December 15, 1966
In confession (to Fr. Matthew) was talking about my resentment of petty harassment tactics on the part of the Abbot – in silly little things – mail especially – and this led to other things, his politics, his playing the monks against each other, his petty forms of tyranny. The whole picture is depressing in the extreme. There is nothing anyone can do to make it healthy. The community is really poisoned by all this, in a subtle way. No hope in visitations, no hope from higher superiors. No hope of his resigning – and no one special to take over his job. Fortunately most of us are stoical enough to shrug it off and live in peace. But the situation is wrong, destructive, dishonest, harmful. No hope of really carrying out in this monastery what the Council really calls for. Only a few gestures, a little face lifting – nothing more than a new coat of paint on the building and of course the air-conditioned Church, which was railroaded through by him before anyone knew it and then blamed on the building committee … It is a sick situation – and for some people the only honest thing to do is leave.
I think of Joan and Ira last week and all they were saying.
And got a card from Bob Wesselman today, married (was a Monsignor).
And so on. Depressing.
But one thing I know: as long as I am in the hermitage I can live according to my conscience, not anyone else’s! I am not pure either, but at least I can struggle honestly with my ordinary dishonesty and not inflict my problems on other people. I know at least this solitude and this responsibility and this privileged silence. And the need to pray.
Words of my Latin psalms have been driving themselves home to me lately.
Contribulasti capita draconum in aquis. [(You) who crushed the heads of monsters in the waters.]
Laetamini cum Jerusalem et exultate in ea, omnes qui diligitis eam in aeternum. [Rejoice with Jerusalem, and exult in her, all you who love her forever.]
Et factus est mihi Dominus in refugium, et Deus meus in adjutorium spei meae. [And the Lord has made himself my refuge, and my God the help of my hope.]
Convertere anima mea in requiem tuam, quia Dominus benefecit tibi. [Return, my soul, to your rest, for the Lord has done good things for you.]
Multiplicabis in anima mea virtutem …. Dominus retribuet pro me. [You will increase strength in my soul …. The Lord will repay on my behalf.]
December 16, 1966
It is good that I did not read Faulkner when I was not ready for him (of course Sanctuary thirty five years ago, but that was special) – like ten years back when Matt Scott sent me A Fable and I just glanced at it and tossed it back to him with total indifference – even agreeing with [Clifton] Fadiman (Fadiman!!) about Faulkner being unreadable.
Now is the time and now I see his true questions. The American prophet of the twentieth century (or at least the first half of it) – too great to be heeded by the nation. Has so much to say, so accurately for everybody – since what he says of the South applies to all the little Sutpens and Jason Compson[s] and Joe Christmases and Snopeses in the whole U.S.
Finishing notes on [Rafael] Alberti’s angels for Continuum [Spring, 1967].
Wrote again yesterday to Josefa Manresa, Miguel Hernandez’s widow. Learned more of his tragic innocence. How he foolishly treated Franco’s police and let himself be captured again – jailed near home, but with TB could not see his wife and child etc. On March 28, 1942 – a month after I got the novice habit.
A grand dawn – pre-dawn still – the long dark line of hills, the varieties of red and dark and purple in the sky, the chalk streak of a gone jet about the black trees, the lights, there in the farm building through the screen of bare oaks … grass underfoot slipping with unseen frost. I have become so used to the splendor of morning that I remain with my nose in books and don’t go to look at it. Same with stars. Yet last night the Swan was plunging down into the west through my high pines and when I got up Cassiopeia was swinging down into the north, the Great Bear over against her in the north east. The Lion sweeping up overhead out of the Southeast, and Arcturus out there over the dark oak wood at the top of the long field.
Made more coffee. From the silence of the valley I can learn that certain questions do not need answers of mine, or not now. Don’t make the Abbot too big a question. Don’t be too anxious about the ruin of this place which is now so rich, so stable (so likely to be abandoned because of him). The only thing is patience. Wait! Do nothing yourself. You will see. Constantes estote videritis auxilium Dominis super vos! [Be constant, you will see God’s help over you!]
December 18, 1966
Judgment will come. But Nolite ante tempus judicare [Be unwilling to judge beforehand]. Everything is still uncertain, hidden in hearts, the end not known, we do not see, we cannot see until God Himself throws His light into those depths. When he has, everyone will be praised. Tune erit laus unicuique a Deo. [Then will be praise to each one from God.] Until then neither blame nor praise.
[Amiya] Chakravarty’s fine pamphlet (a talk at Boston U.) on the “Emergent Plan.” Emphasis on compassion and Pacem in Terris [Peace on Earth]. He is to come here today.
An old issue of Choice. James Wright, Robert Bly are good poets.
December 20, 1966
Mild winter days and nights “for men and animals”!
Animals like Billie’s police dog that got my scapular all dirty with his paws, and the nice black pup that was there (first dog I would want to have – need no damn dog).
Went over there with Clem who was fretting over a meeting of the Monastery Council (Private Council rather) about work. He says the monks don’t work any more anyhow.
Against my own feelings, went there and called M. – felt it was right to take this opportunity though – a good but curious call. She had not yet got a letter supposed to have been mailed Thursday or Friday. Wanted to see me. Wanted to know about “the other night” – then when I said something about “trust and patience” she got a little funny and said “but is that enough” and began telling me to resist the abbot and take matters into my own hands. But in the end she seemed to be telling me to become Ahab and hunt him like a white whale. Finally though she realized I was not really agreeing and said, “Don’t worry over what I said.” And I said it was good to know what she was thinking. But I don’t feel she was realistic, except in terms of a sort of worldly go-getter mythology.
A sense of estrangement, of décalage [discrepancy] between her inmost self, which is so lovely to me, so simple, and this superimposed, determined, aggressive little worldly persona – which is I guess the one that gets her in trouble. The self she has learned to be in business, and is not her at all, the self that the nurses probably built with pop psych. in bull sessions in Lourdes Hall. And a crack about “Oh well, probably in a few years there won’t be any marriage any more anyway.” That jolted me. Because it doesn’t fit with the other things about loving each other forever. She has I think a funny and fluid memory and what she thinks is a stable set of ideas is really a very fluid process – so that I felt she was not talking to me anymore but to someone I had become in her mind in the course of our long separation.
Then today I glanced at a line of a letter I am writing her and thought “My God, this is a lie!” Perhaps. Anyway the whole thing is evolving – and we are evolving – and in our minds we still grasp on ideas of each other as we want ourselves to have been when it was best.
I am not going to worry about it. It will take its own course and there is no point in trying to force a special direction on it.
Astonishing value of Faulkner in this instance. Having read both The Bear and the “[An] Odor of Verbena” lately, I was intensely prepared for her and saw through it at once. This is not for me. I have my way to follow. If it becomes a choice … I am not sure whether it has to, but anyway, this suggestion gets nothing from me but “No.” I have my vocation to follow, and it is on a level she does not really take into account. Maybe she has done so at times before – but how seriously? Can she take it
seriously? Think back to Ascension Day and to June 11.
The real destructiveness of it (which I saw for a moment on Good Friday and wouldn’t do anything about) is beginning to be clear. And yet! And yet there is under it all the reality of that inner M. that I can never, never repudiate. But on that level, love has to be entirely “in God.” And she does not fully accept it. Her body is young and hungers. Mine is middle-aged and has its wild moments and its desperations too. There is the danger. The real danger. And now I know it.
December 22, 1966
Rinzai and another tremendous bout with Faulkner [The Wild Palms] – this time the convict and the woman and the river. Another fantastic myth, the void, the great power of evil, the alone man, the woman, their relationship, the ark – paradise – hell of snakes where the child is born – the primitive lake-dwelling huts of the cajun – the insensate return. As if the Flood with all its evil lifted humanity to a supreme level of stark, lonely meaning – nameless. The convict, the woman, the child is only a bundle, yet alive, and the boat. Marvelous passages on the River as the Void, from which comes inexhaustible, malignant power. And the frail but indestructible identity of man. And the silent presence of woman. A rending and shattering legend about everything.
December 28, 1966
Christmas has come and gone again – and I got through it alive. Actually it was quite peaceful, and I stayed out of everything, going only to concelebrate at Midnight Mass, and visiting Fr. Flavian in his hermitage Christmas Day.
Lovely cold moonlight – going down to Mass Christmas Night.
Came back, read notes and cards and bit of Sister Marion William’s thesis.
On my table, picture of Sy [Freedgood’s] pretty little daughter Julia looking sweetly at her horse.
Flavian’s hermitage doesn’t look as if it were lived in. Seems empty, uninhabited – one hardly knows if he has not yet moved in or if he is moving out. Yet he has been there since August. Two outsize ugly crucifixes – both slightly hideous in fact. A shower without water in which he stores things. Practically no furniture. No visible book. He was talking of a kind of prayer life in which there was practically no reading, only rosary and psalms. And not much work envisaged – except perhaps some job for the monastery. I came away feeling that it was all unreal. Or is it so real that it is beyond me? I have no confidence in it. But he may learn by experience. Anyway he is certainly not what I would call “settled.” A couple of phrases around to indicate that he did not much like being in the woods. “I don’t like nature the way you do” etc.
Yesterday [Feast of] St. John’s. I took a long walk in the knobs, even climbed the high one in the middle which I think is called Thabor, and followed the logging trail all along the top of McGinty’s hollow, out over the edge unto the hollow behind Donahue’s. Woods dark, windy, and cold. Sleet began to fall after I got home. Very bleak. A dead snake on the tall knob, had been killed – could only have been there a few days. Killed by a man? Most likely. It was too cold for snakes the last 3 or 4 days (down around 20) but evidently they can come out on warm days – this is peculiar, for they are supposed to hibernate! The whole thing was strange. Maybe it had been killed by another animal or by a bird. But why not disposed of, then?
Black winds. Tall stately pines. Rugged walls of the knobs. Distant woods and fields and farms beyond New Haven. Lonely wind. Thick carpet of leaves, wet and packed down, with snow still in them from Christmas Eve. Lonely, wanted to call M., but also coming to grips with the fact that I can’t keep calling and it is useless to think of trying to see her. A mind-blowing business. I still deeply love her and know she loves me. And I know the deep, permanent value of our love. And also its complicatedness. No end to it. But if we don’t get impatient, things will quietly work out with no fracas – and with a deep and lasting union of hearts.
December 29, 1966
Year ending. Yesterday I was looking at Dom Frederic’s lake with thin melting ice all over it and a screen of pine needles along the back and the blue warm clearing sky above it and was thinking of all that had happened this year. Crazy but good year anyway.
Finished Fr. [Augustin] Kishi’s book on Zen and St. Thomas [Spiritual Consciousness in Zen from a Thomistic Theological Point of View (Osaka, 1966)] – good on Zen and dutiful on Thomas and not really pulling the two together.
It is good to have accepted a man like Faulkner completely – then you can read and enjoy even an inferior book like Sartoris and watch him working and tolerate the trash that is there – not trash, but juvenile creation. Good really – though a little embarrassing (comic Negroes etc.). Now we are more “serious” than that but do we know anything?
December 30, 1966
Reading Letters from Mississippi – the SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] book [edited by Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez, 1965] about the 1964 Freedom project. Very good, very moving, it leaves you a little hopeless – sense of a transitional style in the Civil Rights movement – realization that it accomplished so little – yet was a great thing, especially for the white students and intellectuals who were in it. They profited most (and three were killed, of course).
The problem is not race only, but man. Race just makes it easy and simple for a certain type of mean bastard to mistreat other people with a good conscience. But there are all sorts of other excuses, and plenty of mean bastards to take advantage of them. And society will bless them every time. The harassment by petty officials and cops, little people with authority, bullies in every walk of life, people who systematically persecute and cheat and provoke and despise others and make their way in the world by depriving others of what they have coming to them. And the others having to accept it and be nice about it because otherwise life would be unlivable. How often I think my own relations with the abbot are nothing but “yassah white boss” ass-kissing relations. The latest petty humiliation – (they are so petty and cheap it is humiliating to write them down and so I almost never do!) – J. Laughlin sent a subscription to Poetry, and Jim Holloway a subscription to the NY Review. In both cases I asked the abbot twice if it was OK for me to receive them, and I’d like to. He said yes, he would see to it. I get one copy of each, no more. He hints that the secretaries are somehow losing them. The secretaries assure me he has them in his desk (probably reading them himself, though God knows what he’ll get out of Poetry!).
And yesterday he had the nerve to ask me how my spiritual life was getting on. “Yessuh white boss, mighty fine white boss. I’se only a simple ole niggah boy, white boss but de Laud he loves me!” It is all of course for my own good.
Even if all the problems of civil rights were solved tomorrow, the same mean bastards would be pulling tricks on other people “for their own good” – only some of the mean bastards would now be black.
Today I go to Louisville again to see the doctor. The bursitis is not bad enough to operate but has not cleared up entirely. Still I think I will need to go in less this next year – unless the back gets bad again. Fed up with it.
December 31, 1966
Cold day yesterday. Rode in on the truck with George – everything heavy with frost. Those same fields, farms, houses, junkyards, bridges rushing by. And the signs: Louisville, Louisville. The name Louisville will forever mean M., and her love. Struggle inside me, knowing once again it has to all end. That I cannot go on calling her every time I am in town. Still less go to town in order to call her. I did need to get this shot and also see another doctor about my ears.
Called her from the M.A. building. She was sleepy and sad (just waking up – had some sad days). Main thing she said – though she is changing from _______ to _______ Hospital on Jan. 2. She still wants to get away completely from Cincinnati and her family and the people there. And wants to go to Hawaii which sounds like an evasion. For a year she says. Still, maybe that is a good thing.
Lunch at Cunningham’s – some of the records on the juke box reminded me of her (“Together Again”) and I call her a second time from there
– more lively. I am still so powerfully held by her love and she seems to be by mine also. It is going to be a struggle to get all this straight, but the main thing I think is to get the phone calls etc. in order. Certainly there will be no more of these if she is in Hawaii. [ … ]
She wants to go to Hawaii at the end of February. Meanwhile she has sent another letter. We’ll see if I get it!!
PART IV
A Life Free from Care
January 1967–October 1967
Once again the old freedom, the peace of being without care, of not being at odds with the real sense of my own existence and with God’s grace to me.
April 10, 1967
January 1, 1967
Still night. Warm and rainy.
This year I have to get back to right order, and really make my meditation etc. what they ought to be. Actually my prayer life has not been bad but not good either. A certain radical shift in my relation to M. is necessary. An inner detachment. Time I think is working on both of us. Less calling, less writing too. If she goes to Hawaii all that will take care of itself. I am worried because she seems upset and unsettled. And there is really nothing I can do for her. Yet we love each other and can’t help ourselves much. Useless to say again that I know I have been foolish, have exaggerated, have been impulsive, have probably done more harm that I realize. Yesterday dark, rough, depressed day but after a lot of anguish it ended in hope and comfort and I went to bed, slept until I heard the bells pealing out in the rain, the first sound of the New Year.
While I was eating breakfast, read in Letters from Mississippi how the SNCC volunteers and the Negroes watched on TV the signing of the Civil Rights bill (July 2, 1964), knowing that as far as the South went it meant nothing. A Negro woman declared she was going to the local pool for a swim. Had to be dissuaded – she might have got herself killed. How hard it is fully to realize the utter enormity of the situation. All these people systematically and totally denied the simple needs and desires of the human heart! No question that this country is under judgment, and the moral blindness of the majority – of those in power – the total moral impotence of the system – are sufficient indications. It gets worse all the time and everyone is helpless. The gestures of a few are perhaps consoling, but achieve nothing important. Perhaps a little here and there.
Learning To Love Page 23