Dinkle's Life: A Spiritual Biography

By John Janovy, Jr

DINKLE’S LIFE tells the story of Dr. Lonnie Paul Dinkle, now a famous mathematician and philosopher at Cimarron College in southern Oklahoma. His secret burden involves desecration of an ancient burial mound and release of three exceedingly dangerous spirits so wisely interred by the Native People. Dinkle’s life’s work consists of four great philosophical masterpieces—Theory of Complex Systems, Mystic Experience Correlates, Subatomic Sociology, and The Nature of God—all impossibly arcane and filled will with equations and proofs. But all through his successful career as a thinker, he’s carried his Ma’s demand that he find those spirits, kill them, and return them to their graves. The fact that his mother was a real, true, witch, and that those spirits are now incarnate, makes the task difficult enough so that Dinkle enlists an unsuspecting student newspaper journalist, Jimmy Bolt, an orphan, as help. As Dinkle dug into the mound, so Bolt digs through Dinkle’s office, and the result is an epic journey through time, space, culture, the American Central Plains agricultural economy, the banking industry, and, strange as it seems, the Universe beyond our galaxy. The ghosts are still with us: The God of Fiction produces the lies of men in power; the God of Growth stimulates us to increase our use, exponentially, of limited resources; and, the God of the Group drives us to hate “the other” with a passion that leads so often to violence. DINKLE’S LIFE is a ghost story, yes, but one with profound meaning for the modern world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Janovy, Jr
• Release date: Aug 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466145122

John Janovy, Jr

About the author:John Janovy, Jr. (PhD, University of Oklahoma, 1965) is the author of seventeen books and over ninety scientific papers and book chapters. These books range from textbooks to science fiction to essays on athletics. He is now retired, but when an active faculty member held the Paula and D. B. Varner Distinguished Professorship in Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research interest is parasitology. He has been Director of UNL’s Cedar Point Biological Station, Interim Director of the University of Nebraska State Museum, Assistant Dean of Arts and Sciences, and secretary-treasurer of the American Society of Parasitologists.His teaching experiences include large-enrollment freshman biology courses, Field Parasitology at the Cedar Point Biological Station, Invertebrate Zoology, Parasitology, Organismic Biology, and numerous honors seminars. He has supervised thirty-two graduate students, and approximately 50 undergraduate researchers, including ten Howard Hughes scholars.His honors include the University of Nebraska Distinguished Teaching Award, University Honors Program Master Lecturer, American Health Magazine book award (for Fields of Friendly Strife), State of Nebraska Pioneer Award, University of Nebraska Outstanding Research and Creativity Award, The Nature Conservancy Hero recognition, Nebraska Library Association Mari Sandoz Award, UNL Library Friend’s Hartley Burr Alexander Award, and the American Society of Parasitologists Clark P. Read Mentorship Award.

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DINKLE’S LIFE: A SPIRITUAL BIOGRAPHY

John Janovy, Jr.

Copyright © 1988 by John Janovy, Jr.

Smashwords Edition

**********

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DINKLE’S LIFE tells the story of Dr. Lonnie Paul Dinkle, now a famous mathematician and philosopher at Cimarron College in southern Oklahoma. His secret burden involves desecration of an ancient burial mound and release of three exceedingly dangerous spirits so wisely interred by the Native People. Dinkle’s life’s work consists of four great philosophical masterpieces—Theory of Complex Systems, Mystic Experience Correlates, Subatomic Sociology, and The Nature of God—all impossibly arcane and filled with equations and proofs. But all through his successful career as a thinker, he’s carried his Ma’s demand that he find those spirits, kill them, and return them to their graves. The fact that his mother was a real, true, witch, and that those spirits are now incarnate, makes the task difficult enough so that Dinkle enlists an unsuspecting student newspaper journalist, Jimmy Bolt, an orphan, as help. As Dinkle dug into the mound, so Bolt digs through Dinkle’s office, and the result is an epic journey through time, space, culture, the American Central Plains agricultural economy, the banking industry, and, strange as it seems, the Universe beyond our galaxy. The ghosts are still with us: The God of Fiction produces the lies of men in power; the God of Growth stimulates us to increase our use, exponentially, of limited resources; and, the God of the Group drives us to hate the other with a passion that leads so often to violence. DINKLE’S LIFE is a ghost story, yes, but one with profound meaning for the modern world.

Designed by John Janovy, Jr.

ISBN: 978-1-4661-4512-2

_______________________

Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat;

But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it;

For in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shall surely die.

— God

_______________________

*****

Go to Table of Contents

Prologue

Like an amoeba; just like a goddamn running, yelling, but worst of all, touching, amoeba, she thinks, as she watches children flow out of the long yellow bus. The amoeba moves up the marble steps toward her, a multi-colored mass of stinking little bodies herded by a heavy-set teacher in run-down shoes. The sweaty brats will stink; the teacher will be exhausted from a long climb in the unseasonably hot last week of school. Why did I volunteer to work at the museum, she wonders; why did I ever agree to give tours? Because that’s what women in my situation do, she answers herself. They don’t work as clerks in dry good stores; instead, they serve as docents in local museums. They give of themselves because their husbands can buy anything they want.

Out in the parking lot her new white Mercedes gleams in the hot sun. Her high-heeled lizard shoes match perfectly a stylish belt and complementary earrings. She has her script memorized. Thank God there are no American Indians or blacks in this group. She never felt she was able to say anything meaningful to black kids, and the Indians embarrassed her. She feels most comfortable playing like an expert on arrowheads and flint scrapers when the group is all white, and especially if the girls are nicely dressed. Nor does she mind the Hispanics; they are mostly Catholic, and consequently quiet and well-behaved, although still not very receptive to her spiel.

Inside the building, the teacher smiles, wipes her forehead, and pushes the children into a group, speaking harshly to a few, and finally gets them all facing the docent. Around each neck is a yarn loop holding a name card. Good; she could ask questions by name: Michelle, now why do you suppose these people painted their stories instead of writing them? A dozen hands go up. They didn’t care what Michelle supposes; they just want to tell their version of some experience that pops into, or out of, their minds. I painted a story once! My brother painted a story once! Hey, lady, one time we were out at my grandpa’s farm and we found a arrowhead (err’haid)!

Michelle? Michelle is shy, sucks on her finger. I know, ‘cause they didn’t know how to write! A freckly-faced redhead blurts out Michelle’s answer. His friends laugh. You cain’t write neither! Douglas, be quiet! says the teacher. Michelle, can you answer the lady? I don’t think the Indians knew how to write back then, says Michelle softly. That’s right, Michelle; written language had not been invented, so they kept records with pictures and stories. Good! What else hadn’t been invented, Michelle?

Atomic bombs, answers Michelle, and television sets, and cars, and assault rifles, and telescopes, and computers, and electricity, and improvised explosive devices, and . . . and . . . and.

That’s enough, Michelle, says the teacher; that’s enough.

But I think they made pretty pictures on their teepees anyway, continues Michelle, and they probably had good ideas.

And they probably used them hatchets to bash in each other’s skulls! says Douglas. His friends laugh. Yeah, Douglas! And they’d shoot you in the ass with one o’ them arrows (errs)!

The docent is ready to shoot Douglas in the ass with an arrow herself. If she’d been able to get into the glass cases she’d probably have done it. She looks at her watch. Need to hustle these kids on. Supposed to meet a friend for lunch before her tennis lesson. The group moves on, but Michelle stays behind, staring into the case.

Why did one of them paint a picture of a raccoon? she asks. Nobody is around to answer. Her teacher calls; come, Michelle, we need to move on. But Michelle does not move on. Something about that raccoon behind the glass keeps her attention fixed. I wonder, thinks Michelle to herself, why a raccoon was important enough to paint its picture. The question sticks in her mind. When she gets home that night, she gets on the Internet to learn as much as she can about raccoons.

*****

Return to Table of Contents

The Participants in This Story:

Main Characters:

Lonnie Paul Dinkle – a famous mathematician

Samantha Dooley – Dinkle’s consort

Jimmy Bolt – a student newspaper reporter

Monica – an astrophysicist

Very Important Characters:

Ma Dinkle – a witch

Tilman Grant, Jr. – a hired hand

Bernie Milford – a banker

Jeremiah Suggs – a failed athlete

The Native Skeletons and Spirits:

Mink – a killer

Toad – a large strange man

Fish – a young man with an unusual skull

Raccoon – owner of the obsidian knife

Important Characters:

Mickey Ray Dooley – co-owner of the Dooley Boys Custom Combine Company

Ham Garvens – a sheriff, and later a private investigator

Minor But Essential Characters:

Samantha Grant – an older widow

Gramma – Dinkle’s grandmother; also a witch

Samantha Pitts – Dinkle’s high school girl friend

Ellen Kite – an older woman

Erma Kite – Ellen’s twin sister

Fred Willis – a drunk

Emile Moravec – a farmer

Anna Moravec – Emile’s wife

The Moravec children – especially one daughter

Andelt and Betty Suggs – Jeremiah’s adoptive parents

Monica’s mother – a crone who lives in the woods

Tommy Jay Willford – an evangelist

Harry Beecher – a recruiter

Minor Characters:

A museum docent

Michelle – a child

Douglas – another child

Pa Dinkle – Lonnie Paul’s father

Harold Rapp – an employee of the Sallisaw Hatchet

Lily – Fred Willis’ wife

Lily – Ham Garvens’ wife

Elmo Fergins – a farmer

Myrtle Dooley – Samantha’s aunt

Crawford Dooley – Samantha’s cousin

Billy Bob Dooley – Samantha’s uncle

Elroy Ganzer – a high school football coach

Davey Wilkins – a high school football player

Suzi Sharpe – a high school girl

Kermit Blaine – chancellor of Hope College

A philosophy teacher

A dirty student

Dogs:

Gismo – Dinkle’s dog in Sallisaw

Tailgate – Gismo’s predecessor

Radiator – Gismo’s replacement

Flatbed – the one and only dog the Dooley boys ever had

Bumper – Samantha Dooley’s seeing-eye dog

Worthless Hound – Bumper’s friend

Wild Animals:

Raccoons

Mice, especially Samantha and her babies

Herman, the planarian

Inanimate Characters:

The observatory computers

The obsidian knife

Dinkle’s black truck

Dinkle’s Great Works and their equations:

Theory of Complex Systems

Mystic Experience Correlates

Subatomic Sociology

The Nature of God

The weather

The Places Where This Story Occurs:

Cimarron College and the surrounding town

Holbrook Hall – Dinkle’s office

The observatory – Monica’s laboratory

The mountains nearby

The North Sallisaw Burial Mound

The Grafton Quarries

Sallisaw – a town in eastern Oklahoma

Hugo – another town in eastern Oklahoma

Monica’s house

Jimmy’s apartment

The Great Plains, especially Oklahoma and Kansas

Great Bend – a town in central Kansas

The Plainsman National Bank in Great Bend

Lyons – a town near Great Bend

#47227-54 – a star

The University of Colorado

McPherson – a town near Lyons and Great Bend

Kingman Stadium

Hope Chapel

The Hope Chapel projection booth

Lyons cemetery

The North Sallisaw Mound (again)

*****

Table of Contents:

The participants in this story

Prologue

Chapter 1. The Office Grave

Chapter 2. The Dinkle Family

Chapter 3. The Observatory

Chapter 4. The Paper Route

Chapter 5. The Burial Mound

Chapter 6. A Raccoon

Chapter 7. Skeletons

Chapter 8. The Grafton Quarry

Chapter 9. Fish

Chapter 10. The Combine Crew

Chapter 11. The Moravec Farm

Chapter 12. Milford

Chapter 13. Monica’s Models

Chapter 14. Monica’s Place

Chapter 15. Ghost Dance

Chapter 16. Vision Dream

Chapter 17. Ham Garvens

Chapter 18. Dinkle Speaks

Chapter 19. Jimmy Raccoon

Chapter 20. Samantha’s Puppy

Chapter 21. Jeremiah Suggs

Chapter 22. Jimmy’s Trip

Chapter 23. Monica’s Trip

Chapter 24. Dinkle’s Trip

Chapter 25. Dinkle Rambles

Chapter 26. The Speech

Chapter 27. The Funeral

Chapter 28. Sallisaw

The Author

Books by John Janovy, Jr.

*****

Return to Table of Contents

Chapter 1. The Office Grave

House lights dim, a rheostat pushed by the ubiquitous unseen hand; blatant meddle turns to familiar noise. A group of humans cannot be silent, he thinks, then resists the gnawing wave of cynicism. I’m too old for that; too far gone. He adjusts his robe, works his fingers over the velvet chevrons, tries, unsuccessfully, to focus on the threaded gold tassel dangling at his eyebrow. The music heard a thousand times has lost no power—chords pull hard—he suppresses a tear. After all these miles, all these generations of the mind, the symbolism of this moment remains. What strange beings we are, strange as ants, he mumbles to nobody in particular, and takes his first steps. Faces turn. Careful with the risers. There was a time . . . but then there was always a time. At his right an oily dignitary leans to mutter something in his ear. At his left, the Dean of Arts and Letters exhales; there is whiskey on his breath and its sweet smell cuts through the reek of sweaty robes. He hears his name: Dr. L. P. Dinkle; his list of great works—Theory of Complex Systems, Subatomic Sociology, Mystic Experience Correlates; The Nature of God. At the end, Lonnie Paul Dinkle stands to deliver the most famous commencement address in the history of Cimarron College.

The world, announces Dinkle to the hope of tomorrow and the wrinkled look of money, is not the way you think it is. Then he sits down. From the back of the auditorium, silent as the Tomb of Tombs upon the River Dead, comes the clapping of a single pair of hands.

As the solitary clapping continues, echoing hollowly, and heads twist to gaze at the slight female figure in the upper balcony, Dinkle muses to himself: these are primeval times, glacial periods of the collective soul that always seem to spawn the mutants, ghosts that walk through skulls until the final one goes clapping all alone, sensing all’s been said that ever was, or ever will be, known about a universe. The world is not the way you think it is. Such a summary I have given them! You do not believe? Then read what happened today, listen to the news: a stranger opened fire on an unsuspecting crowd; an actress sold her home to live with Mr. X; a Princess gives her longest speech, a minute’s worth of royal words. All is told a half a world away within minutes. Listen to the News!

But, my friends, down among the sponges, clawing through the purple rocks along the continental shelf there moves a horseshoe crab, its genes the molecules of time. Today we take its DNA, put the coded information in a virus, put the virus in a bacterium, then store them both in liquid nitrogen. Here is the logic: a horseshoe crab, alive unchanged since the Triassic, must go into a chemical museum. This scratchy, dumb, and darling beast—it saw the dinosaurs, it saw them die, it rode the continents drifting through the open sea until the tropics turned to glaciers; mammals, birds, it saw them come along by Darwin’s rule, saw them cower in fear and hide from man, new amongst them, with fire, and sharpened sticks; it felt the dull thud of Bikini Atoll; it watched in stupid wonder as the pieces of a burning spacecraft drifted slowly past its cataractic eyes. And you think it’s news that an actress sold her home to live with Mr. X?

Some men have decided this animal is now an endangered species. But who among us has more right, than the crab, to say the world is not the way you think it is? Dinkle? Here at Cimarron College? How could a lowly person come to see as much as a crab that’s been here since the Mesozoic? And how else, except by such vision, can we come to such an answer for an unasked question? Better ask the easy ones: Why did we drop The Bomb? From where came Vietnam? Will the Afghanistan war ever end? Is Revelation a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Upon the stage, while the dean drones on and reads the names of graduates, Dinkle smiles. He loves a puzzle, delights in the struggle of humans with their own powerful thoughts. He takes heart because there are still those fools willing to put their persons to the tests. They must be the ones who are not afraid to fail, he decides, then looks out over the crowd, searching for a face with a certain kind of eyes. Dinkle can read the eyes; he can see through them into the brain. Finally, he finds the one he is looking for, taking notes upon a small lined pad, his camera bag beside him. Beware, young man! The Great Teacher has picked you out for favors! I will see this one later, Dinkle whispers to no one in particular. He will come to see me. Even now, this scribbler in the audience cannot keep his mind on his business. He is here on assignment, but he’s found something else, something that he cannot bury in the smaller paragraphs on pages four and five of whatever newspaper has sent him.

What did you say? asks the man in the next chair.

See that reporter in the third row at the far left?

A reporter? How can you tell?

He is doomed.

Doomed?

His life as he knows it is over.

And so young. Tragic. These people should use condoms. The man stares intently out into the audience. I’m a doctor.

Dinkle studies the man. Cimarron College does not have a record of turning out these types. But then perhaps the mathematician has been sheltered in his dealing with alums. The dignitary fidgets. Perhaps expecting a slash of lightning? wonders LPD, then takes a piece of paper from beneath his gown, writes upon it a time, and this day’s date, then hands it to the gentleman in the next chair. To the other’s quizzical look, LPD replies: That is the hour of his metaphorical death.

The worst kind of fate! How do you know these things?

Don’t be stupid, says LPD; it’s the job of a thinker, to know, to predict, to test the predictions, to challenge, then change, the unsuspecting.

Lonnie Paul feels the man’s bewilderment, so makes an additional note: That is the hour this young man will enter my office. He leans back and smiles. The music starts; officials rise for the procession. Dinkle takes a final glance into the audience. The reporter’s chair is empty. Fifteen minutes later, he’s in Dinkle’s office.

If this is an inconvenient time, I can return. He does not have time to return; anyone can see it. He needs, and more important wants, his story immediately. LPD likes that. People who want something are vulnerable; those who know what they want are even more so—they can be taught.

You’re late, son.

I didn’t have an appointment.

You didn’t know you had an appointment.

If you’re busy . . .

Do I look busy?

Beg your pardon, Sir; it’s not always easy to tell when professors are busy. I’ve known some who just sit and think.

Yes, I know the type; know them well, says LPD.

"My name is Jimmy Bolt. I’m from the Oracle." The infamous student newspaper, training ground for . . . Dinkle reels them off in his mind, his former students, moguls of the communication trade. He gives Bolt thirty years: Jimmy Bolt, Editor in Chief, Washington Post; James Bolt, Publisher, Chicago Tribune; Jim Bolt, Managing Editor, Dallas Morning News. Such havoc they’d have caused at any normal school; at CC their worth was measured by the wielding of their editorial swords. The slashing ones did just fine; the mild ones needed help. Ah, such open secrets of the learning process. Lonnie Paul sizes this one up.

What’s on your mind, Jimmy Bolt?

I’m doing a follow-up on your speech. Do you have time to answer a few questions?

No.

Bolt doesn’t even look up from his pad; his pencil moves incessantly.

What exactly did you mean by ‘The world is not the way you think it is’?

What did you think I meant?

That we form these impressions of reality. That’s all they are, impressions, but still we act on them. As he speaks, the young man inventories the items on Dinkle’s desk.

And?

And the dumb ones never wonder whether the impressions are true.

Keep going.

And the evil ones don’t care.

And the smart ones?

I’ve not decided whether there are any smart ones.

Are you smart, Jimmy Bolt?

The student’s eyes move to the bookcases, the walls; his inventory continues.

I’m very capable, Dr. Dinkle. I can see things nobody else can see. I’m perceptive, not afraid, intelligent. I write well. I will be a success some day.

Mr. Bolt, would you like to know exactly what I was saying to the person beside me on the stage today?

Sure. Not really; he’s more interested in the titles in LPD’s bookshelves.

I was saying that this is the day Jimmy Bolt will die. The inventory stops. I even predicted the time. The eyes become more interested.

But I was late for my ‘appointment’.

Not late enough, says Dinkle. He hoists his ample belly up from behind the desk and shuffles past the student, into the hall. Jimmy Bolt counts twenty footsteps, then moves quickly into Dinkle’s chair and opens the top desk drawer.

Cimarron College lay in the foothills of Wichita Mountains although in honesty, even the tallest of the Wichitas could scarcely be called anything but hills. Up close they were strewn with boulders, a strange geological concoction in which the rock formations were of less interest than the rattlesnakes, the bison herds more protected than the landscape. Dinkle studies these elevations from his park bench, making bets with himself about which of his files Jimmy was into by this time, looks at his watch, grins like a badger. If his insights into human nature were correct, it would take Bolt about seven more minutes to find the label reading The Nature of God. He had time for a cigarette. Time to review his life. Time to contemplate his next few years. All the time in the universe. The May sunshine warms his belly; the slight breeze carries his smoke in the direction of a mockingbird babbling stolen songs in defense of a territory. Dinkle wonders if it’s too late to get married.

Below the mountains ran a river, bloody and meandering across its mile-wide bed. The river had always been a symbolic living being for Dinkle. A hundred miles to the east, Wildhorse Creek emptied into the main stream. Down Wildhorse had floated not a few of the Dinkle family possessions. Floods taught even a child to carry his household in his head. To the west, a treeline marked the mouth of North Fork. Two hundred miles upstream on North Fork lay the Elmo Fergins wheat fields where Lonnie Paul Dinkle had first begun to learn the bittersweet truths of an obsession with the family farm. He crushes the cigarette under a shoe bought especially for the commencement exercises. The robes had covered the rest of his garb. He’d thought about going naked under the black drapes, then about painting a tie on a white paper bib and using that instead of a shirt. How I do hate graduation days, he thinks. They are the saddest of times, bringing back memories of a vibrant youth when there was no end to the semesters and mistakes were ones of love and innocence. Worse yet, commencements drag Cimarron College down into a pedestrian communion with the world’s Harvards. Wake up, Jimmy Bolt. Let’s see if you’ve found out what’s good about my life yet.

Strolling, thinking, analyzing, Dinkle chooses a brick-paved walk through the older part of campus. Hell to be in this mood. He kicks at twigs. What could be more dangerous than an idle mind, especially one with nagging unfinished business? He savors the knowledge that what he’d done before with spare time—the list of his great works, culminating with The Nature of God. He frowns at the suspicion that he cannot top his own performance. Not that he considered it so grand, of course, to be the one who writes a classic, mind-bending, incendiary bomb too hot for libraries. Did Charles Darwin know what he’d done? Karl Marx? They may have thought something at the time, or wished, whispers LPD, out loud; but did they know, actually know what they’d accomplished, as he did? Probably not, he concludes; they could not have known.

The mockingbird flies to the top of a small, newly planted pecan tree and with hardly a break in its rhythm dumps a stream of notes down Dinkle’s back. For the first time in my life, he says to the bird, I’m stumped. Hands in pockets, he looks back into the Wichita Mountains. At fifty-five, Theory of Complex Systems having done its nasty work, freeing innumerable patterns from their prisons of chaos; Mystic Experience Correlates having hypnotized the daytime television crowd; the theoretical portions of Subatomic Sociology having destroyed the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies; and The Nature of God having . . . having . . . well, now just what did The Nature of God accomplish? Nothing. Wait. It had, so far, done something no other power in the universe could do: It shut down Lonnie Paul Dinkle’s mind and put him to physical work for a year.

Ants scurry on the bricks, a mound of finely chewed soil marking their origin. Dinkle stops, digs in various pockets for his glasses, finds them in the left rear. He’d sat on them. And on his cigarettes. Now which is worse? he wonders. It depends on whether one wants to smoke or study ants, he concludes. A sudden pain sweeps through his forehead, down his neck, and into the region of his chest. It happens every time he gets down on his knees. Luck I don’t have much need for prayer, he says to the ants. The glasses are too dirty and bent for use. He sits back on his feet, a giant doughy groundhog, and starts bending the frames and polishing the lenses on his shirt.

Hello, Dr. Dinkle! He looks up at a bare leg. I loved your speech!

Did you understand it?

As well as I’m supposed to at this stage of my life.

And your parents?

We enjoyed it, too. Dark trousers, wingtips, stood to the left; a slightly slit skirt and high heels to the right.

Thanks!

Sorry to disturb you. Say ‘hello’ to the ants, Dr. Dinkle.

Congratulations! The three pairs of legs move out of his field of vision as he gets down on his elbows. He sees organization, communication, specialization, life, death, territoriality, defense, agriculture, architecture, bustle, a society that outlives its individual members, all within inches of his face. He struggles back to his feet, dizzy for a moment from the effort, puts his glasses back into the left rear pocket, and looks back toward the mountains, over the city that lay beside a river, then down at the ants, then back at the city.

Dismayed by the desk, almost embarrassed at the random mess his curiosity has uncovered, Jimmy Bolt turns to the file cabinet. Immediately he decides that no ordinary human can make sense of Cimarron College’s most distinguished scholar by reading his private files. He’d started with the Mystic Experience Correlates drawer, the research, he’d supposed, for the only one of The Great Dinkle Works he’d