• Iona (13)

    Saturday, June 14,2003 As always, I’m ready way early. I’ve been up, dressed, hung around the pier to get more of my fill of sea and waves and early morning. It isn’t quarter to eight yet and I’m entirely packed and waiting first for breakfast, then for the ferry – which isn’t due til 9:30.…

  • Iona (14)

    Sunday, June 15,2003 Call it dream or nightmare, whatever. A recurring dream, back again. I must get away because I have killed someone. I take a practice shot and am told by my sister, “I cannot undertake to explain contravention of the 1919 Firearms Act,” or words to that effect. She sort of knows I…

  • Iona (15)

    Wednesday, June 18 ,2003 Up at 5 a.m., and resolutely back to bed. Up again at 7:30. On days when one might stay in bed indefinitely, there comes a time, pretty quickly, when it becomes impossible. At the terminal, I have a revolting breakfast, buy a two-novel volume of John Buchan, and pass a long…

  • Iona (16)

    [Continuing Robert Clarke’s reaction to my 2003 writeup of my trip to Iona. ] Dennis seems to be something of a positive shadow figure; mischievous, friendly, though you have to be a little wary of him. The congressman you are working for is probably a representative of the Self. A figure of authority, teacher, doctor,…

  • Iona (17)

    Finally, as a sort of retrospective, this from David Poynter, four years later. (I was again in Britain.) July 30, 2007 Well, David, another excursion to your homeland. I am going to get a map of the British Isles (or so I tell myself) and mark my various journeys since 1970. I’ve seen some of…

  • Remembering Kesey

    Came across this New York Times obit while poking around my files. Shocking to realize he was only 66 when he died, and that it was all of 22 years ago.. Ken Kesey, Author of ‘Cuckoo’s Nest,’ Who Defined the Psychedelic Era, Dies at 66 By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT Published: November 11, 2001 Ken Kesey, the…

  • Riding Point

    When I learned that Ken Kesey had died, I wrote a poem and sent it along, which Ken Babbs was gracious enough to acknowledge and say he liked. Riding Point Kesey’s son went over in a cosmic instant, in a car wreck, and later Kesey sent a book “to Jed, across the river riding point.”…

  • Into Magic (1)

    Into Magic All day Thursday, January 1, 1987, it had rained, and for much of the day, I sat in my dining room looking out the windows, watching the silver sheets of rain come down, ending what had been a prolonged drought. A few days later, on the 10th, again it rained all day. In…

  • Into Magic (2)

    “In the Spirit” appeared on Feb. 1, 1987. In the spirit Shirley MacLaine Isn’t the only one out on that limb                                                              by Frank DeMarco I was among those who paid $300 to attend Shirley MacLaine’s two-day seminar in Virginia Beach on “Connecting with the higher self” last weekend. Let me go out on a…

  • Into Magic (3)

    In that article, I didn’t hide behind the journalist’s facade of pretended impartiality. I was more willing to be called a fool than I was to pretend that nothing had happened to me. Yet I made no attempt to describe meeting my “higher self,” because for a general audience a thirdhand description would be worse…