Thursday
Mar. 13, 2008
At Tower Peak
Every tan rolling meadow will turn into housing
Freeways are clogged all day
Academies packed with scholars writing papers
City people lean and dark
This land most real
As its western-tending golden slopes
And bird-entangled central valley swamps
Sea-lion, urchin coasts
Southerly salmon-probes
Into the aromatic almost-Mexican hills
Along a range of granite peaks
The names forgotten,
An eastward running river that ends out in desert
The chipping ground-squirrels in the tumbled blocks
The gloss of glacier ghost on a slab
Where we wake refreshed from ten hours sleep
After a long day's walking
Packing burdens to the snow
Wake to the same old world of no names,
No things, new as ever, rock and water,
Cool dawn birdcalls, high jet contrails.
A day or two or million, breathing
A few steps back from what goes down
In the current realm.
A kind of ice age, spreading, filling valleys
Shaving soils, paving fields, you can walk in it
Live in it, drive through it then
It melts away
For whatever sprouts
After the age of
Frozen hearts. Flesh-carved rock
And gusts on the summit,
Smoke from forest fires is white,
The haze above the distant valley like a dusk.
It's just one world, this spine of rock and streams
And snow, and the wash of gravels, silts
Sands, bunchgrasses, saltbrush, bee-fields,
Twenty million human people, downstream, here below.
It's the birthday of science fiction writer and Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, born in Tilden, Nebraska (1911).
He enrolled in George Washington University in 1930 to study civil engineering but was placed on academic probation because of poor grades, and he left after two semesters.
During World War II, Hubbard served in the Navy and was in command of a submarine chaser in the Pacific.
In 1950, he wrote Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, which formed the basis of the Church of Scientology's teaching. The book explains that humans have "engrams," recordings of painful events experienced in the past, stored in their subconscious and that these are the basis of physical and emotional problems. In order to be cleared of these engrams and unwanted spiritual conditions, a person takes part in an "auditing" session, where a counselor uses an Electropsychometer, or E-Meter, to measure the mental state of a person, helping to locate areas of spiritual distress so they can be addressed and handled in a session.
The book became a best seller and sold 150,000 copies within a year of publication. Groups formed all over the country to apply Dianetics techniques. Hubbard said, "The creation of Dianetics is a milestone for man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his inventions of the wheel and the arch."
It's the birthday of journalist Janet Flanner, (books by this author) born in Indianapolis (1892).
She worked for The Indianapolis Star as a film critic, one of the first in the nation. She was particularly interested in crime and moved to Pennsylvania to work at a girl's reformatory. In 1922, she took a trip to Europe and ended up settling in Paris. From there, she began writing long letters to her friends in America, including to Jane Grant, with whom she had helped found the Lucy Stone League, an organization that fought to allow women to keep and use legally their maiden name after marriage. Grant was the wife of Harold Ross, who was starting a new magazine, and she asked if Flanner would write a regular letter from Paris for the magazine.
Her first "Letter from Paris" appeared in The New Yorker in September of 1925, and she continued writing it for 50 years. It became a biweekly feature of the magazine in which she wrote about how public political news affected private lives. Without telling her, Ross gave Flanner the penname Genet, which he thought was the French name for Janet, but is actually the French word for female donkey.
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