History of My Reading: To Stony Creek and Buffalo 1969-70

Stony Creek, Connecticut 1969/70.  BK photo.

 After my months in Berkeley, I flew to Chicago in late October or early November 1969.  I visited for a few days with Jeremy Gladstone (a friend from Knox College) who was back from Europe and staying at the family home in Park Forest until he sorted out his next move.  In Europe Jeremy had acquired a taste for Pernod, one of the anise-based French liqueurs, a legal form of absinthe.  He showed me how to drink it over ice, with water.

  One evening he invited a group of former Knox friends, and initiated them as well.  I’m pretty sure Howard Partner was among them.  We sat around a table drinking Pernod.  I think it was on this occasion that I got a better appreciation for how far apart these Chicagoland suburbs really are.  It took longer for everyone to get there and to get back than the time we spent together.

 My next stop was the family home in Greensburg.  This was likely a short visit because I was soon on my way to rejoin Joni in Connecticut.  I got myself there by first going to Washington for the second Moratorium demonstration against the Vietnam War on November 15.  This turned out to be officially the largest Washington demonstration of the war.  I may have gone down with my friend Mike or maybe I met him there because he was stationed nearby.  He had been drafted into the Army the year before.  So I marched against the war in the company of an active duty soldier (or in his case, chaplain’s assistant.) 

Many demonstrators from distant places came on rented buses, and so my plan was to find a bus returning to New Haven and hitch a ride. Not really a mad strategy in 1969.  In any case, the plan worked. Mike and I found a bus going to New Haven and they had empty seats.  I even got acquainted with someone on the bus who offered to put me up for the night when I couldn’t reach Joni upon our arrival.  In the morning I met his wife, and he and I traded versions of Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country” (I knew the Nashville Skyline version in G, he knew the original version in C.) Then I called Joni again and she came to pick me up.

 Joni had found a small place in a village called Stony Creek, directly on Long Island Sound, about eight miles from New Haven.  As I recall, it was three rooms in a building set back from the main drag, Thimble Island Road.  Though oysters and lobster fishing were part of its identity, the “stony” in Stony Creek likely came from the quarry.  Before it closed at the beginning of the 20^th century, it supplied pink granite for the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, and the base of the Statue of Liberty.

Probably Thimble Island Road.  BK photo.

 With a population of about a thousand, Stony Creek was part of the town of Branford, Connecticut.  An article I clipped from the New York Times a decade later began with the quip of an unnamed critic: “Every town has its village idiot, but only Branford has an idiot village.”  This article made much of Stony Creek’s resistance to change; specifically to tourism.  I don’t know if it’s still that way, though photos on line don’t give me that impression.

 The 1979 Times article suggested that many residents were employed at Yale, and perhaps that was the case to some extent also in 1969.  Across the Sound from Stony Creek there were houses where groups of Yale Law students lived.  One of them was named Bill Clinton. His girlfriend Hillary was often around.  Joni’s brother-in-law was at Yale Law, and she attended a party over there sometime before I’d arrived.  Perhaps they met. 

I don't know if it was a cultural high point but in the late 1930s, Stony Creek had a summer theatre, operated by two women who also interned for the legendary Mercury Theatre in New York, run by John Houseman and Orson Welles, often the star in its productions.  This is how Stony Creek hosted a Mercury Theatre show for a week prior to its Broadway debut. Unfortunately the tryout was so dismal that the show never opened--only those who came to Stony Creek, like Katharine Hepburn, ever saw it. She stole one of the actors, Joseph Cotton, for her 1939 Broadway hit, The Philadelphia Story, which revived her career. 

That New York Times article sings the praises of Stony Creek in summer, but I saw it only in the dead of winter, intermittently from November through February (with some time back in Greensburg for Christmas, which extended well into January to avoid Joni’s parents, visiting her and her sister.  They were not my allies.) 

BK

 Still, even though it was dim and frigid (or sunny and slushy) much of the time, I liked our corner of Stony Creek by the Sound. The Sound wasn’t the ocean but it was something, and it was always there.  I wrote this about it:

 Dredging the gray sky,/the winter wind sears home./Against the window/it pours/stinging rain from the sea./Though it does not leap into the warm kitchen/I go out to meet it/greet it/say hello/and come back in.

 Something about that dynamic suited me then, and still does. Besides the Sound, there was very little else in Stony Creek, at least within walking distance, except farther down Thimble Island Road there was a small store--and a public library.  It was (and is) the Willoughby Wallace Library, built in 1956 thanks to a bequest by the eccentric but public-spirited Mr. Wallace, plus an architect’s donated design, and donated town granite.  

So this bright substantial building was pretty new when I discovered it, amazed it was there.  I was inside it just after 3 in the afternoon, and found it was a prime hangout for high school students after school.  They sat around sunny tables, munching candy from the store and debriefing the day: who got in trouble on the bus that morning, who got ripped last weekend, plus demonstrations of how Martha and Jennifer walk. (As well as casting suspicious glances at the possible narc with the long hair, taking notes.)

 Around 4, they were replaced by a noisy bunch of grade schoolers.  “I wonder what menstruation means?”  I watched a third grader look over a Jimi Hendrix album.  Others laughed over the magazines, or broke into whispery, gossipy groups. 

 The library became my regular destination—walking past the abandoned offices of Pacific Sanchero, Permittee, and the house with the multicolored design painted by a summer tenant, who also inscribed on its wall “Latch onto a feather.”  In relatively good weather, I could sit on a stone bench outside, if it wasn’t already occupied by the aforementioned students.

 It was in this library that I discovered an author I would follow for the rest of his life: Ronald Sukenick. Very likely his latest book was on display, with a title bound to catch my eye: Death of the Novel and Other Stories.  (The “death of the novel” was a thing, long before—and much different than-- the death of the author.) 

Sukenick

The stories amazed me—I hadn’t read anything like them before.  Today some might qualify as “metafiction,” or be called deconstruction.  At the time they felt to be attempts to find new forms commensurate with the current fractious and fractured reality, as well as further forays in expanding the possibilities of writing by essentially playing with some of those possibilities.  These stories were basically comic, and in a sense conventional—the experiments were part of the story, as for example, when he includes a transcript of a conversation with his wife with a tape recorder between them.  When the conversation becomes uncomfortable for him, he wants to turn the tape off.  (At least that’s how I remember it, from a re-reading ten years ago or so.)

 So I was delighted to find in the library stacks a copy of his novel, Up, published the previous year.  It also played with narrative—the initial character was a writer, so part of it is about a character he’s writing (Strop Banally), including the changes he’s making along the way (the character’s hair color, etc.)  It also threads other narratives, but again includes critiques of their discontinuities and excesses as part of the story.

 Sukenick seemed only a little older, and I immediately bonded with our similarities in outlook and literary attempts, ignoring many differences.  Writing conventional narrative seemed superficial and false to many in those nuclear psychedelic Vietnam Nixonated days.  I didn’t get all he was doing or trying to do, but I was attracted to the mosaic form and the irreverent style I’d been drawn to in the Beatles, Vonnegut, Donleavy, Joseph Heller, etc.

My Sukenick collection, minus "Mosaic," hiding somewhere

 But Sukenick became a hard author to follow—even as a reader.  Those first two books were from major publishers, but subsequent ones were from small presses, including the organization he helped to start, the Fiction Collective.  At least a few times I found his books on carts of university bookstores sale books.  I found his 1986 novel Blown Away (Sun and Moon Press) deep in a pile of discount books on my last visit to the Harvard Coop bookstore.  But I managed to get copies of all of his novels, and one collection of stories.  I still have most of them, including his last, easily the best fiction I’ve read about 9/11, Last Fall.  I even have his extremely useful book on Wallace Stevens, Musing the Obscure, from his earlier life as a very perceptive and methodical literary scholar.  He died in 2004.

 Sukenick was a named character in Up, and the novel followed other characters (his boyhood friends mostly) who also were a little older than me.  There were retrospective scenes from their past, though I wasn’t much interested in them at the time. (Now they seem vivid.) What impressed me was that this was contemporary fiction about contemporary times and people.  Characters smoked dope and talked about revolution (though usually their complicated reasons for supporting it and not supporting it simultaneously.)  They were out of school (though some were teaching) and trying to find a place in a society they feared and loathed. That got my attention, as I was just beginning that journey.

 When I wasn’t in Stony Creek, I was in New Haven, a 20 minute bus ride away.  My efforts to find a job—desperate, muddled and halfhearted simultaneously-- were focused there. I checked bulletin boards and the newspapers, including the Yale student paper. 

 In one of those papers I saw an ad for volunteers for a Yale psychology department experiment “in learning” that paid $25 for a few hours.  I called the number and asked for more information on what this experiment entailed.  My first suspicion was that it involved drugs, and at this point in my life I wasn’t eager to let others experiment on me. The female voice on the other end assured me there were no drugs but when I asked other questions she was persistently evasive. That turned my suspicions into alarm bells.  As much as I needed the money, I didn’t participate.

 Years later I realized that this was very probably an early iteration of the famous (or infamous) Milgram experiments. (This was pretty much confirmed for me in a book by psychologist Elliot Aronson when he described what subjects were told the experiments were about—precisely what that ad said.) 

The Milgram experiments were one of the most often cited psychology experiments of modern times.  Participants were instructed to give electric shocks to people in the next room if they answer questions incorrectly.  With each wrong answer the shock is intensified, until the victim can be heard screaming in pain and begging to be released from the experiment. The victims weren’t actually getting shocks—they were in on the con.  The experiments weren’t about learning; they were to see how many people will follow instructions and administer the shocks, even after hearing cries of pain and the begging. 

 The answer was a shockingly high percentage of them.  I first heard it reported as 100%.  Later the figure given for those willing to administer the maximum voltage was 64%.  The experiment is usually said to prove two main points: that people will do what authority tells them to do, and that people will do so in situations even if they believe that they wouldn’t, regardless of their personal ethics.

 But here’s the problem.  To make such an inference about people in general, the participants had to accurately represent the population.  This is the fatal flaw of most such psychological experiments (participants are mostly students who always need money, and overwhelmingly white.) In this experiment, those who actually participated had to be willing to take the unquestioned word of authorities, without knowing what they were getting into, just to walk in the door. So they were self-selected pre-disposed. But how many people like me smelled something fishy and just didn’t participate?  On the other hand, how many participants needed the $25 enough to do what they were told?

 Think about it: this was Yale in 1969 and 1970.  There were antiwar protests on campus.  William Sloane Coffin, an advocate for defying the draft and therefore the authority of the government, was a campus hero.  Part of the huge generation gap was the distrust many younger people had for the honesty and veracity of those in authority in the government, the university  and big business.  Scientific research secretly funded by the military was a big issue on many campuses.

 So if you were against the killing and the maiming in Vietnam, to the extent of resisting the government’s orders to do so, or even if you were a stoned peace and love hippie, how likely is it that you were going to push a button to cause somebody pain?  I’ve seen photos of these experiments—there was no long hair, no countercultural clothing in any of them. 

 (These experiments, now considered unethical, are often cited along with the equally notorious Stanford  experiments that purported to prove that people given the role of prison guard invariably act in sadistic ways towards prisoners.  This was a much-cited finding in the corporate world of the 1980s and 1990s, though the experiments have largely been discredited.) 

My perspective on the Milgram experiments led to my skepticism of many psychological experiments, and books about them.  I found support in the work of eminent psychologist Jerome Kagan, particularly in his book Psychology’s Ghosts: The Crisis in the Profession and the Way Back, in which he gently but definitely questioned whether universal conclusions about behavior can be based on small numbers of culturally identical subjects in a laboratory setting.

 In any case, the stark divide in the late 1960s was something I keenly felt.  Even before the Pentagon Papers or Watergate, there was amply evidence of systematic lying in high places.  All our literature, movies and music questioned the moral authority if not the intelligence of those running things.  Apart from my ignorance of how the “adult world” worked, and how I could possibly find my way into the elements of it I still respected, my general attitude was both baffled and adversarial.  How could I make a living, and not lose myself?  I had too much yet to learn.

 “Out of college, money spent,” went the Beatles’ lyric, “see no future, pay no rent/all the money’s gone, nowhere to go.  But oh that magic feeling/ no where to go...”

 Apart from visits to my Knox friend Mike Shain, who for some reason now forgotten was living in a New Haven rooming house, with a sign on his door that said “Home of the Bobby Dylan Conspiracy,” I gravitated towards Yale. The academic campus was still the only industrial site I knew, and where I was somewhat comfortable.  I went to readings and knew how to get myself invited to the parties afterwards.  I believe that’s where I heard poet Kenneth Koch read.

He read a long poem that may have been called “Eyes.” In any case, it was my inspiration for a long poem I later wrote called “Ears,” which was published a couple of times in the mid-70s.

  I heard the poet Bill Knott, who at the time was writing under the name of St. Geraud.  I was astounded by his poems—they were the most unrelenting and mind-blowing surrealist poems I’d encountered. Also very short.  He may have read on the same bill with Koch or perhaps another poet, because I remember him being at the after-party and he left without much notice. Later I happened to be in the living room of this house when the doorbell rang and I answered it.  It was Bill Knott, looking shamefaced about returning.  I laughed.  I loved it.

 I met poet Michael Benedikt and we began a correspondence when he was back in New York.  He was interested in my writing that I sent him. This was some rare encouragement.  I was still sending things out and getting them back.

 Thinking back, it seems obvious that this would have been a good moment for a mentor to appear in my life. But it didn’t happen then, and never happened.  I later depended greatly on the faith of several editors, but they were all more or less my contemporaries.  This, like everything else, was as much my fault as anyone’s, and equally a sign of the times. 

I did manage a fair amount of writing at Stony Creek. Apart from verse and short fiction, and the usual endless notes on the novel I wasn’t writing, I once simply let go and wrote a sustained prose fiction called “Apostrophe S.”  Influenced by Sukenick but more by Vonnegut in its tone, I wrote it late at night, in the warm quiet kitchen, while Joni was asleep. I often had the company of our two kittens, named Abbey and Rhoda, who prowled around the pale plywood plank I was writing on, and chased my pen across the yellow legal pad.

 What survives of “Apostrophe S” seems to include elements added later.  Perhaps a wise editor could have helped me develop the good parts (some were quite funny) into something publishable, but in retrospect, the best part of it is remembering the experience of writing it. 

 But I did write something while at Stony Creek that was more of an indication of a direction I would later follow.  It’s not much remembered, but in late 1969, there was a brief but intense frenzy over an assertion that Paul McCartney had died in a car crash some three years before, and been secretly replaced by a lookalike.  Then the Beatles had seeded various songs with clues.  This “Paul is dead” theory led to top 40 stations all over America airing the “evidence” as well as lots of Beatles songs.  It made the news (Huntley-Brinkley, Time Magazine) and a New Haven moviehouse advertised a special showing of Yellow Submarine with the line, “Paul is alive and well in Yellow Submarine!”  Sales of Beatles albums shot up.

 But what apparently impressed me most was how seriously the high school students I saw in Stony Creek were taking it.  I realized that this was a contemporary subject of interest to my generation and younger that I knew something about, both in terms of the Beatles and what are now known as “conspiracy theories.”  The long piece I wrote about it, entitled the “The Paul Is Dead Theology,” was the kind of cultural reportage and analysis that in the not too distant future I would be writing and publishing.  But at that moment, though Michael Benedikt especially liked it and tried to get it published, it only joined my manuscript pile of futility.

 The article asserted knowledge concerning what high school students were talking about that I probably didn’t derive just from hanging around the Stony Creek library.  Joni was teaching high school, and we talked about her students.

We had happy times in Stony Creek. The music I associate with those wintry days includes the Band albums and The Papas and the Mamas, especially the song "Safe in my Garden." But our garden was not so safe. Our problem was the future, and the nature of our future together. These issues were the sources of tension, and along with external and internal pressures, were more than an undercurrent to those months.  But as far as I knew we’d come to no conclusion. 

Stony Creek sunset. BK photo.

Apart from manuscripts, I’d sent out various proposals, applications and inquiries.  I applied for a summer arts workshop at Cummington, in western Massachusetts.  I was in touch with Knox friend Steve Meyers who was in graduate school in Buffalo.  He was enthusiastic about the English department there, and urged me to come up and check things out. Perhaps I’d come to the reluctant conclusion that I didn’t know how to do anything that paid a salary except maybe teach, and if I was going to have to make a living that way, I would need an advanced degree.  Or maybe I was just looking for some income for a few years, burrowed into books.

 So one cold March morning I slid a duffel bag and my guitar case into the front trunk of Joni’s yellow VW bug. We drove first to the dump in a frozen field of thin snow, and I unloaded a bag of garbage.  I got back into the car and she drove me to an interstate ramp, so I could begin hitchhiking up to Buffalo.  After a brief farewell, she drove away.  It would be the last time I saw her.

 Shortly after I got to Steve’s in Buffalo, her letter arrived inviting me not to come back.  Over the next weeks we talked on the phone a few times and exchanged letters, but the situation didn’t change.  I was dislocated and bereft on many levels, but I don’t think I really blamed her. I certainly saw the justice of her point of view. 

 If Sukenick’s Up has a theme it would probably be to “be true to the discontinuity of experience.”  Even then, the 60s seemed an especially discontinuous and contingent time, so it seemed writing should express it.  But discontinuity is also a theme of youth.  All experience that falls outside the expected, the changes and rapid twists and turns, especially when moving among “worlds” of what passes for the traditional or normal and what seems to be new, as well as crossing undefined geographical, socio-economic (class) and other borders, is experienced as discontinuous.  It’s only later that it’s possible to sense the patterns, the continuities, even if they never become entirely clear, or they are multiple.

 There may be accidents or missed opportunities or stupid moves and so on, the memory of which may keep us up at night, but ultimately they become elements in the pattern.  For example, had a certain letter arrived a few days earlier when I was in Berkeley, my life might have taken me in a different direction, perhaps to western Canada.  And so on.  Or as we said a lot in those days, so it goes.

 In a way that’s what this project is about: partly through the agency of reading, seeing where things fall into the pattern that time has made, that can only be seen retrospectively.  In a larger sense, that’s a project of old age. 

 Events of all kinds contribute to the pattern—things that happened and did not happen, as well as things read or thought or felt or heard or seen, or desired, or feared. The influence of others at a particular time, or the lack of it. The picture will never be complete, because memory and various kinds of records of the time are almost guaranteed to be incomplete, if not distorting.  But it’s pretty clear what the pattern is of: it’s how you got to where you end up.

Virgil Thomson (r)

 Sometime in the early 1990s, I had the television on, not entirely absorbed in what I think was a documentary film about the American composer Virgil Thomson.  There was a brief scene, apparently filler, of Thomson at a party. He was talking to a young man, who I imagine was troubled about his career or his life.  Thompson was looking at him intently, and said very carefully and earnestly: “The outcome of everything is the way it happens, and the way it happens is the story of your life.”

 It took me awhile to accept this but that’s the pattern.  That’s the retrospective continuity: the story of your life. And as I am finding now, it begins to become visible when the story is pretty much over, and you’re in the coda, or maybe the last act.

 In Buffalo it was still winter.  I slept in Steve’s living room, for longer than I intended.  Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water album had come out, and I learned the first song on the second side, “The Only Living Boy in New York.”  I played it so much that a friend of Steve’s thought I’d written it.  I also liked “Papa Hobo” from that record.  Together they represented my moment. 

Bobbie and Bob Creeley

The only reading I remember was from the bookshelf in that living room: several books by William Carlos Williams, notably his essays In The American Grain.

I must have also been reading Robert Creeley’s newer poetry, since he was teaching in Buffalo, and I was seeing a lot of him.  I attended at least one of his classes, spoke with him in his office, and was at an epic party in which, at one end of the host apartment, Robert Creeley held court, surrounded by others, and at the other end, his wife Bobbie Creeley was equally the center of attention.  When Bob mentioned Bobbie's enthusiasm for palmistry and I held up my liberally creased hand, he immediately sent me to Bobbie (later known as writer and artist Bobbie Louise Hawkins), who, as predicted, exulted in the challenge.  

 I was deliberately spending time at the English department building, particularly one long row of offices, belonging to (among others) poet John Logan, fictionist John Barth, and literary critic and gadfly Leslie Fiedler, as well as Creeley.  I learned enough about them to find the ways they decorated the window in the door to their offices appropriately expressive.  Logan’s window looked like stained glass, Fiedler’s was psychedelic, Barth’s was blacked out, and Creeley’s was clear.

 I met a lot of people in the department, as well as other of Steve’s friends, especially at the almost weekly huge communal meals.  Steve remembers that we both brought guitars to a class he was teaching and improvised a song with lyrics by T.S. Eliot.   

 But it was also a moment of crisis for SUNY Buffalo, eventually including street demonstrations.  After awhile police of various kinds were called in, and there was barricades and tear gas.  Steve and I mostly listened to the reports each evening on the campus radio station.  But we also attended meetings, including a big one of the faculty (that included graduate TAs) in the College of Arts and Letters.   The issues were wide-ranging, including academic freedom (unjustified suspensions of faculty) and others I’ve frankly forgotten. 

Leslie Fiedler

 Leslie Fiedler spoke about how serious it was to call for the resignation of a university president—and why he was calling for it now. A resolution of no confidence passed overwhelmingly (according to my notebook.) Then a student came in shouting that police were on their way to a particular campus building, and so all of us marched arm in arm to that building, where nothing happened.

 There was another moment I had reason to remember later.  Before the meeting started, someone behind us cautioned that people chatting with each other needed to be careful what they said because there were probably FBI undercover agents in the crowd.  What seemed a tad paranoid though not crazy turned out to be broadly true, when the extent of FBI infiltration of antiwar and related groups was revealed.  Some agents were even provocateurs, pushing radical groups to violence.

 I’d never entertained participating in premeditated political violence, and I was skeptical of its benefits versus its human and moral costs. My attitudes towards “revolution” were also complicated. I was selective in what I felt needed to change, and how to go about obtaining that change.  Some of these attitudes were not quite conscious, so I learned something from a moment in Buffalo.

 Richard Ellmann, author of the biography of James Joyce that had meant so much to me, was teaching at the university (though I never met him.)  But I read somewhere that his collection of Joyce memorabilia was on display that month at the university library.

When I went to see it, I couldn’t find it.  A library official asked if he could help me, and when I told him, he said that unfortunately the display had to be put back in storage because of the ongoing strife in the streets.  He must have seen my expression of dismay—I’d never dreamed that angry students would sack the library but at the same time, it didn’t seem like an outrageous precaution.  And I suppose that, with my long hair and jeans, I was a bit ashamed to be a cause of such anxiety.  But he saw right away that I was a Joyce enthusiast, and sympathized.  

SUNY Buffalo campus

At some point in my Buffalo exile, I made a trip over the Canadian border for a quick visit with Bill Thompson, my former housemate our senior year at Knox.  I met his friends from the University of Hamilton where he was (or had been) a graduate student.  So cold and insistent was the Buffalo winter that it actually was warmer in Canada.

 It was at the University of Hamilton that I had my first exposure to what was then called Women’s Liberation.  I attended an open forum on the subject, run with  authority by leaders of a campus Women’s Liberation organization.  It was an eye-opener, or as we would soon learn to say, a consciousness-raiser.  A lot of their points I experienced as valid immediately, and others it took a short while to admit.  I was troubled however by how the women leaders treated a woman in the audience, who said she didn’t think women had to have a career to feel liberated or be fulfilled—she felt liberated working in her garden.  They fell on her like a ton of bricks.  Today it seems like a first iteration of the “woke” moment: it’s liberating side, and it’s tyrannical side.

 

I was still in Buffalo in April (where it was still winter), for the very first Earth Day.  Some 20 million Americans marched or otherwise participated.  It was a big deal.  (I wrote more about this here.)  I heard Ralph Nader speak, and engaged a garage mechanic in a conversation about how ecology could generate jobs. 

 In general Buffalo had calmed down in late April, until President Nixon announced the U.S. incursion into Cambodia, widening the Vietnam war. The university, along with colleges across the country, immediately erupted.  On May 4^th, National Guard troops shot and killed four Kent State students.  The war, it seemed, had come home.  There were larger protests at even more colleges, and a national student strike. For those of us a little older, Kent State crystallized a feeling we’d had for years: that we were enemies in our country.

 The University of Buffalo was shut down, and Steve and I spontaneously decided to head back to Knox College in Illinois, perhaps from some homing instinct in this crisis time.

 I had miraculously (and largely through the efforts of Robert Creeley, I’m convinced) been accepted into the SUNY Buffalo graduate English program for the following fall.  But I no longer saw myself staying there. Whatever I was going to do or be next, it wasn’t going to be in academia after all.  In the immediate sense I’d abused Steve’s hospitality for too long.  So I knew I wasn’t going back to Buffalo.

 I had also been accepted at the Cummington, Massachusetts summer arts community, all expenses paid.  Before and after that, I was back to “nowhere to go.”

 We got in Steve’s MG, and by the time we got to Ohio—and drank coffee while being stared at by truckers—we realized that outside of Buffalo, and despite the ongoing crisis, it was spring. 

 The story of that Galesburg visit—including my participation in The Students Are Revolting and the takeover of an administrative office, as well as the political books of the time—is told in a prior post indexed to this series, published on the 50^th anniversary of these events.  Next in this sequence, I’ll pick up the story at Cummington and Cambridge, Massachusetts in the summer of 1970.

Hiding in a Drop of Water

Hiding in a Drop of Water

 It is early morning and death has forgotten us for

 A while. Darkness owns the house, but I am alive.

 I am ready to praise all the great musicians. 

 Whatever happens to me will also happen to you.

 Surely you must have realized this from hearing

 The way strings cry out no matter who hits them.

 From the great oak trees in the yard in October,

 Leaves fall for hours every morning. Every night

 A thousand wrinkled faces look up at the stars.

 When Rabia’s donkey fell dead in the desert, she shouted

 To God, “Is that the way you treat an old woman?”

 The donkey stood up, and they went on to the Meeting.

 It is this reaching toward the Kaaba that keeps us glad.

 It is this way of hiding inside a drop of water

 That lets the hidden face become visible to everyone.

 Gautama said that when the Great Ferris Wheel

 Stops turning, you will still be way up 

There, swinging in your seat and laughing.

 Robert Bly

 1926-2021

"Rabia" was a Sufi saint.  "Kaaba" is the most sacred site in Islam.  "Gautama" is the Buddha.   The Ferris Wheel was invented in the late 19th century by George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. of Galesburg, Illinois. He later founded a business in Pittsburgh.  Poetic license or Bly's wry joke, the point is made.  RIP to an essential voice of the 20th century and beyond.  His work lives on.