August 17, 1968
One of the hottest, stuffiest days of the summer. No breeze. Someone is firing a rifle over at the lake. It is past sundown. In the SE—huge thunderheads, lighted by the last of the sun-only thin tops-no sound of thunder. No indication of a storm approaching. Stillness. Enormous rumor of crickets, locusts, bull frogs. And the steadily repeated crack of the rifle. Probably some kid shooting at a beer can.
All evening I have been reading travel folders on India. It is probably not much better there!
Monks Pond IV all edited-except for a couple of poems still expected from Ron Punnett, the West Indian at Fort Benning.
The other evening there was an abortive riot in Louisville-after a Negro Church was bombed. Possibly white racists were trying to provoke a riot. Negro leaders did everything they could to calm things down.
August 18, 1968
Next week the Democratic Convention opens in Chicago. Huge crowds expected-including crowds of protesters, anti-war people, “yippies” etc.
National guardsmen have been in special training and will be stationed in two small parks near the amphitheater as well as in an armory and underground parking lot near the Loop. Police will be stationed in and around the amphitheater and an untold number of agents will be…everywhere including the ranks of the demonstrators…. A mile square area will be fenced off around the amphitheater…. Dignitaries will be brought to the convention by helicopter…. Special jails are being prepared.
What with this and with McGovern’s candidacy (to get the Kennedy votes) I’d say McCarthy’s chances of nomination are almost nil. The one hope for a democratic peace effort-ruined by division and confusion. Still, this is not so much the fault of the “demonstrators” as it is of the pig-headed and doctrinaire people both of right and left. Nobody really wants “peace”-what they all want is for their own interests to “prevail.”
Evening.
It is as hot and stuffy a night as I can remember in Kentucky. Going to bed has no attractions. I have been walking in the field barefoot with shirt off. There it was comfortable. Not here in the hermitage.
Eating supper I finished Cesare Pavese’s The House on the Hill. Marvelous writing! A beautiful book! Then I went out and read a French translation of AI Ghazali’s Error and Deliverance which is also a magnificent book, one of the greatest!
I am beginning, in spite of myself, Pavese’s Among Women Only. Fantastic stuff! What a writer!
Today in the afternoon I walked by the lake that used to belong to the Brother Novices. For a while there was a breeze there, but not for long. One of the other hermit types, Fr. Richard from Mepkin, came out and sat on the other side of this lake (pond). I thought of the old days before there was a lake, and the trees I cherished there, and the small pine Fr. Francis de Sales stole and hung upside down above the altar for Christmas Midnight Mass (maybe in 1951, or 52). What changes since those days!
I talked in Chapter on Joyce’s “Arahy” and other things.
August 19, 1968
Tired of heat, yet I don’t want to lie and sweat in bed though dark has fallen. The steamy night is alive with frog and insect noises. Before sunset I walked in the field and looked at the sea of bluish steam about 1000 feet deep that hangs over everything, with a few pink cloud-bergs standing up high out of it in the cleaner blue. This afternoon-signs of a storm but it went away with hardly a growl.
The great pages on Al Ghazali’s conversion to Sufism moved me.
A letter from Fr. Denis, the hermit, who has left Christ of the Desert and gone to a semi-deserted village parish south of Albuquerque and urges me to come to visit him there. He says that Dom Aelred will now he after me to occupy that hermitage, but I don’t think so.
August 20, 1968. Feast of St. Bernard
I have been three years officially in this hermitage. I spent some of the morning cleaning out papers from the bedroom-where most of my work is stored or filed.
Files too full. Shelves too full. Boxes.
It is really clear that I have written too much useless trivial stuff whether on politics or on monastic problems. I don’t take account of earlier books which perhaps had their place.
I regret less some of the recent poetry, and especially Cables and Lograire. I wish I had done more creative work and less of this trivial, sanctimonious editorializing. Easy enough to see that Fr. Raymond’s new book [Relax and Rejoice] is a sick joke. (Half the community is laughing at it-he could not even sell it to Bruce and Co., and had to print it privately-but now claims this was due to a “liberal plot” to suppress the “truth” which he alone reveals!) But is my stuff any less ridiculous? I wonder. Of course one has a duty to speak out. But as soon as you attach yourself to a “cause” your perspective gets distorted.
Nevertheless-I am constantly appalled by the growing barbarism of this country.
Says George Wallace, racist presidential candidate from Alabama:
When I get to be president, if any anarchist lays down in front of my car that would be the last thing he would ever lay down in front of on this earth!
And when Johnson visited Australia in 1966, as he drove with the Prime Minister and some people lay down in front of the car in protest, the PM said to the driver, “Ride over the bastards.” Johnson said, “You’re a man after my own heart.” And most Americans would approve them as “defending law and order”—and civilization.
In three days (Friday) I am to go to Washington-lunch on Saturday with [Giacomo] Soedjatmoko, the Indonesian Ambassador. I am very eager to talk to him! In four weeks-I am supposed to go to Alaska-it is hardly credible.
Today, among other things, I burned M.’s letters. Incredible stupidity in 1966! I did not even glance at anyone of them. High hot flames of the pine branches in the sun!
I have prayed much more in these days. More and more sense of being lost without it.
August 22, 1968
Again-very hot and stuffy. A storm after dinner only made things steamier. I was lying down after my third typhoid shot. But the second and third did not upset me. At least the 3rd has not so far.
Cleaned up the bookshelves a bit. Fr. Flavian says that when I am away the hermitage will be used-by others. Some of my modern literanIre had better be elsewhere, if that is the case.
Monks Pond III is about ready for sorting. It will be much bigger than the others. Phil Stark is typing IV now-bigger still than III.
When I was in the print shop Bro. Charles was hinting at all sorts of sinister events. The power had gone off. This was due to flying saucers “hovering over the power plant.” Culligan, Fr. Raymond’s new (private) publisher, declares that the fliers of saucers are the airmen of hell and that indeed the Devil is behind it. All of it. (All of what? All of it.0 Bro. Charles is also very exercised over the great “liberal plot” at Bruce Publishing Co. to prevent Fr. Raymond’s (ultra-conservative) truth from reaching the public. Bro. Charles, and indeed also Fr. Raymond, don’t like Eugene McCarthy as a presidential candidate—but do think that Wallace has some good points now!—I’m afraid a lot of people around here (the neighborhood rather than the monastery itself) would agree.
Tomorrow afternoon Ron Seitz is supposed to come and pick me up and take me to the airport to go to Washington. A picture of Mount McKinley in front of me under the lamp-(came today as a feast day greeting for Sunday [Feast of St. Louis]—I cannot believe that I may see it. Or even find myself one day living near it. Is Alaska a real option? One would think not. And yet there’s that Bishop. Certainly it is not the place I myself would spontaneously choose (full of military).
For myself—Bhutan! Or that tea-plantation I heard about yesterday near Darjeeling!
August 26, 1968. Monday
The short trip to Washington—a tiring but good experience, a great deal crowded into a day. Will I be able to handle such crowding for a long period? I’ll have to learn to stretch things longer than the world wants them. To live at my own tempo which is slow, and yet fruitful. Rather than at t
his huge speed in which really nothing happens—except of course that you do get to Washington and back in a hurry!
Friday, in dark, steamy heat (a storm threatened but didn’t break), Ron Seitz picked me up and drove me in to the airport. I had a long wait—ate in the Luau Room, sat around in the bar, read some of Ferlinghetti’s routines, said Office.
The plane to Washington was a fast jet, about an hour, and I had the two seats to myself. Nothing to see but the window (steam, blackness, a few clean clouds standing out of it). Quiet. Read and thought. Pleasant.
Flew down into Washington at nightfall. Fantastic traffic around the National Airport. I was met by Dr. Camara Peron, who drove me to Georgetown and I liked Georgetown (remembered it vaguely from 30 years ago). Very hot.
Most of the patients appear to be nuns, priests, etc., and I get the impression that he is in the middle of a great religious mess, communities going to pieces. Nuns ready for suicide. Old authoritarian systems and new immaturities.
The Liturgical Conference (at Washington—just ended) seems to have been quite ridiculous. (My “Freedom Songs” were sung by the Ebenezer Baptist Choir—haven’t heard any reactions except a wire fromJune [Yungblut] and a letter from [Alexander] Peloquin.)
Late supper at the “Old Europe.” Bedded down Japanese style in an air-conditioned room at Camara’s. Got up about 7 and went hunting for a church on Massachusetts Avenue in which to say Mass. Spaciousness of everything. Slow, quiet Mass in Latin all alone in a big church—only one old lady.
Lunch at the Indonesian Embassy Residence with Soedjatrnoko was fine. I had five hours in which we talked about Java, mysticism, everything. I now think I have a fair idea of what lies ahead and it is exciting. A whole gamut of possibilities—much of which will not get on paper. The literary people, seeing the country. Boroboden. Soto. The Dutch Jesuits who understand and the Indonesian Trappists who mayor may not understand. Then the Javanese mystics. Some more esoteric, some less—and Bali. I will, at any rate, have the best possible contacts and introductions. He just became Ambassador three months ago!
I really am very interested in Soedjatrnoko—a fine person and one of the few with whom I can communicate fully and freely on a deep level. There was no need for any triviality or double-talk in those five hours. We had a great deal to say. Real [indecipherable]-a person I have been waiting to meet for a lifetime. It seems we are companions on the same strange way-whatever it may be.
This makes the Asian trip all the more exciting, for it seems I am summoned to meet Asia on the deepest level—and it may mean a hard business of breaking through a lamentable crust of ruins, decadence and misery.
Soedjatrnoko’s wife—a most beautiful person in batik! And the children.
I rode away from the big house, in a huge, black, shiny, chauffeur-driven-Cadillac—and half the way to the airport was through Rock Creek Park—woods and glens—as if no city existed. The roads were very quiet. Then the big parkway, the airport traffic, the crowded halls of the airport full of sailors, soldiers, children, mothers, an occasional nun-with a new wise look (maybe saying “I got laid at the Liturgical Conference”?).
And there does seem to be a sudden aura of erotic interest about nuns, priests, etc., tor in the airport I saw this rather attractive girl smiling at me. I was puzzled—didn’t know if she was someone I was supposed to recognize. When I found myself a window seat and sat down hoping to have another quiet trip, she came along, sat down next to me and started a conversation. She was just a rather sweet Kentucky girl from a small town, a junior in college, who had been on a trip east having fun in Philadelphia—where she had dated a kid who had just left the seminary. She was a Catholic girl, really quite attractive and sweet, and with no ulterior motives I could detect. The plane was slow—prop flight with a stop at Charleston—twice as long a flight as the one before—I bought her a couple of drinks which made all the small talk easier.
When the plane practically emptied in Charleston, I was a bit irked to miss the peace and quiet of being alone. On the other hand it was rather touching that she just enjoyed a simple conversation and picked a middle-aged priest to talk to!
I am certainly glad it was she that decided she wanted me for a companion and not some stupid idiot talking about real estate or something. On the other hand I’d be smarter to travel without the Roman collar—maybe I’d have more time to pray. A priest on a plane seems to be fair game for anyone.
Got into Louisville. Ron and Sally met me at the plane and we all went for another late supper with Fr. John Loftus at the Embassy Club, which (though the food was O.K.) struck me as the epitome of all that is stupid and expensive about suburbia. All the organ playing, the dull wives, the smell of money, the aura of boredom and phoniness, the expensive, unattractive clothes. The general plush ugliness of everything. Giving me some inkling of how utterly horrible things must now be back “home” in Douglaston or Great Neck! (Or, my God, Alaska!)
Finally, a crowning American ritual, sitting dead tired with a glass of bourbon in the lounge of the Franciscan Friary watching pro football on TV—at midnight!!
The Packers beat the Dallas Cowboys—and it was, I must say, damn good football because it was pre-season and many contracts depended on it.
Football is one of the really valid and deep American rituals. It has a religious seriousness which American religion can never achieve. A comic, contemplative dynamism, a gratuity, a movement from play to play, a definitiveness that responds to some deep need, a religious need, a sense of meaning that is at once final and provisional: a substratum of dependable regularity, continuity, and an ever renewed variety, openness to new possibilities, new chances. It happens. It is done. It is possible again. It happens. Another play is decided, played out, “done” (replay for the good ones so you can really see how it happened) and that’s enough, on to the next one-until the final gun blows them out of a huddle and the last play never happens. They disperse. Cosmic breakup. Final score 31–27 is now football history. This will last forever. It is secure [underscored twice] in its having happened. And we saw it happen. We existed.
Now comes the other, more stupid, yet also more dangerous ritual: the Democratic Convention. I might have met Eugene McCarthy’s wife in Washington but she was at the hairdresser’s getting a hairdo for the convention.
August 27, 1968. Tuesday
Fine bright day. Reading the German book by Schumann on Indonesian Mysticism—lent me by Soedjatmoko. It is very fine.
A bit of Barthes on Voltaire. “The last happy writer.”
This afternoon there was a Council Meeting—Fr. Eudes will be Novice Master, Fr. Matthew, Master of Juniors, Fr. Timothy, Prefect of Studies.
I have heard nothing about the Democratic Convention—and will be surprised by nothing, except the nomination of McCarthy.
I had a typhus shot today. My arm is slightly sore—but I did not get sick as I did with the one for typhoid.
In a couple of days I must go to Louisville to get some clothes—and a back x-ray, and have Dr. Mitchell check what appears to be bursitis in my jaw! (It hurts when I eat.)
Letter from the Archbishop of Anchorage—the Vicar General will meet me at the plane—Northwestern Flight 3 from Chicago is the best-several pieces of property in mind. I can live in a trailer at the (contemplative) Precious Blood Nuns.
September 1, 1968. 13[th] Sunday after Pentecost
The Democratic Convention was celebrated with lusty police beatings of unarmed demonstrators and the general sentiment out is that the police were right because people should not protest. To protest is to threaten and indeed no distinction is made between the innocent protester and the assassin. They are all one. In the end Humphrey of course was nominated. So now the nation has three complete zeros to vote for-and does not seem aware that the “party system” no longer exists or means anything except as a pure empty ritual.
The day after Humphrey’s nomination I went in to Louisville to buy luggage and clothes, with the help and ad
vice of Frank O’Callaghan.
Gene Meatyard with Madeline and Chris and Melissa came over today. We ate curry and drank daiquiris and listened to calypso music. Yesterday Bob and Hanna Shepherd came over. Everyone says: “Be sure to come back,” as if! might not. And really there is no reason to do so—if I can find another place, which is perfectly O.K. with Fr. Flavian. Today—for instance—constant rifle shooting to the north of my place—not exactly on monastery property. It seems may be a sort of rifle range has been set up beyond Boone’s?? A right-wing group? I don’t know or care. It is simply another indication of the way the wind blows here.
After the Meatyards had left I walked over to the big empty field beyond the soybeans on the Linton Farm—looked at the distant white farmhouse to the east, the high clouds.
Now I am back listening to the still mind in the dark, under the new moon.
I am too restless to do much reading. Only some things stick—a few pages on Hindu philosophy, on Java, etc. Can’t get any writing done. Yet, there are a couple of things to be finished.
What (very slowly) sinks into my mind is that soon I will really leave this place, to live for a long time out of a suitcase—everything I “have” will be within the 44lbs. a plane will take for you. Leaving my books, cottage, security, time to write, time to be alone, and going on where I don’t know, with only a few plans ahead that can all be changed. And that this may not be easy at all—in fact it might be very difficult. Certainly difficult to do well. It leaves me confused, and the only way to make sense of it is prayer.
The Other Side of the Mountain Page 20