"I of my own knowledge…"

Friday, June 13
Eight dreams to transcribe.

1) I start to go outside, and a man steps aside for me, and lets me go first, and I go, and he stabs me! In the back. He’s going to do something but instead, I annihilate him with this blast of anger, an amazing thing. He’s literally not there on the field. There’s nothing left. It was a blast of anger, it just flashed. I’m lying there wondering, what was that all about? I think I had just finished naming to myself the seven deadly sins, of which anger is one. Susan had said I had all sorts of anger that I wasn’t aware of, that I was not wanting to have, because I was trying to be too “nice,” as she put it.

2) Nancy __’s brother and I and somebody else come back from something or other and we’re going to leave something at her place. There’s a sign on the door that says “don’t knock.” Then we’re listening to her answering machine tape and for some reason we decide something happened to her when we were gone. We knock on the door and she opens it looking very sleepy and exasperated. Her brother says, “Well Nancy, we were worried about you because” [I forget why] and she explains that she had left a note saying not to wake her up, which of course we had – but we had somehow turned it all around. The common denominator there is the strength of my emotion, because I was really concerned, I was sure something had happened. I seem to remember an unacknowledged sense of almost over-theatricality about the emotion of concern.

(more…)

Thursday, June 12
At 8 a.m. I record a couple things from the night’s tape recording.

– I’m lying here not even thinking I’ve been dreaming. I’m not asleep, yet all this stuff has been going through my mind generally, gradually. Now talking about electricity in automobile plants, for God’s sakes. I don’t know where it comes from.

– Something very appropriate in my lying here in sleep mask and earplugs. It’s like isolating myself from everything around me for this purpose. But I’ve done that my whole life, and there’s not been the results I would hope for, and I’m thinking, maybe I need to go more into the world. Perhaps if I could find a proper venue for it I could write an article about the spiritual nervous breakdown caused by the protestant revolution and the materialist revolution that followed. It would be an unusual mixture of elements because it would take for granted that we are many lives joined, and that these lives contend within us, and that changes in civilization result in parts of ourselves fighting violently or actively or quietly or in whatever manner, against each other, we being the battleground. Stuff the guys have told Rita and me would be much background on it. And I begin to sense that the book on what they have said has more to do with this than with the fact that they said it. I think perhaps the book has lacked a point of application to individuals, and maybe this is it, or part of it.

(more…)

Wednesday, June 11, three dreams on the tape recorder:

1) I almost didn’t recognize it as a dream, more like a daydream. At the end we are in a boat, way at the top of a hill. Lying there, feeling the motion of the boat I’d taken to and from Staffa. We – whoever “we” are – came out the back door, and there’s this long, long, long way down to the water.

2) The two ladies from the Iona Community gift shop, in the office by their desks. Suddenly they collapsed downward. That is, they disappeared, as though they had been angels rather than people.

3) There was some kind of building work being done in the church. And there was a man working who was somewhat skillful. I was involved with it at a less skilled level. The man had to quit. He couldn’t do it any more, there was something wrong. The posture hurt his feet, or something. I offered to do the work, or was asked, I forget which. The woman in charge of the thing said I had great [force?] The idea was that I could do the job, and otherwise it couldn’t be done.

I notice during the night that I was reluctant actually to record dreams. I was almost too reluctant to think about them. I didn’t reach for the recorder. It seemed too much trouble. Which is highly suspicious, since that is what I was waiting for, and wanting, since the night before when I had six. But again, this seems to be a case of when you search for something, it flees from you. (more…)

Monday, June 9
At 2:45 a.m. I note a dream, saying “active dreaming. May it continue.” The only thing I remember from this rather entertaining dream is giving my old college friend Dennis a boot in the tail because he got me in trouble with (the congressman I am working for?). I tell him that when I’m 83, I’ll still be circling round him to avoid the return kick.

At 7:15 I am up, packed, waiting for breakfast and the start of the day. I pull out my journal.

“So – friend David – we were interrupted in a very interesting conversation some while ago – when the plane landed in Aberdeen.” And we are off on a discussion of the relationship within us between other lives. David says, “You have within you connection to every other lifetime you are primarily connected with. Which ones you are connected with is in itself a measure of you as an individual. This may not be obvious.

“Well – so those you are closest to will most closely influence you. This is how it will seem to you. And if you are compounded of primary influences that hate each other’s values, you will find yourself a battlefield, and maybe one side or the other will be overwhelmed, or maybe they will fight over every little thing, or maybe your life can be a means of reconciling them. But in whatever case, you are primary because you are at the point of application, the present from your view of reality. For each of the influences in motion, each of them is the one in the point of application, and you are the influence from afar. So it is continual flux and war of movement, you see.”

“I am sitting here in the front room of the b&b waiting for breakfast to begin in a few minutes, wishing I were the man I saw in the mirror after we visited Pluscarden.”

“And maybe he has reason to wish you could make the trade.”

(more…)

My friend Rich Spees, who is a photographer of professional caliber, sent me this, kindly noting “Remember Frank, my camera was about 7 times the cost of the one you have,” thus providing me with a built-in excuse. He said I could share this, so here it is. Pretty nifty, no?

Before it began

(more…)

Saturday, June 7

Another breakfast at the hotel, then a cab to the train station at Crewe, a train to the Manchester airport, and a flight to Aberdeen. Traveling is easier alone. Although one might think that another person would help find things, and avoid mistakes, and share the load, in practice, it isn’t so. I watch myself traveling very efficiently, very smoothly, except for moments of confusion that a moment sorts out without much difficulty. I watch myself glide smoothly from the train through the maze to the right place to check in for the flight, and even my movements are smooth and sure, usually. Far more so than if I were with someone, my attention half on the companion. This of course has nothing to do with the companion and everything to do with the way I operate.

I like the British ways so much more than commercial-American. At Dulles airport, every 15 minutes came a strident warning that “for security reasons” you mustn’t leave your baggage unattended; unattended baggage would be seized for inspection and might be damaged or destroyed. Here in Manchester, a pleasant voice merely asked passengers “to reduce the number of security alerts by keeping your luggage with you at all times.” No threats, no stridency. Same message underneath, but all the difference in the world how it was delivered. (more…)

The first of several descriptions of a trip to Scotland and England that was in some ways a restless spiritual pilgrimage, more so than my trip to Glastonbury and other places last year.

Iona 

On Monday April 12, 2003, I realize that I want to go to Iona. I look for people to come with me, but no one can. I decide to go anyway, and within days I have the trip planned. I will fly to Glasgow, spend a day and a half with Robert Clarke in England, fly to Aberdeen to spend a couple of days with Michael Ross, then go to Iona for four days and five nights, then visit Ronald and Jill Russell for a couple of days. It seems a lot of moving around, but manageable.

On Friday, May 23^rd, I write in my journal: “Dion Fortune read a passage referring to the Brotherhood, and her whole being responded. For ten days she could think of nothing else but her desire to serve. Then came a vision, and her whole life was changed. May I not strive for something like that on Iona? May I not earnestly pray to be of service? Have I anything else in life I desire? I have not.” 

The following Friday, the 30^th, I pick up a few hundred English pounds from my bank, borrow a backpack, and that night I pack everything except for last-minute things. (What’s the weather going to be like? Should I bring a winter coat? Surely not, in June, even in Scotland! I settle for packing in layers. Besides my short coat, a sweater and sweatshirt, a warm woolen jacket-like thing, a flannel shirt and two dress shirts, a pair of blue jeans, a pair of good pants and – in an unwarranted burst of optimism – a pair of shorts.) I spend the weekend wondering if four days on Iona will bore me. For reading material, I choose, after some hesitation, The Lives of the Saints (Brendan, Cuthbert and Wilfred), and The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling. Both books are small, lightweight, and likely to match my mood. 

Wednesday morning, June 4, a Greyhound bus to Dulles airport. I begin snoozing as soon as the bus starts at 9 a.m., figuring it will be long hours before I get to sleep in a bed again.

And then I am at Dulles airport at 11:20 a.m., with my flight to Newark scheduled to leave at 5 p.m. (Greyhound only has one bus to Dulles from C’ville.) I have a piece of pizza and go up to the check-in desk. The woman there advises me to get onto their 1 p.m. to Newark, saying that they are experiencing weather delays all up and down the east coast, and it would be better for me to be in Newark waiting than in Dulles.  

Good thinking. As it is, the 1 p.m. doesn’t get off the runway until 2 p.m.. Then up out of the grey clouds into the bright blue sky, and 35 minutes later back down into the same grey overcast we’d left, one short hop closer to my scheduled 8:35 departure for Scotland. (more…)

By way of a teaser, here’s the preface to Babe in the Woods, a novel.

Prologue

March 24, 1995

Friday night

It was about six when I walked into the newsroom, a typical Friday night in progress. Joe Lampman looked up from his keyboard, saw me, and said, “Well! Back from the dead! How’d it go, Ace?” I grinned at him and made a waffling motion with my hand, and didn’t even slow down. A couple of other reporters and I exchanged nods, and then there I was at Charlie Reilly’s desk. I’d seen him glance up and register my presence and then go back to whoever’s copy he was editing. By the time I sat myself in the chair next to his desk, he had already saved the copy and was giving me the usual – the piercing appraisal, the challenging grin with the sparkle in his eye, the indefinable attitude that made him look like reporters must have looked 50 years earlier. He should have been wearing a battered fedora, cocked back and to one side, maybe with a little feather in the hatband.

“So, Angelo,” he said. “We friends again?”

I was biting down on my own grin. “Yeah, you’re forgiven, maybe.”

“Do we have a story?”

“I do believe we do.”

“Do we have a good story?” (more…)

Finished revision three today, third time is a charm. Now to get it published.

I didn’t expect this novel to proceed so straightforwardly and well. At 115,000  words, it’s considerably longer than my previous novel, Messenger, and considerably more complex. Yet it was a very easy novel to write in certain respects. I knew the people, I knew the situation, and I really knew what I had to say.

So now I’ll give myself a little rest and perhaps I will post the first chapter here after a while.