Tag: Love

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.

 

Some interactions with other poets …

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

D.W., envious of my electric typewriter.

Me, envious of the garage he converted into a large writing studio.

Poetry workshop, as we called it.

I was asked to read at the end of the evening – just as I was about to leave, actually. So I shared three pieces.

“Your poetry is very rich. It’s almost so rich you don’t know what to do with your wealth,” one person said to me afterward.

Pflum was very pleased. “You’ve improved a lot in the past year.” He enjoyed the suggestion, the room for the reader’s imagination. I told him I had a lot of help.

Earlier, I had sensed in his reading a real or whole person, despite his disclaimers.

A poetry journal I noted had a “Zen mood.”

Rejection 21:I:76: “… your poems lack vitality, are surface, not involved.”

Was surprised by our featured reader, who had contributed so little to the group and usually left immediately after reading. … She invited her ex-husband to come and hear her read of lovers and her abortion.

Am thinking about a style that requires a new turn in each line, so that the poem move forward by mosaic rather than each line alone

Pflum and Wade arguing over whether to discuss a work-in-progress or wait till it’s done.

In Pfingston’s poems, every word is right, exactly on target. His deceptive clarity is so much harder to achieve than is apparent, so that some might dismiss these as “so what.” Not me.

David Halpern on poets under 40: “There is no poet-public. Name a well-known living poet. Few people could.”

~*~

You never know where you’ll find inspiration:

 

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.

It was a time of crucial growth for me as a poet

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I journaled: All of my writing moves toward silence. The practice is a cleaning out of past accumulations. Let me burn like a candle until I reach a supreme transparency. [Not transcendence!]

My head throbs at the thought as I receive yet another rejection slip: there are 1,500 published poets in the USA [this was back in ’75!] … this, according to a new directory.

My first poetry reading at University Lutheran’s Spring Arts Festival: I had won $15 for second-place in their competition with the poem “Binghamton,” not “In Ashram” as my memory would have it. Nor first-place.

One of the jurors’ daughters liked mine best.

Pavarotti was singing down the street.

At another reading, Victor Contoski: “I decided there were thousands of love poems, but none about an air conditioner,” or, “This is my shoe poem.”

My take? Having decided the subject, he forced himself upon it like a flat-topped economist.

The next volume, had a red cover and, yes, pink pages.

“Read my ‘crazy’ poems at poetry workshop tonight. Went well, very well.”

Read four poems at Hummingbird in Naptown. Good crowd, half-Black, responsive to the word, willing to laugh, to hell with the erudition …

Destruction, when a poem takes form.

My writing strives to erase my past, wring it dry, work down to bone for the present, take flame from there.

“What do you write about?”

Let’s start with places and seasons and hope to find love.

 Notice that I wasn’t having so many diatribes by this point.

 Found poet who seems to have what O’Hara strove for, and in plainer, stronger English: JACK SPICER!

 Dick Pflum called late night (10:30). Me, groggy. Wanted some poems for WFIU to consider. Earlier that week I had wondered why the station didn’t intersperse local poets in addition to the national network offerings. I had even thought of writing the manager and suggesting it.

“You walk a lot. I feel it in your poems. I walk, too.” Another woman at Mtg.

Go-Between (III) accepted by Cottonwood Review today. Quite surprised, didn’t expect an acceptance. The piece, the fourth variation on a source, has no adjectives – or verbs. The nouns all have associations and emotional weight. … They also liked section 5 of Survival Kit, the part I thought was weakest. So it goes.

Anthologies seem to choose the poet’s least visionary work – or a least safest work.

Use of chorus in Native chants:

“I was there, I was there, I was there”

“We will kill, we will kill, we will kill”

Writers “living by our wits,” working hard but unable to capitalize/obtain equity from our labor – the fear of growing old.

Thinking about so many good writers who work only two hours a day – or 40 lines or some such – constant limit.

Inscription in A Book of Music: “No Spicer book was ever © copyright.”

His Book of Magazine Verse, with a cover designed like Poetry (Chicago): “None of the poems in this book have been published in magazines. The author wishes to acknowledge the rejection of poems herein by Denise Levertov of The Nation and Henry Rago of Poetry Chicago.”

Regarding Jack Spicer, per acolyte Robin Blaser: “The final aspect of Jack’s work is in this – that the reader participates in the meaning of the poem – that the poet is only one voice alongside another – that the poetic reopens words into an action.”

So here is a statement of the tantric aspect of objective, selfless writing that I’ve been pursuing. How ‘bout that!

Manny G found my poems “too delicate” or “too fragile,” yet wants to see more …

Also, regarding “opening the field” or “projective verse,” the necessity for keeping the meaning open …

“The batch of submissions that is mailed must be consistent: i.e., if one poem is down on love, the next shouldn’t be about your wife, otherwise you will seem shallow.”

~*~

Through the university libraries, I had access to some wonderful small-press works. I analyzed them closely, hoping to apply their lessons somewhere in my own future.

 

~*~

 

On 9:IV:76, was featured poet with Paul Solyn … audience of 20+ included Nancy Neubert, Francie Bish, Charlotte Pennel, Robin and Andy … Bonnie, walking in late from a yoga class, said the “feeling was exactly the same” …

Pfingston later wondered if it was actually one long piece. I had conceived of it as a yoga class. Need more humor, though. He perceived autobiographical development.

Pflum found new depth in my work, finding an intellect at work in the longer presentation that didn’t appear in the shorter readings.

Betty Q. found the reading full of incredible visual minutia. She also felt I had done everything I could in Bloomington and was now moving in different directions – in my experience, expression, and geography.

Several people said they most enjoyed the poems they had previously seen or heard. Perhaps I should repeat the micro-poems three times each, like a chant or circular work.

Kat suggested more patter, thought I read too long (35 minutes), didn’t like me sitting in half-lotus(!) (too hard to see), though I found it more concentrated and closer to my work – no mic in the way.

In assembling an extended reading, an unanticipated voice emerged. Not the Snyder or Brautigan or Bly, but wholly my own, somehow not the silver I had feared but a sense of craft and, more important, emotion or life or of watching a nearly indefinite sense of my existence emerge in dimensions … not my mind but my heart and feelings emerging truer, in the whole, in ways I couldn’t have known if asked … expression

Betty is right, it is time to move on, though I don’t know where or how.

Pound: “Only emotion endures.” And, “Nothing counts but the quality of the emotion.”

Carlos Williams: “When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you,” it has “an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.”

Creeley: Writing is an act [or a way] of discovering … Poems have been about the same matters for 20,000 or 30,000 years.

Curiously, I began delving into poetry and journaling when Nikki and I were breaking up, a time of intense emotions, when my writing needed to spit out in more powerful or sappy, less thought-out or rounded out expressions that I had previously worked.

[In retrospect, I see how much of looking for my problem instead looked at the problemed society in the larger society around me …]

During that period I discovered shorter forms: Brautigan and Borges, then Creeley’s Pieces, often untitled, Tom Clark’s Stones, Snyder, Saroyan. Here I was writing headlines for a living – short, tense, accurate use of words. Only later did I turn to longer forms [often cobbling together shorter bits!]

I admire Creeley’s one-sitting draft, but find after keeping most of the original I hone it later into something much more compact. And to think he dropped out of Harvard.

Reading at the Hummingbird, Jerod Carter’s comment, “I enjoyed your poems. They have a marvelous [wonderful?] delicacy, almost Oriental.” … Somehow, I wished they were stronger.

 Two of my poems were accepted by the Bloomington Poetry in Public Places project.

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.

Getting to know the Quakers better

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

“Live adventurously,” as one woman at Quaker Meeting recalled reading. Another was upset that our “silence” can cover too many “barren spots,” as snow does. Had I replied, it would have been in anger, praising the silence. [Fifty years later, I would confirm the occasions when silence ignores an elephant in the room, a tension or injury that needs to be addressed: an opportunity for Truth to work.]

Another in Friends worship quoted Montaigne: “Respect the man who seeks Truth; be wary of him who has it.”

 So many people reading spiritual and religious books do not comprehend them. Recognizing this makes me understand why Tibetan masters, among others, were so careful to keep their teachings “secret” or “hidden,” lest others ruthlessly exploited the words.

Why Jesus talked in puzzles – parables – rather than open logic.

 I notice that Paul is more important to Christianity than is Jesus.

 In this journals review, I’ve been struck by how much identity – first as a yogi and then as a Quaker – shaped my decisions and action, morally, especially.

A visitor to Meeting told how Quakers and other Protestants in her community were caring for a dying Zen monk. She didn’t know why.

Meeting, for me, became a community of Light, upholding the essence of yamas and niyamas, something that is often lost in the pageantry or theater of various schools of Asian practice, at least in the New World. The ethical constraints and actions, that is.

 In worship-sharing, an “important event age 5 to ten” … one Friend observing her grandfather’s suicide as the first death in the family

For me, the natural museum classes.

 Millard, after Mtg, mentioned how Jesus’ time was the most beneficial period for spreading a new faith. The Roman armies had subdued rivalrous tribes/nations, persecuted highway bandits, and built roads throughout the empire.

Paul, as a Roman citizen, could travel anywhere without a passport (or its equivalent).

Alice, quoting “an old white-haired woman in a Pennsylvania Meeting,” reminded another worshiper, “But if the vocal ministry doth not speak to thy condition, thou canst pull down thy body over thine ears and thus continue thy meditation.”

 All the Quakers I came to know were intense people, and thus as instruments they moved toward fulfillment, however humbly or stubbornly.

 At Gulli’s Brahms last night, Dennis remarked that one woman has put a number of people off. Not me. Perhaps I’ve simply grown to ignore that side of her.

Sitting is silent worship with the meetinghouse window open to a world of birds and breathing, children’s laughter, an electric saw, the wind even a neighbor’s radio with the smoky voice of an indistinct church organ, not that any of them matter

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.

Yoga clash …

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Rudrananda Ashram here, with its businesses. As the locals say, a third of the town is owned by the university, and another third by the ashram. The bakery, restaurant, construction, property management, framing and art gallery. [Starts to sound like Cassia’s family in my novel What’s Left!] Phonebook had numbers for all of these but not for any classes. And there were no vibes.

Has about 70 members, said a girl with a pleasant, pre-recorded smiling voice, hint of tension. And another 40 at Big Indian in the Catskills.

When I first stopped into Rudra Gallery, with Kat, we were hit by cold words of business being spoken into a phone: an orange-sweatered, burr-headed Taurus, or so I assumed from the corpulent body and luxurious surroundings as he held forth in his court of very expensive, carefully selected items displayed for sale.

I inquired about some Tibetan prints, how much, after complimenting the quality, and he proceeds to tell me “This is a Buddha and in Buddhism, uh, they believe that everything comes from the Void, or nothingness, and all of this around him comes from that, it’s his own world.”

I went on acting dumbly, while inwardly Kat was splitting a gut.

I had a feeling I had seen this guy before, perhaps as a visitor in the Poconos ashram, but he did look like two older guys in my Scout troop, too. [Turns out he was a year younger, but got into yoga about the same time I did.]

I sized him up as a creep. He strolled around in self-importance. When he began explaining another tanka to me, in a patronizing manner, trying to impress me with his thin knowledge, I mentioned how confusing these names got in going from Tibetan to Sanskrit. I replied that we knew this cosmic conflict better as Shiva, “Think about that,” and we left.

He wanted us to come back in, but I later recognized he was trying to suck me in with his vibes: they weren’t pure but of an occult power sort. He’s no swami, despite the orange. [He changed his name in 1978, to Swami Chetenananda.]

We went on to a leather store run by a good-energy BS 6-5 Aquarian “businessman” who was enjoying people as an extension of his job. We were his first customers of the day and just had a good time talking. On a later visit, we bought the broad belt with its huge, shiny sun buckle, which always garnered praise.

As it turned out, the yogi in question left a trail of financial and sexual scandal along with division in his movements to Portland, Oregon. And I was wondering if my judgments were too harsh?

In retrospect, how pivotal this becomes in my gravitation toward Quakers. I needed a circle where I could meditate. 

~*~

Another almost connection involved Thubten Jigme Norbu, assistant professor of Uralitic and Altaic studies, a lama teaching Tibetan. With Walter Kaufman just did a book on Tibetan chants for IU Press.

Turns out he was the brother of the Dalai Lama. As for all of those Tibetan readings I had done in Fostoria? And here he was, commuting to campus on the same bus I took occasionally.

~*~

Each spiritual practice must be rediscovered and reinvigorated by each generation. This is a responsibility of the Teachers, otherwise known as Elders.

A true Teacher lets the Seeker find the Truth for himself, but lends the Seeker strength, especially to admit when he’s deluding himself, which is all too easy.

What is the difference between the ashram leader with his commercialism and my struggle to survive in the world and yet be a swami?

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.

Old associations on my birthday

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Bumped into Nikki yesterday at the Gables [once a hamburger dive but turned hip]. An awkward moment, but Kat went on to class while I tried to chase down my first lover. How strange the interval of time.

Yes, there was unfinished business to bring to closure, if only we could.

Running into a few others from the past?

MG: “You used to weight twenty-seven pounds” meaning me but she’s married now.

KP: “Just hanging out,” divorced after five years.

“We just got bored”

Now intrigued by my mysterious, ineffable changes, she’s finally wanting to touch me.

I do remember her showing me a photo after an artsy shoot and her joking about having “banana breasts.”

~*~

By dwelling on the other side of downtown during my return to Bloomington, we were introduced a much different landscape than I had known in my residency on campus. Here’s an example from the southside of town by Vmenkov via Wikimedia Commons.

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.

 

My, how the town and campus had changed within a few years

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Bloomington has brightened so much: the new public library, buses, Dunkirk Square, Musical Arts Center and Glenn Black Laboratory …

That Tuesday afternoon [December 10] when I went for “a little hike,” over the hill, “to catch the sunset” … sink holes all over, found a dirt road “Xmas Trees ¼ mile” and took it past forest and a bottomless gorge and on and on … taking the next left actually took me further astray, until finally, I passed a few houses and asked someone, “Excuse me, how do I get to Leonard Springs Road?”

He either laughed or looked at me as a dope.

“It’s right here.”

I didn’t get home till 7, well after dark. Kat was very worried, actually went out looking for me.

Turns out my little walk was 7½ miles. “Around the block.”

I drew a map, which I later filled in with details.

[Gee, don’t think I had another walk like that till Marconi Station on Cape Cod decades later.]

~*~

One of the things I encountered on that walk was abandoned limestone quarries, which I would soon view as common features tucked away in the woodlands beyond town. They typically flooded in. Here’ are some examples by Vmenkov via Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

 

 

~*~

Other explorations? A long drive, including Spring Mill [Madison?], Paoli, West Baden Springs, Washington, Amish country, and Bloomfield. But we were back home by 5 and had dinner at Michaelangelo’s up the street on our side of town.

A mention here of Mennonite, though I still knew next to nothing about the faith. We did pass two lovely white-frame, clear-window, “severely simple” meetinghouses, no name attached. The second had an outhouse behind.

Windmills gave the Amish away, before the lack of utility lines did.

White houses and barns.

Clotheslines in January: solid, somber colors or white.

The radiant face of a middle-aged woman on a buckboard who turned to us and waved.

That woman’s face stuck in my mind.

In its first decades, Paoli was known as a Quaker town, the seat of Orange County, named for the one in North Carolina. Included Lick Creek (later Paoli), Newberry, and Beech Grove Friends meetings.

So much Greek Revival / Greek Temple Revival through southern Indiana.

What struck me was the order – mathematical, geometric, classical – of Paoli in its design and construction. A step beyond the state of log-cabin and rough-cut stone development at Spring Mill as wealth built up into brick homes.

The old wire bridge across White River at Hindoostan: farm-style fencing rather than railing along the sides, three boards on each side as a single lane over a flooded river, in places too widely spaced for our Bug, in others, the bottom boards have broken through. Unbelievable, looking back, that we made it.

Hindoostan settled 1818, vacated 1828: “terrible death” outbreaks of Yellow Fever or cholera. Never resettled. Bluffs nearby.

More formally, Hindoostan Falls. Originally on the stagecoach route.

Nearby, in forest: “Greenwich, 1778, first – in Indiana.” Didn’t get that vital part in driving past.

Vincinnes, founded 1732[!]

Clarksville, founded 1784 by George Rogers Clark, Indiana’s oldest American community; the man hated Indians and wished them all exterminated.

Patoka, 1789.

New Albany, on the Ohio River, was state’s largest city in 1840.

Madison, also on the river, founded 1805, was largest city in 1850.

New Harmony, originally a commune, 1814.

~*~

Spring Mill State Park, an 1816 village of log cabins and a great stone mill a marvelous beauty. Caves and sinkholes all over. As a kid, my family camped there several times.

The great eerie hall of Baden Springs. Decay, the polish gone, earth sinking, buildings crumbling: “new hotel” built in 1901 after fire claimed the first. Who would want to wear a suit and tie while on vacation, even to gamble? As for the waters of the spa? Such formalities!

Caves as vertical shafts of cold air rising and fogging in an otherwise barren field: 66 recorded caves and pits in Monroe County, meaning around our home.

US 150, approximate site of ancient buffalo trail from Louisville to Vincinnes, in 1840 became Indiana’s first toll road. Meaning the earlier ones were private?

Lost River: out and then back into the earth, blind fish and crayfish, endangered by flood-control projects (Orangeville).

Back from the road, facing a creek and hillside, Union Primitive Baptist Church, plain cars still there at 1 p.m. Two doors, men’s and women’s. Plus outhouses.

Further on, Hebron Valley Baptist, 1822.

The eerie silence of caves in a fog: “Do not enter this pit without permission.”

Not sure quite where:

Three caves, two days – strange beauty of the muddy sculptural underworld. The twisting rooms, cold reflective water returning whatever light we introduce. Dripping from ceiling.

Southern Indiana is laced with caves, including Mayfield’s situated a couple of miles from our home, not that you could see it. Photo from 1907 by Arthur Mangun Banta via Wikimedia Commons. Wyandotte was another, public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

~*~

Brown County thick with stupid gawking, the contrast of neatly-creased shorts and black Orlon socks and oxfords gawking at rural life and earlier eras punctuated by rough log cabins.

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.

Us, as a couple

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Kat made her first bread (five loaves): not bad. Also, first bus trip to town and back.

Sitting at our kitchen window and looking out at our new birdfeeder, watching cardinals and titmice, such a treat to examine them almost microscopically: free pets, in nature!

In the year 2003, I will be 55: the door is always open.

She is tired of my talking always about things. Or, as I see 50 years later, facts. Not my feelings. [Seeing that pattern would take years of therapy.]

Kat and I are private people: we know no one we can drop in on.

Mail addressed to Ms Jnana Hodson

Some days nothing goes right – up too early, humidity and heat, killer sinuses – wife dragging feet and my late start to work.

They can’t fix the car today. The mess started a week ago with auto inspection. Mr. Muskrat (pointy nose, sunglasses, and cigarette, smiling) and Mr. Ladykiller (cigarette and fast-talking) selling Kat into shocks with alignment and inspection, but the car wouldn’t pass inspection because it needed new king bolts, $60. Next day, to Brinegar’s, for the king bolts and, surprise, rod ($75) … and a long walk to work.

Still, no inspection sticker: the horn wouldn’t work.

Off to Ohio, stopped by state cops (bears), right front light out – warning ticket – and then the Bloomdale patrolman.

After fixing the horn, the turn signals didn’t dink.

In the end, it was a shorted fuse.

And then our check bounced, adding a $5 fee from the bank.

That defeated feeling you can’t get ahead of the game. Can’t save, car’s falling apart, only a fool would write poetry and submit. The more you rework for them, the more you lose from your own life.

“Life is worth living only in retrospect.”

At dawn on the 4th, Nosmo (our black kitten) wasn’t back. The house seemed empty.

Chicago trip; we stayed with Celeste and Luis, edge of the DMZ twixt Hyde Park, University of Chicago, and South Side.

unstretched canvases tacked to walls
massive waves crashing into shore

cold, stiff wind

The Maxwell Street market, block after block of hot goods amid burned-out lots abutting the precinct station house and state college campus. Catholic church, Masses in Spanish packed every service.

Mirrors, mirrors.

Hyde Park, with Frank Lloyd Wright houses
and a Swendenborgian church

~*~

On opening a page, amid Sunday afternoon jazz, a startling confession: “So hard to say what I really feel.” Specifically, it was regarding the music, but the fuller scope came back to haunt me throughout the rest of my life.

With Kat at S. John’s, the heathen beauty of ritual: No music, a relief from music poorly done. I’m bothered by the emphasis on sin, which should not be applicable to those who have been baptized in grace, and also bothered by the political positions from the pulpit … especially interpreting scripture to support family when Jesus clearly called men away …

CLOUDS WITH RAIN

~*~

21:II:76, a rainy morning: Omkara, our VW, towed in again, the coil had fallen off …

Kat shaved her legs last night, first time in a year or more – their smoothness, newness turns me on, especially after sitting across from JB the previous night, she was dressed up, eyeshadow, too. Funny, looking at your own wife that way and so delightful. Not to take anything away from his partner, who could have swept me away, too.

Delightful? Or deceitful?

The high scolding scream of a little rabbit freed from our cat’s mouth as it runs shitless home.

Kat, with her wanting a divorce … 

She wants affairs and a place of her own. So often she fights us yet often keeps us solitary, complaining of Aquarians’ love of friends and strangers.

How strange to see that latter observation, considering how solitary most of my hours in retirement have been.

Can’t take it anymore – her inarticulate depression, her months of “You don’t love me anymore,” her jealousness of my writing and my music, her desire for a divorce, her blaming me for our marriage, her resentment of my practices – my yoga, my Friends, my need for a meditation area, for silence (her yap-yap, her Qs w/out answers, her constant efforts to drain me: the meat, cigarettes, TV, radio, her desire to spend money, her efforts to push me out, to keep me from having friends or from having them over, her withdrawals, her Jekyll-Hyde snappings).

If she wants a divorce, OK. Half the bank account, half our goods, no alimony.

She can suffer in her own stupor. I’m tired of it.

Terrible thunderstorm about 6:30 this morning: green/gray skies, leaves scattered all over the yard, cornstalks flattened. No tornado watch or warning.

Car inspection. Needs new tires but Firestone’s out on strike. They tried to sell me retreads, no deal. I wound up buying Dayton Thoroughbreds, but the shop can’t balance or align them. [wonder who did].

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.

Life at the Workshop, part one

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Starting to get squared away at office: so much space amazes me [my own room!] and then all the backup material, staff, and freedom of movement. I feel like I’m in heaven. Hard to readjust to open work scheduling. New freedom, large-vocabulary return: academic life and performance seem somehow foreign, though I’ve never really left it. Either I perform/deliver now or flunk forever.

Feels very good to work at a slower, more thoughtful pace …

“Have the girls fill this out,” Charlyne said, as I trotted down the hall.

Our administrative assistant, incredulous when I wickedly passed the word along while getting my three carbon papers: “Tell Charlyne the girls are very busy; tell her the girls send their love.”

Charlyne was the uber-feminist in the outfit.

Openly referring to myself as “Jnana” sounds strange again: kept starting to say the legal equivalent of “Boy.”

The leisurely pace of academic reflectiveness, gestation, can be guilt-inducing after the gut-busting pace of the Review-Times [or other newsrooms or assembly lines]. But guilt will only clog intuition. I must learn to pace myself so that I will be producing at peak quality [not quantity]. More than three or four hours of heaving editing or writing is too much for one day, since concentration slips.

Sometimes, on this slower pace, it seems I’m going nowhere, that I should be producing on an 8-5 shift and doing my homework – reading – at other times.

Workshop, a place where craftsmen bring design/theory/aesthetics/tradition/discipline to fulfillment/practice in diverse materials …

In our sense, a place of testing and integrity …

A whole garden to delight the mind’s eye and the physical touch …

Somehow, right after the “little stroll around the block,” I note, 13:XII:74 [a Friday], just back from St. Louis, much energy. [No idea where we stayed – out near the airport? – think we did go to a fancy German one evening.] Came back with a clearer sense of the newsletter, greatly simplified: more like our yoga newsletter!

I think we settled on WORKSHOP REPORTS, with the potential of designating different series such as a police or city government.

Lynn wants at least one foundation or funding source thanked in each workshop paper: it builds their files, gives them a sense that their work is going somewhere (even if only into a folder).

VO discussing difficulties he’s had in writing for publications and how he developed the strategy of writing to write and then usually delivering the work as a paper when invited. Using this approach, he learned he didn’t spend a year to find out the editor had “chickened out” and that if an editor is interested, publication is a byproduct. This way, we have a good backlog so that when the shit hits the fan, we will be ready to market.

He mentioned that Hobbes worked over several decades revising his work.

Another time, he mentioned that his most depressed period was in trying to write a water report and not being able to frame his words: the theoretical framework was weak.

Also, the difficulty of maintaining a creative tension while writing.

My pace is recovering my yogic …

Kat on VO and EO: “I couldn’t imagine them married to anybody else,” and he was now Kat’s favorite person. How curious, considering how upset she would get at my political discussions.

~*~

On the side, Vincent enjoyed designing furniture with carpenter Paul Goodwin. Here’s a sketch of a bookshelf system in his house. I’m not sure now, though, how it connected to the floor, wall, or even ceiling.

~*~

Etienne and Amelie could frame a novel.

Her mother from a very wealthy, steel-making family that lost and regained its fortune; her father, from immigrant Ukrainian miners.

Etienne, from a morbid, divisively argumentative peasant family. It was preoccupied with death. When he was 12 or 13, the grandfather was living in the same farmhouse, not knowing he was dying, though the house reeked of the odor of rectal cancer. The father, in a furious argument, told the old man, “It doesn’t matter, in two months you’ll be dead!” something the wife, Etienne’s mother, could never forgive. The fights that followed led to separation but also their remarriage a week before Etienne and Amelie’s wedding, “so it would be proper.” Yet they still fought.

America? “Here it is just eat your brother!”

France? The mad pace of Paris or the boredom of the provinces.

“I’ve broken many bottles over such cars,” the ones trying to run down pedestrians. “Oh? Did I do that?”

In an office, I feel trapped or cut off. Want to be closer to sun or wind. My mind is no longer original.

Perhaps I write this under the weight of Saturn: I feel sluggish, sedentary. I have piles there and here, projects I do not know how to resolve.

That “little stroll,” by the way, led to my Leonard Springs poems. The site has since been developed into a public nature reserve.

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.