(This reaction against the liturgical change is pretty neurotic in the form it takes, though objectively I can see reasons for some of the criticisms.)
b. Poetry etc. Letter from [Clayton] Eshleman upbraiding me (not without reason) for my crack in Harper’s about Ginsberg in South America. Yet the letter was full of other implications – seemed to be centered on a demand to live life with a kind of poetic orthodoxy, to declare myself “with” the new poetry written in America. [Charles] Olson, [Robert] Duncan, [Robert] Kelly, Ginsberg etc. I like what I have read of it (not much) and I know I have made impossible and sweeping statements about it. E. (Obviously homesick in Peru and probably getting a rough time because of the U.S. in Vietnam) criticizes me for identifying with South American poets against U.S. poets in this “black” hour for our country etc. In a word, demand to conform to poetic and patriotic orthodoxy of some sort. Nuts.
c. There is always the question of race: besides the obvious choice of being for civil rights – there are the unlimited esoteric options and the whole neurotic business of identifying with the Negro, who now is absolutely not permitting himself to be identified with – yet enjoying the courtship. (I am involved in more of this – saw a report of some congress or other of writers in which the whole theme was “No matter how hard you try you can’t identify with us, Charlie, you don’t know how we feel.”) Nuts. No courtship.
d. War and peace: Again – I am on record as having made the obvious option – against the war in V[iet] N[am]. But then the issue is immensely complicated. Johnson is trying to get out of it now – some say sincerely, others no. China obviously wants the war to continue, to bleed and humiliate America. The Pentagon wants to continue it so as to beat up North V.N. and get at China. And so on. There are a hundred possibilities for saying “yes” and “no.” I have no obligation to come out with these ambiguities and will not. I do not know the ins and outs of it well enough. Who does? (Yet I do think the situation remains terribly serious, precisely because it is so complicated and ambiguous.)
e. Monasticism. Dom James is first going to Rome for a meeting of abbots. Interminable petty questions about details of observance (radio or no radio!). The whole thing gets to be more and more trivial. I am not concelebrating even on Sundays because last Sunday evening coming in from the snow to the overheated Church I spent the whole mass in a sweat. I have no part in the business of change in the order. Certainly this is important. But things being what they are I have no way of getting into it in any way that makes sense. Also I do not think that the order in America is going or can go in any direction that leads anywhere except to mediocrity and bourgeois comfort – and superficiality. Yet there are such good young monks here and some good possibilities. Maybe I am too pessimistic, since Dom James blocks the whole view.
f. Literature in general – all this about people like Rilke, Unamuno etc. Superficial and unimportant. Same with the new theology people – the Bonhoefferites et al. None of my business – though since I have started on Rilke I will keep after this study until I am satisfied or get enough of it and can stand no more of him.
g. “Mysticism.” The rather absurd discussion of mysticism and regression being carried on by the people at McGill. And all the literature about questions of drugs, psychiatry etc. I may give an opinion if asked – and certainly I am ready to help L.P. [Linda Parsons] personally if I can.1 Don’t expect to do much.
h. Zen – this will probably get sticky and unfortunate soon. Zen itself will keep me from “Zen” as a movement. All the other Oriental stuff – the same.
i. [William] Du Bay and his priests’ union!!! He has asked the Center at Santa Barbara for advice. [W. H. Ping] Ferry asked me. This is part of a movement that is going to be very active and cause an enormous amount of stir and upheaval. I am rather dubious about it and have already said I want no part in any of it. But of course will give an opinion on various points if asked.
j. Health etc. It is true my back is bad and my hand is not in good shape. I write with difficulty and it is painful. My stomach is as usual. Probably I will have to go to see. [Dr. William C.] Mitchell about the back, but will put it off as long as I can and try to avoid an operation. Skin of my hands all broken up again with dermatitis.
Reviewing all this: it seems to be my life and is not. It offers itself, suggests itself, asks to be taken seriously. I see that I am called to be free of it and to deal with it all in freedom, seeking only isolated occasions to help others here and there, not getting involved in any program.
The other thing is that with my hands in bad shape, and with the fantastic trouble I now have with my typewriter, writing will be slowed down and that is good too!
In all these things I see one central option for me: to let go of all that seems to suggest getting somewhere, being someone, having a name and a voice, following a policy and directing people in “my” ways. What matters is to love, to be in one place in silence, if necessary in suffering, sickness, tribulation, and not try to be anybody outwardly. Not try to have a public identity. And this, just at the time when papers all over the place have picked up the story that was about me in the Courier Journal.
Life is very funny! Vive la neige! [Long live the snow!]
Monday is my 51st birthday. Hence the summing up.
It would be fine if I really think the CJ story was my way of saying “Goodbye” and getting out for keeps. I know I cannot avoid still writing (do not want to avoid it) and occasionally blasting out about something – but surely now it can take on a whole new direction.
Certainly I am going to write a lot of letters saying “No!”
January 31, 1966
Yesterday was bitterly cold. About 10 below in the early morning (14 below on the unprotected thermometer at the monastery, 16 below at the cowbarn). It hardly got above 15 at the warmest time of the day and there was a biting wind. Had a couple of fine walks in the snow – stayed on my own hillside, which more and more is enough for me.
Today, my 51st birthday. Gratitude and a kind of astonishment that I should be so old. A good day. Reading more of Isaac of Stella, finishing his sermons.
A bit perplexed by the stupid picture book job that has dragged on and on. After we had paid Peter Geist a good sum to do some rather interesting layouts, Bro. Pius, entirely on his own initiative, has taken the book over, changed many of the pictures and some of the pages and the result is a banal and confused mess. I worried a bit about whether I should put up a fight over it and decided not to. It is not worth the trouble. Nobody gives a damn anyway whether the book is really interesting or not. It is simply something for tourists. So I decided to forget it, write my text when I can get up the courage to do so, and that will be that. I hope.2
February 3, 1966
Purple landscape coming into view, still full of snow. Dom James leaves today for a committee of Abbots in Rome and probably a visit to Norway. I have not talked with him about it and I have no idea what is coming up except of course they are implementing the council decree. Our decree from the congregation on “unifying” the communities really was quite general.
Yesterday was a fine feast for me. Did not go down to the candle-blessing, procession and concelebration but said mass privately as usual, and thought deeply about Our Lady afterwards, prayed much to her, saw her immense importance in my life, “gave” myself as completely as I could. I have a great need to “belong” to her. All this is not easily explained and easily becomes confusing if put into words. It is something to be lived in secret. It is the way for me to learn the purity of love and trust. A love that should be completely non-sentimental and even in a certain sense non-objective, “through” her entirely to the invisible, yet not possible in that purity without her – and it is aware of her, yes and no, and of the void too. Impossible to explain and I don’t need to.
My (desk) typewriter has been impossible. Yesterday Br. Clement gave me an almost new portable, a Hermes.
February 7, 1966. F[east] of St. Romuald
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br /> I don’t know what happens to time in the hermitage. Three and four hours in the pre-dawn go by like half an hour. Reading, meditation, a few notes, some coffee and toast – there is not much to show for it, but it is probably the most fruitful part of the day.
Today I have spent all this time on a discovery. “John the Solitary,” a Syrian, whose Dialogue on the Soul and Passions was published by Hauscherr (in French) in 1939. It has remained practically unknown. Yet is extremely interesting. Can use a bit of it in the article I am writing now on Spiritual Direction in the Desert Fathers (for Hermits).
Yesterday, Septuagesima, it finally began to thaw (before that there were some wonderful zero nights with full moon on the hard, sparkling snow). Last night I could have my window open again and melting snow ran off the roof into the buckets all night.
Yesterday was a full day – some good ideas in the morning, and the realization that I am on my right way, that I am at grips with a critical problem – which is also a reason why Rilke holds my interest: what is lacking in him? There is perhaps in him a central neurotic falsity which I probably have to negotiate in myself also, and for me a poetic solution, however brilliant, will not do. It has to be coped with in grace, in true solitude, in authentic love, not bypassed. I realize though that I cannot plan on perfect success. Have to have a sober estimate!! But what matters is that I sincerely face it and do what I can and not tamper with the truth.
Then this Orpheus idea – this is important (as a kind of theoria) and attractive. Much to be done here. An entirely different question.
In the afternoon, musing on the Prajna paramita Sutra, out at the top of the hay field, really saw it (instead of simply understanding that there was something in it to see). And really laughed! It means exactly what it says, and yet one does not break through. To break through everything! With whom does emptiness shake hands when it shakes hands with itself?
After that two deer started off in the red brush on the east side of the hill, only fifty or a hundred feet from where I was walking, and ran away without haste in long, slow, curving leaps, with their huge white tails up like flags.
Talked on Rilke in Chapter Room and read 3 poems from the Book of Hours – their merits and deficiencies.
February 10, 1966
All week, warm days, like spring. Then today, rain all day. This evening the storm is breaking up. Long low blue-black clouds came trailing up over the black ridge out of Tennessee, low and fast, streaming to the North. I stood and watched them in my evening meditation. Perfect silence, but for a dog barking far down the valley somewhere, towards Newton’s.
Today I finished a first draft of an article for Katallagete which was difficult to write. They insist on my writing something and I do not really know the South. So it is general! Walker Percy had a very smart piece in their last issue. They are just starting – it is one of the only really articulate voices in the South and so deserves support.
Yesterday I heard from Cardenal. He has started his project on Solentiname, though very unofficially, with full approval of his bishop.
Ammon Hennacy writes that he is coming to Kentucky and wants to visit, but I don’t think it will be possible.
After three weeks of snow it is good to see the green!
February 13, 1966
I have had almost all I can take of Rilke – turn now with relief to people like [Paul] Celan, [Heinz] Piontek, [Karl] Krolow. Need to finish more of this. This is what I have not well enough known, what has been going on while I have been fighting here with the phantoms in Gethsemani.
February 17, 1966
Today was the prophetic day, the first of the real shining spring: not that there was not warm weather last week, not that the there will not be cold weather again. But this was the day of the year when spring became truly credible. Freezing night, but cold bright morning, and a brave, bright shining of sun that is new, and an awakening in all the land, as if the earth were aware of its capacities!
I saw that the woodchuck had opened up his den and had come out, after three months or so of sleep, and at that early hour when it was still freezing. I thought he had gone crazy. But the day proved him right and me wrong.
The morning got more and more brilliant and I could feel the brilliancy of it getting into my own blood. Living so close to the cold, you feel the spring. And this is man’s mission! The earth cannot feel all this. We must. But living away from the earth and the trees we fail them. We are absent from the wedding feast.
There are moments of great loneliness and lostness in this solitude, but often then come other deeper moments of hope and understanding, and I realize that these would not be possible, in their purity, their simple secret directions, anywhere but in solitude. I hope to be worthy of them!
After dinner when I came back to the hermitage the whole hillside was so bright and new I wanted to cry out, and I got tears in my eyes from it!
With the new, comes also memory: as if that which was once so fresh in the past (days of discovery when I was 19 or 20) were very close again, and as if one were beginning to live again from the beginning: one must experience spring like that. A whole new chance! A complete renewal!
February 20, 1966. Quinquagesima
Cold clear night. It was 25 this morning early and now at sunrise is nearly down to 20 with a keen wind.
The other night in the clear sky about 3:30 suddenly saw in the South the great sign of Scorpio rising. It is awesome to see the T-shaped head climb into the sky and the twisting body slowly follow it up out of Tennessee, with red Antares in its heart!
Seeing this I got out and looked at other constellations with a star map for July (which does not quite fit Feb. at 3:30 but July at 8 or 9 is close). In the west my view is hindered by the tall pine but the sickle and Leo are high and I see them. In the East the beautiful Swan, and the Eagle. Today I went out in the open and could see the Cassiopeia upside down over Boones’ in the North.
Condemnation of [Andrei] Sinyavsky and [Yuli] Daniel, the writers, is treason. Sickening pharisaism of the Soviet establishment! How can anyone be taken in by these people? It is possible only if one wants to submit to a secure, stupid, self-righteous, “orthodox” system. From which God preserve us! Two more condemned for trying to talk as if they were alive!
February 21, 1966
Rilke again.
Rereading the II Elegy and [Romano] Guardini about it. It seems to me that Guardini, while right in many judgments about R., takes too seriously R’s own “passionate” rejections of Christianity in letters etc. For passionately one should understand emotionally. For subjective reasons beyond his control (his mother) R. simply could not be at peace with conventional Christian language and even with the idea of Christ as Mediator. I do not minimize this – objectively a failure of faith. Yet G. does not see that R. was also struggling with a false religious problem imposed on him by 19th-century Christianity. The problem of finding wholeness (ultimate truth etc.) in God by denying and excluding the world. The holy is the non-secular. Feeling himself called upon to deny and exclude what he saw to be in reality necessary for “wholeness,” “holiness,” “openness,” he finally refused this denial, and chose his “open world.” In a sense he does come up with a cosmology that seems a parody of Christianity – but is it really as G. thinks, a “secularization” in the sense of a degradation? Is he not really reaching for the kind of Pleroma revealed in Colossians? Yes, his choice of angels is in a sense a failure, acc[ording] to Paul – yet was it entirely his fault? Was it forced on him by a manichean type of Christianity?
I cannot agree with all Rilke says – but I do not think he himself would have expected, still less demanded, an act of theological faith in the content of the Duino Elegies!!
But on the other hand this pharisaic shunning of it, this cutting him dead in public etc. – analogous to the condemnation of Sinyavski and Daniel, no?
February 23, 1966. Ash Wednesday
The curse is in the skin of my hands again –
all broken up. Also I will need X-rays of that vertebra again soon, my hands easily get numb, and even hurt.
Last night I stood out in the cold late trying to see Canopus in the south sky, but there was haze along the hills and horizon. There was a star trying to look through the haze which might have been it. Going down to monastery in the dark at 5 for ashes and concelebration, the sky was bright – Corvus up in the west over the monastery and Castor and Pollux down in the northwest.
Another discovery: this time the Sufi tales of Nasruddin. Where can I get the whole collection? I know I have much to learn in them. They are fascinating and very funny: but point in all directions at once!
February 25, 1966
Lent is getting into full swing.
The Abbot returned from Rome and Oslo Wednesday night. Saw him yesterday. No information about Norway except that there was a lot of snow and “too much snow for skiing.” He excels in giving irrelevant information. Tried to find out something about the Collectanea [Cisterciensia], but again nothing precise. Fr. Charles had come to see him. The English edition would be mailed out from Gethsemani. He would not, however, admit that there was an English edition. I came away exasperated with him and his politics.
His letters from Rome have caused a lot of laughter and some commotion in the community (especially his way of getting around higher authority – which he was for once embarrassingly clear about!!). The impression one gets is that – he is going to enforce his own ideas and those of a few members of the community against the vocal opposition of others (the senior or sub-senior brothers like Colman, Clement etc.) and with the indifference of the majority.
This disturbs me and I have to negotiate it. I have no confidence in the man, and am convinced his motives are much more “natural” than he realizes, indeed perhaps somewhat neurotic. I have no respect for his ideas of monasticism, based on no real acquaintance with tradition, or with the real meaning of the life – and indeed full of bad theology.
Learning To Love Page 4