I now have a flight booked out of Louisville on September 11. Nine days to get everything in order. Am supposed first to go to New Mexico, Christ in the Desert. I had them on the end of my itinerary, assuming I would come back here in February or March. Now I don’t know if! will come back at all. New Mexico is one of the places where I might evenmally settle. Dom Aelred has invited me to his place any time I want to come. I can live there as a hermit if I want to.
First I’ll look elsewhere!
But certainly the nights are silent there in that empty canyon.
September 3, 1968
Moon covered with mist (9 p.m.) and a yelling dog which I just upbraided. I can cry “Get out bastard” in the night, as I am leaving in a week.
Yesterday was a clear, beautiful, fall day-with not much shooting until evening.
Today they were at school. Only a few bona fide hunters were firing in the distance. It was relatively quiet.
And when it is quiet I see the beauty of the place again. But it is so seldom quiet that I must leave it.
I went over to Linton’s but I have blisters because of the yellow shoes. So I guess I don’t take the yellow shoes with me when I go.
Yesterday I finished the preface to [Amadee] Hallier’s Aelred [of Rievaulx]. Today I finished the first draft of the revised of Barthes for the Sewanee.
I sat up late reading Indonesian poets. Torn up by Chairil Auwas, W[illibrordus] S. Rendra, Sitor Simmorang. I hope I can meet Rendra-if he is still living in Jogjakarta. All that they say demonstrates Barthes’ stuff on “writing degree zero” and yet I suppose Indonesia too will come to that-and will have to.
Want to talk to Soedjatmoko and his family. I like them. It is hard to be without them. I had a day dream of him calling and my saying—“I am going to New Mexico—come there-we will watch the Apache fiesta together.”
I have a flight booked to Albuquerque a week from tomorrow.
I struggle in myself with my own future-and with the fear I will be discovered before I can get away (irrational)—or even that I may die or be shot. (If I am discovered-what difference does it make? It will all be announced next Wednesday anyhow!)
I see the absurdity of attachment to these fields. As if leaving them I would somehow be in jeopardy-what an attitude to cultivate!
But it is true, I am nervous, insecure, have blisters, and my allergy rages.
I wrote today to Ron Seitz to pick me up next Tuesday. I’ll sleep in the Friary at Bellarmine. Then to the plane. God be with me!
It is late. I must go to bed. I call to mind Dominique and her alleluias, and the shore. They sustain me.
September 5, 1968
Rainy, and therefore quiet-except that the guns were firing again (apart from hunters), from 3 to 6. Not at the lake-up the road-a little further away. Kids can’t afford to waste ammunition in such quantities-someone is giving it to them. An eerie business!
Strange that there was so little shooting on Labor Day.
Obviously, though, I’m through here. Why live on a rifle range?
A letter carne, by surprise, from Mrs. Jones-wife of the owner of Needle Rock, Bear Harbor, etc. They have made their September arrangement, whatever it was, and I can have Bear Harbor if I want it. They all agree to fix the place up, etc. I hate to disappoint them. The way things are shaping up in India are too good to be true. Harold Talbott5 has been living near the Ashram of the Dalai Lama, in close contact with his secretary, etc. And thinks the D. will provide me with cottage and guru with no trouble at all. In any case I am to see him-and now my plan is to return to India after Indonesia and take my time-maybe also go to Bhutan etc. Maybe a long retreat in the Himalaya.
I am trying to finish reading of important books I can’t take with me. Absorbed by Chogyam Trungpa’s Born in Tibet.6 I question Zaehner’s At Sundry Times. I think he is off target.
A fine lineup of names and addresses in Java from Soedjatmoko. Java too will he fine. One month will never be enough for that!
I have my tickets to Albuquerque, then to Anchorage. Passport still not hack with Indian and Indonesian visas.
September 6, 1968
Ed Rice drove in this afternoon in a battered blue Volkswagen. He had been as far west as Salt Lake City, back through Denver, Christ of the Desert, St. Louis, Southern Illinois, New Harmony, Indiana-and for the last two days he was doing a story on a blind seminarian in Louisville.
Fine pictures of India (people, beautiful people, though starving!), Cuba, everywhere. Much talk about India and above all Katmandu.
We had supper together in the hermitage, and after that his Volkswagen wouldn’t start though we rolled it until it went all the way down the steep hill. We left it at the bottom.
On the way back I said Office as the full moon rose.
For a moment, the first tip of the rising moon in the trees across the bottoms looked like a lighted palace. I thought some fabulous new building had suddenly been erected in the woods.
September 7, 1968
Dom Leclercq arrived today. He and I and Fr. Flavian had dinner and supper together and some good talks. We drove out in Ed Rice’s Volkswagen to the lake where the fish hatchery is, where it was quiet and cool. Talked of the Orient, of the student troubles in France, which will begin again in the fall-and all the rest.
After supper Ed and I walked out the front avenue, and ran into Andrew Boone, I inquired why his dogs were making so much noise at night around my house, and he said he was having them chase the deer because the bucks were raping his cows (sic) and causing them to miscarry! “The only thing to do is to chase them out of the country!” Maybe Andrew’s head has been a little addled by Southern racism. However, he gave me some information about all the shooting. “Eighteen men” (?) surrounded one of his cornfields and blasted at doves all afternoon-it was a real slaughter, he said. (Last Sunday.) As for the kids at the lake-they “have a mattress in the back of a station wagon for service.” Well, maybe!
I observed that no one likes to live next to a whorehouse and he felt my reaction was fair enough.
I have been reading a long report on a preparatory questionnaire for the Bangkok meeting. The usual—with some special slants. In my opinion, I don’t think Christian monasticism, as we now know it, has much future in Asia. Merely wearing saffron robes won’t do much good.
Tonight I wrote to Mother Myriam about the meeting at Redwoods.
September 9, 1968
Rainy and warm, a misty night of bells and insects.
It is hard to believe this is my last night at Gethsemani for some time—at least for several months.
Lest I regret going, the shooters were out again this afternoon, blasting off in the rain, and evidently in Boone’s cornfield. I can’t figure it out! Can’t be that many doves. But whereas you saw doves fly over in fives and sixes two weeks ago, now you see—and rarely—one alone. And it flies like mad from you into the far distance!
I have had several good talks with Fr. Flavian, especially when taking meals with him and Dom Leclercq in the Guesthouse. Certainly I am grateful to have such an Abbot. He marks a real progress.
He came up in the afternoon, left in my big yellow rain coat with a hesychast anthology on the Art of Prayer.
Bros. Maurice [Flood] and Patrick [Hart] with Phil Stark came up for Mass at the hermitage this morning and we had a good session at breakfast afterwards.
I go with a completely open mind, I hope without special illusions. My hope is simply to enjoy the long journey, profit by it, learn, change, and perhaps find something or someone who will help me advance in my own spiritual quest.
I am not starting out with a firm plan never to return or with an absolute determination to return at all costs. I do feel there is not much for me here at the moment and that I need to be open to lots of new possibilities. I hope I shall be! But I remain a monk of Gethsemani. Whether or not I will end my days here, I don’t know-and perhaps it is not so important. The great thing is to respond perfectly to God’
s Will in this providential opportunity, whatever it may bring.
Best of all—from a letter from Bess Brigham (it came today). This was a sign in “a deep mountain town in Mexico”—on a flowered arch for some festival.
Welcome to those who come
In the name of glory
The Sons of the King
Greet you with consideration.
So I go wherever it is in the name of glory. That is enough!
And then (10:15) for some unknown reason Is it up late reading Robinson Jeffers, that Pacific Blake, and he is O.K. I am deeply moved by him, I abide by him!
We have climbed at length to a height, to an end, this end:
shall we go down again to Mother Asia?
Some of us will go down, some will abide, but we sought
More than to return to a mother. This huge, inhuman,
remote, unruled, this ocean will show us
The inhuman road, the unruled attempt, the remote lodestar….
“And the old symbols forgotten in the glory of that your hawk’s dream.”7 So-title!
Sent Geography of Lograire [to J. Laughlin] today.
PART IV
New Mexico, Alaska, California
September 1968–October 1968
September 11, 1968. Chicago Airport
Quiet in O’Hare. Gate G5. Waiting TWA to Albuquerque. Not in clericals.
Peace. Over the dirty cotton quilt that covered Indiana and Illinois.
When we left Louisville: talking to a nice Negro hostess who had approached me saying “Are you a philosopher?”
I did not see Louisville fall away—into its own semi-darkness.
The tensions of the night before. The noises. The shouts in the red den full of organ music. Finished, thank God. Was any of it my fault? Perhaps. Tommie O’C. and I tongue-lashed each other sadistically, all in “fun,” and I won. She ended up crying. It was no good.
So now that lies under the dirty [indecipherable] sludge of clouds, the blue sea full of drifting snow, cloud-floes. And the big brown-green river makes south.
Best exit: through the Brahanarandra—or Foramen of Monro.
Importance of Tibetan Book of Dead—the “clean passage,” direct, into a new space or area of existence—even in one’s “this present” life—clean unclogged steps into more maturity.
I stepped through a big mudhole. Like escaping through the window of a toilet.
It lifts. It talks. Meditation of the motors. Mantra. Om. Om Om Om over and over like a sea-cow. And sun sits on the page.
Great grey-green Limpopo. Om. Miles of olive prairie vanishing in smoke.
Very long Om. Lost in rushings, washings of air; drops, bumps. Long Om. Om.
Right over the land of the political pig: (Say OM!). Right over the grease of the death erasers: Nom de Dom.
Dominic had a coat. His heart was written on it. He gave it away to a friend. He was loved by a child and loved the child in return. He was not wrong. He loved in the wrong country—as did everybody else. The country gradually showed him a million-dollar pig. It had revealed to him the art of non-dying. It comes of wanting to live in Pork Barrel country. Out of it. Out of it is a good plane ride [to] a thundering death.
Four streaks of rat-colored smoke five miles long over the prairie. (Missouri?)
Thinking we can crack death with rollers.
Rivers, sweet sisters of earth-life, ignore the smoke.
Right up over the country of bad death
Grease fries all sky over
The numb
We too the numb we are up, up
Thinking we will cheat death
With cokes and coffee
And vodka martinis.
Right over the Snake river
Where the others once flew
In a correct sitting posture
And let the mind float free
And grabbed with all their might
(The grabbing was itself release and light.)
“The humming, rolling and crackling noises before and up to fifteen hours after death…recognized by Grünewald in 1618 and referred to by other writers.”
(Govinda—in Evans—Wentz—TBD1)
Roaring of the six lokas: around the mind, body (in it)
pride
jealousy
sloth (ign rance)
anger
greed
lust.
(as it reaches out with tickets in hand)
The man who smokes and drinks and does not know he is dead. Thinks he is still alive, smoking and drinking, 12 hours after death—or12 days.
“The deceased expressed a desire for a dream cigar.”
The haunted natives hastened to provide a smoke and some drinks.
“The Sahib’s grave was found carefully fenced in and covered with empty whiskey and beer bottles…. The dead Sahib’s ghost had caused much trouble…. The ghost craved whiskey and beer to which it had been long habituated in the flesh…. The people purchased the same brands which the Sahib was known to have used…and poured them out regularly upon the grave. Finding this kept the ghost quiet they continued the practice in self-defense.”
(Evans-Wentz, lxxvi)
Send G[eorgia] O’K[eeffe]
Conjectures [of a Guilty Bystander] [The liVtly of] Chuang Tzu Monks Pond
[Send to Christ of the Desert] monastery
Monks Pond III. IV.
Now
Now
Now
OM
Over country
Of good death
Indian
Country
Now—canyons.
A lake signaled to me, (Blue lake perhaps?)
Flashed in my
(Mind’s) eye.
“Do battle
With the mind
Conquer
The mind.
Let the spirit
Go free.”
But who?
September 12, 1968
Back in a clear mind. Chama Canyon. The river is low. I was in the cold water. Feel clean. Awake. Sitting in soft sand. Where has that big red dog gone? He fought a wasp and scattered sand and mud all over my clothes.
Georgia O’Keeffe—a woman of extraordinary quality, [a]live, full of resiliency, awareness, quietness. One of the few people one ever finds (in this country at least) who quietly does everything right. Perfection of her house and patio on ghost ranch, low, hidden in desert rocks and vegetation, but with an extraordinary view of the mountains—especially the great majestic mesa of Pedernal.
“The mystery of the self’s nature remains ever unsolved to those who are in the empirical plane.”
“The conditions of empirical knowledge all disappear and then the self requires its proper nature.”
(H. Brattacharyya)
I.e., the self is not known within nature.
(Prakriti)
The true self is “supernatural” (but they don’t use that term).
“The realm of the knowable begins to shrink without affecting the sense of the known.”
The self (Purusa)—a spiritual essence which is experience itself without the attributes and limitations of empirical personality. Language was not devised to indicate this spiritual condition!
HB.
September 13, 1968
A journey is a bad death if you ingeniously grasp or remove all that you had and were before you started, so that in the end you do not change in the least. The stimulation enables you to grasp more raffishly at the same, familiar, distorted illusions.
You come home only confirmed in greater greed—with new skills (real or imaginary) for satisfying it.
I am not going “home.”
The purpose of this death is to become truly homeless.
Bardo of small bad hermitage, empty smell, quiet musty, a cobweb, some cardboard boxes.
Very quiet. Good river. Good cliffs.
Blue clouds arising after noon. Silence!
The big red dog, wet ears full of burrs, his s
tomach roaring with some grass he had eaten while I was swimming.
Go on! Go on!
The Other Side of the Mountain Page 21