from New Jersey. Asked if she knew Doris Kramer, the answer was yup. Small world. [Now, who on earth was Doris?]

Amid the flames, the Lord called between the logs and said, “Speak to the people of America and say unto the them.”

Who was Matthew Peacock?

In my journaling, rather than writing about what yoga can do for a presumed reader or student, I should have tried writing about what it was doing for me, at least more directly. There are mentions of difficulty sitting or concentrating, but those appear as failings rather than natural challenges in the discipline.

As for all of my railings against the perceived pressures of the conformist majority, if I could have only gotten around the casting of blame …

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

 

Seven days later, I’m struck by the whole concept that if one suffers enough, he (or she) will pile up great spiritual beauty and become a martyr. This approach seems to mark the principal thrust of Christianity; reflects a hatred of life, and breeds gloom. (So I observed at the time.)

Meditative action spiritual practice, in contrast, has God found within rather than above; life can be light and compassion.

“Have you been saved?”

“Yes. Have you been liberated?”

How to befuddle a Jesus freak.

The experimental aspect of yoga/Zen excites me: the practitioner is not ordered to embrace any dogmatic dictates but rather told to observe how he reacts: what he (or she) feels, tastes, hears, and intuits in a set of carefully ordered settings. The adept suspends  judgment long enough to experience first-hand.

Tonight in hatha class Bev was bewildered by the possibility of her own divinity, as introduced through Sivananda’s Practical Lessons.

Knocking down walls? “What do you have left? It seems like you are denying life.”

~*~

~*~

Thanksgiving Day: I used to think there was a glory, a kind of permanence to newspaper work: I valued craftsmanship and perfection. Now, regarding a faded, brittle 1952 clipping sent to the office last week, my feelings of temporality are reenforced. It is as permanent as an ocean wave on the shore.

Are modern civilizations, as the Club of Rome suggests, headed for THE GREAT DARK AGES within a century?

Joe Dell: “There’s no excuse for making a bad cup of coffee. Keep your equipment clean, buy a good quality coffee. Now you take these chain restaurants, they have these modern management techniques. If you’re gonna eat a chain restaurant, do it at the beginning of the month. About the middle of the month, they have to start cutting back to meet their quotas. They even buy a cheaper brand of coffee. That’s what the salesman said.”

Capitalism, not labor unions, is the ruin of the country.

Sometimes American society seems to break down into crooks and Quakers. [Now I just hope they never overlap.]

I am not at home here. I will never be.

Always the missionary.

I am my best, moving with the bright lightning bolt from deep within.

I must publish [in literary journals] within the next year.

The first American to perform magic in Europe called himself Philadelphia.

American Indians kept their magic private: make snakes appear and acorn and beanstalks grow.

The catching the bullet-in-the-teeth trick finally proved fatal to Chung Ling Soo.

Typhoid suicide.

Madness “made idiotic by the use of tobacco” with a frog in the stomach the real cause.

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

Opening page of the next volume has Box 16, Lima Hall, 45310 but nothing else. As a point of fact, she didn’t attend Ohio Northern until the fall semester but had that summer term as an introduction to college at the nearby state university. To her surprise, she passed that and was on to a new world.

First entry, next page, is 15:VII:73, Nikki’s birthday and Kat’s off for the summer. I was already entwined with the latter’s family. Helped Sam erect his backyard flagpole.

An entry on locking myself out of my apartment while shaking a rug over the banister. Keys left inside. Lights and air-conditioner were left on. I was in shorts, no shoes. Brady next door knew the way over the transom. Got my keys and I then headed off to her campus.

Call from Swami: “How’s that 17-year-old?” She thinks I need somebody about 24. Also, mention of upcoming New York Times piece on the ashram, by Judy Karlstad or Karlsrud: it was long and had six pix.

Mom and Dad dropped in, a surprise. They wouldn’t have found me if Kat had been home.

Coming back to my apartment at midnight Friday, saw Brady’s wife was in the street, telling me of a 17-year-old in her bed, he’s been jealous and beating her, she had him locked up. He’s been in jail since 13, she was pregnant three months at marriage, he was 18: trapped, no maturity. (You can’t make up stories like this, can you?)

Then five men in Day’s tavern baseball shirts, to her, “How’s your tomato? I bet it’s got hair on it!” Out of Holman’s, obnoxiously drunk. They went off driving and throwing eggs, twice. We, to police.

She said I talk sense, not knowing it was only yoga talk.

Monday, a call from Gene and Nikki: first conversation with her since before yoga. The same spacy, faraway.

American Swami Rudrananda killed in plane crash. (He’ll show up later in these spiralbound journals.)

Girl in laundromat, two black eyes, hoarse voice, her birthday / same as Nicki’s / no diamond, lives in trailer in the country. Though we speak, no mention of eyes.

~*~

~*~

From a letter to Len: This is the flattest, most endless land you could ever imagine, and the people reflect it, having stripped off all the trees and driven out all the deer and Indians. … The local cops think we at the paper are all pinkos. … Kat and I went to Chicago to see the 41 paintings from the Hermitage and Pushkin museums.

So we would have stayed with Iris and Luis? I thought that trip was a year or two later.

Land left spiceless.

Len came out from Gotham for a visit and left this morning, back to the City. We apparently had a bottle of muscatel, or muskadibble, which whacked me. A legacy from a wino he once learned, after asking what was in the brown bag.

Also, late Tuesday afternoon, my one and only Scuba dive: heavy, like a backpack, throws me off-balance: we suit hot in humid air, flippers hard to walk in, throw you backward but easy to swim

No hair under mask: will leak

Every breath, I instinctively raise my head above water: reflexive unthinking: “Not me, not this!”

I’d never before used fins nor snorkeled.

Minnows or darters swimming up to my mask. Gold and black streaks rim their tails.

Brown and black snake in reeds three yards away. “Let’s clear out,” Bob says, remembering ‘Nam.

3:XI:73 / Last night, deeper, our relationship transformed. Her fears, and mine, unexpected, vanished. No hurt, “It feels strange.”

Her new face, of moon mystery.

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

 

Vol. 25, green Indiana cover, begins 19 February ’73 in a Bloomington visit, then turns into the first of the Fostoria series. Some overlap with the previous volume.

A phantom follows me around in flashes of her traipsing and schlumping through campus … my real reason for the visits was to win her back, only to be thwarted in the pursuit. And then Capt. Amerika flaked on me, after all the hospitality I’d offered him earlier. Did I take the Greyhound on any of those trips?

You list an old address and an older phone number. Who are you running from? Or what? It’s funny how so little can say so much. Two friends saw you last week, about the same, with a slob-freak grad student, an older man: still seeking a father you can punish? Still seeking to punish yourself?

15:III:73 / Day in Yellow Springs: see why Fern and Cedar ran back to the ashram after moving out: security of the tribe.

“We expand through sorrow.”

The self-righteous barrier of Quaker smiles scared me off in Waynesville Sunday yet I should share through speak.

Knife in the Water: such a fine title (film by Polanski): using only three players.

Ugly Ohio: snarl of rails, grain elevators, auto parts factories, sky vast as Montana, endless prairie, 50-hour workweeks at scab pay.

(So I was mulling the job.)

Horoscope: opportunities multiply.

Associate editor = managing editor elsewhere, opportunity of editorial page column; 12 correspondents and a small staff.

Move with ideas.

Mom revealing her mother’s past [add this to my Mother’s Day perspectives!] As for the aunt divorced and smoking scandalous cigarettes?

Searching for an apartment: highway trucks shake the walls all night, a king’s ransom for not enough room to turn around in, “furnished” means crowded with junk, Grubber tells me of kicking the last tenants out for taping Playmates to the ugly walls, “Told ‘em: Out! Tonight!” And no wimmen in the room either. No closet and a terrible stench.

And then, stalking the wild auto, Morris Jones, fine rap VW salesman, delivered …

~*~

~*~

Entry of 29:III:73 introduces Kat and Ann, the waitresses, Italian and Polish.

Two weeks later, a Friday / Met a great Boddhisatva, Jesse Owens. Expected an aging jock and found a yogi who gives his energy to spur on others. He told of a high school track coach who sacrificed vacations to tell students of muscles in such clarity “You could see it” … and in response “you wanted to give this man everything you could … you learned your lessons well” A Virgo, September 12, too fast to be a Capricorn

Soon, betwixt Palm Sunday and Easter, I was calling the place Prairie Depot, but with only one “i,” a misspelling that continued a few years. One eye? Or half-blind?

Two weeks later / West Virginia white-water rafting trip. No dams upstream … Cheat River … Kingwood Albirght power station smoke Mamie’s motel and restaurant.

Cold, cold river.

And two weeks after that, a dash to the ashram. Memorial Day weekend? Swami’s first comment: “You have city pallor.”

Swami Black Cloud in hell.

Slave wages = no pride.

Small-clan Fostoria, small minds and no imagination
and divorce from nature gods.

Mid-June. Took Kat to BG today: in her brother I saw my old self: selfish, materialistic, mean, bossy; she, too, saw a difference, “You’re alive, you’re human.”

I was also teaching hatha in the apartment …

“Be a lay teacher … for laymen.”

And then poetic blasts about glaciers before I’d ever seen or heard any …

“where once flew eagles now sail buzzards” except that eagles have returned with a vengeance

By July, Troubles with Kat …

Why great monasteries are in mountains: the reaching up to the glory of the universe, versus the running out to worldly desires …

Many yoga notes, too.

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.

Deep into the well of the heart is the universal cosmos.

Many items on drafting Subway Hitchhikers, though I should note it was much larger in scope, including Daffodil and the other eventual Hippie novels … “a false tone in so much of my past writing: a thin line between that neo-Baroque artifact … invoking that jerk in the sky.”

Am now realizing: With Hitchhikers, I was hoping to make a change in the world at hand; instead, I should be seeing the characters as individuals whose lives are prayers upholding the goodness of the world and keeping it from falling into Trumpism and other darkness … preservationists against the evils of global capitalism etc.

 

2:III:73 / meditation makes the whole world seem new.

Contrasts ‘tween Nikki and Fay. “That Nikki! Gnawing, grasping, devouring, desperate and destructive hunger, insatiability …”

Sunday 4:III:73: “The Friends’ meetinghouse in Waynesville perhaps 150 years old (town settled 1797): white simple brick: porch and two doors (one men’s, one women’s?) Worship 10:45.” (At least I now knew where the Quaker site was.)

Little Miami River Valley: roads: Corwin, Feedwire, McBee, Upper Bellbrook, Oregonia, Ferry Church, Chenowith, Middle Run, Old Stage (Pittsburgh-Cincinnati), Indian Ripple, Stuttman, Alpha, Trebein, Darst, Carpenter. Past places where Fay and I necked or were chased … this time, I passed a baptism in the river …

Wednesday, off to Glen Helen in Yellow Springs: drafted the Eight-Fold Path poem.

Afterward, stopped at an English prof’s from my past. She was prompting me to “adopt” Eroica, a real sex bomb, flirt, flaunting it: needs other outlets.

To drive a new car. [Was that the Bug? Or Dad’s?]

My troubles began when I was born.

From a short story by John Bart Gerald, July ’71 Harper’s, on rich girls (one of the “horrors of the world”): She may well direct her energies to pleasing some older man, possibly her father. Life will be essentially a game … seeks total moral or sexual obliteration and continually manages to survive it … Rich girls shut horror out of their lives at any cost, and someone else will pick up the tab.”

Sunday (First-day), Quaker Meeting in Waynesville: my mind very dualistic: hard to sit the 45 minutes: the Dharma is further away.

“Do you as Quakers strive to make your homes a place of peace, joy, and contentment?” (asked once a year)

Was also reading Berry’s Hidden Wound …

Listen to animals and observe the water.

Overcome sleep and master the breath.

In letter to Barb: What’s Hitchhikers about? Reincarnation. Or life. Or both. Zany and surrealistic … actually, it’s a lot about my experiences in the past five years.

Has Bharti’s 2027 Walnut noted on last page …

~*~

On a slip of teletype paper: now back to practice
4 am arise and meditate, read clear thoughts
5 am exercise and shower, cool water
6 am prasad of worship
7-11 am work sesshin I
11 am brunch
Noon to 3 pm work sesshin II
3 pm pranayama
3:30 pm work sesshin III
5:30 pm dinner
7 pm work sesshin IV
Meditate at 8 and bed

Looks brutal, though sesshins covered writing or revision, calligraphy, job applications, violin, cooking, carpentry, cleaning, packing. Also, must have been short-term focus, reflecting Zen sesshins ….

~*~

From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.