Dancing in the Water of Life

by Thomas Merton

  For Merleau-Ponty our body is not an apparatus which, directed by the Spirit, makes use of pre-existing signs to express a meaning which is “there.” It is on the contrary a living instrument of its own life, making sense, by all its acts, of the world in which it is. The whole body is art and full of art. Corporeity is style. A deeply (religious) spiritual concept!! Corporiety–a sense and focus of intelligent convergences. “Le propre du geste humain…d’inau-gurer un sens.” [“It is proper for human signs to make sense.”] (Signes, p. 85)

  All gestures part of a universal syntax–the proportion of monograms and inscapes. History as “horizontal transcendence” becomes a sacred cow (Signes, 88). That is to say an external power bearing down on us inexorably and demanding the immolation of the present, the recognition of our nothingness in the presence of what “Man” will “one day be.” (For as yet he is not.) (Ibid.)

  He sees more rightly than most Christians that in fact Christianity abolished subordination and revealed a new mystery in relation of man to God that is not vertical only or horizontal only, for “le Christ atteste que Dieu ne serait pas pleinement Dieu sans épouser la condition d’homme” [“Christ gives witness that God would not be completely God without embracing the human condition”] in whom we find God as our other self “qui habite et au-thentifie notre obscurité” [“who lives and verifies our obscurity”]. (Ibid.) The whole mystery of the Ascension is here!

  (Stalinist) Marxist history–a newness of the future, a non-philosophy. History–the judgment not of intentions only nor of consequences only, but of the measure in which values have passed into facts by virtue of free action. (Hegel.) Hence the maturation of the future in the present, not the sacrifice of the present in the future. Brilliant diagnosis of the evil of our time: a dialectic between the pessimism of the neo-marxists and the laziness of the non-marxists, in complicity with each other to produce the “puissance de mensonge et d’échec” [“the force of untruth and of failure”] which stifles the whole world in self-deception and transforms everything into futility–because it makes us blind to the “grace of the event” and strangles expression, therefore history, for history is language, i.e. dialogue. A dialogue in which the speakers (artist, politician, etc.) lead each other to new values which they can recognize as being their own.

  January 18, 1964

  I wonder if anyone reads the monastic letters, etc. of Abelard. They are full of fine traditional material, in the manner of Jerome, clear, precise, and among the best monastic writings of the twelfth century. I am reading them now for the course on Bernard, in connection with De Conversione. Ought to do an article on them but I don’t have time. Unable to buy [Franciscus Salesius] Schmitt’s edition of Anselm. We have two volumes on interlibrary loan from West Baden–I have them until Easter and went to work on some of his letters too. A question of order, and of making time.

  The great impact of Walker Percy’s Moviegoer is that the whole book says in reality what the hero is not and expresses his awareness of what he is not. His sense of alienation, his comparative refusal to be alienated as everyone else is (not successful), his comparative acceptance of the ambiguity and failure. Book full of emblems and patterns of life. (The misty place where they fish, or rather his brother fishes, like a vague movie too.)

  “Le romancier tient à son lecteur, et tout homme à tout homme, un language d’initiés: initiés au monde, à l’univers des possibles que détient un corps humain” [“The novelist converses with his reader in a language of initiates and every man to every man, people initiated into the universe of possibilities contained in the human body”] (Merleau-Ponty, Signes, p. 95). This describes exactly the awareness that is alive in Walker Percy’s book–of the scene with the crippled child. “Ce que nous voulons dire n’est pas devant nous, hors de toute parole, comme une pure signification. Ce n’est que l’excès de ce que nous vivons sur ce qui a été déjà dit” [“What we want to say is not right in front of us, outside of every word, as a pure signification. It is only the excess of what we live over what has already been said”] (Signes, p. 104).

  Real expression–a spontaneous elucidation of what we do not yet know rather than a final statement of what we have “acquired.” But we go at it the other way: we pretend to say what we know. Our genuine surplus is what we do not know, and what will come to be known in our saying it to someone who will reply. For instance I am not now saying something I alone know, but what I have not fully comprehended in Merleau-Ponty, and what he did not know because it is my response, and what will (or will not) be elucidated in the response of some other. (And yet, awareness of this reader is also irrelevant.) But if this response is merely “objective” it is as yet nothing and it is as if I too had said nothing. To this I have no particular objection; someone else may hear what is here.

  January 19, 1964

  Last night I dreamt I was speaking to a kind and friendly Benedictine and saying to him with confident happiness and abandon that I deserved punishment for my sins (deserved and accepted it gladly) and he was apparently deprecating this, as if it were a “too extreme” spirituality–yet as though he half knew I was right. Then this morning in Anselm’s Meditations and Orations–I find his “Digne, certe, digne!” [“Fitting, certainly, fitting!”] (Med. 2).

  Anselm’s meditations and prayers are musical compositions. He can use his themes without inhibition. Themes on which we are condemned to be inarticulate, for if we tried to say what he says we could not be authentic. Those forms have been worn out by tired monks and no longer say what he wanted them to say. Yet how close he comes to existentialist nausea for instance in prayer 8 (on St. John Baptist!). Yet there is always the hope, the presence of the compassionate Christ (not permitted to the existentialist!). I love Anselm. I love these prayers, though I could never attempt to use such language myself.

  Merleau-Ponty again–from Husserl–“Penser n’estpasposséder des objets de pensée, c’est circonscrire par eux un domain à penser, que nous ne pensons donc pas encore.” [To think is not to possess objects of thought; it is to use them to demarcate a domain of thinking that we never again think about.] (Signes, p. 202)

  The appointment of a person called Thomas Mann–not the novelist but a Texas lawyer and politician–to run the country’s Latin American affairs may be the first step towards serious troubles, and is perhaps the first indication (after the Texas beer party with Erhard) of President Johnson’s limitations.

  January 20, 1964

  Importance of that solitude, which is a solitary, spiritual-material rehabilitation of the sensible not as en soi which I can relate to others, and see is relatable, as part of a narrative or an explanation, nor as object which I understand in any such sense, but as “self” known in and through me, knowing not only my own “Einfassung” [“setting”] (Husserl) but the sensible around me being conscious of itself as me–allowing nature to return this virginal, silent, secret, pure, unrelatable consciousness in me. The reality “before all thesis” before the beginning of dialectic and en soi, the singular and timeless (not part of any series) mutual exploration of silences and meanings with which my consciousness never manages to be quite simultaneous, but to which my body is present or in which it is present. The self-awareness of the great present in which my body is fully and uniquely situated (“my”?–not as “had” by me, though!!).

  January 23, 1964

  The retreat–brings up again the problem of my resentments, my frustrations, sense of being unfairly treated, cheated in fact and to some extent exploited. There may be from a certain point of view some truth in this, but if I attempt to treat Dom James as guilty or to see the indications in him of perverseness and failure of which he is himself unconscious, it does no good to anyone. I have no need to judge and no capacity to (Father Miller had a good conference on judging). What matters is the struggle to make the right adjustment in my own life, and this upsets me because there is no pattern for me to follow, and I don’t have either the courage or the insight to
follow the Holy Spirit in freedom. Hence my fear and my guilt, my indecisions, my hesitations, my back tracking, my attempts to cover myself when wrong, etc.

  Actually it is a matter of deciding what limited and concrete view to take so as to fulfill my duty to God and to my community–and to obedience–and thus be the monk I am supposed to be and seek truth according as I am called to do so. If I were a man of love and spirit I would have no problem. So my job is to advance with the difficulty of one who lacks love and yet seeks it–and the realization that I am not supposed to solve all my problems for myself.

  Hence a good, fruitful, though anguished meditation in the wood by St. Malachy’s field. The paradise smell under the pines, the warm sun, the seat of branches. I need to find my way out of a constructed solitude which is actually the chief obstacle to the realization of true solitude in openness, inner subjectivity. (False solitude–built on an artificially induced awareness of unrealized possibilities of inner subjectivity. One prefers to keep them unrealized. Leads to a short circuit.)

  Magnificent ending of Merleau-Ponty’s essay on Husserl (“Le Philosophe et son ombre”). Must translate and meditate [on] this. All is there–(I mean all of Merleau-Ponty).

  January 25, 1964

  The year of the dragon has so far distinguished itself by strong, lusty winds–great windstorm the other night, some trees blew down in the woods near the hermitage (one across the path going up). Pine cones and bits of branches all over the lawn. And last night too, great strong winds fighting the side of the building. I still hear them grumbling around outside like friendly beasts. Moon at 3:30, over the cold garden full of wind.

  Father Miller the retreat master, an O.M.I. trained in Texas, the most American of priests, middle aged, greying hair, tired, handsome, full of all the known intonations and insinuations, he embodies now in himself all the people he has talked to and pleased, all the groups of women he has comforted and made to laugh, all the service men, all the prisoners. With us he started on a military swing–we were in battle. Next we were sailing in the Gulf. And so on. He has given us mostly psychology, and that is par for the course. The community is disgruntled.

  Things are more humane in the infirmary refectory this year as Brother Thaddeus has replaced Brother Wilfrid. (Wilfrid has left with his vines and his statues and his little games and gone to the library where a non-cook creates no problems.) Brother Theobald is still there in the kitchen, a patient, devoted brother from Florida whose charity edifies me. Honest and simple. He and Thaddeus seem very aware of themselves as a team, and they are perhaps the two children in red robes and false haloes in the unexplained picture on their notice board. (That notice board! The fragment of brown paper on which is scrawled “cheese for mixt and eggs for supper always” and after it in large print LEO. Deaf and irascible Brother Leo!)

  Still on Anselm’s Letters–and now too Caesarius of Aries.

  “C’est la ruse majeure du pouvoir de persuader les hommes qu’ils gagnent quand ilperdent” [“The major trick or deception used by power is to persuade men that they are winning when they are losing,” Signes, p. 272], says Merleau-Ponty, commenting on Machiavelli. And he commends the honesty of Machiavelli for admitting that social conflict is the basis of all power. Also that the prince must not become the prisoner of a virtuous image of himself that would obstruct action made necessary by a sudden new aspect of the struggle for power. “Véritable force d’âme puisqu’il s’agit, entre la volonté de plaire et de défi…de concevoir une enterprise historique à laquelle tous puissent se joindre” [“True strength of soul is needed, since in between the will to please and defiance, it is necessary to conceive an historic enterprise in which all can join,” Signes, p. 275]. On this historic magnanimity and altruism (everyone gets in on the power project) Merleau-Ponty bases his defense of Machiavelli as a realistic moralist. It establishes a genuine relationship, while the moralizing politician remains aloof. The realist accepts distance but mediates through it.

  The need for constant self-revision, growth, leaving behind, renunciation of yesterday, yet in continuity with all yesterdays (to cling to the fact is to lose one’s continuity with it, for this means clinging to what was not there). My ideas are always changing, always moving around one center, always seeing the center from somewhere else. I will always be accused of inconsistencies–and will no longer be there to hear the accusation.

  January 26, 1964

  “What makes us afraid is our great freedom, in face of the emptiness that has still to be filled.” Jaspers. And again these concluding words from the arresting little pamphlet on The European Spirit. “The philosophically serious European is faced today with the choice between opposed philosophical possibilities. Will he enter the limited field of fixed truth which in the end has only to be obeyed; or will he go into the limitless open truth?…Will he win this perilous independence in perilous openness as in existential philosophy, the philosophy of communication in which the individual becomes himself on condition that others become themselves, in which there is no solitary peace but constant dissatisfaction and in which a man exposes his soul to suffering.”

  January 31, 1964

  I begin my jubilee year, not exactly clear what I am doing, for everything is always beginning again. If everything in my life remains indefinite to some extent (though it is superficially definite) I accept this as a good thing. As a serious and perhaps troubling thing always faced with possibilities, I must recognize that many of the “possibilities” are so illusory or so impossible as not to be worth considering. And at times I will not know which to consider, which not.

  The new Monastic Studies is out, only one copy in the house, in the Chapter Room. A long review takes in that Italian collection of monastic conferences in which Dom [Benedetto] Calati discusses me as–precisely what? As utterly out of his world. And of course he is right. I do not belong to his monastic world at all, am no part of it–the world where the status quo is just all right. On the other hand I do not rebel against it either, I am just not concerned with it. And thus from many points of view I am “not a monk.” In general that is all right with me, since I need only to be concerned with loyalty to my own graces and my own task in life, not with being recognized by “them” in “their” categories. Unfortunately I must meet them somewhere in order to be true to myself and I don’t know where. Perhaps never will.

  Ambiguities here–1) I know I should equally well read Sartre and Ammonas or Theodoret on Julian Saba. Both are relevant to me at the same time. To pretend otherwise would be to lie.

  2) I suppose I still worry about disapproval, incomprehension. And tend to meet the problem in some wrong way. I must remain open to any legitimate criticism and suggestions, and not dress up the truth to make it appealing to some imaginary judge. To say God is my judge is to be closer to Sartre than to Calati…and this is the scandal (i.e., that there is humanly speaking no judge. Only the Holy Spirit!). I do find in Sartre a modesty, a gentleness, a concern for humanity, a simplicity that are too good not to acknowledge. At the same time there is the fact that if I give other monks nothing more than an example of frivolity and dilettantism, due to my fears and rebellions, my refusal to get to grips with what is really there…this would be bad, and Calati is right to see the danger. There is no one, however far left, I could appeal to against him if I were really frivolous–and unfortunately I am.

  Hence the real enemy and danger are my lack of seriousness, my triviality, my dilettantism. These are deep in me, and have to be negotiated. I cannot escape them altogether. The point is that I have refused to simply merge them in a triviality and false seriousness that are general and canonized by the fact that they are common to many and officially approved. It is the old question of justification–not now theological but human. The thing is not to waste time justifying trivialities.

  February 2, 1964

  Purification. Magnum haereditatis mysterium! Christus pro nobis homo factus, ingreditum in templum. [Great mystery of inher
itance! Christ made man for us goes into the sanctuary.] A marvelous, Greek-sounding line from the tenth responsory.

  Getting to grips with my reality–(as if this were not going on all the time) coordinating, incorporating in a living regime all that I can reach to make relevant my presence here, on its way to ending. The religious depth of Ammonas, the perspicacity of Merleau-Ponty, even the tedious subtleties of Sartre, and always the Bible. Meetings of opposites, not carefully planned exclusions and mere inclusion of the familiar. A life of clashes and discoveries, not of repetitions: and yet also deep dread before God, and not trivial excitement.

  One of the worst things I have ever done–the absurd enterprise of writing that text for the Vatican Pavilion. Nothing whatever to do with a movie. I must learn to refuse these baits. Yet how marvelous to really and competently do a movie! Merleau-Ponty’s essay on the films–have important implications for the new liturgy. Liturgy on “comportement” [behavior]! Translating language of movies into Liturgy. “(La liturgie) s’addresse à notre pouvoir de déchiffrer tacitement le monde ou les hommes et de coexister avec eux.”

  [“Liturgy addresses itself to our power to decipher tacitly the world or men and coexist with them,” Sens et non sens, p. 103.] This is either so right or so utterly wrong as to be blasphemous. But in that case…? Liturgy is to be experienced, and it is a film. Not past thought or willed. Experienced by the presentation of conducts. “Non pas…chaque conscience et les autres, mais la conscience jetée dans le monde, soumise au regard des autres et apprenant d’eux ce qu’elle est” [“Not…each conscience and the other consciences, but the conscience thrown into the world, submitted to the view of others and learning from others what it is”] (Sens et non sens, pp. 104–105). This needs interpretation (danger of the Fascist application, or the Soviet application of it!) but in the right sense it is “liturgy.” Or is it? “Engagement de la conscience dans un corps.” [“The engagement of a conscience in a body.”]