Lunch in the cafeteria about 1:15 – some rock in the Juke box – Beatles sounded good.
Back to library – some of [Paul] Klee’s diaries and notes.
Later, tired of looking and reading, wanted to find some living magazine in the reference room but found none. Though they have a representative selection.
Finally on the way home called M. from a phone booth near Bardstown station. (She was by that time home from work.) It was a happy call. She is much more buoyant since her letter got through and her hard work in the hospital is a help. “I am very tired.” – “I think of you constantly!” “Especially when I wake up.” She was a little worried about the commitment but I told her everything went well. “I was thinking about that all day – ” (the 8th) (seriously). She was a little piqued that I liked B. Dylan’s song “Just Like a Woman.” “Well, it’s pretty.” (Sort of distant tone.) I forgot to ask the exact date of her birthday but I think it is__________. (She was born just about two months before I came through Cincinnati on my way to Gethsemani! And I walked through Cincinnati station with the words of Proverbs 8 in my mind: “And my delights were to be with the children of men!” – I have never forgotten this, it struck me so forcefully then! Strange connection in my deepest heart – between M. and the “Wisdom” figure – and Mary – and the Feminine in the Bible – Eve etc. – Paradise – wisdom. Most mysterious, haunting, deep, lovely, moving, transforming!) At the beginning of the call she changed to the other phone (bedroom, I guess) where she could talk more openly. We talked of our love being deep and the same and of our “radar.” And I said, “Yes, but there is no consolation” and she said, “This is consolation.” It was a happy, cheerful, friendly, affectionate call without hooks and without anguish, and without smoke. She said I ought to write a poem about the freight trains going by (she was delighted at the strange place I was calling from – always wants to know exactly where I am). I said I could guarantee nothing but wrote a poem this morning.
A LONG CALL IS MADE OUT OF WHEELS
This is a long call
Built of heavy wheels
In the undestroyed solemnity
of two powers
Industry and love
Do not know each other personally
But live together
In the same town
With questions and quarters
In a hot glass house
I seek you humbly
I throw no stones at trains.
It is copper September
A season of vows
A covenant of beginnings
The New Year of the Jews
A month of ripening
As able as ever
To enrich this country
With bourbon and tobacco
O let September call you
To the beating heart
Of everlasting barns
To the long heaviness
of rolling cars
To the cool sun’s center
Where I sing in a transparent bell
of green glass
Let the copper line wake
With an instantaneous
Loving charge
Princess of my world
In your fabled river-town
You run from room to room
Til your sweet joy
Is very near
And the boom of my freights
Can crowd you with glory
Though just yesterday
I was in despair
Love is a sacred gamble
of quick seasons, and rain
Dryness and recovery
There is no time
Table for the unforeseen
connection
(O lumbering train
“Must to thy motion lovers’ seasons run?”)
All the little buildings
Come and go
And do they criticize
While I buy time
To hear the sun set
In Cincinnati?
No one can criticize
Your silver smile
At these dusty hedges
Nameless unseen blooms
And the tune of my train
Changes nothing
The edge of this last town
Is still the edge of Eden.
September 13, 1966
Sunday I was thinking guiltily about that call. This business of writing and calling her does involve me in a certain duplicity. And yet I honestly think it is necessary – not just a matter of passion but also of genuine rightness and justice. It is “owed.” I find it impossible to believe that my state demands an absolute, abrupt fracture and rejection of human affection! It does demand fidelity to my vow and hence great caution about any positive attempt to meet and see her again.
Reading Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media. I think it is very important indeed for monks to go into this. Critically important for the whole question of adaptation. I would like to write to him – would like in fact to go to Toronto, but this is hopeless. It remains a very important question. I may try to invite him down.
Certainly McLuhan brings home to me the fact that I do not really know what is going on. Doubtless Conjectures (or the other diary) may appeal to a lot of people who, like myself, are essentially book-types. But does it have any real understanding of new developments? Possibly very little.
This is another reason to be careful about writing essays and comment. Or more still, sermons (more still, medieval theology, however mystical).
I think this is another reason why I should think more of “creative” writing – poetry – prose notes – etc.
September 17, 1966
On the 14th – Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, copies of Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander arrived. There were ten in my box – also a letter from Sister K. which, though sealed in a second envelope marked “conscience matter,” had been opened. The second envelope was opened too. I was worried and amazed, but perhaps it was only an accident. She does have her own problem which is certainly “conscience matter” but also she told of giving my letter to M.
Had you seen her expressive little face while reading your letter you would have been amply rewarded for your thoughtful efforts to reach her. She was ecstatic. She is well, looking her usual lovely little self …. Sensitive to the tremendous gift that is hers, aware of your powerful love and all it means to her as woman, grateful to your leading her closer to God; to your every token of communication …. You know her experience overwhelms her. The irony is that she discovers love and is in love with the impossible …. Woman is meant to be a “Yes.” Not to live that “yes” in its fullness with the one she loves is something only God can understand …. You are saving, in your love and suffering, the one you love. She is charged with your love; you’re not denying her its greatest significance nor are you being denied it. She loves you and will always love you ….
All I can do now is ask to serve God as the instrument of His love for her. And to be attentive to His will. I can’t plan anything myself. Even the little contact we still have may be cut off. I don’t know if the abbot read all this. He might have – but if he had, I don’t think he would have given me the letter. And if I protested to higher Superiors about this he would say I was just evading the rules by a trick and they would uphold him. But it is a matter of conscience and I believe that before God in a case like this I have to decide in my own conscience and in view of her needs, what ought and ought not to be done as regards letters.
Humanly how can such a thing be left to the decision of others who do not know anything of the case, are not interested, and decide in purely abstract terms?
Letters still come in about the bits of Conjectures that were in Life. Translated another poem of Miguel Hernandez yesterday (onion lullaby). A good letter from Cid Corman, a bit apologetic for his rather harsh rejection of Raids (he is most sensitive to any violence in language – too sensitive. As bad as the prudery which cannot even bear any mention of sex).
Yesterday, a brilliant September day. Bro. Cuthbert fixed the cracked stone in the center of my fireplace. Good weather is coming. Since I can’t chop wood too well I will get a tank of gas and a gas heater this winter. Coffee percolator went wrong but is trying again. Morning coffee is important to me. I am not really fasting yet. Guess I will. Bob Dylan records each evening while I have the record player which I must return soon to Abbot. The records must go back to Jubilee after I have written the article on Dylan. Re-read Camus’ “Renegade” and today the “Growing Stone.” I wish to compare them. Nostalgia for primitive community. Camus is really a traditionalist and romantic conservative, balked by fact that he can’t accept Christian transcendence – or even, really, primitive immanence either. So he has neither Man nor Macumba – but wants to celebrate the Sisyphus with primitives none the less. Knows it is hopeless, of course. The ending of “Growing Stone” gives it all away.
Yesterday in the woods I read the whole of René Char Feuillets d’Hypnos [Leaves of Hypnos] – powerful, compressed, authentic, rock-like and alive too. (The Sisyphus project of Resistance: necessary and inevitable!) The young murdered husband Roger, who had become to his wife the husband in whom God is given her, made me weep. The nice dog, greeting the Maquisards in silence. The forest fire. The execution in the village, which to save the village, they did not prevent. Thoughts of the young Maquisards. Landscape of resistance. And so much else. I got down what is on the surface of my mind here at the moment.
September 17, 1966
later
Finally had the sense to get rid of the fluorescent desk lamp that has been ruining my eyes. More room on the desk too!
Another letter from Cid Corman, this time harder to take. Having informed me in a previous letter that he was a saint, and having implied that many had him as their guru, and having emphasized his hatred of all violent language – he finally managed to write some pretty stinging letters none the less! I felt that they were rather gratuitous and that really he was acting under a kind of compulsion for which he himself perhaps had some unconscious guilt. But anyway he is smart and means well – and some of his points were pretty sharp and telling. (He is probably pretty good at finding where people are vulnerable and protects himself by pointing out all this to them. He has apparently lost a lot of friends, doing this!) But I ended up questioning the value of my own work and the purity of my own motives. Without sadness or preoccupation I know I can really get along without this nonsense. If I never wrote another book I’d be happy enough! I don’t have to do all this. If I have to work on some creative stuff and never get anywhere with it – it will be worth while. Like weaving baskets and burning them as the old monks did.
Victor and Carolyn came over though Victor had a slight heart attack in the morning. I am worried about him. He was talking about “Die Letzte Stunde” (“the last hour”) and seems very aware that he is soon going to die and may never see me again. We were talking about anger (Jewish New Year’s – being written in the angels’ book etc. – and the angels at my Mass yesterday – explained etc.). Each time he drives away in the Volkswagen or MG or whatever it is – I wonder if it’s the last time I’ll see him.
September 18, 1966
Early morning. Pre-dawn. 16 Sunday after Pentecost.
The different desk light is not only better to read by but quiet – it does not hum. That fluorescent was really hard on my eyes!
Reading about importance of the Trial symbol in Camus’ artistic interpretation of life – how pervasive it is. Here is where our hubris comes out: in judgment. We are all judges and lawyers and penitents and defendants and accusers and juries. Cid Corman gets me at once in a judge-accused relationship. I must relate to him as a defendant. He is “up” – he will stay “up.” I must vindicate my claim to exist. But this is doubtless because he feels himself to be on trial (maybe he thinks I am trying him. I can’t remember saying anything that would give him that idea. Maybe he got it from Raids). But the joke is that I don’t have to be on trial at all if I don’t want to. Let them all play at being judges – what has that to do with me as long as I don’t join the game by my own will and acts? Unfortunately, however, my acts – my writings – have been such that they have put me in the game. But I don’t have to play it any more. I can get out any time. That is the real purpose of the solitary life!
But the point is to get out without excuse and without vindication, for the moment you justify yourself you are back in it again. If I depart with one last Parthian anathema, judging them all and then escaping … they will meet me again around the next corner. It is another story: being in the court and not of it – forgiving and not judging. (Rather than judging and getting away unpunished.)
According to an ad of E. I. Dupont (stockbroker) in the N’Yorker I have a life-expectancy of another twenty years, so I ought to invest in life insurance stock – or something. All very bewildering. Another stockbroker says that women have “special investment needs” to which he will give “personal understanding attention.”
September 19, 1966
Merit of meditating on J. B. Clamence in Camus’s Fall. This is what one should not be in the solitary life. The false desert father (vox clamantis) [the voice of one crying] crying out only about guilt and trying to be innocent, i.e. not judged. And judging others in order not to be judged first. All this is irrelevant, an absurdity – the issue itself is a fiction. What is there to justify or excuse? Love takes care of it all. Whose love? Must I prove that I love? No, I hope in God’s love, i.e. in the incomprehensible. And in that love live at peace with myself and others. Someone questions the peace and asks to examine it. That’s his problem, not mine. It is not examinable.
September 20, 1966
In the pile of things I have lying around waiting to be read, I picked out today the mimeographed conference of Jacques Maritain (in December 1964) to the Little Brothers of Jesus on their vocation. The best thing I have seen on the “apostolate of contemplatives.” First he clears up the awful ambiguities of the phrase – which has degenerated into the purest cliché. He excludes all forced and artificial témoignage [witness]: artificial in the sense of the conscious or the self-conscious. For instance a funny sentence on the man who listens to a crashing bore with devout and overdone intentness as if he were an oracle. “That’s all right for the Opus Dei but it is not the vocation of the Little Brothers.” (Probably the trouble with Cursillo too – as it is too intently conscious, deliberate, organized.) Jacques emphasizes the “microsignes [microsigns]” of a Christian love that acts without awareness and is received without special or detailed awareness – the human and unconscious “aura” of a contemplative love that is simply there. (The implications of this would be frightening – if one were to realize that what counted was one’s being and not one’s acts. So aware that one is nothing!! And acts are nothing too! How dare to undertake this? This idea of presence in and to the world is fundamental. “Ce ne sont plus des murailles, ce sont des exigences d’un amour constamment épuré du prochain qui gardent et abritent leur contemplation d’amour.” [“These are no longer walls, but the demands of a constantly purified love for one’s fellow being which protect and shelter their contemplation of love.”]
He speaks of the Little Brother “present” in a Moslem city being a good enough reason why a Moslem lives and dies in Christ without ceasing to be a Moslem. But would it ever be the other way around too? A strange question: but a very real one to me!)
So important: this presence is not a “pre-apostolate” simply “softening up” the unbelievers for the coming of the missionary!
“La mouise confessionnelle des vocations religieuses – la mouise rêvée aux manies et aux particularités du monde catholique.” [“The confessional poverty of religious vocations – the dreamed of misery with the obsessions and peculiarities of the Catholic world.”]
Freely Catholic = without Catholic provincialism (which is of course un-Catholic. The official and forced universalism and centralism of
Post Trent Catholicism has made the Church provincial).
No special job to do. “C’est pourquoi leur vocation n’est pas la plus haute mais la plus abaissée, la plus au ras du sol – et du même coup la plus libre et la plus universelle. Tout travail oriente et entraîne et resserre la vie dans sa direction particulière.” [“That is why their vocation is not the highest but the most abased, the most flush with the surface – and at the same time the most free and universal. Every task orients and trains and binds life in its particular direction.”] The job = rails along which henceforth everything has to travel. Even contemplation is then drafted for a purpose.
But (he touches only lightly on this) the contemplative in the world is limited to inefficacy humanly speaking – not being able to “do anything for the poor with whom he lives.” “Ils se contentent d’être là: sur certains points sensibles du monde, où les hommes ont un terrible besoin d’être aimés par des coeurs voués à la contemplation.” [“They are happy just to be there: at certain sensitive spots in the world where men have a tremendous need to be loved by hearts vowed to contemplation.”]
The importance of a purely immanent activity (the contemplative does not do nothing). This can be basis for an incomparably deep understanding of another’s suffering.
“L’être humain ici bas dans la nuit de sa condition charnelle est aussi mystérieux que les saints du ciel dans la lumière de leur gloire, il y a en lui des trésors inépuisables, des constellations sans fin de douceur et de beauté qui demandent à être reconnues et qui échappent entièrement d’ordinaire à la futilité de notre regard. L’amour vient porter remède à cela. Il s’agit de vaincre cette futilité et d’entreprendre sérieusement de reconnaître l’univers innombrable que le prochain porte en lui. C’est l’affaire de l’amour contemplatif et de la douceur de son regard.” [“The human being down here in the darkness of his fleshly state is as mysterious as the saints of heaven in the light of their glory, there are in him inexhaustible treasures, constellations without end of sweetness and beauty which ask to be recognized and which usually escape completely the futility of our regard. Love brings a remedy for that. One must vanquish this futility and undertake seriously to recognize the innumerable universe that one’s fellow being carries within him. This is the business of contemplative love and of the sweetness of its regard.”]
Learning To Love Page 18