Therefore one cannot cease to be absurd by dint of metaphysics, or concentration, or meditation, or study, or knowledge: only by experiencing the fact that there is no wall between ourselves and others, in other words by accepting the absurdity of our own life in terms of the suffering of others: not separating “my” pain, suffering, limitation, lostness, etc. from that of others. As long as a single person is lost I am lost. To try to save myself by getting free from the mass of the damned (massa damnata) and becoming good by myself, is to be both damned and absurd – as well as antichrist. Christ descended into hell to show that He willed to be lost with the lost, in a certain sense, emptied so that they might be filled and saved, in the realization that now their lostness was not theirs but His. Hence the way one begins to make sense out of life is taking upon oneself the lostness of everyone – and then realizing not that one has done something, or “made sense” but that he has simply entered into the stream of realization. The rest will work out by itself, and we do not know what that might mean.
Where does one find this? I notice that someone like Bob Dylan has a better intuitive realization of it than the bishops and the clergy. “There is something happening here and you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mister Jones?”
But of course he has rejected the sin of being Mister Jones. Even Bob Dylan is not perfect. The imperfection is right, provisionally. What is said about Mister J. always has to be said since the problem of Mister J. is that he is not absurd. We go round in the circle. It makes no difference, once you know it is a circle.
To affirm the self by fulfilling desire: desire conditioned by the illusions of what people consider a fulfilled desire: turns out to be unfulfillable: hence absurdity: and one tries to hide the absurdity by fulfilling another desire. The beginning is to recognize the radical absurdity of desire.
So far so good. It is a familiar pattern. But it is only a sketch, a beginning. Because the desire to be without desire is equally absurd and unfulfillable. Camus thinks the answer is to be like Sisyphus, and accept the absurdity, roll the rock with immense effort to the top of the hill and let it roll down again, then start over: just keep at it. For no reason. To admit one has no reason for keeping at it is to be free. The glad acceptance of hell. “Let us suppose Sisyphus is happy.” But this is just as bourgeois as contenting oneself with the clichés: “Well, at least we tried.”
The other way is difficult: it means getting free, by realization, from total enslavement to an absurd self that has to be constantly reaffirmed against others but in their own terms. One must be accepted and not-accepted. Recognized with envy. Loved and hated. The proof that one has succeeded and has overcome absurdity. This is the ultimate absurdity. But to ignore this and go one’s own way is not enough. It is better than nothing. One needs to be against nothing, and one needs to take little or no account of the terms in which self-affirmation is considered possible or important. Then absurdity does not matter and one no longer has to care about it. There is a whole new frame of reference: compassion.
Basic: the struggle for lucidity, out of which compassion can at last arise. Then you are free. That is, you are lost: there is no self to save. You simply love. Free of desire for oneself, desiring only lucidity for oneself and others.
Monday evening
Lucidity does not prevent anguish. In spite of all these stoical considerations I am missing her tremendously today. The worst thing is to be unable to call, to hear her voice even. Several times I have wanted to get to a phone but it would be absurdly useless and would make things far worse. There is no question of the depth of my attachment to her. It is very deep, and the real depth of it is only just beginning to appear. How far down does it go? It is certainly deeper and stronger than anything I ever got into before. I need her love in the deepest possible way, and I know she needs mine. And there is now nothing we can do about it. I underestimated the power of this love, and was wrong in thinking that we could just keep it on the level of a friendly sort of affection, something rather detached and pleasant, not too involved. This was certainly not possible, and now I know it, and a strong physical desire is part of it. There is enough power involved in it for it to be ruinous for both of us. I am sure we will get through it because the circumstances, brutal as they are, will make it almost impossible for anything to go too far wrong. But we may have to suffer far more than we expected, or at any rate far more than I did, with my rather naive ideas about it all. It is of course easy enough to look back and say that “here” or “there” I should have turned another corner and got off the road. But is was not possible to get off that road. I was on it before I knew it, and going fast. At one point she saw the danger far more clearly than I did – and I talked her out of it. Or rather she saw how good my intentions were, and the basic innocence of it … The most intolerable thing of all is not to know what she feels, whether or not she needs my help, whether or not I can do something for her. Perhaps after all the most helpful thing is that we are kept apart in spite of ourselves.
There is a loud pump in the valley (irrigating). I have been drinking. Good thing they do not know I have the stuff here. It won’t last long at the present rate. Especially if that pump keeps me awake tonight. I fell and bumped my back. My arm hurts, my leg hurts, everything hurts. But I am not sorry for myself. There is no point in it. If only I can keep from thinking about her body maybe I can sleep … “Let us suppose Sisyphus is happy!”
(June 21, 1966)
The most shattering thing of all for both of us is the fact that a real and deep love has been blocked and prevented: was perhaps socially impossible anyway. Not just that we were compatible in so many ways, but we were open to each other in our deepest and most intimate need for full acceptance and understanding. We were: we are. But all communication is now blocked. Yet I think we are so open to each other that even when we cannot communicate, we remain somehow in contact, sharing our lives on a hidden level too far down for expression. We had been together so little, yet in the intense intimacy of the hours we did spend together we were fast learning every aspect, every inch of each other, not in the usual sort of collision of objects that love turns out to be, but in the need to give and surrender without disguise and without pretense, in our complexities and in our obsessions, in our deepest need for love, for comprehension. We are very different from each other in many ways, and for that reason very drawn to each other. I felt that if we had only had a chance, we could have grown magnificently together into a beautiful dual organism of love: we could have slowly healed and strengthened each other, brought out all that was waiting to develop, that was blocked, that was held back by society. But also there was a sort of double desperation about it: the sense that time was against us, that life itself would not let us fully live, because we could never live together. That soon it would all be stopped and we would fall back into our solitudes.
This torments me. I say we are different, and where we are most different is perhaps also where we are most the same. In our solitude, our aloneness. She is such a complete waif. That is perhaps what I most love in her – and it is what she wanted me to love, I think. I am too a waif. But for me that is a bit more complex because I am a man and men are not supposed to be waifs. There was, however, one point where I sensed that she fully knew and accepted and loved precisely this in me, and I had a great secret joy in it. I was very glad of that particular, small, symbolic surrender. But getting back to our aloneness: where we differ is that I accept it and I suppose both of us end up with most unsatisfactory solutions. Both of us wanted to pool our lonelinesses and make one reality out of two voids and because we saw that it was really possible, an immense hope was beginning to rise up in our hearts: perhaps especially hers, for she is not as resigned as I. Now the hope has apparently been shattered. I hope we can still go on with it in spite of everything.
Dear, we must not forget the reality of our love and the reality of the sharing, the penetration into our mutual secrets. We have really done this and do
ne it much more than lovers ordinarily do. We are really in possession of one another’s secrets, the inmost self of the other, in its glory and its abandonment. To have seen this in each other as we have seen it is a great gift of love, a great creative joy, one of the greatest and most awesome gifts of life: let us never forget this. Let us cherish the secrets that we have exchanged, more beautiful than any ring or any symbol of union, secrets that are unspeakable and cannot be explained to anyone for we alone will ever know them: we and God.
Yet behind all this is the fact that I could not say I was entitled to any of it. Or was I? I have ended up deciding for my vow and clinging to it, and yet I will never really understand on earth what relation this love has to my solitude. I cannot help placing it at the very heart of my aloneness, and not just on the periphery somewhere. But that is against all “reason” and all the Church believes. But don’t let me bring in the Church. Everyone would say that it is the Church that separates us. The Church in fact is blamed for everything. Is it really the Church? The Church is blamed for burning St. Joan of Arc, too.
(June 22, 1966) Wednesday
I dreamt in several different ways of trying to contact M. I cannot remember what the dreams were, only that the last one, before I woke up, was that I was sending a child to the hospital to tell her that I loved her. I realized this was most unsatisfactory but there was nothing else I could do. (I was aware that the child would just go in and say “He told me today he loves you” in an embarrassed sort of way and walk out again.)
I almost never dream of M. as she is, but of someone who, I instinctively know, represents her. Yet this girl is “different” from M. How does one explain this? Still, just when I wake up, the archetypal M. and the reality merge together: the M. I love in the depths of my heart is not symbolic and not just the everyday M. either, but the deep, mysterious, personal, unique potential that is in her: the M. that is trying to become free in my love and is clinging to me for love and help. Yet not that either, because it is the insecure and unreal self in each of us that clings so hard to the other. Even that has to be qualified, however. It was basically right that she should want me to make love to her fully, and there is no question that I wanted to do this in my heart. And yet now, because for me somehow the situation was all wrong, psychologically and spiritually, yet it did not matter. It seems to me now that with her, our love (at least as I see it) was and is so much the important thing that the details do not make any difference. But precisely at this point everything was cut short, bombed out, gutted. What should naturally have turned into a long warm, slow-growing, sweet love expressed in all its depth, has been amputated just when it was about to begin. And I have no right to complain because I have committed myself to another kind of life. As for her, at least I told her over and over what was coming. But the result is cruel for us both, and I am only just beginning to discover how cruel it really is.
I cannot regard this as “just an episode.” It is a profound event in my life and one which will have entered deeply into my heart to alter and transform my whole climate of thought and experience: for in her I now realize I had found something, someone, that I had been looking for all my life. I know too that she feels the same about me. No matter what happens I think we will both always feel that this was and is something too deep and too real to be essentially changed. What we have found in each other will not be lost: yet it will not be truly possessed either. Hence the awful loneliness, deprivation, desolation of being without each other, even though in our hearts we continue to love each other deeply. Yet we are going to have to face the fact that we now go separate ways, and that is what I think neither of us is quite willing to face. Can we really go separate ways? In a sense, no. We have to travel together in our hearts as long as we live. She says she can never love anyone else. That moves me deeply and breaks my heart, yet I know that she must someday love another, because it would be inhuman to expect such a deprivation in anyone’s life. As for me, I am supposed to be lonely and live alone and sleep alone, so I have no problem and no complaint. It is merely what I have chosen and the choice is ratified over and over each day. Even though I so vividly remember her body and long for her love.
Yesterday Fr. Joe Watt suddenly came (ex-monk, now in California) with John G. (former novice now a med. student in Louisville). Incredible number of people have been leaving, especially from the California monastery. This is certainly due to the deep ambiguities in the life of the Order, especially those kept in existence by people like Dom James. One senses the awful power of the resentment he has generated against everything he believes in and represents, so that what he considers the true “contemplative life” becomes hateful, nauseating to the people he is trying to influence. They get themselves finally in a position where they have to rebel against it. Those who do not rebel remain either as semi-comical and self-satisfied idiots, or else bitter and withdrawn individualists who keep to themselves and live their lives in their own way, salvaging what they can from the wreckage. That is my lot, I suppose. It implies rebellion as well as a certain exterior resignation. I am not proud of my resignation, but I think it is dictated by circumstances and by God’s will – I still don’t know what the future will bring. Perhaps some strange redress: or just the healing reactive work of literal creation. In any case, one senses the basically destructive and desperate nature of Dom J.’s brand of fervor. It poses an immense problem. But since I am now little concerned about the survival of monasticism (it will take care of itself, and the new small monasteries will continue as signs and sources of hope), I will not waste time worrying about it. He is a providential affliction, a kind of skin disease that I have to live with in patience. I loathe everything he stands for. And yet I can see that basically he is a man of good desires: but they have been twisted and corroded and he is now, without knowing it, a most inhuman person: even though there is so much potential warmth and concern. Under it all is a deep contempt for man, for love, and for the persons of his monks.
I wrote her a letter, a short one, for Joe W. to take out. It was a very poor letter, written in haste, when I could not think straight, and with all kinds of questions in my mind about it, since I have been strictly forbidden to write and therefore have to wonder about the necessity of any exception (I believe that exceptions can be made, but when they are strictly necessary only). Perhaps it was a useless letter but I wanted at least to give her a sign of life, and some reassurance, because I feel intensely at times that she suffers from our separation, and I can almost register physically the impact of love and longing and suffering that come to me through the evening and the night from Louisville. She must feel the same coming from me.
Last night about twelve-thirty I woke up convinced that someone was knocking softly on the door of the hermitage.
Last evening when Joe and John G. were leaving, I said jokingly, “Why not take me into Louisville with you?” But I was not really joking. I would certainly have gone if they had taken it seriously. But the whole thing was so futile, and so desperately silly. I know now that though I am drawn to this, it is not what I should do. I am no longer the unknown kid that can do things like that. I do have a responsibility. It is not just that I care about being found out here – and losing all the liberty and leeway I have in the hermitage – but it is a question of a deeper responsibility. Vocation is more than just a matter of being in a certain place and wearing a certain kind of costume. There are too many people in the world who rely on the fact that I am serious about deepening an inner dimension of experience that they desire and that is closed to them. And it is not closed to me. This is a gift that has been given me not for myself but for everyone, even including M. I cannot let it be squandered and dissipated foolishly. It would be criminal to do so. In the end I would ruin her along with myself.
It is a cool brilliant morning. The birds sing. The valley is full of sunlit mist. The tall fiery day lilies are opening to the June sun. I know I am where I belong. The books and papers are on the tab
le and work is waiting. I know the poets I must read (yesterday for the first time really got into Louis Zukofsky, who is certainly one of the great classic poets of our time. Great mastery and richness and structure).
I know I have to read, and understand, and think, and grasp, and experience. And this is easy and delightful to me. I have a rich life, but built on the central cost of cruel deprivation. That cruelty burns into my heart at times like a brand. But I know that I am not in a position to choose another kind of richness: that of love and living with M. I can have her love in a deep and lasting, very fruitful form, as long as it is part of my solitude. If I try to take it on other terms, the wall will crumble. She has desperately refused to believe this, and has in her own silent and womanly way challenged me on it, and tried to force the issue. The issue cannot be forced.
There is a lovely doe in the woods behind the hermitage. At times dogs come and chase her. Yesterday I saw her and them: she leapt into the open without seeing me, looked around in distress, then bounded off into another thicket. The dogs came presently and I fired at them with the twenty-two (that has be-bes in the shells). Stung one of them good, and perhaps hit the other (but he was still in the bushes – I fired twice) and they went away. I felt it had been worth while. These were different dogs from the ones I stung up the other day. (The two black ones.)
Back to the question of M. “challenging” me. There is perhaps an undercurrent of implicit argument – or there was at one point, like June 11 – between us. As if she wanted to prove in some way that erotic love had to win over everything else, that it had to affirm its priority, its deeper reality. I do not question its natural priority, its deeper reality and all that – especially when it comes to a confrontation between authentic love as experienced and an abstract, formal concept of the vows. On the other hand, my vocation is not a formality that I can evade or set aside with a mental operation. On the contrary, it is built more deeply into my experience than anything else in the world, and I am now completely identified with it. To test it is to test my own identity. Yet secretly I am glad that she thinks there is something else in me besides the monk and the priest, although she knows I am a priest perhaps better than I do (I have always had trouble really believing it, but at the moment the argument has been closed for us by fate – or whatever you want to call it).
Learning To Love Page 42