Donald Traxler's Poetry: February 2020

Friday, February 28, 2020

Journal of a Naked Poet XXI - He Awaits the Future

He awaits the future,
having seen the past
and somehow thrived.

Il attend l'avenir,
ayant vu le passé
et en quelque sorte prospéré.

El espera el futuro,
habiendo visto el pasado
y de alguna manera prosperado.

Commentary on the Teachings of Rabbi Yeshua XII - "What's in a Name?" (Mt. 1:21)

21 וְתֹלֶד בֵן וְתִקְרָא שְׁמוֹ יֵשוּ“עַ כִי הוּא יוֹשִׁיעַ אֶת עַמִי מֵעֲוֹנוֹתֵם׃

The above text is Mt. 1:21, as it appears in Shem-Tob's Hebrew Matthew, with pointing added by me (there could be errors in the pointing).

The name given to Jesus is יֵשׁוּעַ (Yeshua). The symbol that looks like a quotation mark in the verse above is used in the manuscript to indicate that the word is a name.

Professor Howard's excellent translation of the verse is:

She will bear a son and you will call his name Jesus because he will save my people from their sins.

The canonical, Greek version is the same, except that it says "his people" instead of "my people."

This name, Yeshua, was not new; it appears in the Tanakh ("Old Testament") twenty-nine times in this spelling, and one more time in a variant spelling, for a total of thirty times. The meaning is "God is salvation," or more properly "G-d is salvation."

I think this is the only time that the full name appears in Hebrew Matthew. Most of the time a shorter form, יש“ו (Yeshu) is used, which does not imply any change in meaning.

I thought it best to make a point of this, because there has been some controversy as to what Jesus' name actually was.

It will be noticed that I give to Yeshua the title of Rabbi. This is because I prefer to think of him as a man, a teacher, perhaps one of the greatest who ever lived. I do not divinize him, as is done in Christianity and in "Messianic Judaism." The latter movement, while it includes some wonderful, spirited people and marvelous music, is in my opinion a form of Protestantism.

I do not consider myself a Christian, or a Jew either, exactly (though Reform Judaism might be a good and comfortable fit). But I see those who divinize Yeshua as involved in an idolatrous practice. Will I change my mind? You never know, but I doubt it.

Thursday, February 27, 2020

Commentary on the Teachings of Rabbi Yeshua XI - The Avinu (Mt. 6:9-13)

The Avinu (Our Father) is somewhat different in its Hebrew and Aramaic versions. The latter typically does not have the word "our," but begins "abba d'bashamaya" (Father in heaven). The oldest Hebrew version that we have is that in Shem-Tob's Hebrew Matthew:

אָבִינוּ יִתְקַדַש שְׁמֶךָ׃ 9

וְיִתְבַרֵך מַלְכוּתֶךָ רְצוֹנְךָ יִהְיֶה עָשוּי בַשָׁמַיִם וּבָאָרֶץ׃ 10

וְתִתֶן לֶחְמַנוּ תְמִידִית׃ 11

וּמָחוֹל לָנוּ חֵטְאתֵינוּ כַּאֲשֶׁר אֲנַחְנוּ מוֹחְלִים לְחוֹטְאִים לָנוּ׃ 12

וְאַל תְּבִיאֵנוּ לִידֵי נִסָּיוֹן וְשָׁמְרֵינוּ מִכָל רָע אָמֵן׃ 13

[The pointing is mine, so there may be errors.]

Here is canonical Matthew:

Our Father who art in heaven,

Hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come,

Thy will be done,

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread;

And forgive us our debts,

As we also have forgiven our debtors;

And lead us not into temptation,

But deliver us from evil.

And here is canonical Luke:

Father,

Hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread;

and forgive us our sins,

for we ourselves forgive everyone who is

indebted to us;

and lead us not into temptation.

The observant reader will notice that instead of "thy kingdom come," the Hebrew has "may thy kingdom be blessed." The Hebrew also does not say "in heaven" with regard to the Father, Also, our bread is "continual," rather than "daily."

If we compare the version in Hebrew Matthew to that in canonical Luke, we see that Luke is sparse, and appears incomplete. Luke's "Father," rather than "Our Father," reminds us of the Aramaic version, so it is possible that the version in Luke was translated from an early, incomplete Aramaic version.

But we also see that Luke has "sins" rather than "debts," as does Hebrew Matthew.

Luke does not speak of our Father's will at all. Luke does not ask that we be kept from all evil, as both Hebrew Matthew and canonical Matthew do,

It appears that the version in Luke is a primitive one, probably taken from a source other than Matthew, possibly an Aramaic source.

The version of the Avinu in Matthew (whether Hebrew or Greek Matthew) is a magnificent little prayer, and it seems to have its roots, at least loosely and symbolically, in the first, third, sixth, and ninth blessings of the Amidah (or Sh'moneh Esrei), the central prayer in the Jewish liturgy. This indicates, at least to me, that Rabbi Yeshua did not intend to break away from Judaism, but only to reform it. The intention of Saul / Paul of Tarsus may, though, have been different.

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Commentary on the Teachings of Rabbi Yeshua X - Mt. 5:13-15

בְעֵת הָהִיא אָמַר יֶשׁ“וּ לְתַלְמִידָיו מֶלַח אַתֶם בְעוֹלָמ אִם הַמֶלַח יִבְטֹלַח טַעַמוֹ בַּמֶה יוֹמְלָח ואֵינוֹ שְׁוָה כְלוּם אֶלָּא שְיוֹשְׁלִךְ בַחוּץ לְהָיוֹת מִרְמָס רַגְלַיִם׃ 13

מָאוֹר אַתֶּם בְעוֹלָם עִיר בָנוֹיה עַל הָהָר לֹא תוּכַל לְהִסָתֵר׃ 14

לֹא יִדְלִיקוּ נֵר לְהָשִׂים אוֹתוֹ בְמָקוֹם נִסְתַר שְלֹא תָאֵיר רַק מְשִימִים אוֹתוֹ עַל הַמְנוֹרָה לְהָאֵיר לְכָל בְנֵי הַבָיִת׃

15

The verses above are Mt. 5:13-15 in Shem-Tob's Hebrew Matthew. The pointing is mine, so there could be errors in it (if you spot any, please point them out to me).

Here is Professor Howard's excellent translation:

13 At that time Jesus said to his disciples: You are salt in the world. If the salt is neutralized in regard to its taste with what will it be salted? It is fit for nothing but to be cast outside to be trampled under foot.

14 You are light in the world. A city built upon a hill cannot be hidden.

15 They do not light a lamp to place it in a hidden place where it cannot shine; but they place it upon a lamp stand so that it might shine for all in the house.

Before I give the canonical version, I would like to point out some interesting and very important things about these verses as they appear in Hebrew:

1) Verses 13 and 14 are connected by the catchword "world," as are verses 14 and 15 by the catchword "hidden."

2) In verse 14, there is an assonance between "city" ("ir") and "light" ("or"). This assonance only works in a Semitic language, in this case Hebrew. This is further evidence for the Semitic substratum in Matthew.

As I've mentioned before, catchwords are a mnemonic device associated with the oral transmission stage. This suggests an early, probably first-century date for Hebrew Matthew.

Now, here is the canonical version, from the RSV:

13 You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trodden under foot by men.

14 You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid.

15 Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house.

The reader will notice that in the canonical, Greek version, the catchword "world" has been lost, because the Greek translation has "earth / world." The catchword "hidden has also been lost, because the Greek has "hid / bushel." Clearly, it is not the Greek version that goes back to the stage of oral transmission.

It is also of great significance that the Hebrew verses have commonalities with Logia 32/33 in the Gospel of Thomas (GTh): In both Hebrew and GTh, the city is "built," rather than set. GTh has BOTH "bushel" and "hidden place," thus maintaining the catchword "hidden." It is interesting that the order of these sayings was maintained in canonical Matthew, even though catchword connections had been lost. GTh was not known in medieval times, only having been rediscovered in 1945. One of the preeminent researchers on GTh, April D. DeConick, considers Logia 32/33 to be part of the "Kernel Gospel," which she dates to 30-50 CE, as opposed to later accretions.. Both Hebrew Matthew and the Gospelof Thomas are, in their core versions, older than our canonical Gospel texts. The evidence is simply overwhelming.

It Is the Forest that Teaches Me / +fr, es, pt, eo, heb

It is the forest that teaches me,
and all the creatures in it.
The universe is my guru
and my rabbi.
All nature
is my congregation.

C'est la forêt qui m'apprend,
et toutes les créatures qui s'y trouvent.
L'univers est mon gourou
et mon rabbin.
Toute la nature
est ma congrégation.

Es el bosque que me enseña
y todas las criaturas que contiene.
El universo es mi gurú.
y mi rabino
Toda la naturaleza
es mi congregacion

É a floresta que me ensina,
e todas as criaturas nela.
O universo é meu guru
e meu rabino.
Toda a natureza
é a minha congregação.

Estas la arbaro, kiu instruas min,
kaj ĉiuj kreitaĵoj en ĝi.
La universo estas mia guruo
kaj mia rabeno.
La tuta naturo
estas mia kongregacio.

היער הוא שמלמד אותי,
וכל היצורים שבתוכו.
היקום הוא הגורו שלי
והרב שלי.
כל הטבע
זו הקהילה שלי.

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

78,000 Visits, and the Road Ahead

Today we are passing the milestone of 78,000 visits to this blog since I started it in October 2016. As always, I thank my loyal readers in well over a hundred countries.

I expect that the content of the blog will remain much the same in coming months: poetry, photography, and the occasional prose piece. At the same time, I think there is likely to be a sharpening of focus: I need to get back to my work on the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew. I will be continuing to point the text, and will further extend the Commentary on the Teachings of Rabbi Yeshua. These things will, at any rate, be among my priorities.

I am not sure whether I will be adding to my memoir. Having published what I have, in twenty parts, I feel less pressure about it.

Thanks to all of you for making this blog the success that it already is. Thank you, merci, gracias, obrigado, todah, wadó, ꮹꮩ.

The Cosmic Woman / La femme cosmique / La mujer cósmica / A mulher cósmica / La kosma virino

There is only the cosmic woman
and the cosmic man.
We live myriad billions of lives
while she lowers her fan.

Il n'y a que la femme cosmique
et l'homme cosmique.
Nous vivons des milliards de vies
pendant qu'elle baisse son éventail.

Solo hay la mujer cósmica
y el hombre cósmico.
Vivimos miles de millones de vidas
mientras que ella baja su abanico.

Existe apenas a mulher cósmica
e o homem cósmico.
Vivemos uma infinidade de bilhões de vidas
enquanto ela abaixa o leque.

Estas nur la kosma virino
kaj la kosma homo.
Ni vivas multajn miliardojn da vivoj
dum ŝi malaltigas sian ventumilon.

The Ruins of this Riches Les ruines de cette richesse / +es, pt, eo, heb

Even the ruins of this riches
are a gift and sacrosanct.

Même les ruines de cette richesse
sont un cadeau et sacro-saintes.

Incluso las ruinas de esta riqueza
son un regalo y sacrosantas.

Até as ruínas dessa riqueza
são um presente e sacrossantas.

Eĉ la ruinoj de ĉi tiu riĉaĵo
estas donaco kaj sacrosantaj.

אפילו הריסות העושר הזה
הם מתנה ומקודש.

Sunday, February 23, 2020

Jeshuano / Yeshuan / Yeshuen / Yeshuano

Jeshuano mi estis,
Jeshuano mi estas.
La mia fido jam kreskis,
sed kore Judo mi restas.
chi-tio estas nova vido,
antauen marshas ni kun fido.
Forlasante chiun malamon,
ni audas novan klamon.
Ni komencas novan vivon.
Sekvante la rabenon
mi eniras la ghardenon.
Dum nova suno sin levighas,
mian vivon mi revivigas.

I was a Yeshuan,
I am a Yeshuan.
My faith has grown,
but I remain at heart a Jew.
This is a new vision,
we walk forward with faith.
Leaving all hatred,
we hear a new call.
We start a new life.
Following the rabbi,
I enter the garden.
As a new sun rises,
I revive my life.

J'étais un Yeshuen,
Je suis un Yeshuen.
Ma foi a grandi,
mais je reste dans l'âme juif.
Ceci est une nouvelle vision,
nous avançons avec foi.
Laissant toute haine,
nous entendons un nouvel appel.
Nous commençons une nouvelle vie.
Suivant le rabbin,
J'entre dans le jardin.
Alors qu'un nouveau soleil se lève,
Je ressuscite ma vie.

Yo era un yeshuano,
Soy un yeshuano.
Mi fe ha crecido
Pero sigo siendo judío en mi corazón.
Esta es una nueva visión,
Avanzamos con fe.
Dejando todo el odio,
Escuchamos una nueva llamada.
Comenzamos una nueva vida.
Siguiendo al rabino,
Entro al jardín.
A medida que sale un nuevo sol,
Revivo mi vida.

Eu era Yeshuano
Eu sou um Yeshuano.
Minha fé cresceu,
mas permaneço no coração judeu..
Esta é uma nova visão,
seguimos em frente com fé.
Deixando todo o ódio,
ouvimos uma nova chamada.
Começamos uma nova vida.
Após o rabino,
Eu entro no jardim.
Quando um novo sol nasce,
Eu revivo minha vida.

Saturday, February 22, 2020

Journal of a Naked Poet XX - He Sees with All His Body

He sees with all his body
and all his mind:
to cover up would make him
almost blind.

Journal of a Naked Poet XIX - A Naked Poet Has No Secrets

A naked poet has no secrets.

Journal of a Naked Poet XVIII - The Main Thing

The main thing that I have learned from this life is that everybody needs love.
Without it, we cannot survive.

Journal of a Naked Poet XVII - A lot of it

A lot of it
is just water
under the bridge
that we are not
supposed to build
our house on.

He's Defined / Il est défini / Se define / Ele está definido

He's defined by darkness and by light,
and all the rest is out of sight.

Il est défini par l'obscurité et par la lumière,
et tout le reste est hors de vue.

Se define por la oscuridad y por la luz,
y todo lo demás está fuera de la vista.

Ele está definido pela escuridão e pela luz,
e todo o resto está fora de vista.

Friday, February 21, 2020

Journal of a Naked Poet XVI - My Nudity

My nudity is very precious to me, and I make no apologies for it. Still, some explanation may be in order.

I live in Florida, a state that has about thirty-four nudist communities and resorts. Sixteen or seventeen of them are in Pasco County, where we live. But we do not live in a clothing-optional community. We chose our house for several reasons, among them the chain-link fence for the dog, and the privacy screen of trees in back, for me.

I wish I could be naked all the time, but at present that is not in the cards. If I go shopping, I put some clothes on. If we have visitors who are not nudists, I wear clothes out of respect for their preferences. I try not to force my nudity on anyone. But if it's just Sandy, Betty, and me, I'm almost always naked.

"Why?" you may ask. I have a veritable basketful of reasons:

1) It's more comfortable.

2) I get a lot more sun, which I believe is very necessary to good health.

3) When it comes to laundry, it's much more efficient, and better for the environment.

4) Less air-conditioning is needed (also good for the environment).

5) I enjoy it, and feel more like myself.

6) Here's the biggie: Florida, at least this part of it, has very high humidity (usually more than 90%). This humidity, especially when accompanied by Florida's heat, causes me to get heat / humidity rashes in the groin areas. This is a problem that I first had in Barcelona, which is also quite humid. The best protection against this condition is to wear as little clothing as possible, especially in that area, in order to provide adequate ventilation to the body.

In addition to the above good and cogent reasons, I seem to intuit that my nudity is helpful psychically and mentally--in other words, I feel that it is protecting me on that level too, although I can't prove it. Maybe it just fosters whatever sanity I still have left. Or perhaps it just keeps intolerant and small-minded people away.

But for you, I would be happy to throw on a bathrobe or some Bermuda shorts. Naturally, they'll disappear the minute that you're gone.

Journal of a Naked Poet XV - Unseen Worlds

I spend a not-insignificant portion of my time "between the worlds." This is not the same as "head in the clouds," or "dans la lune." Witch and Shaman friends will understand. Mystics and mushroom-eaters will understand. Lalla, another naked poet, surely understood.

I have had "psychic" experiences at least since the age of four or five. In 1991 Sandy and I revisited Europe. Among our stops was a place called Caunes Minervois, near Toulouse, where one of Sandy's friends had an inn. But Caunes is near the battlefields where the Pope's army slaughtered the Albigeois (Albigensians). One can still feel in the air the pain and grief of the local people. At least I could feel them, and I knew that I would never be able to live in such a place.

In Spain, in 1982, we visited all three of the ancient synagogues that were still standing. In two of them the vibes were clean, redolent of education. But in one of them the vibes were bad. I learned that it had been taken over by Christians after the expulsion of the Jews, and made into a convent. At least one of the nuns died from the austerities they practiced there.

In Rome, I could not approach the colosseum. I waited a block away for Sandy and our friend Nancy.

I had a premonition of the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. When I got on the commuter bus, at about 4:50, I thought, "Are we headed into a disaster?" We were. The earthquake struck at 5:04.

I have had precognitive dreams.

When my mother passed away, in 2006, I was the last person to talk to her. But I was living in Portland, OR, and had not been able to go to San Diego. Our conversation was telepathic. When she was gone, I knew it with certainty. I noted the time on the clock in the attic of our floating home, where I had just finished my morning yoga (I was meditating when she visited me), and then headed downstairs to take my shower, As I stepped into the bathroom, I said to Sandy, "you may be getting a call." The call came while I was in the shower. I later checked with a sister who had been at Mom's bedside. The time I had noted on the attic clock was correct.

I could go on and on, but what I want to say is this: I am not crazy, or some kind of freak. You could do it , too. It is our birthright.

(to be continued)

Thursday, February 20, 2020

Journal of a Naked Poet XIV - Calendarium

My interests and activities during the next few years:

1968 - Yoga, Hinduism, study of Sanskrit, Astrology

1969 - Hinduism, Astrology

1970 - As above, plus Photography. In November, began work part-time for my Uncle Charles.

1971-73 - As above, plus beach bum. Lots of beaches and mountains with Julie. Abandoned the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna for the Gospel of Thomas.

1974 - Construction slowdown affecting my uncle's business prompted my relocation to SF. Had a wonderful "aha!" moment while reading The Seth Material. Began work at Crocker Bank, One Montgomery Street, in spite of Molly Hockett's prediction. Lots of photography, and Hinduism.

1975 - Lived and breathed photography. Hinduism, too.

1976 - Coming up for air From Hinduism. Beginning of China period.

1977 - Quit Crocker, went to work for China Books & Periodicals. USCPFA. Doing lots of photography.

1978 - Met Sandy. November: Sandy moved in. Quit China Books at year-end, and went back to Crocker, temporarily.

1979 - Helped Sandy prep for her Second Class and First Class FCC licences. We moved to Tucson, AZ for her job. We were married on Dec. 8, 1979. Tough job search for me. Hired by Unicopy.

1980 - We were still living in Tucson. Restoring antique radios. Flea Markets. Studied electronics at Pima Valley CC.

1981 - Moved to Barcelona at mid-year. Taught in two language schools, many adventures.

1982 - Easter vacation in Ibiza. Finished contract at Inlingua in July. Studying the books of Silo, and translating one of them. Traveled through eleven countries of Europe. Returned to US in September and traveled across the country by bus for 30 days. Late '82 - took hourly job at Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

1983 - Job at FRBSF became permanent. Living on Chenery Street in SF. Lived and breathed computers and BASIC programming, lots of time at nude beaches (Sandy often went along).

1984 - Changed departments at the Fed. Applied myself to mastering the automated accounting system. Still doing lots of photography.

1985 - Much the same, emerging as the department expert in the automated system. May have been the year when I took some conversion instructions at a Conservative synagogue.

1986 - Was accomplishing amazing things at the Fed. Near year-end, Sandy and I bought a house in Pacifica, which we moved into early the next year.

1987 - Sandy and I were now living in Pacifica, and I was commuting to the Fed. It may have been at this time that I started my project to translate the body of poetic work of Lalla of Kashmir.

1988 - Sandy and I began our studies at New College of California. While there I worked on a Senior Project to analyze the catchwords in the Gospel of Thomas.

1989 - Sandy and I completed our studies at New College. It had taken 25 years, but I finally had a BA, in Interdisciplinary Humanities. At the Fed, I was promoted to Project Analyst.

1990 - I can't explain it, but I dove head first into the occult and neopaganism. Still doing great things at the Fed.

1991-95 - Much the same, and continued work on the Lalla project. In November of 1995, I made my first attempt at retirement, but it turned out to be premature. Sandy and I moved to North Carolina, settling in Brevard, Transylvania Co.

1996 - It was in this year that I first put my home computer on-line on the Internet, which tended to change everything. Lots of old-time music.

1997 - Social life, real-estate deals, old-time music.

1998 - Sandy and I started our own business, Papyrus Copy Center. Part of this was that I had to learn offset printing, which I did the hard way: OJT.

1999 - Much the same, very busy. Not enough profit to justify the very hard work and long hours.

2000 - Sandy convinced me that we needed to return to California, where we could earn a decent living. That is what we did, leaving Brevard, NC on an icy February morning. That June, although I hadn't planned on it, I went back to work at the Fed. We lived in an apartment in Albany.

2001-2004 - Working in the Fed's IT department, specifically in Information Security. Moved to an apartment in Pacifica in 2002. Lots of long walks on the beach, with hot chocolate purchased on the pier afterwards.. Took an early retirement package, thus starting my real retirement, and moved to Portland, OR, in September 2004. Still Lalla. Still neopaganism. Still photography.

2005-2007 - Much the same, time for my passions. Was also working on a constructed language (conlang), Almensk. Also created a beautiful artlang, Romanyol. In 2007, Sandy and I bought a house in Martinez, CA, where we lived through 2012.

2008-2012 - Hot tub, sunbathing, gardening, Sandy's art. In 2010 I began a project to translate a five-book series of books by Maria de Naglowska from French to English, for Inner Traditions. This would keep me very busy for the next three years, to Sandy's chagrin. They were beautiful books, though.

2013-2019 - Adventures in Uruguay. Started poetry blog in October 2016. Created the Udugi conlang in 2018. Returned to the US in late April 2019, bought a car and a house on the Gulf coast of Florida, in Pasco Co. That's where we are now.

(Memoir to be continued.)

Wednesday, February 19, 2020

Journal of a Naked Poet XIII - Postliminary Epilogue to 1969

A very dear friend has caused me to remember that there is more that needs to be said about the building at (1596?) Hayes Street. Please prepare for a very rambling episode.

The landlords had evicted my friends from 72 Pierce a couple of months after I left. Dan's friend David "Noel" Hinojosa told the other communards that every ship has to have a captain, "Now that Tall Don is gone," he said, "who is going to do it?" To his surprise, they chose him. [This conversation was reported to me by Noel, in 1968.]

I had tried to keep a lid on the situation, and had a personal relationship with the landlords. But we had almost burned the house down and I, the most responsible one in the group, was now gone. It was an impossible situation for Noel, and the end soon came. My friends would have to go elsewhere.

That "elsewhere" ended up being the building on Hayes Street. It was a dangerous neighborhood, but the landlady was not afraid of hippies. The rent for an apartment was only $40 a month. There were soon two groups dominating the demographics of the building: old ladies, and hippies. They got along together very well.

The most unforgettable character in the mix was 86-year-old Mrs. Jackson. She had been in the first graduating class at UC that had any women in it. She was a pleasant woman, still very engaged with life, and we could talk with her about absolutely anything. Every Sunday she walked to Golden Gate Park to listen to the free concerts in the band shell. It was a couple of miles each way.

The symbiosis between the hippies and the old ladies worked well for everyone. I, penniless as usual, would do little odd jobs for the old ladies and for the landlady. On one occasion, I climbed a pole to re-attach a pulley clothesline. On another, I defrosted and cleaned the refrigerator in the community kitchen. I made a special TV antenna, cut to the resonant frequency, for a resident who wanted to get a particular channel and hadn't been able to. She baked me a pie. Meanwhile, I did birth charts and predictive work for clients who were often sent to me by Julie in San Diego. The astrology business was not as successful in SF, because my clients were fellow-hippies, and wanted to pay me with dope or a piece of leather, none of which the landlady would accept for the rent.

As I said, it was a dangerous neighborhood. There was a heroin "shooting gallery" across the street. One night, someone was killed there. Now, I have always been very psychic (I get it from my mother). That night, I experienced all the emotions of the victim, culminating in his release and a feeling that I was at the helm of a ship, sailing through the Universe. The next day, I heard about the killing, and I understood what it was that I had experienced.

I mention the foregoing because it ties in with the astrology I was doing at the time, which was both technical and intuitive, with the "Coming to Meet" experience with the I Ching that I mentioned previously, and with many other experiences both before and since. It is part of the background to who I was and who I am.

If anyone should ask me what my main takeaway was from the Summer of Love, I would have to say that it was a strong interest in Hinduism. Maybe that isn't the answer that you were expecting, but it's the one that I'm giving.

(to be continued)

A Gentle Rain Is Falling / Une douce pluie tombe / Cae una lluvia suave / Está caindo uma chuva suave

A gentle rain is falling
on my trees,
on my naked body,
on my house,
and on this sweet town.

Une douce pluie tombe
sur mes arbres,
sur mon corps nu,
sur ma maison,
et sur cette douce ville.

Cae una lluvia suave
en mis arboles,
en mi cuerpo desnudo,
en mi casa,
y en esta dulce ciudad.

Está caindo uma chuva suave
nas minhas árvores,
no meu corpo nu,
na minha casa,
e nesta cidade doce.

Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Journal of a Naked Poet XII - Epilogue to the Summer of Love

There is more to be said about 1967, but I don't want to go there in any depth. I t is enough to say that little Sarah was born in January, 1968, in Don and Jane's upstairs bedroom in the house at 72 Pierce. The baby was delivered by our friend Mereta, who was a registered nurse. They boiled the red drawstring from my bag of finger cymbals to tie off the umbilical. The afterbirth was buried in the backyard garden, where our pet rabbit had also been buried.

Things were winding down, and in some ways they were getting ugly. After the election of Mayor Alioto, hard drugs started to flood the Haight. Hippies who were dealing a little grass to pay the rent were getting murdered in gangland-style killings (the famous "Super Spade" is one example). It was time to get out.

Shortly after the birth of Sarah, I did a Saturday-night-to-Sunday-morning acid trip in which I had a mystical experience, or so I thought (what I think now doesn't really matter). When I went to work on Monday, I quit my job. The Personnel Director, Molly Hockett, told me that I would never work on "The Street" (Montgomery Street) again. She was wrong.

I bought an old 1953 GMC pickup for $350, and packed my meager belongings, mostly books, guitar, some clothes and some sound equipment, covered by a used Persian rug, into the back of it. The truck couldn't be locked, because I had improvised a driver's.side window from a piece of plexiglass. When I left in the morning, I found that someone, I think it was Sally, had left a white carnation stuck into the dash. This was going to be hard.

It was winter, and it was cold with no window on the driver's side. I think I took the coast route, because I wanted to see the Big Sur coast again, and because I didn't trust the old truck, with its bald tires, at freeway speeds. By the time I had gone two-thirds of the way, I was cold and exhausted. I checked into a cheap motel. It had a connecting door to the next room, which I made sure was locked on my side. As I hung my clothes up, a woman in the next room, just the other side of the connecting door, was softly and seductively singing, "I wiiish somebody would heeelp me." I knew what kind of help she meant, and I was too tired to be interested.

San Diego was always a very difficult job market for me, while San Francisco has always been easy. Go figure. I was living in my parents' house and trying to support myself by teaching at the SanDiego Berlitz franchise, run by Boris and Nina Zalessky. Eventually I supplemented that paltry income by astrology. When summer came, I used the last of the little money I had in the bank to fly to Seattle to visit Al, and then to San Francisco, to find my old hippie friends. With the help of David Noel Hinojosa, a gay man, poet, and friend of Dan Opincar who had lived in the Pierce St. house for a while, I found them living in a building on Hayes Street. More on that building later.

Back in San Diego, I taught a little, did a lot of astrology, and drank about a gallon a week of Red Mountain jug wine. I also did yoga, and studied Hinduism. I tried to earn a little more money by helping my Dad to prep cars for painting after he had straightened them. I couldn't even get a dishwasher job, because I was over-qualified.

I got a used camper shell for the GMC, and furnished it the way a hippie would, putting the old Persian rug from SF on top of some roofing tar paper, which I imagined would provide insulation between my sleeping bag and the steel truck bed. It didn't.

I had been invited by Jane Flood up to Pacific Grove (near Monterey), where she and Don were then living. I arrived in May. As usual, they had created an alternate reality around them.

I think they were trying to match me up with someone. First I met a woman older than myself, who had been part of the Beatnik movement. She had even lived on Bernal (Carnal) Heights, but on the "good" side of it, with a view facing the lights of downtown SF. She invited me to her house, and I went. The house reeked of cat piss, because she hadn't cleaned the cat boxes. After dinner, she told me that her nine-year-old daughter slept in the same bed with her, and had "seen everything." While I examined the books in her quite impressive library, she went to bed, clearly expecting that I would follow her there. As I looked at a book of beautiful, erotic sculpture from India, I wondered what I should do. I could overlook the cat piss, but I'm pretty old-fashioned, I guess, and I just wasn't about to do "it" with her nine-year-old daughter in the bed. Looking around, I saw that she was already asleep. I quietly slipped out the door. Pacific Grove is built on a steep hill, and her house was near the top of it. Walking back to Don and Jane's place, someone asked me where C Street was. I said, "try up," pointing at the sky.

A few days later I saw that woman again, at a party. She came close, fingering my hippie love beads, and asked me why I had gone the other night. I told her something like, "well, you were already asleep, and I was pretty tired myself, so I thought I should just go."

But the case of a young woman named Marianne Seaver was quite different. I had already done a birth chart for her. She brought me to her house, said I could sleep with her in her bed, but first I had to take a bath (that part was a good call). So I took a bath in her tub, and then climbed into bed with her. I think I snuggled up behind her, maybe rubbed her back or cupped her breast She said, "Do you want to get sick?" Then she told me that she was pretty sure she had a venereal disease and wanted to go to the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic to have it checked out. Well, OK, and yes, I would take her there

I spent the better part of a week with her, and I did take her to SF to go to the clinic. Don't know if that's actually where she went. Some of her behavior was extremely strange. But when I reported back to Jane and she asked me how things were progressing, I told her about the VD claim. "It isn't true, Jane said." "A couple months ago, Don went over there and ended up spending the night with her. I wanted to scratch her eyes out. But if she had something, we'd have it too, and we don't."

Marianne was sweet, kind, and attractive. She was exactly one month older than Julie (there it is again--the 29th). I was used to strange people, because drugs can make people a bit strange, and we would refer to them as "wiggie." As to drugs, Marianne told me that for a while she had used LSD for birth-control pills, until her hair started falling out. But she told me many things, including that she had a brother, Tom, who played major league baseball. "Maybe you've heard of him?" I told her I thought I had. Soon, everyone who followed the sport would have heard of Tom Seaver. For years I took the story at face value.

Marianne's behavior was extremely erratic and unpredictable. She was definitely "wiggie," to say the least. But you know the old joke: "I may be crazy, but I ain't stupid." I invited her to play gin. She asked me how long I'd been playing, and I told her a few years. She said, I've been playing all my life--I'll kill you. And she did.

One of the last things Marianne got me to do was give her a ride in my old truck from SF down to Carmel, where her parents lived. I did. She didn't invite me into the house. She told me that I needed to get out of there right away, because a vehicle like mine would arouse suspicion in that neighborhood (Carmel is a wealthy community where the houses have names instead of numbers).

I recently did a bit of research and learned a lot more about Marianne. After being "burdened with mental illness all her life," according to the obituary, she had died of brain cancer in 2012.

Marianne had claimed to be an artist, but I never saw any of her art, other than a rather unimpressive little postcard that she sent me around 1971. The obit said nothing about art. Neither did she have any brothers.

And now I'd like to leave my gentle readers with a last, little vignette. In the summer of 1969, an artist friend of mine, who was really more of a friend of Sally, came to my apartment on Hayes St., asking for advice on whether he should hitchhike to Woodstock or just go hiking and camping in the woods. His name was Dangerfield (in different iterations, but always containing that name, which was what most people called him. In 1967 he had told me that he had been in prison. He didn't say why, and I didn't ask. But he said that he was actually grateful to the prison, because they had given him a trade by teaching him to be a printer. What he did not tell me, and I only learned years later, was that he was the one who had taught the staff of the San Francisco Oracle to do the split-fountain printing that had turned the Haight-Ashbury's newspaper into a rainbow of color.

I thought about him hitchhiking three thousand miles, without any money, and advised him to go hiking instead.

We dropped some acid, the very last LSD that I ever did. My cosmic egg had cracked, and I knew that I couldn't do that anymore. The next day, he borrowed my military-surplus mummy bag and went hiking. He woke up the next morning to see a sheriff standing over him, but the bag didn't get searched, which is good, because he was holding.

For years I thought that I had given Dangerfield the wrong advice. But now I know that I gave him the right advice. We had already, in 1967, experienced something far greater than Woodstock. It may be imitated, but it will never, ever be replicated.

Remember Nancy and Tim, who had lived in our communal house on Pierce Street, and almost burned it down? They had formed a three-way relationship with another guy, and the two young men would sometimes play jacks to decide who would get to sleep with Nancy. I also heard that they sometimes painted luminescent paint on the backs of cockroaches, turned the lights out, and watched them move around in the dark.

Twenty years after the Summer of Love, I read a special about it in the San Francisco Chronicle. One of the stories recounted was by a woman named Nancy, in Marin Co. (an upscale part of the Bay Area). When I read her story about the cockroaches and the glow-in-the-dark paint, I knew it was her. She didn't say anything about jacks.

Sandy and I went to the 40th Anniversary celebration, in Golden Gate Park. It was a mix of old people, their middle-aged kids, and their grandchildren, which is as it should be. I didn't get to go to the 50th, because we were living in South America, but one way or another, I plan to be at the 60th.

(to be continued)

San Francisco Oracle, Vol. I Nos, 6, 7, 8. From my collection.

Text and images © 2020 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.

Another Day Un autre jour / Otro día / Outro dia

Another day,
naked as much as possible,
writing as much as possible,
sharing the adventure
of life.

Un autre jour,
nu autant que possible,
écrire autant que possible,
partager l'aventure
de la vie.

Otro día,
desnudo tanto como sea posible
escribiendo tanto como sea posible,
compartiendo la aventura
de la vida.

Outro dia,
nu, tanto quanto possível,
escrevendo o máximo possível,
compartilhando a aventura
da vida.

Monday, February 17, 2020

77,000 Visits and Many Memories

Yesterday we passed the milestone of 77,000 visits to this blog since its inception a little over three years ago. We are still publishing mostly my poetry and photography, but I am adding more prose to the mix. The latest addition is a memoir series, now up to part XI. Response to the memoir has been very good, and I am really gratified. That series and the others I am working on will continue.

As always, I want to thank all of you for your continued interest and enthusiasm. Thank you. Merci. Gracias. Obrigado. Wadó. ꮹꮩ.

Sunday, February 16, 2020

Journal of a Naked Poet XI - Jane's Poem

untitled poem by Jane Campbell Flood
San Francisco, Summer of 1967

I

I'm having a good time in the attic
this afternoon
with the sun and the wind all around me
and the new baby
thoughts are like songs
happy songs
and worried songs
some short, some long
thoughts
like yours
like mine
because I'm me
because you're you
and underneath them all
we grow loving each other more
"So sweet and pure is your soul
So sweet and pure is mine"
I love loving you
I love loving me
glad there is you and me and us
and all the afternoons and nights and mornings
of the child and the woman
of the child and the man
of God and all life

II

Summer winds screetch at my skin
my body minds my mind
I hear the wind
Why is it so strong
Why now
the trees will lose their leaves in fall
the tides cannot be hurried
Wind, why do you try to cool the sun
Why do I hear you so often
as often as the sun is strongest
and because you come at day
why must you come again at night
do you think the stars need you
their movement is beyond knowing
but I can see the stars
and I cannot see you, wind
is that why your sounds are loved
is that why you screetch at my skin
while I look at the stars
is it Love that I feel when I listen to you
is it Love that keeps me here,
wondering

III

Why do men reason their best moments away
Why is a poem sometimes only one line long
Why does my mind sometimes block my desires
What can our bodies give to our minds
but the knowledge that everything is beautiful
Why does the body resist the mind
and the mind resist the body
but why does grass turn brown in summer
and what makes my fingertips feel as they feel
What has created the glory in my lover's eyes
or the perfection of his body next to mine
What strong and delicious flavor comes from his skin
between his legs, foam
low in the center of him, loving crying
gasping joy
let me touch and admire
as milk now flows through my breasts
nipples stretching
God is found
He at the beginning
of all these wonders
these wonderings
catching us closer
to the center of the knowing and the unknowing
into that silent collision
of birth and death
the center of all fires
and their flames

IV

I gaze and laugh silently
surprised at how simple
my life is
that someone should ask me
how or why
is strange, maybe unreal
watch the cat in the morning
the sun when the day is tired
watch lovers look at one another
I hear you whistle
I gaze and laugh silently
Why give me reasons for anything!
for the moment you are not sure
to laugh or cry
God looks down upon you and loves you.

V

A blind man held my hand
and I felt his heart beating through it
My lover's hands touched my breast
my eyes closed
I thought it was his stomach pressed
We smile and everything is felt
turn away and we must search again
come back and we remember
I left the blind man and went to my lover
from my lover I went to my friend
from night till morning we made love
now from now, and from yesterday until tomorrow
I've remembered love
its coming never stops
beyond the judgement of the mind
beyond the seclusion of desire
into the air my energies press
into the air, colors emerge
in radiant purple
yellow darts shining like jagged gold
pass among us
still too hot to touch
although we smile and see

Text © 2020 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler for Jane Campbell Flood and her heirs.

This poem was preserved through the wisdom of my late, dear friend Juliette Savary,
who copied it out by hand and entrusted it to me. May it be a blessing for all and a monument
to the memory of the poet, Jane Campbell Flood.

Journal of a Naked Poet X

In a way, I'm hesitant to write about the Summer of Love. It's a little bit like the way, in Judaism, you don't say the name of G-d: it's too sacred. The summer of 1967 in SF's Haight-Ashbury was a fragile, mystical time.

Julie arrived in August. She wasted no time getting into trouble. While I was at work in the Financial District, Julie went, alone, to Buena Vista Park, which I would never have let her do. In a frightening incident, she had her wallet taken. Someone mailed it back to the address found in it, which was that of her parents in Lemon Grove. This, of course, caused her parents to freak out. They sent her older sister, Verna, and Verna's husband to drive up to San Francisco and bring Julie back with them. Julie might have resisted more strongly, had she not had a bad acid trip while she was with us in the Pierce Street house.

Verna told me some things about Julie that I hadn't known: She had planned to enter a convent after high school, but when the time came, she made herself sick psycho-somatically, and then spent months in bed, translating Vergil. If I had known things like that, I would never have given her the half-dose of LSD that I gave her one night.

Julie loved being in the communal house with my friends. She copied, by hand, a complete multi-page poem that Jane (Campbell Flood, who was at the time quite pregnant but not yet married to another communard, Don Flood). I still have the poem, and will reproduce it here if I can.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that Julie came, and Julie went.

When I had gotten back from my July vacation, Don and Jane were living in the Pierce Street attic, invited, I think, by Dan. They were a great addition to our "family," and I think they eventually became the heart of it, and very dear friends. Don was a musician, a classically-trained violinist from Chicago. Jane was a gentle, big-hearted young woman from a Christian Scientist family in Boston. She had come into our family via Dan's girlfriend at the time, Sarah (Sally) McCune. Jane had worked as a waitress at the Cedar Alley Cafe with Janis Joplin (when Janis first came to town), and she told me that Janis had given her her first hit of speed.

Here I have to make a little digression. In those days the bands of the psychedelic, San Francisco sound were just becoming well known. I saw all of them, for free, in the panhandle of Golden Gate Park. The first time I saw Janis perform, I didn't know who she was. She was belting out "Down On Me," and chills went up and down my spine. Her voice had a roughness to it, a sort of rasp (probably due to speed and Southern Comfort). Someone, misunderstanding the source of the roughness, shouted at her, "Don't use that mic,it's no good." I said, "Sounds all right to me!" When Janis died, three years later, it had a huge impact on me. That was when I started to get my own life together.

One-eyed Al got a job downtown as an insurance underwriter. He turned out to be very good at it, and the company transferred him to their Seattle office. On his last visit to the communal house before leaving, Al brought a young woman named Bambi to the house. She had a doe-like face, whence the name, I guess. I have a feeling that she was well known in the Haight-Ashbury.

When Al left, it freed up one of the upstairs bedrooms, and Don and Jane moved down from the attic. It wasn't very much later that I came home to find a young couple, "Tim" (I forget his real name) and Nancy, living in our attic. They were fresh out of high school in suburban South San Francisco. Their parents had let them do what they were doing, knowing that otherwise they would do it anyway, on the condition that, instead of being runaways like so many others that summer, they would keep in touch, and let their parents know how they were doing. They also made sure that Nancy had a good supply of birth-control pills. I never met them, but if you ask me, they were enlightened parents. In many ways, Tim and Nancy could not have found a safer place in the Haight than our house.

While we were living at 72 Pierce, there were four fires, and Al and I put all of them out. Clearly, we were the responsible ones. The first was in a bag of trash in the kitchen, and didn't amount to much. The second could potentially have been much worse: Dan fell asleep with a cigarette in the big, overstuffed chair that I had bought at the Purple Heart Thrift Store (along with ALL the other furniture in the house, for which I had paid a total of one hundred dollars). The chair was destroyed, but the house was OK. We still had the sofa that I had paid two dollars for, with a 4x4 under one end because two of its feet were missing.

The third fire was, by far, the most serious. Al and I were talking downstairs in what had once been a parlor, and I mentioned something I had seen in the Oracle (the Haight-Ashbury's psychedelic newspaper, which I'll have more to say about later). I went upstairs to get the article, and smelled smoke. I dashed up to the attic, to find flames coming from Tim and Nancy's mattress. I ran back to the stair railing and called out, "Al, bring water." He immediately understood the situation, and came back with a pitcher of water from the sink. We threw it on the mattress, but it was not enough. He went into the bathroom for more, while I tried to beat out the flames with a blanket. It was a losing battle and the blanket caught fire. I threw the blanket out of the skylight window in the roof, then dropped the rest of the bedding down the stairwell. The burning blanket I had thrown out through the skylight had caught on a cornice of the house and was still burning. Al, with his one eye, crawled out of the skylight, onto the catwalk, unhooked the blanket and threw it down. Inside, the soggy mattress was still burning internally. Al and I carried it, smoldering, down the stairs to the street and left it by the curb. A neighbor arrived with a washtub of water and dumped it on the mattress. A fire truck arrived, but we had already put the fire out.

When Tim and Nancy got back to the house, Tim told me that he had flicked a cigarette and the burning end had come off. He failed to find it, and left the house anyway. Big mistake. I told him that they couldn't have a mattress in the attic (where one wall was now a little charred) anymore. I also told him that they would also have to be responsible for getting rid of the burnt mattress. A couple of days later Daddy and Mommy came in a station wagon and took the mattress away.

(to be continued)

This is yours truly with our friend Mereta Saltrup, who had come over that night wearing a bathrobe and a blanket. Photo by Sara "Sally" McCune, using my Brownie Hawkeye. Mereta and I are sitting on the sofa that I had bought at the Purple Heart Thrift Store for $2. Leaning up against the sofa is my beloved Mexican 12-string that I converted to six strings. I wish I still had it, it was as good as Willie Nelson's "Trigger."

Jack Hirsh and Sally McCune

Sally McCune and Dan Opnicar

L. to R.: One of Noel's friends, whose name I don't remember; Me; Jane Campbell Flood; Don Flood; and Jack Hirsh, on Don and Jane's wedding day, January 10, 1968.

This is the little girl who was born in our communal house in January, 1968: Sarah Flood. It is hard for me to believe that she would now be over fifty years old. This picture was taken in 1977, when Sarah was nine years old, just a few months before Don Flood passed away from cancer. Sarah was doing cartwheels all over my flat in SF. Don said, "She'll be fine." One of the last things Don said before he died was, "You know, people write whole books about how to die; I'm just playing it by ear." Goodbye, my brother. Hope you are resting well.

I did find Jane's poem. It's four pages on legal-size paper. I'll publish it in the next installment of this memoir.

Saturday, February 15, 2020

Journal of a Naked Poet IX

We are now in 1967, and I think I need to back up a little bit.

In the first part of that year, I was living in an apartment on Valencia Street in the Mission. One incident in particular that I remember was a more or less all-night party in that apartment. My sister, Patricia, was visiting. Elsa (Johanna) was there that night, a college student friend of hers, Miriam, Bob, Miriam's black boyfriend, and myself. I had my guitar out, and Miriam and I were trading songs while we drank rotgut jug wine. That was when I learned the beautiful "Shalom, Chaverim." While it was still light out, we took a walk to get some fresh air (and probably also to get more wine). We saw a man lying in the gutter on Valencia Street, probably just an old wino whose drink had got the better of him. But people were just walking by like there was nothing wrong, which really bothered us. Bob took it upon himself to step into a bar (no cellphones in those days) and call for the paramedics. I mention this for reasons that you will see momentarily.

Back in the apartment, we proceeded to get drunker and louder. We sang every song we knew, and when it was quite late we made up our own, singing "Mountain Castle Wine" as a round, in four-part harmony. At least there were four parts, but I'm not sure how harmonious it was. Finally, we crashed all over the floor. When we got up the next morning, we took turns using the one bathroom in the apartment to empty the contents of our stomachs.

A couple of days later, my landlady, a frowzy, obese redhead from Florida, read me the riot act for having brought a black man into the building. I told her how Bob had called for help for the old wino, while all the white men on the street just walked on by. Her response was, "Don't you talk about white men that way!" I'm not making this up. Nobody tells me who my friends can be, and I decided to get out of there as soon as possible. The opportunity came in May, just as the Summer of Love was about to explode.

My friend Dan showed up in town from Detroit with his one-eyed friend Al and a bag of purple LSD.
For a while they were crashing in my apartment, but I quickly made arrangements with a friend at work to rent their two-story Victorian at 72 Pierce St., near Haight and Steiner. At first it was the three of us, but we quickly grew to six people. We told the landlords that we would pay extra if we could have that many people living in the house, and they agreed to it. That was the beginning of one of the most memorable times of my life.

By August, we had been living in the communal house for three months. The Steve Miller Band also had a communal house on Pierce, a block away from us. Just to the south was Duboce Park. If we walked for twenty minutes, we would be in the "downtown" part of the Haight-Ashbury.

Anyway, Julie showed up there around that time, intending to stay with me. Within a day or two, Kirsten also showed up, telling me that her father had a private detective on her trail. She had again come with Mike and his wife, and my housemates had shown them all up to my bedroom to chill while they waited for me to come home from work. While they were chilling, they saw Julie's clothes hanging in my closet. Since they knew I wasn't a transvestite, they figured there was going to be a problem.

This was the exact "Coming to Meet" that I had glimpsed when Julie and I were doing the I Ching. I told Julie that I needed to talk to Kirsten. Outside, in the back garden, which was inhabited by our pet rabbit, I explained to Kirsten that Julie was there, and that she would have to go. She wasn't happy about it, but took it philosophically. I don't know whether she stayed or went back to SD, but I never saw her again.

(to be continued)

Journal of a Naked Poet VIII

They say that if you remember the Sixties, you weren't there. I'm having some trouble putting events in their proper order, so I guess I was there.

In 1966 I started work for a stock brokerage firm on Montgomery Street (the "Wall Street of the West") in San Francisco. Once I had proved myself on the job (so well, in fact, that they made me a supervisor), I started growing a beard. This had more to do with Judaism than the Hippie thing, but I guess they were both factors. One day the Assistant Manager of the back office I worked in came over to my desk and asked me about the beard. I said, "it's part of my religion." He said, "I thought you were in a seminary, and all that." I had not anticipated that he would know about that (you had to be bondable in that job, so they investigated you very thoroughly). Thinking at lightning speed, I said,"Oh, you mean the yeshiva. Yeah, I tried that, but decided that it wasn't right for me." He went away and left me alone. But as time went on, two things happened: my beard got longer, and the Vietnam War heated up. The Manager (not his assistant) called me into his office and told me that some of the clients were complaining that, while their son was fighting in Vietnam, the brokerage firm was hiring hippies. I suggested that they move my work space to a spot where the clients coming to the window couldn't see me. That's what they did.

Why wasn't I fighting in Vietnam? I was neither 2-D (Divinity Student) nor 2-S (Student) after December 1964. Technically, I was available to be drafted, and had already been called in for two physicals, which I flunked because (wait for it) I was underweight. In '64 I would have been willing to go, in '66 not so sure, and by the time they called me for the last time, in 1970, they had also invaded Cambodia, and I had burned my draft card, so I don't think so.

I had protested various situations since the SNCC (Students' Non-violent Coordinating Committee) time in 1964. In '66 I marched in an anti-Vietnam War demonstration, carrying a tambourine. It must have been a major demonstration, because my friend Mike and his then wife, Maureen, drove up from San Diego for it, with a young woman named Kirsten. She was an artist, and kind of dreamy and way out there. For some reason, I caught her imagination. Fortunately, they all had to go back to SD. Kirsten and I exchanged addresses. We even wrote to each other, using our artwork as a kind of code, because her father was extremely protective and suspicious. He also had some bucks, as the owner of an electronics firm.

The next year, on a visit to San Diego in July, I sat with Julie on the floor of her parents' home in Lemon Grove, as she taught me how to throw the I Ching. It was quite amazing, and when I got the hexagram Kou - Coming to Meet, I knew with certainty what was going to happen. It did.

Text © 2020 by Donald C.Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.

The Body Is the Garment / Le corps est le vêtement / El cuerpo es la prenda / O corpo é a roupa

The body is the garment,
why put clothes on clothes?
Until the body is gone,
we are not really naked.

Le corps est le vêtement,
pourquoi mettre des vêtements sur les vêtements?
Jusqu'à ce que le corps soit parti,
nous ne sommes pas vraiment nus.

El cuerpo es la prenda,
¿Por qué poner ropa en la ropa?
Hasta que el cuerpo se haya ido
No estamos realmente desnudos.

O corpo é a roupa,
por que colocar roupas sobre roupas?
Até que o corpo se vá,
nós não estamos realmente nus.

Friday, February 14, 2020

The Heron

The heron told me of the storm.
Herons, you see, are never wrong.
This one was a stunning white,
and he was right,
he was right.

Le héron m'a parlé de la tempête.
Les hérons, vous voyez, ne se trompent jamais.
Celui-ci était d'un blanc magnifique,
et il avait raison,
il avait raison.

La garza me habló de la tormenta.
Las garzas, como ves, nunca se equivocan.
Ésta era de un blanco impresionante,
y tenía razón,
tenía razón.

A garça me falou da tempestade.
Garças, você vê, nunca estão erradas.
Esta era de um branco deslumbrante,
e ela estava certa,
ela estava certa..

Text © 2020 by Donald Jacobson Traxler.

Commentary on the Teachings of Rabbi Yeshua IX - Mt. 5:9-12

אַשְׁרֵי רוֹדְפֵי שָׁלוֹם שְׁבְנֵי אֱלֹקִים יִקְרְאוּ׃ 9

אַשְׁרֵי הַנִרְדָפִים לְצֶדֶק שְׁלָהֶם מַלְכוּת שָמָיִם׃ 10

אַשְׁרֵיכֶם כַּאֲשֶׁר יִרְדְפוּ וְיִגְדְפוּ אֶתְכֶם וְיִאְמְרוּ אֲלֵיכֶם כָּל רָע בְּעֵדִי וְטִכְזְבוּ׃ 11

שִׂישׂוּ וְשִׂמְחוּ שְׁשְׂכַרְכֶם רַב מְאֹד בַּשָׁמָיִם שְׁכֵן רָדְפוּ הַנְבִִיאִים׃ 12

Above we have Mt. 5:9-12 According to Shem-Tob's Hebrew Matthew. These verses should be considered as a unit, because they are all connected by a single catchword, but THIS IS TRUE ONLY IN HEBREW, NOT IN GREEK OR LATIN.

Here is the translation of these verses:

9 Happy are those who pursue peace, for they shall be called sons of God.

10 Happy are those who are persecuted for righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

11 Happy are you when they persecute and revile you and say against you all kinds of evil for my sake, but speak falsely.

12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is very great in heaven, for thus they persecuted the prophets.

To clarify, the catchword connection "persecute" occurs in verses 10, 11, and 12, and that could work as well in any language. But the connection between verse 9 and the other three verses depends upon the double meaning in Hebrew of the verb "רדף," which means both "to persecute" and "to pursue." But in most other languages one talks about "peacemakers" or "peace-doers," terms that are not idiomatic in Biblical Hebrew, where "peace pursuers" or "those who pursue peace" is the idiomatic usage. Thus, in languages other than Hebrew, the catchword connection between verse 9 and the other three verses is lost. This is extremely strong evidence for the Semitic substratum in Matthew.

Such catchword connections, by the way, are usually considered to be characteristic of oral transmission. In this case, as in several others, the Gospel of Matthew, especially in its Hebrew form, takes us back to a very early stage in the Sayings tradition.

Matthew 5 verses 11 and 12 are rather loosely paralleled in Luke 6:22-23 where, however, the word "persecute" does not even appear. Clearly, the catchword, no longer needed as a mnemonic in the written tradition, was not recognized. This is further evidence for Matthaean priority among the Synoptic Gospels.

The White Lotus (+fr, es, pt, hin)

To the swimming fish,
the white lotus points upward,
but to the entering bee,
it is inverted.
Both are correct.

Aux poissons qui nagent,
le lotus blanc pointe vers le haut,
mais à l'abeille qui entre,
il est inversé.
Les deux sont corrects.

Para los peces nadadores,
el loto blanco apunta hacia arriba,
pero para la abeja entrante,
está invertido.
Ambos son correctos.

Para os peixes nadadores,
o lótus branco aponta para cima,
mas para a abelha que entra,
está invertido.
Ambos estão corretos.

तैराकी मछली के लिए,
सफेद कमल ऊपर की ओर इशारा करता है,
लेकिन प्रवेश करने वाले मधुमक्खी के लिए,
यह उलटा है।
दोनों सही हैं।

Thursday, February 13, 2020

Palm DeVille / Palmier DeVille / Palmera DeVille / Palmeira DeVille

Cadillac DeVille in the driveway,
Plastic palm in the yard,
He's spraying green paint on the top of the palm.
Florida.

Cadillac DeVille dans l'allée,
Palmier en plastique dans la cour,
Il peint en vert le dessus du palmier.
Floride.

Cadillac DeVille en el camino de entrada,
Palmera de plástico en el patio,
Está pintando con spray verde la parte superior de la palmera.
Florida.

Cadillac DeVille na garagem,
Palmeira de plástico no quintal,
Ele está pintando com spray verde no topo da palmeira.
Florida.

Text © 2020 by Donald Jacobson Traxler.

Tuesday, February 11, 2020

Journal of a Naked Poet - VII

Well, to make a long story shorter, I dropped out of Cal in December, 1964. I immediately felt much freer, and the pressure was gone. My friend Mike, whom I had known since our "ham" radio days in high school, was tired of living in squalor in SF, and convinced me to go back to San Diego. We got jobs down there, and shared an apartment right across the street from the old, downtown campus of San Diego City College, where I had spent two years. It was there that I first met a young, bearded Lubavitcher Hasid (or Chassid, if you prefer) named John Blank (not the John Blank of Portland, OR, whom I still know). Anyway, he introduced me to the music of Shlomo Carlebach, whom I would eventually meet. That was one of those seminal experiences that I mentioned earlier. I had never met, and still have not met, a person as charismatic as Rabbi Carlebach. That was also the year when I first met Julie Savary, and we would be friends for the rest of her life (she was, unfortunately, killed in an automobile accident in Mexico in 2002). Julie's birthday was January 29. My earlier girlfriend, Cheryl, had her birthday on March 29. The birthday of my wife, Sandy, to whom I have been married for forty years, was born on July 29. Strange. Three of the most important women in my life, all with birthdays on the 29th.

While I'm on the subject of women, I must also mention Ilse "Elsa" Operschall, whom I also met in that year, after I returned to SF. We did not have an intimate relationship, but we definitely had a spiritual one.

Elsa (who later preferred to be called by her middle name, Johanna) was from Vienna, and was, like me, multilingual. Those languages, in her case German, English, and French, had landed her a job at the New York World's Fair a few years earlier. She came back in 1965 to teach German at Berlitz in San Francisco, where I was a receptionist and English teacher, We had had a few conversations, and I knew that she was half-Jewish and interested in learning about that side of her heritage (an interest that I shared, although I didn't yet know that I, too, had some of that heritage). One of my duties was to prepare the classrooms for the teachers, and one day I left a big "Shalom!" in Hebrew handwriting on her blackboard. I didn't even know if she would be able to read it. After the class, she came out to my desk in the front office, and said "Did I find a Shalom on my blackboard?" I admitted that I had left it there, and we became fast friends.

When I first arrived in SF (1963), you could ride the Muni buses and trollies for 15 cents. You could also buy a hot dog on Market Street for 18 cents, or a hamburger for 25 cents. Cheryl had introduced me to one of those hole-in-the-wall burger places, run by an older, Jewish guy named Art, whom I became friendly with, often stopping there. One day I heard Art use a Hebrew phrase, which I understood, with his assistant. As a little test, I asked him how to say "moon" in Hebrew. He said "that would be 'levanah,'" which was the correct answer. Anyway, "Elsa" and I started taking Hebrew lessons together from Art. We did a great many other things together. I remember, in particular, having lunch with her at Zim's. We ordered hamburgers, but they gave us cheeseburgers, which she sent back to the kitchen, saying "it's against our religion." I took her with me to a Shlomo Carlebach concert at the Berkeley Community Theater, where we both received " The Rebbe's Kiss," and afterward sang and danced through the streets of Berkeley, following Rabbi Carlebach on the way to the shul. I recently learned that Elsa, by then calling herself "Johanna," had become a doctor. She passed away a few years ago, from cancer. I feel her presence sometimes, as I feel that of Julie. They are out there, somewhere.