Tag: Midwest

SUCH DIFFERENCES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As I said at the time …

Finally, observing the banner in the background of the thirty-fifth reunion pictures, my wife finally connected a date she’d long known with her own experience: “When you were all graduating, I was being potty trained.”

I wonder what I would tell them, given the chance. I’m not judging them, as much as judging myself and all of the intervening years. The long journey to here. I’m not gloating that I have a younger wife, one who’s only a few years older than some of their own children; besides, that wouldn’t have been the case, had my first marriage not failed. I’m finally experiencing the challenges and joys of parenting, while they already have grandchildren – on that front, maybe they really are much older. See, I am envious of those still married to their spouse right out of high school. They took the straight path and got down to business. In contrast, many lonely nights and a sequence of transitory relationships have been my alternative. I think how innocent I was (ignorant is the more accurate term, actually), especially on matters of sex. In the intervening years, even after I realized that certain girls had gone away because they were pregnant or certain guys were homosexual, I simply couldn’t admit that any of us were actually having, gulp, intercourse. Although, years later, looking at the homecoming court photos in the yearbook, the realization flashed upon me, from one’s smile, that she must have recently become sexually active.

Which leads me to the goddesses. The beauties I both idealized and gazed at with masked lust, wondering how the soft touch would feel, how the naked body would look, how two people actually connect. The ones who left me speechless. The ones who were, in many ways, in a league other than the one I inhabited. To my eyes, they were miraculous and mysterious, invested with secret knowledge and magical powers, with taste, social graces, and high style – no matter how middle-class we were or the fact that our conversations rarely went any deeper than howdy. The reunion photos, then, confirm my fears – that goddesses may become hags – yes, mortal, even grotesque. And yet, to my surprise, some have become more beautiful than ever. How can this be? If we could only return, however briefly, for candid discourse, to uncover what thoughts, feelings, and actions lurked behind those Mona Lisa facades, both then and in the subsequent years. Not superficial conversation, but blunt disclosures. Now, however, sifting through the reunion photos, I soon calculate how few of these goddesses attended – which leads to further speculation. To my eye, they were the essence of what Hollywood starlets aspire to represent. Unlike any mythology, however, few remain in any Olympus. Instead, I must confront a youth culture that offered little wisdom.

I must leave it to the girls-turned-to-women to speak of the Adonis club and its deterioration. Besides, I was never a member. On the other hand, I’ve sometimes quipped that if I could do it all over again, I would have hung out with the greasers – that they had what I was lacking. As if they would have had me! Or am I only imagining they had fun in their tweaking of authority?

To reenter those years also means admitting shame, embarrassment, and guilt. I’m not the golden boy my mother expected, or the great talent my youth pastor counseled. For that matter, it’s been many years since I could tie my hair back in a ponytail or part it down the middle. Since I had a beer bottle tossed at me at a party. As I’ve said, it’s been a long road from there to here.

One soon approaching what will be a fiftieth anniversary reunion, if it happens.

ST. LOUIS AND CIVILIZATION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

As I said at the time …

We share a debt of gratitude to your grandmother, who has spent many hours assembling a remarkable gift for you – a knowledge of your ancestors. I hope you will come to treasure her findings, and the love she has put into this project.

Through Eide Henry Hopke, you and I also share a common bond, although our legacy from him varies in one crucial aspect. For you, he provides not only your surname, but also some distinctive DNA strands that come only through the male line. For me, he is part of a maternal genetic mix that is ever-expanding, the further back we go. (For example, while Eide Henry is one of my sixteen great-great-great-grandfathers, only George Hodgin carries the equivalent DNA strands for me; Eide Henry’s endowment, meanwhile, comes down through my mother’s father’s mother’s mother, in a bit of a zig-zag path.)

I hope you won’t look at your genealogy simply as a long list of names and dates – a sort of variation on the Biblical begats. (That’s not to deny the frustration and pleasure that goes into the investigative digging and puzzle-solving involved along the way of gathering these details.) Rather, the power comes in building the story of these seemingly common people and the ways they addressed their time in history and the places they dwelled. Researchers who try to connect their ancestry to ancient royalty or who stop the moment they find an ancestor hanged as a horse thief need to rethink their vision. In this venture we need to accept the facts, good or bad, in their full truth; what we eventually have is a personal history, one that will often stand at some distance from the one taught in schoolrooms or give us some insight into a greater framework. As you read historical accounts, you may find that through these ancestors, you, too, are in their time and place. Oh, yes, and as stories go, genealogies can turn up the most unexpected twists. For instance, the first of my Hodson surname ancestors in America arrived as the only surviving family member after their ship had been captured by French privateers (pirates); his great-grandson, a miller, owned a gold mine in North Carolina; and, on my dad’s side, all of my ancestors until the Second World War were staunch pacifists in their religious principles – I knew none of this when I was growing up.

On my mother’s side, Eide Henry emerges as a remarkable figure. Maybe you’ll be the one to figure out how he arrived in the New World, whether he came alone or with family, how he paid for his journey, or what led him to St. Louis; there are certainly many details to fill in about his life, and every answer seems to produce more questions. But what we already can sketch from the facts at hand point to an enterprising character who adapted himself well to his new surroundings. While we don’t know for certain what prompted him to leave Prussia, we can imagine the values the place instilled in him – truthfulness, modesty, self-control, and loyalty, in the words of Peter F. Drucker. “This Prussia had been a military state” and “was not educated, let alone cultured; but it was pious, with a narrow and sentimental Lutheranism,” Drucker notes, including an observation credited to Bismarck “that the Germans require a father figure, and that they will fall victim to a tyrant unless they have a legitimate and lawful king.” (From “The Man Who Invented Kissinger” in Adventures of a Bystander.) We can ask ourselves how much of this played out in Eide Henry’s life – in his decision to serve in the Mexican-American War, for instance, or in naming sons during the Civil War Robert Lee Hopke and Jefferson D. Hopke. This, despite the reported universal opposition to slavery by the German population in St. Louis during this period. (As you grow older, you may come to realize how often our values conflict or how much ambiguity arises in daily life; black-and-white decisions seem to be far rarer than we’d like.) We can also imagine that Eide Henry knew sorrow, in the death of his first wife or young children, and perhaps in the separation from his homeland. He must have known loneliness, too, in those times when he lived apart from his family in order to earn an income. We can look at the portrait your grandmother has collected and see all of these things in his face.

He also opens us to the pervasiveness of German civilization on American life, something that World War I erased from public awareness. Actually, I can speak of two major streams of German influence, the first being what we would consider Pennsylvania Dutch and including the Anabaptist traditions most visible now among the Amish, and a second, which settled largely in Midwestern cities and carried a deep sense of “good living,” meaning learning and progress. Eide Henry would have been part of that second movement, while many of my father’s ancestors were part of the first.

Sometimes we will glean background for our story from the most unexpectedly sources. One of my wife’s favorite books, for instance, is Stand Facing the Stove: The Story of the Women Who Gave America “The Joy of Cooking.” While Anne Mendelson is writing about her mother and grandmother, her opening chapter examines “The Golden Age of St. Louis,” which did “indeed – at least in a brief and glorious interval after the Civil War – seem one of the finest spots on earth to dwell … “ She then turns to Lebenskunstler, “as untranslatable as any word in the German language, which is saying a good deal. It implies a civilized command of living as an art form like singing or painting. German-English dictionaries lamely offer explanations like ‘one who appreciates the finer things in life.’ ‘Life artist’ is the baldly literal rendering, and perhaps as good as any.” Mendelson then goes to present the story of her genealogy in a thoroughly engaging manner, one that can be seen as a model for this enterprise. What interests us most, however, is the points where it overlaps on our own story. For instance, she mentions “Thousands of poor Irish had also come to the region, especially after the potato famine of 1845-46. They competed for work as laborers, artisans, and servants with large numbers of Germans fleeing comparable poverty.” And then she notes “a very different community brought by the abortive stirrings of liberal German nationalism after 1830 and more markedly 1848. They were articulate professionals, or sometimes minor nobility, who rejoiced in a particularly German marriage of cultural ideals, consciously enlightened convictions, and creature comforts.” At this point, it seems more likely that Eide Henry was one of those “fleeing comparable poverty,” yet he still would have been part of that mixture of German life in the city, with its “life artist” influence. While my mother probably had no idea of her Hopke ancestry, she always spoke of St. Louis in almost reverential tones; meanwhile, her mother – who married a Hopke descendant – strikes me as one who hungered for that “life artist” ideal, even though she had not been born into it.

Maybe you forget that St. Louis was once the largest and most important city west of the Appalachian mountains, after supplanting Cincinnati for the honor. Chicago took the lead only later. By 1860, Mendleson writes, St. Louis “had a population of nearly 161,000, and supported a small handful of theaters and a large handful of music societies (well populated with Germans), a library, the new St. Louis Academy of Sciences, Washington University, several foundries, the Pacific Railroad (stretching a magnificent 176 miles westward), a noisy range of political opinions, and sundry German- and English-language newspapers.”

She relates that a “traveler reaching St. Louis by steamer saw first the broad man-made plateau of city levees, swarming with teamsters’ wagons and lined with warehouses. The land rose to a modified grid of streets, orderly enough on paper but at most seasons of the year fed by an inexhaustible supply of mud reputed not to differ greatly from the St. Louis drinking water.” As a teamster, Eide Henry may well have been one of those with a wagon waiting at the wharf; we can imagine, too, what he said of the water.

Much of what I know about Eide Henry is thanks to your grandmother’s generous sharing of material she’s gathered for you. Along the way, she has also filled in large gaps in my knowledge of Eide Henry’s son-in-law, David W. Ward, and even my Munro ancestors from Scotland – all of which somehow come together in Pike County, Missouri, in what can be seen as the northern shadow of St. Louis. None of these people are among her own bloodlines, either, yet she has been faithful to the larger task of bringing their lives to the light.

How it all comes together is largely up to us. Jeremy, I hope you find much in this legacy that will inspire you, add perspective to your own life decisions, and give you an appreciation for the blessings we have because of their efforts.

I’ve spoken of Eide Henry as a remarkable character. I think we can add Patsy Lynn to that list, as well.

Best wishes in all you undertake, Cousin.

FURROW

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Like the American bison that dominated the prairie, the continuous ocean of tall grasses, which for so long spread from a corner of Ohio into Montana and Colorado, has been decimated. Homesteaders – seized by a fever to possess farmland of their own – sowed apprehension in their furrows. Inhabitants and land itself now lay open to chronic infection. After each harvest, the Breadbasket of the World, the Interior States of the American Soul, is left vacant, a stubble desert awaiting rebirth. Descendants of those who made this band agriculturally productive bear both its blessing, in economic output, and curse, as if no one can entirely escape the desperation that prompted settlement in the first place. In the recesses of the psyche, inheritors of these spaces must likewise sense themselves to be buffalo-people, and then fear they, too, may be heir to this fate. Pushed to the fringes, the intrinsic beauty and spiritual potential of the heartland are easily overlooked, both by the remnant population and the world’s policy-makers. Today’s farmers are mechanics, first and foremost. Cry, then, for harmony and healing – a proper reentry into Canaan, a taste of balm in manna. Look, ultimately, to the surviving bison and tall grasses with their underlying lavender shadings. Respect the faint drumming, growing louder.

FIRST, YOU READ

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

As long as I can remember, I’ve been a reader, thanks, especially, to a third-grade teacher who got it rolling and a fifth-grade teacher who extended the Landmark history volumes. Robinson Crusoe, Tom Sawyer, Gulliver’s Travels were all early triumphs. Curiously, Huckleberry Finn was easier at age nine than it was as required reading at seventeen; the second time around, the dialect was more difficult to handle. My general interests, however, soon veered from history to chemistry until the writing bug hit me through a very demanding high school sophomore year English teacher who drilled grammar so thoroughly we were diagramming 250-word sentences and arguing our alternative versions. She also solidified a tentative curiosity in my enrolling in journalism the next year, which wound up leading to my career path. In my senior year, when I was editor-in-chief of the high school newspaper, another English teacher confidently insisted, “You know why you write.” Followed by, “Yes, you do.”

In truth, I’ve never quite been sure what her answer would have been. I assumed she saw a desire to be noticed or appear important. But that’s not what I would have answered. I was, after all, a skinny intellectual in a school that valued football and basketball players. Moreover, my father’s side of the family – the ones I knew, since my mother’s parents had both died before my birth and the rest of her blood relations were in Missouri – had little use for either art or learning for its own sake. They were a practical, God-fearing people where a gift in language would be best employed as a preacher. (Lawyers were another matter.) Only after my father’s death did I learn he had once dreamed of being a sportswriter or the pride he took in my work as a professional journalist. When that flash connected with my grandfather’s saving copies of all of the Dayton Journal and Herald newspapers from the World War II era (“Someday they’ll be valuable”) and his mother’s lifetime of meticulous reading of the daily news could I finally perceive their approval in what I had come to see as a low-paying, and increasingly low-status,  occupation.

From them I also carry a deeply ingrained sense of social responsibility, one in which my personal relationships are often motivated more by duty than love. Here, then, my leap in concern from history to politics would seem natural. Little wonder the novels Animal Farm, Brave New World, and 1984 re-ignited a passion for fiction and what the written word can do. Politics is also the mother lode of journalism, especially for those of us who believe progress is possible through civic action. And so I might have answered Miss Hyle’s statement with, “I write to improve the world.”

~*~

(How audacious that sounds now, more than four decades later. How innocent, too.)

~*~

What she may have seen was unmistakable ambition – a desire to win for the sake of winning, apart from being noticed or appearing important, regardless of the game at hand. Winning as an act of self-affirmation. Winning as the reward for solving the puzzle faster than your rivals. With or without the laurels, trophy, or monument.

Secretly, though, there has been the hunger for a monument, the book in every home or library, the paperback cover in the supermarket and drugstore, the repeated praise in the New York Times Book Review section. Even, at one early point, the aspiration to have not just volumes of poetry and fiction but a play or musical on Broadway as well.

But then the plot thickened.

And how.

AN EXTENDED VIEW OF MY OWN VOLUMES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

It’s now been 12 months since my first ebook appeared at Smashwords – a list that now presents six of my novels and a full-length poetry collection. That’s in addition to my poetry chapbooks appearing at other presses.

First, I want to thank all of you for your support and encouragement. What you’re seeing is the fruition of a lifetime of writing that’s now, finally, coming to light. I cannot imagine trying to write seriously without a desire to share it with others – especially when I hear you tell of ways it speaks of your own experiences or sparks related memories.

I also want to acknowledge the fact that these are not works I could write today, not for a decline in ability but rather because each of us evolves and changes over time. My energies, inspirations, perspectives, and focus are different now than they were 10, 20, 30, or 40 years ago. I look at these works and find much that is wonderfully baroque or surreal or passionately intense and realize I’m in a much different sensibility today – yes, I’m happy to have these souvenirs from the journey, these touchstones and treasures, but they come from my younger years and their visions and even the different companions who shared my life back then, in contrast to the household I cherish now. More than ever, I’m ever-so-grateful I set aside the time over the years to draft and revise then, rather than waiting for my retirement years as so many wannabe writers do.

Let me just say there’s much more coming in the next 12 months.

And thank you.

THE YEAR 1980

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The earth itself is set to erupt.

~*~

Thunder pealed again, and everybody packed up. Outside, Roddy and Erik danced in the eerie dusk. A soft drumming in trees sounded like drizzle, but instead of water, powder fell. Everyone appeared amazed, even elated. Weren’t we fortunate to have a volcano blow up in our face! Then Jaya recalled history: “Oh, Pompeii! Will guides conduct tours here, showing the world exactly how we victims perished? Is this the way our world will end?” Something gripped her, insisting they get home or die in the effort. She dragged Erik, protesting, to the car and raced through the grit. Autos in front of them were invisible, even their taillights, until Jaya was almost atop them. The ink blot overhead closed in on the far horizon, sealing off the last natural light. Plunging through this tar-paper snowfall on a route they knew so well, Jaya recalled the many times she had joked about being able to drive it blindfolded.

Promise~*~

To learn more about my novel, go to my page at Smashwords.com.

FROM GOD TO CINCINNATI

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Karen Armstrong: A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. A stunning a provocative overview. One I will be returning to repeatedly. Its examination of early Islam, especially, opens entirely unexpected perspectives to my awareness. The distinction between the Trinity of Western Christianity and of Orthodoxy is quite helpful in my emerging argument of Logos/Light.
  • G.I. Gurdjieff: Meetings With Remarkable Men; P.D. Ouspensky: The Fourth Way: A Lucid Explanation of the Practical Side of G.I. Gurdjieff’s Teachings. Two that will be leaving my collection. The meetings aren’t all that remarkable – for the most part, mostly travel journeys, actually, or an autobiography – in quite meandering, wordy prose. I could easily come up with nine more remarkable individuals from my own sojourns – and not exclusively male, like his. The Ouspensky turns out to be equally convoluted Q&A accounts of speculation. The wordiness (and vast ego) leave me unmoved.
  • David Meltzer: Hero/Lil and Six. After Armstrong’s explanation of Kabbalah and its growth, I returned to these two poetry collections and find them quite rich and energizing. Hero, however, comes across as more of a villain (and a deadly trickster, at his best) than does Lilith. Some great leaping within the individual works, including (to my surprise) the prose-poems in Six that actually work for me.
  • Robert Lawrence Smith: A Quaker Book of Wisdom: Life Lessons in Simplicity, Service, and Common Sense. A former headmaster of Sidwell Friends School reflects on the lessons he learned growing up in Philadelphia Quaker culture and the ways it played out over the ensuing years.
  • Stephen Mitchell: Parables and Portraits. An enjoyable read of original poems and prose poems based in large part on Biblical figures and their stories as well as others ranging from Manjushri and Huang-po to Vermeer and Freud.
  • Three poetry chapbook competition winners – Carolyn Page, Barn Flight; Linda Lee Harper, Buckeye; and Gary Myers, Lifetime Possessions. Page, a native of Rochester, presents some disturbingly violent insights into Swamp Yankee and then redneck (in North Carolina) life; the poems are essentially flat, prosaic, a single read tells you everything. Harper, with her stories of a childhood in Cincinnati, has a little more edge; still, I’m left wondering how rare my upbringing was, since I’ve found no hints of childhood sexual abuse. The last four poems in Myers’ volume break free from the pack and enter into a dreamlike state – the first pieces, in fact, that have stirred my admiration (how I wish he’d been able to sustain this for the entire book!).

100_6857

CONSIDERING THE COMPETITION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

After I moved from the ashram, I spent a year-and-a-half in a small city that very much resembles one I call Prairie Depot in several of my novels. And then I returned to my university as a research associate.

While our institute was set in a town very much like Daffodil, there was one difference I omitted. By this time, the town had a large urban ashram and, for several reasons, I chose not to attend classes or other activity there but instead began sitting with the Quakers in their mostly silent worship in a country meetinghouse.

Still, as the joke went, the ashram owned a third of the town. It had a vegetarian restaurant or two, maybe a bakery by this point, a house painting company, art gallery, significant real estate, and maybe much more.

The university, of course, owned the rest.

Or so the joke went, back in the mid-’70s.

My own experience is much more along the lines of what I describe in my novel, Ashram. We barely owned anything.

MADRIGAL DINNERS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

When I was in college, one of the unique Christmas events was a series of madrigal feasts replete with Renaissance music, troubadours, jesters, and, of course, a meal that included the procession of the roast boar – in actuality, a large Indiana hog. Effective all the same.

The event originated in 1947 in what we now call the Early Music movement, and soon evolved into its Elizabethan splendor, drawing (as I recall) 550 people to each sitting over a two- or three-week period. And it was quite colorfully memorable.

Alas, by the beginning of the 21st century, the dinners had become history – in part, I assume, because of the academic pressures of a reconfigured semester that now ended before Christmas, rather than two weeks later. (A change I applaud, all the same – having finals hanging over you during your so-called vacation was tortuous, as was returning for two weeks, leaving, and coming right back to register.)

Still, it has me thinking of the many holiday events that now sustain American arts organizations – the Nutcracker ballet at the top of the list, of course, and the staged Christmas Carol or Holiday Pops concerts. As well as the big collapse most people seem to suffer for two or three weeks after.

SLIDE SHOW MEMORIES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

When I was growing up, my family would sometimes go over to another family’s house for dinner or a low-key party that was soon followed by their getting the projector and screen out, along with a brace of Kodak slides, to show us their summer travels.

In those days, we were somewhat awed. These were our friends who could afford the equipment and film and also manage to travel in some kind of style. In other words, it was an occasion, however boring.

These days, of course, photography is, oh, so much easier, and thanks to digital advances, oh, so much cheaper. And the slide show, as I’ve been finding as I blog, is both easier and, well, more intimate – you can watch it when and where you want. You don’t even have to yell out, “Can we back up two?” or “Who was that in the lower right-hand corner?”

Many families now have to figure out what to do with those increasingly fragile slips of film in their cardboard frames – especially the ones that now smell of mildew. They’re history, of course.

As is, it appears as I look around, the custom of families coming together with others.