It can be, Robert, of course, Joe jumps in, but it can be made safe. We make it safe for pregnancy so why not for disease. It’s safe for other diseases, so why not AIDS? Yes, I agree. We must be safer.
Even for Miriam and Joe, certainly for me, the acronym can be a heavy sound in a discussion.
We must demythologise our hate of the homoerotic, Joe proclaims. Coming back to J. M. I think that’s what he was trying to do. Poor bastard, at nineteen in 1963 in a monastery of screwed-up theologians and moral philosophers. Sick.
Joe! Really! Miriam says. Get a balance. You know that’s not half the truth. That’s not J.M.’s story. Get off your soapbox. We must respect all his story.
Miriam notices that I go silent. Miriam and I smile at each other; Joe leaves the room.
You must forgive him. You know he was the first person they met when they left. He’s angry but he’s hurt, very sore. He was their friend for fourteen years or so.
I know, I say. Some of it is too much for me, too much too quickly. You’re both right. I’m lucky to have you.
There was an account in the journal of ‘The Raid,’ as J. M. called it. I call it rape. J. M. going over the ground.
I have the debates going in my head.
The ground is beaten smooth. One of the dens where we boys come to smoke. The wind in the high trees howling, crying. We are both crying and looking at each other. Made to lie side by side face down.
Stripped naked. Pinned down.
We enter each other’s eyes, watery. Here in this luminous eye we see only each other. This is where we have curled, into each other’s eyes. To hide. We ravel up our selves. Only the roar of the wind. All ears. The river at the bottom of the valley. Sunlight on rocks. All ears. Parrots higher than the trees. Green in the blue. Imagine for an instant. Don’t imagine. We leave our bodies on the ground and ascend above them and look down. We look down. They are used by them. Utterly. We utter nothing. Someone says PLEASE. Someone says STOP. One goes in. One comes out. One goes in. One comes out. There is a crowd in there. Entrance. Exit. Pressing. How many more can fit into this room. It is a small room. It is small. It is little. Little. Very little.
The eye is the window to the soul. We climb through the eye into the soul. We leave the body.
The temple. The body is the temple of the Holy Ghost.
Now the room is so deserted. So abandoned. And the curtain of the temple was rent in two. But still it feels full as if that is its natural state. To be so filled up. Then emptied. Empty yourself. Then we can’t feel. I can’t feel anything, there, can you? Numb. I want to feel. I want to feel.
I don’t want to feel.
Fill me, fill me up!
Cleanse me.
Empty. Be emptied.
We climb back out of the eye, out of the window to the soul, into our bodies. Only the wind in the high trees. The sound of water over rocks. How ravaged. We curl into each other. Where in the world is there a place for us? Where can we stand in the open and say what has been done here? Who will listen?
We gather each other’s clothes, helping with sleeves and necks. We use spit to clean off the dirt. It smears. Makes a stain. Stainless. Pure. Like shit. Smell of shit and blood. And numbness. Will we die?
I want to feel. Don’t touch me. Who says that? Where do we go?
We stumble down to the river. Look at what’s happened.
The rock pool runs red with our blood. This is my blood which shall be poured out for you. Blood over blue stones.
We wash our bodies in the River Jordan.
That was one way in which he saw it. Who can imagine these two young boys, sixteen, with their fellow pupils, sixteen? ‘The Raid.’ What state of mind was J. M. in when he wrote that? There’s an early version and then it’s embellished some years later. This is the embellished version.
I was there. It staggers me. It shocks me profoundly. I was thirteen.
Miriam says, You can’t beat yourself for something you did or didn’t do when you were a boy.
I don’t fully remember what I did with my thoughts about what I heard they had done to my brother and his friend.
The new term began as if nothing had ever happened. There must be no scandal. There must be forgiveness. I sometimes saw those boys queuing for confession.
Until that afternoon. They stand all around. Out of the blue. I am there again as witness. A witness for the prosecution. But who does the prosecuting?
Words. Made to eat my words. Testaments.
Fill up. Empty.
The Abbot, whom I’ve spoken to again, said that there was a tradition of fasting, but it must be done with approval, and in moderation. Benedict had gone beyond what was recommended.
So, he did kill himself then?
Who can judge? the Abbot asks. It’s a matter of judgement. Think of the common good. Lest any be scandalised.
‘Take this and eat, for this is my body.’
I pick up all these implicit and explicit meanings in his writing. His puns. His poetry is a poetry of pain.
The Vigils
We will spend the night in the villages,
and in the morning we will go to the vineyards
Song of Songs
Aelred, Abbot of Rievaulx, kept his vigils, while his monks slept till the bells woke them for Matins. It was a warm night. He knelt at the window of the small oratorium off his cell. The black-blue sky was laden with stars. It hung as low as the trees along the Rye. It smelt of rain. The closeness of the clouds spoke of an impending storm.
Particularly, the Abbot prayed for his young novices, prey to the stealth of seductive dreams and restless nights, bewitched by evil thoughts; they might be tempted in the heat of the night to give expression to these phantoms. The novices slept close to each other, as the Rule stipulated. Their belts were undone. Their young bodies lay within their rough woollen habits, their legs and arms free.
Aelred knew of his young monks’ temptations, because they had been his own, and could still be, as he watched the beautiful young men who entered the monastery seeking to sublimate their desires among men who lived to love one another. He was forced to take some of them, who were rough and prone to anger and fighting. He tamed their carnal spirits with the ideals of spiritual tenderness.
On this night, his lover from his youth, the one whom he had loved so extravagantly and more than any other, at the court of Scotland, entered his cell. He could smell him. He knew it was the work of the devil that made him enter his cell, now, at the open window with the sky lowering black and blue, beckoning him into his arms with that smile which had bewitched him as a youth.
He had stroked those arms and legs. He had kissed those lips. He had stroked that back, which he saw as the figure turned.
Aelred knelt and prayed before the naked and crucified figure of his beloved Christ hanging on the wall to take the phantom of his past away, to let him not be weakened, lest he lose the guardianship of his young monks, asleep before Matins was called.
Then the figure of Christ turned into the one whom he had loved so extravagantly. He hung naked as his beloved Saviour. He raised his lowered head. He smiled at him with a gesture of his eyes and a movement of his lips, inviting him to come and kiss his feet where the nails were driven; to come, climb up and put his hand into the wound on his side, to finger where the nails were skewered into his hands; to come and cradle his ill-used head, which was crowned with thorns. He beckoned him to do these things and not disbelieve his love like a doubting Thomas.
Aelred was torn between the image of his prayer, which was his true Christ, and this phantom lover of his past who sought to trick him.
But Aelred had fought this battle before. He had arranged his own tricks for the phantoms of evil, when he could not resist any longer the temptations which risked him losing touch with his innocent novices and their temptations.
He took down off the wall of his cell the monastic discipline, the strands of cord, each strand knotted at intervals. Five strands
for the five wounds of Christ Hard as iron, pitted like stone. With this whip, he would drive the tempting phantom from his cell, drive away the seducer, just as Christ had driven the money-changers from the temple.
He knelt in front of his crucified Lord, who was still in the semblance of his lost loved one. His loincloth had fallen to the ground. His sex was erect.
Aelred knelt, tearing his woollen habit from his frame. He bent forward. With the whip, he lashed his back over the right shoulder and then over the left shoulder. He continued this flagellation of himself till his lover came down from the cross and left there the image of his sweet Lord.
Back at the window, the phantom was reluctant to leave.
Even after he felt that he had performed his task, he could be tricked. His scent still lingered in the cell.
Weakened and bleeding, he would begin again. But by a strange alchemy, this very abuse and humiliation of his flesh could be the door through which pleasure walked. There, he was in his lover’s arms again.
He went to the corner of the oratorium, where he had had a hole excavated above the cold stream which flowed into the River Rye. This was his ultimate trick for the evil one. He lifted the stone cover of the hole. Still stripped naked in the cold night, he lowered his burning body into the icy cold water. Standing there, holding on tightly, while the fast currents rushed about his legs and torso, he could feel his passion leave him with the shock of the cold water.
Naked and wet, he stood silently in the middle of his cell and felt the night settle about him. His sweet Lord reassembled himself on the cross.
The bells for Matins rang out over the valley, scattering sleep before dawn, and Aelred felt confident that he had saved himself and his young novices from the evil one who stalked his monastery like a roaring lion going about seeking whom he might devour.
Aelred and Edward slept in each other’s arms through the first hours of the night, after their lovemaking and their belief in the goodness of their deeds. The warmth and the comfort of the barn and each other’s bodies cushioned and blanketed them, swaddling them in an innocence which lasted for those few hours. Aelred was the first to wake and his mood turned to apprehension, finding himself naked, clinging to Edward in the chill of the night. He pulled his smock over his head and put his arms into the sleeves. There was the smell of the fresh hay. The inside of the barn was dark and loomed above them. The side of the barn that was open showed a faint starlight and half a moon, a slice of lime. The apple trees in the nearby orchard rustled in the night breeze. Aelred lay, looking up into the barn and letting the events of the day and night before unfold. Slowly, anxiety began to build. What had happened began to fill him with a dread.
‘Edward,’ Aelred whispered, ‘Edward.’ He shook his shoulder which felt clammy because of the heat of the barn mixed with the chill of the night.
‘What is it? What is it?’ Edward woke, startled and, turning, he clung to Aelred. ‘Yes, yes.’ He then sat up suddenly. ‘Where are we?’ His arms falling around Aelred’s neck and shoulders.
‘Don’t you remember? We’ve spent the night in the barn after hay-making.’
‘God, I didn’t know where I was.’ He looked at his nakedness, standing up and fetching his smock which somehow had got pushed away from where they slept. He knelt near Aelred. ‘What have we done?’
‘We’ve missed Compline. Well, we would’ve anyway, being late from haymaking. But then we should’ve got a blessing from the Abbot. Maybe no one noticed. What time do you think it is? It’s still very dark. But it could be near Matins.’
‘I mean, what have we done?
‘Oh! I think it’s about one or two in the morning. It will be another two hours at least before the bells for Matins.’ Edward had stumbled in the hay to the edge of the open side of the barn to make his judgements by the light of the night sky. Then he turned to Aelred and said, ‘You know, there’s a clock above the dairy. Maybe I could go down and check the time.’
‘Don’t you think we should return to the novitiate while everyone’s still asleep? What do you think?’
‘No, I want to stay here a while, talk a while and be with each other and assess what we’ve done.’ Edward sounded very decisive, so Aelred agreed.
‘Take care as you climb down the ladder in the dark. Should I come with you? Can you bring up some water? There must be something down there. Actually, there’s a metal cup left by that tap where Brother Martin said we could get water. Take care.’
Edward took off his smock quickly, and pulled on his overalls and then the smock once more. He left it loose, as he could not find his girdle. His head disappeared over the side of the barn, where the long ladder was left standing against it, leading down to the bottom of the conveyor.
It was only when Edward had returned with the metal cup of water, spilling it as he climbed back up the ladder and stumbled over the hay to where Aelred was sitting up that their mood turned into fear as the full realisation of their transgression began to dawn on them. They wiped the sleep from their eyes. They sipped the water, sharing the cup from hand to hand. The nature of their transgression grew.
‘We’ve slept all night in the barn, been here from the previous evening, missed Compline and slept out of the dormitory.’ Edward went over the events, taking stock. He had to remind himself.
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Aelred said, getting agitated. ‘Not only that!’
‘I’m hungry.’ Edward said.
‘Here, have some more water.’
‘I thought the storm would’ve broken last night.’
‘No, the atmosphere is still very tight.’
‘Don’t be worried.’ Edward took Aelred’s hand.
‘But it is worrying.’
‘Yes, but we can’t undo it, what we’ve done. You wouldn’t want to, would you?’
‘No, I wouldn’t want to.’ His hand stroked Edward’s face. ‘But another part of me wishes that we had not gone that far. It was as if we were not thinking any more. Not choosing. It chose us. I can’t remember. I can’t believe what we’ve done.’
‘I can. I want to do it again. I want to make love to you again, even now.’ Edward was emphatic. ‘Kiss me. Your lips are cracked.’
‘Edward! Let’s do what you suggested. Let’s talk. Then let’s go to our cells so that we will be in time for Matins. I want to go to Matins. I want to see Father Basil. No, I need to talk to someone else.’
‘Talk to me.’
‘No, you talk to me. No, someone else who is not you.’
‘Why Father Basil?’
‘He’s my confessor. He understands. He knows about these feelings, about these temptations; about things like this happening as well, I’m sure.’
‘Why? How do you know?’
‘He told me. Well, at any rate, he suggested it. He told me about himself and Sebastian.’
‘Sebastian? Who? Sebastian who has just died?’
‘Yes, they were friends. That’s how he described it. They lay in each other’s arms in a field one summer.’
‘God! Did they? How old is he?’
‘Must be in his seventies. But when he talked it was as if he was as young as you and I are.’
‘But why did he tell you that? For what reason would he come out with things like that to a novice? What, during confession? Anyway, it’s your confession.’
‘It was while we were digging Sebastian’s grave. He was moved, I suppose.’
‘Still, I find it strange that he confided in you. He must’ve felt that he could. That you would understand.’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you mean, yes?
‘Oh, God, so many questions. We’re supposed to be talking about what we’ve done. It’s all so quick. Only yesterday.’
‘Is it? So quick? Only yesterday, yes, that we began to talk. But what’s been going on before? You at the quarry each day. I wanted you there. I noticed you. I wanted you to look at me. I came to want you to smell my clothes. I wished I was my clothes, th
at you were smelling me. I knew. You let yourself be known. You didn’t know. I’m sorry. That was cheating.’
‘No. Yes, I’ve - there’s more I’ve had to confess, things to Basil. Things like this, almost, what we’ve done.’
‘With whom? With whom? No - yes - I can’t believe it. Yes, of course. Benedict.’
‘Don’t say it like that.’ Aelred recalled Benedict walking up through the apple orchard yesterday evening, when he felt that he wanted to run out to meet him and to go with him, to hold his hand, to kiss him behind the tall hedges on the path from the orchard. He had not. He had stayed with Edward. He had stayed and look what had happened. ‘Don’t say it like that.’
‘Benedict. All the time, and me stumbling to tell him. Me confusedly talking about emotions between men. He must’ve known all along that it was you. Who else could it be? Who else but you and your lovely face? Who else? He would know. He had got there first.’
‘Edward! Edward! It’s not what you imagine. Benedict - you don’t know Benedict. He’s so strong. He put a stop to it. We got nowhere. He has not got there first. I love him. Please don’t talk about him without respect. I love him.’
‘You love him? What do you mean you love him? What have we done? What is it that you feel for me, then? You’ve never said, have you? I said I loved you in the library. You’ve not been able to say that.’
‘I said it last night. I said it to you last night.’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘No, we don’t remember the words. There were hardly any words. But I did say it. What did you think I showed you? I’ve given you everything. I’ve not given him anything.’
‘Yes, you have. You’ve given him your respect.’
‘He doesn’t think that. He thinks I endanger his vocation, his final vows.’
‘Yes, you’ve given him your abstentions. You can both be monks. You’ve lost it with me. We’ve endangered ourselves.’
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