The more I read of Cargo cults the more I am excited by the material: it seems to be tremendously important and significant for our time. It opens new perspectives in everything.
“Most important…to eliminate states of relaxation or inner emptiness, when inner resources are insufficient….
“The tendency to disperse oneself, to chatter, to make conquests (or I would add simply to make an impression) marks the degeneration of the creative tendency to reflect reality in one’s own soul.”
These are good observations in Malinowski’s diary (p. 112).13
I laugh at him, but he was really working things through in his own life and this shows it.
But I use him nevertheless, perhaps a little ruthlessly, in Lograire.
Nothing against him: it is a certain kind of mentality, pre-war European, etc. in confrontation with Cargo (in my poem).
“To get up, to walk around, to look for what is hidden around the corner—all this is merely to run away from oneself, to exchange one person for another” (p. 115). Good!
February 29, 1968
Bleak leap-year extra day. Black, with a few snowflakes, like yesterday (Ash Wednesday) when no snow stayed on the ground but there was sleet and the rain-buckets nearly filled. All the grass is white with, not snow, death.
Tried some books. Carlos Fuentes’ Change of Skin, new, from Farrar, Straus & Giroux—starts out lovely, fuzzy, but doesn’t hold me. I guess it is a good job but it doesn’t hold me. What do I care about those people?
Very good, though, the new Robert Duncan, Bending the Bow, from New Directions, with a fine terse, complex introduction, putting it all in a setting—and also a great poem on Christ in the Garden—like Rilke.
Also, the new Gary Snyder—strong, clear, definite poetry, a man of solid experience. No faking.
David Ignatow—a good poet but describing a person that stands between himself and life—and on which sometimes are projected rimal murders. He screams. The screams are unreal (Rescue the Dead). I notice in the poems of Vassar girls a hell of a lot of death wish.
Maybe I am losing all my friends by failure to answer about Monks Pond. Have I written to Russell Edson? He sent fine stuff. I must tell him so finally. Good things yesterday from Anselm Hollo, translations of Klee and a poem of his own. Must write Jonathan Greene, Wendell Berry, etc. etc. Will try to get the second number lined up today. First is stalled in Cassian’s printshop. Liturgy choking every press.
Wrote “The Smdy of Zen” Tuesday and yesterday for the N[ew] D[irecrions] Zen book which I think is now finished.14
Snowflakes meet on the pages of the Breviary. Empty belly “…et flagella tuae iracundiae, quae pro perratis nostris meremur, averte […and turn away the scourges of your anger, which we deserve for our sins]” (Prayer of the day). Ezechias. Centurion. Down in the monastery they now have English vigils. I cling to the Latin. I need the continuity!
March 4, 1968
Still unusually cold—about 20 (7 a.m.) but the days have been bright (not completely warm) with the unmistakable brightness of spring.
Friday (March 1st) I went down to help get together the pages of the first issue of Monks Pond.
Then a disturbing and curious incident. I met Bro. Benedict who was on his way up to get me. Some woman had come unannounced from California claiming she had to see me. Against my better judgment I consented to do so. An attractive, poised person, in some way intriguing, with guarded statements about time cycles, the apocalypse, or coming crisis, a mission. All that. Well, I have no difficulty believing in a coming crisis! Things are very ominous indeed. And in many ways seemingly desperate. (Refusal of Johnson to consider anything but continuing to kill uselessly in Vietnam.)
Much of what she said was incredible; some of it may have had a basis of truth, but in general she adds up to a problem. She intends to stay here (not at the monastery, the Abbot refused her) in the neighborhood and continue “her work” in which I am supposed to have some mysterious part. It could turn into a trying and absurd situation. The Abbot thinks she is insane. I think she is at best deluded; and yet she seems to have something (perhaps I find her appealing). But I am afraid of the whole business—a great mess of false mysticism involving me, the Abbey, etc. It could be very tedious. How to deal with it? I’m trying to keep out of her way and she has not (as far as I know) tried to see me since Friday.
Finished Peter Lawrence on Cargo (chiefly Yali), and realize I have to try to get some of this on paper soon.
The other day (Saturday) I sent off the final ms. of Zen and the Birds Appetite to New Directions after writing “The Study of Zen” previously.
Parrish’s men have done no work here for two weeks.
March 7, 1968
Sagittarius rising. I said the Mass of St. Thomas Aquinas. Then made coffee and read a couple of privately circulated papers from the meeting in Chicago last November. Kathleen Aberle, James Boggs. Terribly clear! They seem to be among the few that know I can’t avoid this same kind of conclusion—but don’t know what to do.
Yesterday my crocuses finally began to appear. There has been a long dry spell now. Still no work on my new addition—and it would have been in good time for the big truck to get up here with cement.
Tuesday I had to go to Dr. Mitchell about bad knees. In the infirmary going to change clothes, I ran into Fr. Raymond [Flanagan] who started a furious argument with me. Apparently in U.S. Catholic, which I have not seen, there is not only my letter about the draft but a reprint of the Motive interview. Raymond (who is radical right) was livid about hoth. He started his usual rapid-fire series of accusations and misrepresentations. I told him he always twisted and distorted everything. He said he was going to write against me and “cut me to pieces.” I said this would make him look cheap. He said it would make him a hero (sic.’). I replied that I supposed that was what he wanted, etc. That kind of stupid blather.
When I, in a calmer moment, told him I thought he should express his opinions, he flew into a bigger rage. “What do you mean, opinions? It is not a matter of opinions but of truth.” I guess he has the charism of infallibility. Among other things he said he was going to prove I was an atheist. I guess in his theology anyone who doesn’t agree with him or accept his ideas without question is a godless communist.
Finally he left and I got into my black suit.
And then Bro. Camillus got into it, not arguing, just expressing his way of seeing things. (I) We ought to fight China. (2) We ought to have clobbered Russia at the time of the Hungarian revolution in ’56. (3) But we failed because we were afraid of the H. homb: “We did not want to make the necessary sacrifice” (sic). So it was purely an ascetic question—a matter of generosity with the lives of a few million people. And we failed!
This sick distortion of Christianity is deep in all the thinking of the war-makers. A perverse, death-loving, self-destructive theology of hate. And yet Camillus is a mild, rather dumb, harmless little guy! Probably the real trouble is that these people live in an entirely imaginary world. Raymond, however, has always been a bit paranoid. The man is pathetic. He is ultra conservative; no one will listen to him in the monastery. Even Bruce won’t accept his latest book. And he falls back on his secular friends and on the Prior, Anastasius, pouring out his woes to them. He has always detested me as an arrant-heretic. I feel sorry for him.
In Louisville: lunch with Fr. Ephrem Compte and an Anglican friend who was at Boquen [abbey] last summer. Then saw Fr. John Loftus in St. Anthony’s Hospital and Jim Wygal in the Baptist Hospital. Both have had heart attacks. “The Woman” has left and gone either to Louisville or Dayton. I have not seen her since Friday and am relieved she is away from the monastery.
March 8, 1968
Yesterday and today were two fine bright spring days and I took both afternoons off to meditate in the woods, Thursday—back by the waterhole in the woods where you used to go through to Hanekamps’ today in a place I had never been to before, a rocky, scrubby hollow across monks cre
ek next to the old Linton place, near Fr. Flavian’s hermitage. I found a good rocky point with a strange view of the knobs and sat there in the sun, said Vespers, read a little Eckhart. It was great, and I am amazed I have not been doing more of it. What else, really, is there? I suppose for one thing I have been too anxious to answer letters and for another I have tried to keep up with articles, etc. I am asked to write—or get myself into writing. Mostly the afternoons are pretty occupied with mail, and that is a waste.
I really enjoyed being in the wild, silent spot where no one as yet goes. It is very much out of the way—and I am aware I will need an out-of-the-way place like that to hide in if too many people start coming to the hermitage on summer afternoons.
And really I am ready to let the writing go to the dogs if necessary, and to prefer this: which is what I really want and what I am here for.
This evening, Mother Francis Clare, Abbess of the Poor Clares in New Orleans, stopped by on her way to Boston. Problems of contemplative renewal in cloistered orders. Most of them are frantically clinging to the status quo—reformers are suspect. Yet she is looking for the right thing. The real contemplative life cannot be saved by clinging to baroque observances, grilles, veils, etc. I have no answers, for I have no experience of the problems of these nuns: but from what I hear, the problems are appalling. She is to speak at the meeting of Vicars for Religious and wants help. We are supposed to have another consultation before the meeting.
March 9, 1968
Back to Blake—after thirty years. I remember the profound overturning of the roots that took place in my study of him. And the same—even much more profound, is required.
And the Mills of Satan were separated into a moony Space
Among the rocks of Albions Temples, and Satans Druid sons
Offer the Human Victims throughout all the Earth, and Albions
Dread Tomb immortal on his Rock, overshadowed the whole Earth:
Where Satan making to himself Laws from his own identity,
Compell’d others to serve him in mortal gratitude & submission
Being call’d God: setting himself above all that is called God.
And all the Spectres of the Dead calling themselves Sons of God
In his Synagogues worship Satan under the Unutterable Name.
Tht: thing that is terrifying about this is that it is true. The fiendish, di-vidt:d, fanaticism which issues in bloodthirsty moral indignation everywhere—in the religious and irreligious, the priest and anti-priest, the war hawk and the pacifist. At times one gets horrible flashes of it—here in the monastery as well, in the twistedness, the forbidding, tense rigorism or the drive to “produce” something. And it is also in myself. This is the real “original sin” and its traces are in us together with grace. How to be entirely open to grace? Not with this idolatry.
And it was enquir’d: Why in a Great Solemn Assembly
The Innocent should be condem’d for the Guilty?
(Milton I)
And Leutha’s plea for Satan—how deep!
I think Blake would be my desert-island book now. I must get into it—and be on my desert-island alone with the mercy.
March 11, 1968
It is gray and cold again, but there have been warm spring days and spring is now irreversible. The crocuses are bunched together in the cold wet grass. I saw my Towhee in the bushes the other day—silent—but today I heard him, and his discreet, questioning chirp, in the rose hedge. There is a solitary mocking bird, apparently with no mate, that patrols the whole length of the rose hedge and tries to keep every other bird from resting there.
Saturday there was rain at last—after a month or so—and at night, with the rain softly falling, a frog began singing in the waterhole behind the hermitage. Now it sounds as if there are half a dozen of them there, singing their interminable spring celebration.
Attacks on me in the correspondence column of The Record for supporting Mulloy in his conscientious objection. Apparently he is thought to be a real red. I very much doubt it. But the country is very tense now. The war is going badly. The Viet Cong are getting into the cities. Khe Sanh is a big threat. Many more people are being drafted. We are on the way to general mobilization. Johnson says he isn’t going to be the first President to lose a war. So a few more thousands of people have to die to save face for him.
I took a couple of notebooks out to the woods and went through my notes on L’Étranger [The Stranger]. Then on the way back, ran into two brothers with a truck and got them to transport three little beech trees I transplanted. Was late having supper, and tired. Will be late going to bed.
March 12, 1968
I wrote the first draft of an article on The Stranger this morning. In the afternoon I transplanted a few small pine trees, but it started raining again and I came in to write some letters. Dan Walsh says that in the Senate, Sen. Morse produce,d evidence that the “Pueblo affair” was something inspired by Washington itself. More and more, Johnson appears to be a completely unscrupulous and untrustworthy operator. Dan says he is not likely to he re-elected but I am not so sure. Rockefeller may get the Republican nomination, in which case there will be at least a choice—though not much of one. I don’t know what will be happening in December when the AIM meeting is supposed to be in Bangkok. Maybe all SE Asia will be in a war—or maybe it will be everywhere!
This evening I had some Rice-a-roni for supper and read a very lively interview with Stravinsky in New York Review which, for some reason, cheered me up considerably. Just the encouragement of having a civilized man around—still! And it was very witty. Then I turned to the Catholic Worker and read some of the letters and a story about two girls trying to help a drunk. When I looked up, out the window, it was snowing again.
March 14, 1968
Cold again. The nights are freezing-down in the twenties. Hard frost in the mornings, buckets solid ice. But the cold is different. The sun comes up bright, and the other morning there was spring birdsong even in the snow. I must admit the frogs are silenced until the noon sun melts the ice. Then they sing in the afternoon.
My solitude is radically changing. I no longer take it for granted that the afternoon is for writing—just because that was the way it had to be in community. Why not early morning? Then in the afternoon I am free to go out to the woods—and it gets me away from the hermitage at a time when people might be tempted just to “drop in” (as Fr. Tim Hogan did with Malcolm Boyd, and others have from time to time).
Yesterday afternoon again, in bright sun and cold wind, I took off for the East Farm (Linton’s) and discovered a pond I had never seen. It was in the hollow over on the SE comer of the farm where the low cedars are—and I had not been there for well over 10 years. Maybe 12 years, even. Anyway, this was a warm, quiet, out-of-the-way corner, lots of rocks, a steep dip, a small artificial pond half full of bullrushes—probably the one Fr. John of the Cross used to go swimming in when it was more clear. I stayed quiet in the sun there for along time. Small clouds high above the bare trees. Sun on the pale green water. Warmth. Peace. A most fruitful afternoon. And I came back out into the cold wind on the high fields wondering why I wasted my afternoons writing letters. Of course, I have to—and I have to write some now. They will continue to be letters of refusal. Every week now I refuse two or three invitations to meetings and conferences—important ones—but I do not think I can get mixed up in them or that there is any point in so doing. Fr. Flavian would probably let me go if I insisted-but I am not going to insist. Still question about Bangkok. This I should go to—Dom Leclercq is a good judge of such things. Fr. Flavian is still not definite about it. But will Bangkok be a place one can get to, this December? Or will the whole place be up in flames?
Ever increasing frenzy, tension, explosiveness of this country. You feel it in the monastery with people like Raymond. In the priesthood with so many upset, one way or another, and so many leaving. So many just cracking up, falling apart. People in Detroit buying guns. Groups of vigilantes being for
med to shoot Negroes. Louisville is a violent place, too. Letters in U.S. Catholic about the war article—some of the shrillest came from Louisville. This is a really mad country, and an explosion of the madness is inevitable. The only question—can it somehow be less bad than one anticipates? Total chaos is quite possible, though I don’t anticipate that. But the fears, frustrations, hatreds, irrationalities, hysterias, are all there and all powerful enough to blow everything wide open. One feels that they want violence. It is preferable to the uncertainty of “waiting.”
March 15, 1968
“Parents! Don’t let your teenagers waste their time and energies in worthless and dangerous pleasures…. Give them a stimulating interest in life,…give them an opportunity to make a million dollars in the Stock Market…The Teenagers’ Guide to the Stockmarket—$3.45…. Other Library of Wall Street Books: How to Read the Wall Street Journal for Pleasure and Profit…etc.”
Even better—a newspaper clipping on an undertaker in Atlanta: he has “adapted the drive-in-window for busy persons to drive by and view a deceased friend without leaving their car.
The Other Side of the Mountain Page 9