When he drove the Scout he drove mostly down the middle of the road and pulled over brusquely if some other car appeared. Is having trouble with his wife. Jubilee has been doing good things but I rarely receive it (it does not get through the Abbot’s hands to me). R. very encouraging about Nicaragua. My idea is, however, perhaps to wait before letting E.C. take decisive action in Rome. Perhaps 1967. See what this year brings, and plan accordingly. Perhaps by summer it will be clear what action should be taken this year – or perhaps next. One thing is sure, once any action is taken, all communication with C. will be stopped by the Abbot. That is the problem. What a stupid way to exist! I wonder if he has any comprehension of the Council Decree on Religious [“Decree on the Appropriate Renewal of the Religious Life, 1965”].
January 12, 1966
Great experience – reading Nishida’s The Intelligible World. How like Evagrius, and yet better. Splendid view of the real (trans-conscious) meaning of Zen and its relation to the conscious and the world.
Monday – an illegal visit of W[illia]m Grimes, ex-Br. Alcuin. It is a pity I am where people know where I am and can get at me (parking car by lake off Bardstown Road, cutting across St. Theresa’s field and through the pine woods, climbing the fence where the hunters come in!). I don’t know what to do – but be patient and I was glad to see him. He is working with Little Brothers of the Poor in Chicago and their work (with the aged and sick poor) is most moving and good.
There has been a “peace offensive” over Vietnam which many think is only a prelude to hotter war when, because of its inevitable contradictions, the effort fails.
The badly printed postulants’ guide (an incredible mess!) is to be done over again by the printers.
January 13, 1966
Nishida throws much light on Rilke. He makes clear and explicit what R. was reaching for in the Duino Elegies: the pure event. This must become a dimension in my own life – it is what the present transcends. (If I could see Nicaragua as “pure event” there would be no further question about it. But really it seems like more – and more useless – “flowering.”)
January 15, 1966
St. Paul the Hermit has not vanished from the ordo – he is today. I don’t know why he was moved from the 10th.
Yesterday was grey and cold and I thought there would be snow (there has been none this year), but sun came out in the afternoon. I sent off the commentary on the Council Constitution on the Church and the World [“Pastoral Constitution on the Church in Modern World,” 1965] to Burns Oates.
A Rule for Recluses edited by Olgin in Antonianum came on interlibrary loan from St. Bona’s [St. Bonaventure University]. Though it is rather pedestrian yet it means a great deal. (English Rule of 13th century, or later.) There is no question that documents like this really speak to me and move me. I am completely attuned to them and to that time (Isaac of Stella, for instance). Lately with all the emphasis on being “contemporary” I have perhaps felt a little guilt about my love for the Middle Ages. This a foolish and rather servile feeling, really! “You have been bought with a great price – do not become the slaves of men!” (I Cor. 7:23) Where is my independence? That is the meaning of solitude, to be free from the compulsion of fashion, dead custom etc., and to be really open to the Holy Spirit. I see, once again, how muddled and distracted I am. Not free!
It is worthwhile, studying Rilke, to remind myself of what I am not and never will be, a poet in this sense. Yet there is so much in him that is valid for me. His thoughts on death, “pure event” etc. (After Mass yesterday that was clarified a bit. Suppose I go to Nicaragua purely to “be available” and hoping nothing for myself, seeking no “ideal”? etc ….)
“Nihil est (se incluso) majus necessarium quam Deum adorare vivientem [nothing (including myself) is more necessary than to adore the living God]” (says the Rule for Recluses). It seems a platitude – really it is a deep mysterious, unfathomable living need – an imperative for one’s whole life, a demand that is often forgotten and never met. I am in solitude precisely to confront this demand and others like it (in Zen terms, for example). I recognize I do not cope with others really. Yet I must keep on with it, however much I fumble around. No one else can tell me what to do now, I have to try to find out for myself (of course people will come at the right time with the right word – books too – but I have no one to rely on). This is my life and I don’t pretend to understand it. Only the mere playing of a role would be intolerable and mere living is also not enough, though at times it seems to resolve itself into that. There is living and living.
January 16, 1966
Finished Nishida’s Intelligible World.
As to the Sonnets to Orpheus – German text that came yesterday from the U.K. I think the best way to read it is this: each day take one sonnet in the German, without English, and try to translate it straight on through as on an examination, not fearing to write nonsense, however. In this way, to stop holding back from the German, simply plunging into it. I really know more German than I think, maybe, and am enough attuned to Rilke to be right in first guesses now. My own guesses will be better for me than the translation (J.B.L. [Leishman]) which sometimes distorts in order to rhyme. Then I can find out my mistakes from the translation.
January 18, 1966
Guess who comes today to preach the retreat: Bishop [Fulton J.] Sheen! But I am not expected to come to conferences. Arranged yesterday with Rev. Father: I will see the Bishop and perhaps take him for a walk to the hermitage (Rev. Fr.’s suggestion). Actually I like Bishop S. He is a pleasant person.
[W. H.] Auden’s “Letter to a Wound” – a Rilkian experience, but with sanity, irony, detachment. Rilke was not capable of this. Too narcissistic to risk standing back for a moment. Could only plunge deeper into the pool. That is the trouble with all introverts: not that they look within but that they are obsessed with “looking within” and afraid to do anything else. Afraid that if they stop looking they will disintegrate. Hence the “Letter to a Wound” is not Rilkian. It is a parody of Rilkian experience.
Read a little of [Allen] Ginsberg before retreat – sending off the books to Ludovico Silva, in Caracas. G. is a good poet and what he writes of is America all right (the America I don’t know, the half of it that completes the other half that I don’t know either). All very clear, this America (fine poem on the movement going on on a college campus), intent, convinced, getting around. He does not judge.
Ginsberg is important, one of those people who causes a whole country to judge itself or come under judgment. Everybody has to say one way or the other what he thinks of Ginsberg and what Ginsberg is trying to say. Maybe I should write a poem about this. His nakedness is perhaps the significant – extraordinary – thing. But I am beyond the point of worrying about someone being naked, narcissistic, etc. No diagnosis: I think you have to see Ginsberg without reaching at once to the medicine chest, or without “deciding” his case with a handyword: fairy, schiz etc. This is the elementary sense of charity demanded by the situation: that here is Allen Ginsberg and he remains an identity which one refuses to evade. And then suddenly you see that the whole country is full of people exactly like that in a way. All the earnestness, sincerity, pity, pointlessness, might, of the U.S. is there, even the space-men. Yet one still has to account also for the Pentagon’s view of itself. What a phenomenon this country is. (I like Ginsberg better than [Theodore] Roethke, simply because he is more explicit. He is warmer and more personal than William Carlos Williams.)
Evening. Beginning of retreat. Since it is the Night of Destiny (27 Ramadan) I stayed up late. Like Christmas. The Night of D. is perhaps a Moslem “Christmas” – heaven open to earth – the angels and “The Spirit” come down, all the prayers of the faithful are answered. Night of joy and peace! I shared the joy of Moslems and prayed for them and for my own needs, and for peace.
Saw Bishop Sheen after dinner. We had a good conversation. No matter how people may disparage all his TV work and so on, he is an extraordinary person a
nd has done immense good and also is very intelligent, widely read, articulate. I suppose people dismiss him with a shrug just because he is popular and effective (a lot of them probably do the same for me!). But that is childish. One has to respect him. He is very vigorous and alert, just as he was sixteen years ago when he was last here. The community is being a bit supercilious about the fact that he’s retreat master. That is not so much because of him as because of the abbot, who is trying to create an effect, of course failing. Those tapes in the guesthouse certainly have got people tired of Bishop Sheen too!
Light snow most of the day first time this winter.
January 20, 1966
Yesterday there were small deer tracks in the snow of the path as I went down to say Mass in the morning. Some of the light snow melted in open spaces, but the ground is still covered in the shady patches and the temperature did not get much above 35. It was 20 when I got up and is going down now towards 15 or lower perhaps.
Dan Walsh picked up a fine drip coffee maker in an auction for $1.25 and I have been using it. It makes fine coffee – which adds to these mornings. But Ernesto [Cardenal] also sent over instant coffee from Nicaragua, which I have not tried yet.
Working on [Pablo] Neruda, Rilke and now Octavio Paz (fine book on poetry). Have got to overcome a certain laziness with Spanish writers (i.e. not reading only superficially and not staying only with the obvious and easy – e.g. have to really get into [César] Vallejo’s Espana for example).
January 22, 1966
It was not too cold when I got up (about 32). At 6 or 6:15 in the dark I went out to find it was snowing. Now (nearly 8) dim blue grey light and snow falling. I put crumbs out on the porch for birds. Will not cut wood (it is good I got mine into the woodshed yesterday. I did not expect snow and thought I was wasting time). Nishida on contradiction: that is the value of life: one must work with and against the elements in a state of productive contradiction (“action – intuition”). The point of contradiction is also the real – where the personal self expresses the world now. In community, everything theoretically arranges so that one is “free” to think and pray (all material needs taken care of). In fact two things happen. (1) Thought becomes abstract, (2) one creates problems and conflicts in desperation. They are unreal contradictions. Hence the sense of futility.
(Evening.) Heavy snow all day. Traffic of birds on the porch; juncos first, the cardinals, a mocking bird, titmice, myrtle warblers, etc. Also at least 3 whitefooted mice (pretty with their brown face and big ears) came out of the wood piles – mice more interested than birds in the crumbs. Birds like the shelter and drink from the pools of melted snow.
Had a hard time keeping on schedule. Tried to answer a tiresome query from Doubleday about quotations from Auden, Eckhart etc. and could not trace them. Had splinters in my hand and had to go down to get them out. Did not say Tierce and Sext until the mid-afternoon (after trying to find copies of some of my own poems). By mid-afternoon was tired and distracted but psalms and tea and the silence of snow re-ordered everything.
January 23, 1966. III Sunday after Epiphany
Deep snow. A marvelous morning (early in the night hours) in which among other things, I suddenly wrote a French poem. Had a good breakfast and the coffee turned out wonderfully this time: better than anything I have had for years except in the hospital, or perhaps here and there in Louisville. (Breakfast coffee in the hospital; always something I like, if I am well enough to enjoy it!)
Curious dimension of time: in four hours (besides writing this poem, getting breakfast and cleaning up) reread a few pages of Burtt’s book and perhaps twenty pages of Nishida. That was all. But the time was most fruitful in depth and awareness and I did not know what happened to all these hours.
Later I would see by the deer tracks that sometime in the dark before the dawn a couple of deer jumped the fence right out in the front of the hermitage – but I did not notice them. (Too dark, and with my desk light in front of me I do not see out when it is dark.)
Cold going down to monastery: then the heavy heat of the buildings. At concelebration I was soaked in sweat, and there is flu everywhere in the community (my neighbor Fr. Herbert had it, or a bad cold). So I wonder if I will concelebrate in weather like this.
As regards prayer – in the hermitage. To be snowed in is to be reminded that this is a place apart, from which praise goes up to God, and that my honor and responsibility are that praise. This is my joy, my only “importance.” For it is important! To be chosen for this! And then the realization that the Spirit is given to me, the veil is removed from my heart, that I reflect “with open face” the glory of Christ (II Cor. 3, end [v. 12–18]). It would be easy to remain with one’s heart veiled (as Rilke did in some sense) and it is not by any wisdom of my own but by God’s gift that it is unveiled.
January 24, 1966
Dark. Cold. Thermometer crawling down to zero. Finished Burtt and Nishida (Unity of Opposites). N. is certainly the one philosopher to whom I respond the most.
Kranth in Monumenta Nipponica suggests comparison between Nishida and the generation of 1898 in Spain. [Miguel de] Unamuno and Ortega [y Gasset]. Don’t know Unamuno but have him here. Try him maybe!
Steel grey dawn. Hard frozen hills. A curious low hanging cloud over the field. The tops of the trees disappear into it. Below, everything sharply outlined. The birds are there on the porch, frantically picking up cracker-crumbs. The first pages of Unamuno’s Agonia look promising. Now to sweep, wash, type.
(Evening.) This has been the coldest day, this winter so far. Down to five below, they said at the monastery (though my porch thermometer did not go down to zero finally) and it did not get above 25 all day. Snow still deep. I took a short walk in the hollow behind the hermitage after dinner, then wrote a draft for a preface for Ernesto Cardenal Meditations (La Vida en El Amor), which are excellent. Some of them written when he was novice here.
I realized today after Mass what a desperate, despairing childhood I had. Around the age of 7–9–10, when Mother was dead and Father was in France and Algeria. How much it meant when he came to take me to France. It really saved me.
In the afternoon-evening: realized that the one thing that is of any worth whatever in me, the one thing of value, and this is infinitely valuable, is the light to know God, the gift of faith that makes Him present in my heart. He who called forth light from darkness has shone in my heart! (II Cor. 4:6).
For this I love II Corinthians, which is my reading now and strikes me very deeply – especially all that is said about suffering (4:7–18). It is becoming one of my favorite epistles (especially 3:12–18).
Yesterday apparently Jim Morrissey’s article about me was in the Courier Journal (Sunday Magazine). I suppose everyone in Kentucky has seen it but me (and the other monks). No matter. Dan Walsh will probably bring a copy along eventually. And I don’t anticipate being thrilled, only embarrassed and wearied.
January 28, 1966
Still much snow. Only yesterday did the thermometer go above freezing in the afternoon. Not much melted. Cold again at night.
I still read a lot of Rilke and Unamuno – with questions and reservations. They are often unsatisfactory in much the same way. Sometimes their intuitions are brilliant, at others merely irresponsible. Both are utter individualists. This is their weakness and their strength.
For Rilke: I have no questions about the value of the Neue Gedichte, or the real beauty of the Elegies and some of the Orpheus Sonnets. But I still do not know about the spiritual world of the Sonnets. For a Christian there is always a natural tendency to read such things in implicitly Christian terms and to ensure, therefore, that he understands. But this is lazy. And where the question is once raised – I wonder if I get anything that he says, really! Except that he praises poetry, in poetry, for being poetry. Which is OK. But if this implies a view of life itself … it raises many questions.
Yet Unamuno’s Agonia is a fascinating, though sometimes unsatisfactory book. Many excellent
points – and above all he has a fine sense of the insufficiency of Christian rationalism, activism etc. “Power Christianity.” Is he truly Pauline? Was he unacceptable in Spain because he had protestant insights? Indeed in many ways he is like [Karl] Barth.
January 29, 1966
Yesterday the thermometer barely went above 20. Now it is down around 10 (6 a.m.) and light, tiny flashes of ice are falling, a kind of mist of ice, that will be slippery: only a thin coat over the hard frozen snow of the other day. It has been falling for at least three or four hours and the footprints are still visible.
Today I feel I must do some summing up: agonia (and peace!).
With the snow all around it, the hermitage is particularly peaceful. And so am I. Though solicited by various troubles and “agonies,” which are in fact of no account whatever. And the more they are multiplied the more they are seen to be senseless.
First of all – it is obvious that I do not need to be taking this or that “position” and making statements (unless in some exceptional case I am obviously required to) in public. I will stick to my decision not to comment on events, and I will even keep quiet about what is going on in the Church.
For example, here are only a few of the “options” that have presented themselves in four or five days – three days rather – since the end of retreat.
a. Liturgy – asked to help in the translation of the liturgical books (missal) by the official commission in Washington. To be exact – to submit sample translation of collects. NO.
Asked on the other hand by a disturbed and somewhat fanatical representative of the conservative thinking to come out against new liturgy. Obviously no.
Learning To Love Page 3