Bob Shepherd sent a couple of Traven books and I read two stories during the evening. I enjoyed them. Traven is a good story-teller anyway. But the real discovery of these last days has been David Jones. Rich, exciting, resonant, witty, Catholic poetry: the only really good Catholic poet writing in English that I know of except Peter Levi. Ping sent the D. Jones issue of Agenda. The verse and art, beautiful, and I enjoy the critical articles.
September 18, 1967
The weekend has been good. Fasting on Saturday is a very helpful thing, at least when the days are fine and instead of eating I can wander in the woods. This time, finished Two Leggings – a rather sad, futile sort of book. With all his striving for powerful visions and strong medicine he never got to be chief. Fought the Sioux on the side of the whites – and the whites took away the Crows’ land anyway.
In the end a white officer gave him a five-dollar gold piece. Sunday was great. Discovery of the Zapotecan city of Monte Alban in new book edited by J. Paddock. Re-reading Mosley on the Mayas. Sacred cities in center of sparsely populated rural areas. Cult centers without army and without King. An ideal, peaceful civilization. No one knows why it finally folded up. Same all through Mexico in the “Classic” period. Zapotecs, Mayas, Toltecs. Violence came with decadence. Aztecs were the last end of it. The final corruption.
I am very tired of the Sunday evening talks. Still on Sufism. But uninspired.
I really need the quiet, the silence, the peace of the hermitage and have been very foolish to create so much destruction for myself. Especially this idiot running around, when I am in town or away from the monastery for an hour or two. I do not remember any of it with pleasure. I used to have fewer visits. This month has been good – it always is – because the guest house is full of the diocesan clergy.
September 20, 1967. Ember Wednesday
Hot weather again. The Bishop came up to the hermitage yesterday (at my invitation and we had a talk and today he had me talk to the OMI [Oblate of Mary Immaculate] who is preaching the clergy retreat. Both were worried about the fact that so many priests “don’t like retreats,” “don’t like silence” and whatnot. And seemed to expect support from me. For my part I have no idea what the priests want or don’t want, and I don’t particularly care. I think they should be able to choose to make whatever kind of retreat they feel would really benefit them. Probably their objection (when it exists) is pretty much the same as that of the monks, a refusal to be herded into a room and lectured – to be dosed with official medicine instead of being allowed to choose something of their own. Personally, I am not attracted by what they seemingly do want – guitars, endless dialogue.
The retreat master gave me a copy of an article which I think explains the trouble – at least from the side of the bishops, Retreat masters, etc. They feel they are no longer able to sell the idea of a retreat. This is a disaster. If they can’t sell retreats, God himself must be letting them down. There’s something the matter somewhere!
But the Bishop is a good sort, and I guess life is not easy for Bishops these days!
Blue night-groups of lighted helicopters going back and forth in the dark, blat-blat-blat, an awful racket, making the place look like town and noises with their traffic and illuminations. Now I suppose that will go on every night for six months, until they find another game to play. Lately too there have been some sonic booms – three or four a day. I suppose we’ll get more. These are not very close. I’d hate to have them right over the house.
– More damn choppers!
September 22, 1967
John Slate is dead. He died of a heart attack Tuesday (19th) in St. Francis Hospital, Roslyn, L.I. I knew he had a bad heart. That was, in fact, what led indirectly to my getting in touch with him again after all these years – his fuming piece in the Atlantic Monthly about his hospitalization. I wrote to him about it. Then got a card from Oxford (this was last summer). Then this year I wrote to him about helping me draw up my will and that was how he came down this Spring. We had a good hot argument about Vietnam, in Louisville. And he was talking with the Franciscans at their Residence at Bellarmine!…
A brilliant day – warm, bright, early fall day, trees have not yet begun to change, grass still green, the lake at St. Bernard’s field was deep blue. Walked out there fasting and it was there I read the news of Slate’s death, around noon, and walked up and down in the sun trying to comprehend it. I know I too must go soon and must get things in order. Making a will is not enough, and getting manuscripts in order is not enough. These fast days seem to be the most lucid and helpful. Skipping dinner at noon and eating only once in the day, about 4:30 p.m. (a little coffee to keep awake at 4 a.m.), this makes for an easy, leisurely, alert day when you don’t have to be anywhere or get anywhere on time. A big chunk of meditation in the fields about noon, instead of dinner, seems very effective. Above all the change is stimulating.
Maybe I can get Julian Cornell, Ezra Pound’s lawyer, to take over my will after all. J. Laughlin had first suggested him. I have been trying for three years to get something done on this, but nothing ever seems to happen. That is what comes of being so far away from everything.
September 23, 1967
Evening. A good day in Louisville. Went in for a back X-ray and for my knee also. Both are tolerably good. Had lunch with Jim Wygal at Cunningham’s as is our custom. He was depressed at first but after a while we both cheered up. Talked of many things – who will be abbot (Baldwin?), the future of Gethsemani, whether I should stay on. We both agreed that I really was in the best situation I could expect at the moment. I was happy about it.
Leo Denoncourt and his wife and a Glenmary sister dropped in to our booth to say hello. I called Pat Welsh (of the M[erton] Room at Bellarmine) and we went to her house for a couple of drinks and some conversation.
Pat got married when she was in Ireland this summer and is now Mrs. Oliver. I am happy about that, and she seems very happy. On the way to her house we stopped at St. Joseph’s Infirmary and saw Fr. John Loftus, who has just been operated on for a cervical disc. Was lying in bed very hoarse after the beating his neck took. (Dr. Mitchell told me about this when I was in his office.)
The day was bright and cloudless from morning to night.
It was good to get back to the monastery and hermitage. Calves lowing in the dark and many crickets.
I was going to call J. Laughlin about the lawyer business but forgot.
September 29, 1967
Joyous feast of Archangels, and now at dawn in the South under Sirius appears there a great smooth ancient hogback mountain of cloud – as if it had been there for a million years.
Heavy rain for two days, now it is clearing and cold. Yesterday was quiet and lonely in the hermitage with rain batting down interminably and a fire on the hearth (partly for burning of papers). Once again I am trying to get things in order. But the avalanche of paper goes on. I have got to get some new system of active resistance. Throwing stuff away down in the monastery before even bringing it up here. Simply not answering letters. (Yet as soon as you say that something more heart breaking than ever comes in and you have to acknowledge it – or some business presents itself and I am sold on it.)
The other day Barry Garfunkel in Slate’s office called and says he can set up a Trust for my writings. I hope he can get to see J. about it and something can finally be got on paper. I called J. myself on Sunday about the possibility of getting a lawyer down here (John Ford maybe). We’ll see about it. Meanwhile Pat Oliver and Martha Schumann came out Wednesday and we went over some papers – sitting in the car under the first downpour of the long rain. They got away with some photos of mine that had just come back from Griffin’s (I am getting Gregory Griffin to develop and print up some of my new root pictures).
Though Dom James has tried to keep it quiet, the news of his resignation is all over the house. He is leaving Monday (Oct. 2) for a tour of the daughter houses and then the meeting of the American Abbots.
September 30, 196
7
A fine clear silent night. During meditation – listening to the vast silent coldness and sleep of woods and awakeness of stars.
Last night I had a strange dream about starting on a journey somewhere with Dom James – but I was having trouble finding clothes to travel in!
I am beginning to get acquainted with G[aston] Bachelard (discovered him through David Kilburn at Birmingham U.). Tried his Psychanalyse de Feu [The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Paris, 1938] and found it rather obvious so I am dropping it and taking up La Poétique de l’espace [The Poetics of Space, Paris, 1948] which is quite another thing again! Very good material – phenomenology of poetic experience. And he is not afraid of ontology either. I suppose now that the Catholics are abandoning ontology the secular thinkers they claim to be imitating will rediscover it.
Bachelard’s phenomenology of poetry is of course first of all a phenomenology of language – and an anthropology of man as “un être parlant [a speaking being].” I wonder if there is any connection with Parain. I keep wondering back to this.
Yesterday sent the Cain song from Lograire to Hudson Review.
“Quel charme l’imagination poétique trouve – se jouer des censures!” [“What charm the poetic imagination finds in making light of censures!”] Bachelard
October 2, 1967. F[east] of Guardian Angels
I love this feast. Hope my angel is not mad at me. Are you?
The Indian emphasis on encounter with one’s “vision person” and obeying him thereafter. Beautiful and very real.
This morning I read Ruth Benedict’s essay on the Pueblo Indians as an Apollonian culture surrounded by Dionysians. Extremely comical, for the insight it gives into Ruth Benedict surrounded by imagined rapists. And the trouble she gets into, her efforts to justify breakthroughs of the Dionysian even in her favored area – above all the business of ritual shit-eating and piss-drinking. I am afraid she doesn’t win. Oh, all the poor dear lady anthropologists – and Margaret Mead is another.
More seriously: Bachelard’s intuitions are most fruitful psychologically. In his study on houses, rooms etc., “demeures,” he suddenly opened up a whole set of obvious questions for me.
The hermitage – OK.
But the Merton Room – to which I have a silver key, and where I never go, but where the public go – where strangers are and will be.
A bloody cuckoo’s nest.
This becomes a typical image of my own stupid lifelong homelessness, rootlessness.
Ambiguities at work here: the pretended “roots” at Gethsemani, where I am alien and where most everyone else is alien too. Yet paradoxically to many people I am completely identified with this strange place I can’t firmly believe in. Where all these people with vows of stability are so obviously on the point of taking flight (and don’t know it) or else simply staying by force of repression. Even the ones who are at home here remain alien though they don’t realize it. Dom James. Br. Clement. Fr. Anastasius. Certainly their deep personal investment in the place is so complete that they are inseparable from it. And all the dead whom no one remembers.
I am here to a great extent because of the guilt and force exercised by Dom James. He knows it and I know it. Yet there is nowhere else I want to go. Also I have a kind of legal, factual separation from the common roof and board, here in the woods. The hermitage is a more personal reality of some sort – however ambiguous.
But the Merton Room.
A place where I store away endless papers, in which a paper-self builds its nest to be visited by strangers in a strange land of unreal intimacy.
Knowing Pat Oliver and Martha Schumann who take care of it, this is a good thing. It becomes a recognizable kind of enterprise, a form of communication. A “demeure” (demur? demure? De-mural. With and without walls. Glass walls looking over to the madhouse!!).
The Merton Room is a kind of escape from Gethsemani, a protest against their messing up, destroying, losing, frittering away, dispersing, rotting, canning, feeding to mice everything I have put my heart into.
The anxiety I have felt lately is due probably to the surfacing awareness that all this is futile – a non-survival, more alien to me even than Gethsemani to some extent. A last despairing childish effort at love for some unknown people in some unknown future. But this is Rilkean. Hell, it is Peter Pan. It is no good. All right if they do like what I have written – or don’t – if they understand or don’t – this is only a kind of non-communication in the end. It is not what I am so desperate for (and what I am supposed to have forgotten).
Part of the trouble is the questioning of the whole traditional concept of monasticism. The liberation that has to be there (or else the whole thing is a lie). But is it?
Is it really there? Does “willing it” make the difference?
The only issue, in reflexion, is by dialectic maybe.
But really there are situations that are only lived: they do not exist in reflexion.
My living seems so haphazard, so open to unpredictable swings and veering, such risky emotion: I see how easily I could go the way of Fr. H., poor guy, who has not stayed at the parish in California and is on the run again. Poor, poor guy. And in some ways one of the best, who put so much into the big illusion here, in his years with that incredible houseful of brother novices. Of course all that was madness. Part of Dom J.’s madness – and mine, with the book!
Merton Room again – ambiguity of an open door that is closed. Of a cell where I don’t really live. Where my papers live. Where my papers are more than I am. I myself am open and closed. When I reveal most I hide most. There is still something I have not said: but what it is I don’t know, and maybe I have to say it by not saying. Word play won’t do it. Or will do it = Geography of Lograire. Writing this is most fun for me now, because in it I think I have finally got away from self-consciousness and introversion. It may be my final liberation from all diaries. Maybe that is my one remaining task.
Importance of the fact that Thompson Willett is on the M. Room committee, and that the break between us – for no real reason – the other day is in reality a deep break between me and the fans. Their illusion of me is seen to be completely out of touch. They have trusted me in building something like a house I myself once built and then destroyed. I frighten them! Maybe I frighten myself! But there is no question that my world and the world of Thompson Willett have nothing in common. And neither of us wants to pretend.
Deeper problem – to avoid a stupid and unnecessary consistency. I don’t have to frighten them all away just to recover my sense of identity. It is not like that!
October 3, 1967. St. Therese
Good as he is, subtle, fascinating, Bachelard does not go deep enough. The spaces and houses, the attics and garrets, the cellars and homes, are those of reverie and not of meditation. Centers of intimacy for the incubation of passion and poetry. And that is all right.
But it is also all wrong if there is not a deeper discussion, beyond reverie and poetry. A mere space for reverie, a phenomenological solitude, a house of imagination, will eventually get corrupt. That is the trouble with Rilke, again! (Yet I respect his love for the house where most of the Elegies were written. The garden of that solitude had in it the rose that poisoned him.) There has to be a deeper meditation, beyond dreams, beyond imagination, beyond biography and beyond psychology.
Hence the danger of forgetting the “interior man” and living only in phenomenology and the experienced self. The madness of wanting to integrate and unify man by reducing him entirely to his exterior self. His true unity comes from the discovery of a non-experienced self, an invisible, non-phenomenal, non-volitional, non-acting self, a self of liberty, a dwelling “in God” who has no house. Eckhart’s castle where even the Divine Persons don’t enter – only the Godhead. I don’t know if I can agree with that – it seems to misunderstand the very root of theology! – but anyway this No-house with no-walls, the Abyss, not “where,” not “which,” but the Abyss (purely) is – God and self in one. Bey
ond (metaphysical) Atman [Hindu name for the individual, eternal spirit or soul].
Yesterday I heard from Catherine Meyer (of Harper’s) that Sy Freedgood was in the hospital with an inflamed heart.
October 7, 1967. F[east] of the Holy Rosary
Dreams which I can’t fully remember – voyage – woman: a dark girl and I (M. and I, I guess) decide to wear kilts. I will put on MacGregor Tartan and thus identify with my “true” ancestors. But the red seems startling, unfamiliar. Islands. Journey. Bull. Horse. All sorts of images. She releases the bull but we are safe … etc.
Glad to have finally got some work done. Wrote on Two Leggings, the Crow Warrior and his fasting for vision. Then Preface to Japanese translation of New Man.19 Then yesterday afternoon the piece for Msgr. Fox’s Spanish Harlem photo book. It is perhaps unreasonable to undertake all these things but each is also an act of love and communion – Indians – Japan – Puerto Ricans.
I am really most excited by the sophistication, versatility, scope, horizons of Lévi-Strauss. In Le Cru et le cuit [The Raw and the Cooked] one tends to get snowed under by the sheer mass of material, concentrated in Brazil. But La Pensée sauvage [The Savage Mind] is more universal and gives a clearer exposition of his understanding of the epistemology and logic based on the idea of species. Real cosmic and “contemplative” quality – aesthetic and scientific at the same time – yet with a sophistication that excludes romance and reminds us we are moderns, not neolithics – but that neolithic thought is more relevant than we think – more sophisticated and complex than some modern “scientific” common-sense categorizing.
October 8, 1967
Best thing about Lévi-Strauss: he makes you work. There is no nonsense about it and if you want to keep up with him you have to run. No idling along, no clichés, no rehashing of familiar material: masses of new stuff, organized in an extremely wide and complex way, with multiple intersections you have to remember. Only if you move fast (and sometimes know where to begin skipping) do you get the whole view. But once you have caught sight of where you are going, you have to work. Because you know you are really coming out somewhere with someone who has extraordinary views and is ahead of everyone (even though he may be “wrong”). It is not just a question of getting a “right answer” to a problem but a whole view of many problems together which are basic to man. Problems of thought, knowledge, culture, man’s relation to nature, to himself, intercultural relations, science, art, etc. etc. “Paradigmatic relationships” and “syntactical chains.” Bachelard too has tried this “bricolage” but he is not as energetic as Lévi-Strauss and he deals in aesthetic trifles. Compared with L.-S., Bachelard is flaccid and uninteresting, except for occasional intuitions. Lévi-Strauss is much deeper because he deals in the basic substance of experience and discourse in primitive society – the raw matter and the primitive luxuriance of forms. Bachelard gets at it only in indifferent and recent poetry where the matter has gone thin and everything has long since been worked out of it.
Learning To Love Page 38