Daffodil Sunrise

By Jnana Hodson

A serene academe in the rural heartland sits on a volcano of political, cultural, and social pressures that erupts in the late '60s and early '70s as youthful anti-war protests, marijuana highs, sexual liberation, and civil rights clamors beleaguer the old-boy Establishment. In the collision of the ultimatums of a rebellious generation versus authoritarian constraints, something must give. For the residents of one small dormitory, these conflicts come to a head as they uncover the college administration's plans to evict them and their longstanding, though often clandestine, traditions. Little do the students know of the extent of the dragon they're battling or the consequences of their actions. Will justice win out in the end? It's a revolution, all the same.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jnana Hodson
• Release date: Nov 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311909060

Jnana Hodson

It’s been a while since I’ve been known by my Hawaiian shirts and tennis shoes, at least in summer. Winters in New England are another matter.For four decades, my career in daily journalism paid the bills while I wrote poetry and fiction on the side. More than a thousand of those works have appeared in literary journals around the globe.My name, bestowed on me when I dwelled in a yoga ashram in the early ‘70s, is usually pronounced “Jah-nah,” a Sanskrit word that becomes “gnosis” in Greek and “knowing” in English. After two decades of residing in a small coastal city near both the Atlantic shoreline and the White Mountains northeast of Boston, the time's come to downsize. These days I'm centered in a remote fishing village with an active arts scene on an island in Maine. From our window we can even watch the occasional traffic in neighboring New Brunswick or lobster boats making their rounds.My wife and two daughters have prompted more of my novels than they’d ever imagine, mostly through their questions about my past and their translations of contemporary social culture and tech advances for a geezer like me. Rest assured, they’re not like any of my fictional characters, apart from being geniuses in the kitchen.Other than that, I'm hard to pigeonhole -- and so is my writing.

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DAFFODIL SUNRISE

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A Novel by Jnana Hodson

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Published by Jnana Hodson at Smashwords

copyright 2013 Jnana Hodson

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Discover other titles by Jnana Hodson at Smashwords.com.

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Table of Contents

I. LOCAL TRAFFIC

Urania Crania

Upwelling Despair in a D-Minor Dumka

Sha-Moo of Skidoo Draws a Red Alert

Primary Colors Surging at Midnight

DuChamp Lights a Dadaist Mandala

Far From an Eastern Sea a Queen Arises

A Little Woolf Regalia

Multiple Exposures in Fix Solution

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II. EXPRESS RUN

Every Clod Has a Silted Lining

Straight Up on the Rocks

Aperture Baptism Dance Setting

Shutter Speed Thunderbolts

Junkyard Chic Vision Chic

Rapid Fire Synapse Boutique

Low Rent Navy Pier in Indianapolis

Hog Heaven Commencement Chili

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About the Author and More

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In memoriam, Vincent and Elinor Ostrom

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I. LOCAL TRAFFIC

"We shall find our ideas always passing in train, one going and another coming, without intermission." - John Locke

~*~

Urania Crania

Tell yourself none of this ever happened. Film and lenses themselves distort. Perhaps a computer has rearranged every image he ever bagged, or tried to pinch. In his notes, the handwriting scrawls into seismographic undulation that’s nearly impossible to decipher. Time blurs. Just what did he see, anyway? More important: how much did anyone actually DO in that passage?

~*~

Everybody keeps rubbernecking in the wrong places. The spiraling events weren’t quite as they’ve been portrayed. When people examine his shots, they generally snicker at the bizarre expressions garbed in bell bottoms and long flowing hair. Viewers seem to notice only the theatrical excesses and overlook the drama itself. They never, ever, ask the right questions. Not everyone was stoned out of their minds - at least, not all of the time. Even his photographs fail to voice socio-political realities that caused the movement to fall so short of its utopian ideals.

In a dormitory cell a spazzed out scholar was furiously drilling himself ever deeper into his unique Dedicated Laborious Quest. At this point of his life, though, he would have vehemently repudiated any suggestion of undertaking a religious mission. There was no reason to suspect this particular room in this particular third of this particular building in this particular square of this particular college campus in America was a stage for societal transformation. But it was, at the least, a frontier for one unsuspecting monk-to-be. The very hungering that had brought him eastward to Indiana somehow intertwined with an evolving mysticism, in his case a discipline relying on the art of photography as his vehicle to steer across the cosmos. Here, on what would become a pivotal early September afternoon in the second week of his second year at the state university in Daffodil, his room - in reality, a cumbersome laboratory of fine arts and low-tech -had become a congested array of gray hardbound texts and dog-eared paperbacks, La Scala opera albums and Salzburg Festival long-playing record jackets, curled glossy jet-black photographic contact sheets, beige stalks of dried weeds arranged as floral bouquets, a miniature corral of muddy shoes on folded newspaper, a mound of unwashed clothes, a column of yellowing newspapers, three stacks of diverse waxy magazines and mimeographed literary journals, and a small forest of empty Coca-Cola, Seven-Up, Ron Bacardi, and brown FRITZ beer bottles.

Despite the apparent chaos of his room, Dorn Lucas Mackenzie was pursuing order. On many fronts, he sought perfection - even immortality. He may have preferred a Zen Buddhist precision, an ascetic holiness in which moss and unpainted wood assume their place in natural harmony, to what he saw happening to the United States, where gray-steel furniture, suspended ceilings, and fluorescent lighting were prevailing in a dollars-and-cents pile of boxes. As suburban housing developments, shopping centers, and new highways rolled across cornfields and meadows, physical comfort prevailed; somehow, nevertheless, he observed that soul-nurturing aspects of dignified craftsmanship were lacking. Himself a product of these mass-produced boxes within boxes, DL sensed a void within himself, even as he remained uncertain of its origin. When nobody could listen intelligently when he tried to speak of this aching, he wound up rejecting organized religion outright. Whether he had evolved at this point into agnosticism, an atheism, or logical positivism could be debated. Whatever his theological label, he was at this time unwilling to consider Zen or Yoga or any other spiritual pathway - a stubbornness that pushed him away from very solace he desired. Intellect ruled: he believed the world’s problems arose from ignorance and irrational passions, even as he railed against the involuntary celibacy he was suffering. Excellence, rather than prosperity, was his obsession. Nothing, he resolved, would ever impede him - no matter how much he felt the deck had already been stacked against him.

Despite his avowed less-is-more aesthetic, no chamber could encase all the gear needed to support his ambitions. At a pint-sized maple desk surrounded by papers and stacks of books and periodicals, DL zealously pounded away at a bulky ace-of-spades Underwood, hammering in rhythm to a pipe organ prelude and fugue. In mid-sentence, his neighbor, a lanky Hungarian-American from Kokomo, plunged through the doorway and, in a Hoosier-accented Spanish that grinned obscenely, wailed an improvised version of Home on Derange - in Spanish - while smoking a Cheroot, to boot.

Whenever Champ Kovats roared into this third-story cavern, he demanded attention. Shee-ut, he snarled. You wouldn’t believe my crummy luck today. But DL had other problems. A poem to explicate. Typing madly, he glanced up and saw he now had less than thirty minutes - eighteen hundred seconds - to finish and deliver this assignment. But Champ, disregarding DL’s anguish, continued speaking to walls and ceiling: But, hey, they say you find two types a’ bikers, those who’ve had a serious accident an’ those who are about to. DL’s eyes darted across the shredded rodeo spurts of what had been Champ’s much prized, intricately detailed Mexican vest and wondered uneasily what else might be afoot. In an outlandish dance, the invader was already nudging a bed away from the wall while strewing minutiae of an uncharacteristic and embarrassing spill he had just suffered. How had he fallen, anyway? Champ always wheeled meticulously, as if anointed - a deft horseman from any number of movies representing any number of centuries or traditions - Cossack or Sioux, Arabian or cowboy, Mongolian or Great Plains cavalry. Unexpected gravel? An unpaved back road, an alley in town? While wearing his most hipped-on drapery, rather than leather? Was some Zelda at play? Or some dealing? As the fractured news dispatch ricocheted through his ears, DL’s fingers considered disillusions, old aches, and parturitions - the ones on his unfinished page. Champ jabbered on, producing another collision: Querido amigo, you should run a mop under this filthy bed more often. (What’s this? Senor Champ giving cleaning lessons? From the appearance of his own room, he had no basis for preaching. For DL, with an essay on the American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson due in twenty-four minutes, this was no time for interruptions. Type faster! And yet:) Senor Mackenzie. This wall is terrible. Give it some poquita salsa! (I can’t help it, D.C. thought; it’s the cheap bastards in Housing Authority who select detestable pigments, and your dormitory contract guarantees walls the color of mold, brand-marks, asphyxiation, sludge, or puss.) Just let me put something here, Champ mumbled pensively. (Just what I need, DL imagined: Housing Authority on my case for some bunghole amateur drawing. Is Champ really rummaging through his backpack?) ... donde venado y antilope jugan ... (No matter what was stewing, one fact remained: this bud from overhead, a chemistry major nobody ever once saw studying, nevertheless carried a 3.8 grade-point average. Champ, who delighted in taking Spanish and Hungarian instead of the German and Latin science majors supposedly needed, had academic advisors shaking heads in disbelief as he charted his own curriculum to assure himself a smooth sail straight into the surgical theater. Accept no obstruction, he vowed. Fear no one. Even so, DL sometimes detected a flicker of brooding behind that smile. More at hand, as DL pondered the syllabus, he doubted whether his own Modern American Poetry course would get as far 1929, much less the living avatars, before semester’s end. At the moment, being stuck in 1897 kept him from discovering Dionysus in Doubt, a volume more befitting his own dormitory and era. He made two fists, squinted tensely, and redoubled his drive as the mechanical carriage tracked the chore before him.

Still muttering, principally in Spanish now, Champs embarked on a dreamy philosophy regarding she-stuff while slipping a rectangular object from his rucksack until, with the ten-by-eighteen inch frame fully visible, DL’s typing skidded and nearly crashed into a guard rail of aesthetics. Champ remained nonplussed, having survived his own crackup only hours before, centered the framed still life above the now deranged bed, bent over, and plugged a dangling electrical cord into wall socket. Within the framed space, a bowl of potato chips immediately glowed. A yellow flower and a red checkered tablecloth lit up, as well as an amber, tapered glass with a foaming cap, and grand red letters: FRITZ! JUST SAY UNCLE! (DL’s breath frosted as he ascended from 1897: What? Tell me! Why on earth is that on my wall?) Answering the unvoiced question, Champ grinned and chimed out: It’s a gift. Just accept it. He shrugged, opening both hands before him, either to plead or bless: It’s a treasure, something to preserve and honor. (Huh? Has he been boozing? Found another tavern that will admit him at his not yet legal age? Now there’s something to explain the wreck earlier that morning, DL sniffed, hardly knowing whether to accept this commercial intrusion on his sanctuary, to see it as an innocent gesture of brotherhood, or to condemn it outright on strictly artistic grounds. In any case, the offering stunned.)

Far more was swirling through this three-ring bilingual circus of chopper crash, poetry account, and mundane barroom promotion than anyone could ever photograph. Sometimes, it’s hard to know where to focus. In those cases, a shooter intuitively just fires roll after roll and trusts something will appear.

In midst of this bedlam, DL’s roommate shuffled in and immediately wrinkled his nose. Ugh! Smoke! Champ, comfortably encamped on Walker Boone’s bed, puffed on a cigarillo and smirked as DL typed furiously.

Walker went to the cabinet to swap shoes. With twenty-two pairs, he projected twenty-two personalities. Regarding his array of weejuns, his dorm neighbors had jested - accurately, it turned out - that Walker had been excruciatingly shy until he latched onto ground grabbers as a way to beat talking. Frequently, they provided a key for others to begin conversing with him. He fancied that in time they would even influence the Right Person in his favor. If his major duty in life was not to shine stompers, then perhaps it would be to design, manufacture, or retail them. He would never admit his secret vision of angels reflected in burnished leather. Nor would he tell of the mandala or tanka that presented Great Teachers on magnificently pedaled lotus blossoms, all riding the backs of Hush-Puppy panthers and preaching emphatically: SHOES MAKE THE MAN! Walker had no idea that some of his obsession could be traced to his great-grandparents (though his father’s mother), who had been shoemakers before emigrating from Italy. Maybe he would have known about it if his father hadn’t split for California when Walker was in kindergarten. One of the things Walker and DL had in common was an appreciation for style - the turn of a line or phrase, the grace or excitement expressed in a given form or structure, the imprint of originality.

Walker rose in a pair of saddle oxfords, then looked up, gaping. Hey dude, that’s all right!

Confused, DL blurted, That! It’s crass!

Whoa! Champ retorted. It’s quintessential American manhood. I thought you’d see that. You’re the photographer. If you want, I’ll just take it away.

Leave it, Walker blurted out. He hadn’t been asked, but was his room as much as it was DL’s. I like it. It’s homey. Right cozy. Only thing missing’s TV football.

Simultaneously, DL cried out in bewilderment: Manhood? With flowers?

Hey, you’re the one with those dried stalks over there. Champ nodded across the room before adding, To say nothing of poetry.

Walker turned toward Champ, accepted a wink in reply, then headed out the door. Champ hopped up, followed Walker, and waved adios as DL glanced, between typing strokes, at the electrified advertisement. Robinson cleared his throat. At least the poet had some respect for the process of writing, DL thought, unlike these intrusions. What DL had written compared and contrasted the lives of the one-time New York Subway worker and George A. Eastman, that patron saint of photographers. In another setting, DL might have discerned in Robinson’s lines some important lessons to apply to psychological portraiture, even on silvery paper. Instead, he glowered at his alarm clock. Seventeen minutes to blast off. The dash to his classroom would take fifteen. His typing deteriorated. Panicked, he swore he’d never again wait until the final day to begin a paper. Then he decided to forego making vows altogether; as far as he could tell, they were just doomed to fail. (Damn!)

At the stairwell, Walker had headed down and out the gate, toward a principles of accounting class.

Upstairs, sprawled across his own bed, Champ meditated, letting his eyes search the heavens. On his ceiling he had taped twenty-six Playboy centerfolds. Friends were always dropping in. Visiting fathers took the Grand Tour. I could have specialized in interior decorating, he thought. Currently, though, he was trying to figure out why the old Greek behind the restaurant had insisted he accept that FRITZ still life and why he, in turn, had impetuously given it away. He contemplated a devilishly smiling redhead and muttered, Now that’s art! Yes, he could see there were many things his camera-toting-comrade still needed to learn. Disrobing a willing model, for one. Uncorking a bottle, for another. Beyond composition and focus, there was a challenge in presenting representations one practically smells, tastes, touches, hears. Take the redhead, who’s nearly purring. The one with the raspberry lips. Aw, shucks, Champ grinned. To the Big Mind! To Manifold Desires!

A half-mile away, having entered the classroom late, DL was now only half-listening to his poetry lecture. Would these notes make any sense? He kept trying to conceive how he would have handled the assignment, had he been given the FRITZ account. At first, he envisioned a single pilsener glass, standing larger than life in front of a flat white backdrop - stark, pristine, effervescent. He began considering variations: a more appealing backdrop color, maybe even river country scenery to reflect the brew’s local origins and marketing territory. Maybe, instead, refracting a football game into the glass itself, as if by drinking one also takes in the national pastime. Or maybe the cheerleaders, as another option. What, too, of the brand image? DL had once tried to make sense of this label’s quirky motto, JUST SAY UNCLE, only to be told it had been there as long as anyone could remember. A motto, curiously, that also made people giggle, as though repeating some inside joke, no matter how many times they had heard it. A motto, then, already circulating when Robinson penned the lines now copied on the blackboard. Now in the fifth generation of family ownership, FRITZ remained a small brewery in a river town just up the Ohio from campus; it had somehow survived both Prohibition and the onslaught of mass-media marketing; however conservative, it satisfied a core of loyal customers within a hundred-mile radius. How, DL wondered, could all of that be told in a photo - or even a series of photos? Whatever else the images accomplished, they ultimately had to make the viewer want to reach, unthinkingly, for the product. Just as George Eastman had done with his Kodak.

~*~

That evening, DL went upstairs to thank Champ for the FRITZ screen. The door was ajar, but no was one home. He entered, turned about, and sat down on the floor, hoping to make sense of the day. He sighed, stretched out on the floor and gazed upward. Since arriving on campus, DL had admired more exquisite women than he ever thought possible - but always from a distance, whether across a sidewalk or desk or laboratory table or even in a photograph. For the first time, he realized how profoundly troubling beauty could be, in any form - not just beautiful women. Just what were the origins of these desires, anyway? The primordial adolescent compulsion to procreate was easily enough identified, if one could slice through all of the overlays of romance, societal roles, self-identity, daydreams, and adjudication. It’s fleeting, a burst of spring; for all of its youthfulness, it also conveys pain - there’s the counterpoise of decay and death, of cold north wind in the wings. No, beauty itself was an overwhelming mystery plaguing philosophers of all eras. Ancient Greeks held no monopoly on its perfection. DL stared at the ceiling, half hoping just one of the Playmates would have mercy on him, call out his name, reveal a cerebral curiosity dovetailing into his own, escort him to the opera, be his soul-mate forever. What would she say, anyway, assuming he could even attract her attention? At last, this ceiling revealed itself as a modern variation of ancients’ mythological formations in heavenly constellations. Starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight. Let me have the wish I ...

Bernard Harlan, another of the dorm’s inhabitants, held another perspective: Shit, man! Fuck ’em all! Move on!

DL wondered whether Bernie could even remember their names, much less any details, of the girls he had known. Without memory, how else could one learn from experience? As a photographer, DL kept intricate records from his shooting, facts that helped him refine his technique or, if needed, write captions. He should have seen that a central difference in their personalities involved his need for times of quiet contemplation. His art, in itself, gave other people focused objects for reflection.

FIELD NOTES

Date ...

Location ...

Subject ...

Film...

Shutter speed ...

Light ...

Aperture ...

Camera body ...

Additional comments ...

~*~

If nothing else, that should keep camera magazines happy, he’d once told Champ. Especially the part about equipment. Photo magazine advertisers expect that.

Just like fishing lures, Champ replied. Forget talent. Praise the gear.

~*~

Upwelling Despair in a D-Minor Dumka

Often, it’s amazing how far a bit of encouragement will travel. DL’s favorite aunt, Berthanna, bought him his first camera. Film, too. The boy has a good eye, she explained. Later, she gave him his prized Olympus one Christmas. Good tools and honest work, I always say, she winked. He could have never afforded such tools on his own; without them, the dream would have died early. With them, he could earn tokens to further his journey.

Perhaps it was one way of bringing together an early interest in science and an inherited weight of social responsibility. Perhaps it was a way of bringing him out of his shell. Who knows? In high school, it gave him a place of some distinction - a photographer in the end zone. Working for his high school newspaper and yearbook provided film and a darkroom, planting one foot in journalism, as well.

He had early aptitudes for both science and fine arts - but which way would he go? Perhaps it was his early explorations around eastern Iowa, with its Mississippi paddle-wheelers and railroad yards, that hooked him. And then he had to decide: vocation or hobby? Opportunity to study in depth cinched it. He chose vocation.

Two years before DL applied to Dementhe River State University, its fine arts department, in an uncharacteristically daring move, turned the reins over to a youthful chairman who promptly unleashed ambitious plans to double its size. He promoted industrial design, textiles, graphic design, and photography - all having marketable applications - while leaving unchanged the traditional painting, drawing, printmaking, and curatorial disciplines. Anxious to show quick results for these efforts, he also selected a circle of talented undergraduate and graduate students, giving them fast-track attention that included a Wednesday evening honors seminar and, whenever possible, public attention through displays - not just in the campus gallery and student union, either, but in any location the faculty could devise. An alert alumnus, seeing DL’s work in a high school competition, pointed him toward the campus. Now the kid was among the elite being groomed for achievement.

The visual arts weren’t alone in this development. In the rapid growth of the decade, the university had decided that emphasizing all of the fine arts could greatly improve its image - especially among major potential donors. In addition, foundation grants were flowing, and by tapping into that source, for high culture, the school could enhance its overall status, with payoffs from corporations and government for other fields. As a consequence, a creative writing program was also launched, as well as an emphasis on public performance in both the music and theater departments.

By now DL was well into vortex, confronting a requirement - a creed - a DEMAND he endorsed- that art blaze into uncharted territory, the same way science was extending the known cosmos. But such a race, of newness for its own sake, might also foster superficiality and bizarre gimmickry. It seemed everyone was shopping for excitement, the latest new fashions in the marketplace, hoping to cash in on immortality. Or at least some momentary fame.

Even in photography, he was facing more crucial decisions: which way? High fashion? Nature, science, medicine - research? Industrial? Commercial? Advertising? Portraiture? Landscapes? Stock photography, for calendars and postcards? Weddings and yearbooks? Photojournalism? And if so, magazine, newspaper, or broadcast? Sports? Theatrical, including opera and dance? Aerial? Underwater? Television? Movies? Black-and-white? Color?

All this, even before computer manipulation.

He would need, also, to master the business side: billing, accounting, self-promotion, scaring up funding. The art of schmoozing and sucking up. Clients, patrons, and grant-writing. And here he was instead studying chemistry, physics of light, the mechanics of camera, of film, of motion.

Moreover, he was striving to discover a unique voice all his own. Relentless realism? Harshness? Fantasy? Romanticism? Classicism? Neo-Baroque? Science fiction takeoffs? Action?