Yesterday I had to go in for my second cholera shot. Rain in the afternoon pouring down on St. Matthews and on the road from the Turnpike to New Haven.
(I hear a mature quail whistling in the field. Perhaps it’s that mother gathering in her five “civilized” ones. Hope she tells them a thing or two about people.,)
Bro. Benedict showed me a newspaper photo of Dom Gregorio Lemercier-just married! So that’s that! All the old Cardinals in Rome will be nodding wisely: they knew all along what this psychoanalysis would lead to!
For Dom G. personally-I can’t judge. But it is a shame for monasticism. Whatever way you look at it, it does mean giving up a monastic experiment. Maybe he’ll go on to something else. As for me, I’m interested in the monastic life and its values. In doing something with it, not just abandoning it.
I said Mass today for Beatrice Olmstead’s husband-they all went to Ireland on vacation and he died of a heart attack in a Dublin boarding house.
July 29, 1968
I am working on my Joyce review article for the Sewanee. Some of the things said in two of the books (Darcy O’Brien and Virginia Moseley) are simply incredible. It was a nice afternoon and I would have liked to spend it over at Linton’s reading the Dhammapada. But the work was good too and the house was not too hot. There are some nice things in Giacomo Joyce. But I see the idiocy of the mystique of spiritual seduction. And all the mental nonsense that goes along with such imaginings.
The inserts for Monks Pond III—at least the concrete poems-are ready and I have put them together. They look good, and I am happy with the various ideas-(the toucan, the fly, the German primitive children trained for war, etc.)-that I pasted in. It is not hard to do good-looking and interesting pages-if you have someone like Bro. Cassian around to process them for you! I’d be tempted to do more issues of MP (after IV) if! were not going to Asia.
This evening-cool and bright-I walked out on the brow of the hill after supper. Looked down at the bottom where pipe is strung out for the new sewage plant. Crisp green line of the hills across the valley. Dark green of the oak tops-for there has been lots of rain this summer. In eight weeks I am to leave here. And who knows-I may not come back. Not that I expect anything to go wrong-though it might-but I might conceivably settle in California to start the hermit thing Fr. Flavian spoke of: it depends. Someone may give him a good piece of property, for instance…In any case I don’t expect to be back here for a few months.
Really I don’t care one way or another if I never come back. On an evening like this the place is certainly beautiful-but you can seldom count on it really being quiet (though it is at the moment). Traffic on the road. Kids at the lake. Guns. Machines, and Boone’s dog yelling in the wood at night. And people coming all the time. All this is to be expected and 1 don’t complain of it. But if! can find somewhere to disappear to, I will. And if! am to begin a relatively wandering life with no fixed abode, that’s all right too.
I really expect little or nothing from the future. Certainly not great “experiences” or a lot of interesting new things. Maybe. But so what? What really intrigues me is the idea of starting out into something unknown, demanding and expecting nothing very special, and hoping only to do what God asks of me, whatever it may be.
July 30, 1968
I finished the Joyce review. Happy to be done with it. One less job to do between now and October-the important ones left are-review of Barthes for the Sewanee, and editing Monks Pond IV. Apart from that-only a couple of monastic chores.
In a review of Harold Nicholson’s Diaries-“he hated racial injustice even more than he hated Negroes.” On the whole this review-highly favorable-made the man look fatuous. But his times were fatuous. Our times, however, are crazy in a much more sinister and destructive way. In the same T.Y. Times Book Review-a picture of Robert Graves looking totally obnoxious. A most unpleasant man!
I will have to see certain people before leaving. If I don’t want to be having three or four visits a week, it had better begin soon! Some will just have to be overlooked.
August 1, 1968
Rain. I had to go to town for my yellow fever shot at the Health Dept. Heavy downpour on the way in, but not much real rain after I got to Louisville. A good day-I enjoyed it. Had lunch with John Ford and Fred [Klapheke] to talk legal business (re: the Freedom Songs mixup).
I tried to get some travel information at American Express in Stewart’s but they were very curt with me as soon as I told them all the flights were being arranged through Pan Am (Friends of monastery). However I did get a plan of Bangkok and a little tourist booklet on Thailand. I’ve decided to stop over at Bangkok on the way out to Calcutta. I did find out what I wanted from a nice obliging girl in Tilford’s Travel Agency: I don’t have to fly PAA Bangkok to Calcutta. There are good early evening flights on Air India, Swiss Air and Lufthansa.
I am expected to give a talk at the Darjeeling meeting and will talk on monasticism—on inter-monastic communication—on the importance of the level of depth and “enlightenment” sought by such groups in all the main religions.
Hoping to see P. Lal in Calcutta. Chances of meeting the Dalai Lama seem good. More anxious than ever to get into Nepal and visit monasteries.
Fighting kites in Thailand! Must see them! And dancing, etc.
Dam Leclercq (who of course is deeply involved in the Bangkok meeting) writes:
“Since I saw a Swami at St. Andre and saw all the silly western questions they all asked him which didn’t exist for him and his monks, I decided, next trip, to see more non-Christian ashrams than Christian. Our first duty is to constate them (sic).
“The Secretariat for Non-Christians, in Rome, where the boss (a Cardinal) and the manager have both been in Japan, insisted that we try to get the Trappist monasteries out of their ghetto. But they never acknowledged the invitation, answered the questionnaire; the four abbesses were in Citeaux and other French monasteries recently; we arranged that they come to AIM in Paris, they promised but flew away in clandestinity (sic). Better to despair-Sinite mortuos sepelire mortuos [Let the dead bury the dead, Matt. 8:22] and work with the Zen. Strange but my best hope lies with the Jesuits free from ‘our traditions.’”
A very amusing and accurate summary. But I think he will find “the Zen” pretty full of conservatism and [indicipherable] too.
Talking of conservatives-stopped in at the hospital to talk to Fr. Raymond who was operated on last week. Cancer was feared but the growth turned out non-malignant. He was full of truculent opinions and satisfaction about the new birth control encyclical (“There will be aschism”). A curious thing, that encyclical! I wonder what will come of it!
August 5, 1968. Our Lady of the Snows
Surely the hottest day of this year—or the stuffiest. Phil Stark came up to cut wood before sunrise. Says he will soon be finished typing the stencils tor Monks Pond IV,
I am working on Roland Barthes. Small books but they require close reading. Very suggestive. But I have not yet made up my mind about him.
Ping writes suggesting we go all the way up the coast into Oregon in October. All right with me. He says]ohn Cogley in protest against Pope Paul’s birth control encyclical, has given up his column in 15 diocesan papers. Who’d want to read a diocesan paper anyway? We have The Record and the St. Louis one now and I never touch either-(except an article on Dan Berrigan in the last one. He is a bit theatrical these days, now he’s a malefactor-with a quasi-episcopal disannament emblem strung around his neck like a pectoral cross. He wants me in N.Y. agitating for and with him in October or November, whenever the trial is. I definitely want to keep out of anything that savors of a public “appearance” or semi-public or anything, especially in America).
At supper I read a tear-sheet from the NY. Daily News, a full page, on the Vermont Carthusians. The old thing: pictures of monks with hoods up, backs to the camera. “This is the most exclusive club in the country,” so the article begins. And one of them is pictured reading from an atrociously pri
nted Latin antiphonary. Yet there is something admirable about their hanging on to their customs and authorities-even though it may mean the end of them. They refuse all aggiornamento. Cartusia numquam reformata…[Carthusians were never refonned…] Yet in the end, I think they are a bit ridiculous. Building “for the next thousand years” in huge slabs of granite. Paid for by “several philanthropic benefactors.” “We are the happiest of people. You have to have a good sense of humor along with the other prerequisites….”
I can see something good in their absolute, unchanging dedication to rule. And yet…How glad I am I never joined them.
Maybe I am no true solitary, and God knows I have certainly missed opportunities, made mistakes-and big ones too! Yet the road I am on is the right one for me and I hope I stay on it wisely-or that my luck holds.
And the forests and every fragrant tree will provide shade
For Israel at the command of God:
for God will guide Israel in joy by the light of his glory,
with his mercy and integrity for escort.
(Baruch 5:8–9)
August 7, 1968
Very hot nights-and two nights ago a lot of noise as well. Loud, rackety beat-up cars of kids marauding up and down the highway and then Boones’ dogs loose in the wood, harassing the deer, crying with almost human passion after rabbits and foxes-and the whole night alive and tense with the barbarity of Kentucky. The place is full of Wallace-voters, racists, roving about looking for trouble. All the worse since a few weeks ago some Negro racists deliberately ambushed and killed some cops in Cleveland. Then a riot. Ten killed altogether. Three cops, two of the snipers-and the rest just “people” who had the misfortune to get in the way of the bullets.
Useless to put down “what people think” of the presidency. Nixon will doubtless be nominated by the Republicans in Miami-maybe already is, who knows? Still a strong possibility of Johnson being “drafted” because Humphrey could not beat anyone-even Nixon. Small hope of McCarthy being nominated.
Conclusion: prospect of one of these for President-Nixon, Humphrey, Johnson. Three zeros, and the worst is Johnson-who might die or get shot and then we’d have Humphrey. Or God knows-Reagan as survivor of Nixon!
The next four years do not look good for America or for the world.
Very hot yesterday. Jim Holloway and Will Campbell here. We sat in the woods-too hot even to drink beer. I was able to raise some money to help with the trip, thanks to Will’s generosity. Supper at Hawk’s [restaurant)-took along Frere Yves from La Tourette (O.P. [Dominicans] near Lyons). The night was hot hut quiet, and I slept fairly well-tired after sitting up til midnight the night before.
August 9, 1968
Yesterday I got a typhoid-paratyphoid shot and it made me very sick. At night, feverish, nightmarish sleep. When I got up I felt as if I were falling apart. Could do little except lie in bed, and when I had to go down to the monastery I was exhausted. I came back and went to bed, dazed, and sweated for a couple of hours and then felt a little better. I went out into the woods and tried to read, but nothing registered.
Now at least, in the evening, I feel better. Today the grass was cut and the place looks a little more civilized. I am hot and thirsty—and very tired.
August 10, 1698
The effects of the shot wore off. A good night. In my morning reading got side-tracked at breakfast by an article on Joyce in the summer Sewanee Review and so went on to re-read the Circe section-Nighttown, which, when I was “in the world” at first perplexed, then disturbed me. Now I find it moving and in away “beautiful”-in its context as a bizarre, macabre, eschatalogical dance of death. In which there is, nevertheless, a kind of compassion for sin and an ultimate wisdom about it. Perhaps because of the saving grace of irony. Anyway the whole section struck me as extremely “actual”-in fact right up to the minute. What we are living at the present latest up-to-date moment is a kind of “Nighttown Christianity.” Or is that too strong? Anyway his vision of the end of the world is plausible-with of course Ithaca beyond, and the big all enveloping life force of Molly’s rather absurd and meaningless “yes” (to which everyone of course attaches a supreme meaning).
August 13, 1968
A fine rainy evening. There was heavy rain around dinnertime and in the early afternoon. Then it stopped and I went to the monastery to mail letters-Aelred Graham, Elsie Mitchell, and the Archbishop of Alaska (strange combination, but quite relevant in my own life right now!). Went for a walk in steamy, hot mist. The lake at St. Bernard’s field is thick with green slime. I came back, got some tomatoes, lettuce, eggs. At suppertime it started raining heavily again and has been pouring ever since.
The curious thing that rather dazes me: I may not be coming back to Gethsemani. This is not my own idea-or not entirely. Fr. Flavian is very definite now about my seeking out and settling in some solitary place in the West. He came back from California Saturday evening and I saw him today.
The California situation is not entirely satisfactory.
Problem of having to rent a whole ranch on the Needle Rock shore. And he was turned off by Bear Harbor which he found to be full of snakes. (Amazing description of Fr. Roger kicking snakes aside right and left saying “Dh! they’re all harmless!”)
Incidentally Al Groth’s house hurned down-possibly arson to cover burglary. Winifred is living up at Ettersburg, on the mountain. A possibility.
Certainly the shore at Needle Rock etc. offers no really permanent solitude. Already full of hippies. The Indian caretaker trying unsuccessfully to run them off etc.
So what happened 10 days or so ago-I did not write it down-the Archbishop of Anchorage visits asking me to come up and give a retreat to his contemplative nuns. I replied saying I would and also mentioning the hermitage project. Yesterday I got an enthusiastic reply. I don’t know how good the climate is-but I may end up six or eight months from now incardinated in his diocese. That is probably where I’ll go if and when I get back from Asia. But before that, in September, I hope to make Anchorage my first stop on the long journey!! Fr. Flavian approves the idea.
It is so utterly new to have an abbot here who is completely open to new possibilities! And it is certainly much more stimulating for the spiritual life! Here I am suddenly on the edge of something totally new, completely unplanned and unforeseen, something that has simply dropped out of the sky. The sense that one can move with this new swing and explore it is very inspiring and does much to lift the burden of depression, suspicion, doubt that has become almost second nature with me after years of the other kind of policy! Now I find I have to shake myself, wake up, pray, think for myself, estimate risks and possibilities, make halfway wise decisions. But this is what we have all been needing. I have no special urge to be a hermit in Alaska, but it is an obvious place for solitude and here is a bishop who likes the idea very much! So let’s look into it and see what happens.
August 15, 1968
Guns blasting off in the woods to the east. Is it squirrel season already? Seasons mean nothing here. But it sounds like intense and official hunting.
The tame quail raised by Bro. Alban, refusing to be wild, running about under the soybean plants in the monastery garden.
Yesterday, heavy rain alternating with hours of damp, hot, fog. Maybe all this has something to do with the French H-Bomb tests last week (or so) in the South Seas. Certainly we are getting some of their fallout.
When it is quiet here, it is as lovely and perfect as it was in the beginning (early hours of this morning when I got up). But when can you count on quiet? More and more visitors. Yesterday Fr. Gilbert Torpey, Fr. August Thompson. Sunday, Roger Robin. Ed Rice coming in September. Dom Leclercq. All fine. But….
I tend to find myself thinking a lot about how to live in Alaska. The problem of my bad driving, etc. The thing is that I can’t make sense out of a purely private endeavor to be completely alone, un-bothered, etc. This is nonsense. The only way to make sense of it is in the frank context of the Alaskan Church. This �
�call” has come really through the Bishop-my solitude and contemplation are to be worked out with him, not just on my own. Obviously it will mean some connections, some duties, some service, therefore some people. So the same thing starts all over again! Not necessarily. But I have to look carefully, use my head, and think not only in terms of personal preference and convenience but of charity, of love, for those who seek Christ as I do (the nuns with whom this all started, his priests, etc.). If I give what I can give, the rest will be taken care of. They’ll fly me in and out in a helicopter if they want me that badly!
The Other Side of the Mountain Page 19