Tag: Personal Journey

JUST PAGES APART

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As I said at the time …

For me, writing means watching my own shifting mind while opening myself up to all the living energies around me. It means simplifying, following unexpected leadings and openings, sometimes to dead ends, other times to unanticipated ranges. Some time ago I discovered that to write poetry I had to be sitting in meditation every day. And later, I found once a week would suffice.

If ego is an ever present trap, the practice can introduce repeated humbling. As do the rejection slips.

Detachment: who wrote that! And when? (The surprise of rediscovering your own work five or ten years later. Who wrote that, it is so incredibly fine! Or: Who wrote that piece of tripe? I’m glad it never saw publication. Sometimes only pages apart.)

And then the piece goes its own way: a living organism: readers, editors see it differently from you. What you would cut they love. What you love they see as sore thumb.

What we’re most fond of is likely to be what bothers others the most; what we’re about to toss out in the next revision may be what is most effective with our readers. (Point raised, I believe, by Joyce Carol Oates; true to my experience.)

As critics of others’ work: harshest, at times, on those whose work is most like our own! Too much mirror? Push ourselves as far as we can, coming to a point where we no longer know if a piece is any good or not only that we’ve done everything in its pursuit that we possibly can at this period in our life.

Prophetic practice: light in the wilderness.

The dilemma of arts/responsibility/spirituality brought into focus by looking at something like the Florentine court of the Medici: High Art interwound with brutal political/economic force. (Throw the man out the fourth floor window; nowadays, we have helicopters. How exquisite.)

The dilemma of the news photographer: Should I save the victim and lose the opportunity of taking a great photograph? Or should I be “professional” and observe the world as an outsider? This holds for all artists: at one point are we being selfish in our pursuits? At what point is our solitude essential for the well being of all?

Into solitude / the Silence / the Holy Now, as Thomas Kelley phrased it.

At its core, I write to discover / remember / connect / distill.

In my writing I collect – that is, bring myself back together. More and more, I think on paper. I write to find what is under the words and phrases before me. Go deeper, and then wider. I write to listen. Eventually, I write to sing.

DISTANT DRUMS GROWING CLOSER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

High among my regrets in this zigzag life of mine is the number of friends who have slipped away along the journey. I started to add “lovers,” but will hedge for a moment, given all of the complications.

Unlike my parents’ generation, mine has exhibited a tendency to let the connections go once we’re no longer in physical proximity. We don’t exchange Christmas cards the way they did. And we don’t visit much in our travels.

I think we’ve simply been too swamped trying to stay afloat in busy schedules, and while it’s possible I’m in an aberrant corner of the baby boomer phenomenon, when I ask around, no one argues to the contrary.

The one exception might be those individuals who serve as “switchboards” connecting social circles, the ones who know the news about everybody, those unique folks you easily confide in, for that matter, or at least easily reveal much more than you’d intend. In my Hippie Trails novels they show up as characters like Tate in the dorm or Nita in the newsroom. But they’re rare, and now that I’m retired from the office, I’m far from the last one of my active acquaintance.

Yes, it is hard to keep up.

~*~

One factor might be simply that guys, as a rule, rarely correspond. More often than not, it’s been their wives who’ve kept me informed – the ones I’ve yet to meet, in many cases, if we’re still exchanging holiday greetings. And that’s before the reality of divorce.

As I’ve also found, attempts to resume contact after a long hiatus can be problematic. Usually, only silence has followed or, in one case, a polite but all too curt update.

Quite simply, we’ve all gone our separate ways.

Admittedly, working in the newspaper trade did little to enhance this. It’s a field with high turnover, at least in the entry-level operations where many of us served in our younger years – the time most prone to socializing together. But the hours are typically nights and weekends, and few anymore would retreat to a nearby bar till closing, as we did during my first internship. Besides, in my last newsroom, closing hour had already arrived before we clocked out and the intensified drunk-driving crackdown dimmed any desire to stop on the way home.

That last newsroom really split into three working circles that rarely interacted anyway – the Sunday paper, where I devoted most of my career, dayside, and nightside. Few of us lived in the same city as the office, either, so once our shift was over, we fanned out across the state for home – well, some split across a state line to the south or east, as well. There was little to link our “outside” activities and families to theirs, despite some attempts such as minor-league baseball outings or a picnic. Mostly, we were pulled along our private byways.

~*~

Looking at my broader life, I’ve known some incredibly talented people and wonder from time to time how they’ve fared. (The kinds I’ve sketched in my Hometown News novel, for that matter.) Many, as I sense, have wound up performing in the small, out-of-the-way places where they’ve settled – something occasionally confirmed in a successful Google search. Or I keep reflecting on a comment a poet repeated the other night, someone born the same year as me – “I never achieved the great things that were expected of me,” even “I failed to accomplish” – something I suspect is very common among those of us born this side of the crest in the baby boom wave. Those just a year or two ahead had that much of an edge in the job openings, especially when it came to university tenure track.

Still, once in a while some jarring bit of news breaks through.

The latest reports the fatal heart attack on Thanksgiving Eve that claimed a photojournalism guru who was at the edge of one of those circles. I knew him through Marcy, the amazing shooter we’d hired at the small newspaper where I was the No. 2 guy in a staff of eight full-timers trying to cover sections of five counties – an operation so tight we didn’t even have access to live wire photos. We were forced to be resourceful (or else mediocre), and some of my proudest work comes from that shoestring venture – especially the projects with Marcy.

Given the long hours and very low pay, it couldn’t last forever. For those of us who were the hired guns from outside, the clock was always ticking – it was only a matter of time before moving on, hopefully out of our own initiative. In this instance, Marcy and Larry married shortly after I’d swept up my own young bride, and as a young couple, they soon shot off to new adventures to the east while my wife and all of our possessions trucked southwest and later northwest.

Larry, as you may have guessed, was the photo guru. In our few encounters, he always loomed larger than life as he overflowed with ideas and energy and, especially, an outrageous glow of humor. He went on, as his obituary confirms, to build a storybook professional resume of management-level success that included the National Geographic and a handful of big-city, big-name newspapers before easing on into college teaching, at least until he was embroiled in a scandal.

Newsroom management, I might add, has always been a tightrope walking act. I’ve seen some very good leaders who were shaken from their heights and simply could never quite get back into the business – they’d gone too far up to go back in the ranks but not far enough up to move from one disaster to the next, as the top level seemed to do.

His wife – and later, former wife – was one of the two photojournalists who have long set the very high standard I apply in editing news pictures, and I’ve often said I’ve worked with some of the best in the business. Her images always had a signature warmth and vision, even before we evaluate her impeccably flawless lab work. But I lost track of her career, picking up only mention that she, too, had gone on to college teaching – something I know she must do well. Somehow I missed that she’d shared in a Pulitzer Prize and now, as I look that up, I see the years she covered the White House for the Associated Press and more. There’s her portrait of five living presidents together or Bill and Hillary with the pope or Socks the cat atop a White House lectern. Yeah, she done good – real good. As I said all along, she’s the best. (Well, with one – just one – exception, who I came across thanks to her reference. But that’s another long story.)

What I didn’t remember – or perhaps even know – was how much Larry fit into that little paper where I’d worked. He was born within its circulation area and became its photographer at the beginning of his career – the same job his future wife would fill. His degree was from the state university at the other edge of our coverage.

What keeps coming back to me is the fact he was only a year older than I am. He always seemed to be, well, that looming presence up the ladder. The one landing in places I might aspire to. One well ahead of me, the way a guide would be.

There were a few close shots at that leap – near misses – but they rarely linger on my list of regrets. If anything, in retrospect, I feel blessed I was instead enabled to reclaim my own life by putting in the required work hours and then going home, where I could live and love and worship and pursue my own literary practices.

I am puzzled that this distant news hits me more than the deaths of a half-dozen colleagues of my generation from my last newsroom did – cancer, diabetes, heart-attack, perhaps even suicide. But I also acknowledge a circle of dear friends facing long-term, but ultimately fatal, diagnoses as well as others who have already had close calls, plus a few others who have passed on – or passed over, in the old Quaker term. Natural mortality is circling in, after all, and there’s no escaping. I’m aging.

So here I am with some glorious wedding photos – taken a day after the ceremony by a Pulitzer Prize winner. The ones that stay in the filing cabinet, given my own eventual divorce. Not just because of the wild polyester suit I wore for the occasion. Historic documentation, as I’m reminded.

And all of that’s flooding back now. Even without the novels.

A LITTLE HOLY CONFESSION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Coming, as most of us modern Quakers do, from other faith traditions, it’s fair to ask ourselves just what we carry with us into the Quaker circle.

My own family, for instance, was quite active in the Evangelical United Brethren denomination, now merged into the United Methodists. Despite the many Sunday mornings spent listening to quarter-hour sermons, however, I find myself remembering very little. There was one telling us not to waste time (because time was a gift from God), another about our bodies being temples that should not be abused by smoking or drinking, another about non-conformity as a Protestant duty (this back in the gray-flannel ‘50s!), as well as the annual money sermon, reduced to a plea for financial support. Surprisingly, I recall no Bible stories. The senior pastor, a quiet and bookish man, quoted many volumes along the way, yet my sense is that he was likely much more effective in his hospital visits and pastoral counsel than he was in the pulpit. The youth pastor, meanwhile, taught me more about organizing and managing successful political campaigns and establishments than about matters of the Holy Spirit.

More influential, I suspect, were the short trailside vespers of our Scout troop. One boy, a preacher’s kid, even spoke of the church being the people, along the lines of the Quaker argument I’ve previously presented. And then there was the twilight circle of rowboats and candles when we camped at Lake Vesuvius – that awe of the stilling day and waters reflecting something of our current worship.

It all seems so long ago, and so far back. Yet a few turns later, emerging from a yoga ashram, I encountered a circle of Friends who began opening the Scriptures to me, and then a few Mennonites who restored the hymn legacy, and something from that past took shape, in a new way. Maybe the last laugh, though, belongs to those EUB officials of my youth who tried to steer me into their ministry – and a faith I soon rejected fully. After all, it opened the way that landed me into free Gospel ministry here.

NO LONGER MUSICAL RARITIES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Looking at yet another recording of Vivaldi’s now ubiquitous Four Seasons reminds me of the first time I encountered the work. Two of our local FM stations each had an hour of classical music each night, and there it was, taking up the entire program, or at least most of it.

At the end of the piece, the announcer came on, leaving me to exclaim, “Who was that? Never heard of him.” A nobody composer, then. (Actually, I think my reaction was more graphic. In those days, I wanted BIG NAMES.)

A month later, the same thing.

And a month after that, the reaction continued.

I must have been a sophomore in high school. By my senior year, Vivaldi had gained enough traction to have one of the Four Seasons concertos be included in a Cincinnati May Festival concert I attended (Robert Shaw conducting), and even Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic had recorded an all-Vivaldi album that was a mainstay of my budding collection.

How times have changed.

I remember, too, discovering Mahler through a Boston Symphony recording under Erich Leinsdorf, probably about the same time. By my senior year of college, Mahler had gained enough visibility that I heard two live performances of his Fifth Symphony, one by an Indiana University orchestra and the other by the Cincinnatians under Max Rudolf – and that was within a span of one month.

Now that Mahler and Vivaldi are regulars in the repertoire, I keep hoping for a similar discovery of John Knowles Paine, George Whitefield Chadwick, Amy Beach, and their American Romantic-era colleagues.

Yes, times and tastes can change. There’s so much more to discover and embrace.

ALONG THE MISSISSIPPI

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

On my Monday free of the office, I drove up the palisades to nose around a picturesque river city in dull, mid-October weather. Looked at the signs. City Fish Market – Fresh or Smoked, down along the water. “Bill’s,” one door said; the other was “Private.” Down the main street from Doug’s Steak House, which was supposed to be THE place for Mississippi catfish, the town school stood in front of Lock and Dam No. 10.

I pulled into the Corps of Engineers parking lot as the Jack Wofford pushed its barges into the lock, noticed an observation tower, and climbed up to a deck  occupied by mostly married retirees. But in the corner, more my age, was a woman in a London Fog trench coat and big boots, her long, black hair blowing in the cold wind. For a while I wondered if she was part of the pairs and quartets of older folks with their cameras who had come to view the autumn foliage and poke around the gift shops and galleries. She turned her head, noticed me briefly, turned back several times. Between twenty-five and thirty-two, I guessed. Proper makeup, classy.

Then, on the riverboat, a cook appeared at a door and fired back with his camera.  She laughed.

Once the retirees beside her left, I asked her how the crews got their three lengths of barges – 3×3, for nine in all – out of  the locks. “I don’t know,” almost a question. “I’ve never been here before.”

This time I noticed her crooked teeth. Began to wonder about games.

The cook emerged again, this time from the pilot house, and threw something, calculating for the wind. The object curved sharply at the last moment, into her fine catch. She unwrapped it a bit, saw it was a brownie with a phone number and address inside. She giggled to another old couple: “I think he’s had a lot of experience.”

Once the riverboat churned out of the lock, she descended to a powder blue Ford Torino, donned kid gloves with little holes for driving, and drove off.

The wrapper around her plates left me wondering if she was from the Henry County in Iowa or the one up in Minnesota.

I was left wondering, of course. Why so dressed up? And free on a Monday? That wasn’t a typical single person’s car. A professional, between stops? An art major, who gave it up for money? A government worker, with Columbus Day free? Off to a sweet rendezvous? Delightful divorced? Bored, with kids?

Me, at the time, with my own wife a thousand miles to the west, presumably finishing college.

EVERYONE’S FROM SOMEWHERE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In the aftermath of major disasters, the wire services run a list of victims, something I used to think was to inform the editors of local newspapers of potential links to their own circulation area. But then my boss told me to run them.

“Why?” I asked. “We don’t have that much space for wire news.” Meaning national and international stories.

“Everybody’s from somewhere,” he answered. And I soon learned how true that was.

In fact, here in New Hampshire, we’ve come to expect a Granite State angle in almost every breaking story.

Small world, indeed.

SABBATICAL LESSONS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

As I said at the time …

When I was 38, several developments occurred in a way that allowed me to give myself a year of unemployment, drawing largely on savings. Rather than travel the world or undertake some related activity, I hunkered down in a writing spree [that resulted in the novels now (finally) being published]. The sabbatical meant that for the first time in my life, I had a period of uninterrupted concentration on this work. The writing itself. Three fast novels, now to be revised, and thud! skidding to a crash or whatever. Enough to expand to a dozen, in the hours of revision after I went back to the paying work. Looking back, I know it had to be done. And done then.

Nevertheless, in my struggle between practicality and art, there’s been a longstanding sense of guilt in spending time on myself. To my surprise, a resolution came through a workshop on prayer, when we were divided into smaller groups and then asked to write out a prayer request. Not for what others might need or a social issue, but for something we needed individually. “Ask for something for yourself,” which the others would then pray for.

Of course, each of us works differently. I’m not one for the blank sheet writer’s block syndrome: I’m usually springing from notes jotted down earlier. (Pacing is another matter: just where is this going? And why?)

In contrast, I recall a poet friend who was also a public school teacher; he was quite prolific during the busy school year, yet during the summer, could produce little, though he could never quite figure out why. (He could also stare at a piece of paper for five hours and then turn out a sharply focused gem.) The other friend, having all the leisure in the world, could produce only disconnected flashes. Could it be some juggling or resistance is also essential to the practice?

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.

OH, YES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

 As I said at the time … Eighth Month 24, 1997 

Dear M of the Warm Heart and Extraordinary Signature …

Thanks for giving those five poems a first home. I look forward to seeing what you’re doing with your ‘zine, being already intrigued by your sense of graphic design. (A lobster in the crest? Great touch, especially considering how many French-speaking kids in Maritime Canada used to go to school with lobster in their lunchboxes while their richer English classmates had roast beef. How times change.)

You have no way of knowing how much your letter meant to me. (So I guess I’ll have to try explaining, right?)

Here I was dragging home from another hellish Saturday at the newspaper office — the 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. drill — well into a mounting depression that has been building for the last several weeks. (In part from watching an ex-girlfriend slip into alcoholism and eating disorders, and also in part from going to contradances where we’ve been way short of women partners, as well as in part from the pleasures of adult orthodontics, and even in part from car trouble, blah-blah. You get the picture.) So there, amid the junk mail and a bill or two: your letter. Poetry acceptances are always nice, especially when an editor selects more than one. An entire batch, of course, is a winning scratch ticket. But a letter? Not just a form acceptance? I’m touched.

You pack a lot into a single page. Things that trigger emotional reactions within me, too. For starters, you write so well — with seeming ease, grace, intimacy, color and a varied vocabulary, joy, and encouragement. You leave me arguing with myself: Is she really 18? (Na, can’t be … way too insightful to be a kid.) (Yes, she is: Listen to the dreams. Listen to the inner connections. You don’t get that from university study.) (Nah, it could be a very studied imitation — somebody who would like to be 18, like your friend who decided 17 was the perfect age and then spent the next half century remaining 17.) (Yes, see how she leaps with playful touches — the “love and liquor” or “little blade of grass in the garden of literature.”)

So, M, which is it? How is it you apparently have so much going — plus the resourcefulness and skill to launch your own magazine? Tell me, do … I’m intrigued. (And why, by the way, were you home on a Friday night instead of out on the town. Especially a big town, like Chi’town?) Ah, life! Ah, mystery!

“Professional” writer? My dear, all writing is work — and sometimes, when we’re really blessed, it becomes intense prayer, no matter how that particular piece turns out. Writing is a process, with two muses, as Wendell Barry insists: one says you can do it, you really have to give it a try, before the other reminds us, it’s harder than you thought! For most journalists, it’s a trade, as in plumbing or meat-cutting. Since no poet today pays the rent or mortgage from royalties alone, my definition of a “professional poet” is anyone who gets pieces published while being employed to teach “creative writing.” That makes the rest of us “amateur poets” — amateur, as in one who loves. Of course, as an editor now, you are “professional” to whatever degree you want to accept — especially since you’re in position to endorse some of those creative-writing teachers through publication. (Feel the power yet?)

Literary masterpieces? Don’t worry about that, not for a long time, if ever. The important thing for you now — as well as those other “mostly manic, angst-ridden teenagers,” who, you acknowledge, “produce some fine work too” — is to ride the energy, recording as much of it as you can while everything is extraordinary, intense, and fresh. This — your “shit load of poems (from) the last several years” — is the Mother Lode you’ll be drawing on for the rest of your writing career. Lucky you! Thirty years from now, you’ll shriek: “A diamond in the muck! A turn of genius where I had seen nothing remarkable!” Trust me. And in the meantime, throw nothing away. I wish I had begun keeping a journal six years earlier I did. One detail can spring an entire movie from oblivion.

A theory: By the time most writers develop the craft to accomplish what they intend technically, they’ve lost the opening that compelled them in the first place. The result is dry, technical work.

Put another way: A critic on PBS remarked that no other visual artist has produced as much bad art as Picasso did, yet we need the nine bad pieces if we are to appreciate the genius of the tenth one. Ted Berrigan, in one of his taped teaching sessions, says much of the same in warning writers to be wary of the limitations success can put on their outpouring.

About my poems in your hands: Yes, these five are delicate, subtle, even dreamlike. Lately, I’ve been reflecting a lot on how the conflicts within any relationship often form as much of the fabric of connecting as the basic erotic/romantic attraction does. Of course, either partner can really know only his or her half of the interaction, at best, so there are always these gaps and misunderstandings and expectations and — well, the kind of lacy texture I think you perceive. I’m trying to let the images themselves convey this energy, without limiting it by any editorial comment. Does this make sense to you? (By the way, a hambo — one of the images — is a wonderful pivoting dance for a couple: somewhat like a waltz or a polka, except that the woman really does seem to fly about five feet rather than five inches above the floor.)

So how ‘bout sending a big batch (copies, of course) of your writing my way? Not that I’m bored, mind you, but as I’ve said, intrigued. The whole point of writing is to share it. Enclosed check, too, is for past issues, future issues, a subscription if you have one.

Wish you were here to read to me. It’s a lovely, dry, cool New England Sunday afternoon. A great day to head to the beach or the mountains. Or even off to Boston, for whatever. Thanks for making up for being so mean to everyone that day by being nice to me. Your penance worked!

Cheerios and grins …

SHOT FIRED AND ALL THAT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

From a note dated 11 June 2005: Old North Bridge

Dixieland band on a pontoon party boat on the swollen Concord River
passing two Revolutionary War era uniformed re-enactors
on a hot, sweltering day.

(My younger one pointed out to them how their uniforms were wrong.)

Incongruous merriment.
How freely, all the same.