What is it that I have tried to evoke in her? I do not really know. I have no conscious project in that regard, and I never talk to her of spirituality, God and so on. It is her true self, her essential inner self that I seek, and it is this that has responded to me so beautifully. Yet at the same time I think her empirical and outer self has resisted this. She wants to stay on the comfortable plane of habit and anxiety that she is familiar with, and perhaps she feels that I am a threat to that. Actually, I think I was wrong to write all the long involved letters I wrote to her before we were stopped. I wrote too much about the wrong things, and these notes too will disturb her in many ways. They are about the wrong things – for her. But they are the things that come to my mind, and so they cannot be completely irrelevant. There is still something here for both of us.
But I know that analyzing and rationalizing are of very little help. With me this can easily be a vice.
Erotic love and the sleep of nature: the contentment of the body. Being drawn back into the general satisfaction of all nature, of society: but it is also a trap: to be deluded with all the self-justifying illusions with which society surrounds itself by means of sex. Uses sex to justify its hold over everyone. But ironically enough it uses chastity in the same way (in religious life). Both eros and agape are invoked in favor of various slaveries. Hence the agony and unquiet life of the deprived and alone man, necessary to keep alive creative discontent.
There has to be a real fear by which one orients his life. What you fear is an indication of what you seek. Usually there is a double fear and a double seeking. You fear to seek the wrong thing: therefore what you fear, you also seek. You fear to lose the right thing. Therefore seeking the right implies a fear of loss. Right and wrong here are not defined in terms of external norms, but in terms of one’s inmost need and calling. What do I fear most? Forgetting and ignorance of the inmost truth of my being. To forget who I am, to be lost in what I am not, to fail my own inner truth, to get carried away in what is not true to me, what is outside me, what imposes itself on me from the outside. But what is this? It can take manifold forms. I must fear and distrust them all. Yet I cannot help being to some extent influenced by what is outside me and hence I must accept that influence to some extent. But always in such a way that it increases my awareness, my remembrance, my understanding, instead of diminishing these.
Fear of ignorance in the sense of avidya: the ignorance that is based on the acceptance of an illusion about myself. The ignorance that comes from the decision to regard my ego as my full, complete, real self, and to work to maintain this illusion against the call of secret truth that rises up within me, that is evoked within me by others, by love, by vocation, by providence, by suffering, by God. The ignorance that hardens the shell, that makes the inner core of selfhood determined to resist the call of truth that would dissolve it. The ignorance that hardens in desire and willfulness, or in conformity, or in hate, or in various refusals of other people, various determinations to be “right at any price” (the Vietnam war is a clear example of the American people’s insistence on refusing to see human truth). Fear of ignorance that comes from clinging to a stupid ideal. Fear of ignorance that comes from submersion in the body, in surrender to the need for comfort and consolation. Yet at the same time, one must not fear the possibility of relative lucidity in all these things, provided they are understood. There is a little lucidity in love, a little lucidity in alcohol, a little lucidity in religion, but there is also the danger of being engulfed more or less easily in all this. The great fear is then the fear of surrendering to sham lucidity and to the “one source” theory of lucidity – clinging to one kind of affirmation and excluding everything else – which means sinking back into ignorance and superstition. One of the worst sources of delusion is of course an exclusive attachment to supposed “logic” and to reason. Worse still when the logic and reason are centered on what claims to be a religious truth. This can be as deep a source of blindness as any in the world, sex included. One always has to distinguish and go beyond: one has to question reason in order to get to the deeper awareness of reality that is built into life itself. What I fear is living in such a way that life becomes opaque and one-sided, centered on one thing only, the illusion of the self. Everything else has to be defined in relation to this kind of ignorance. Once this is understood you can understand what makes me run – not only run in the sense of escape but run in the sense of tick. What runs and what ticks is, however, no longer important. What is important is that life itself should be lucid in “me” (whoever I am). I am nothing but the lucidity that is “in me.” To be opaque and dense with opinion, with passion, with need, with hate, with power, is to be not there, to be absent, to non-exist. The labor of convincing myself that this non-existing is a real presence: this is the source of all falsity and suffering. This is hell on earth and hell in hell. This is the hell I have to keep out of. The price of keeping out of it is that the moment I give in to any of it, I feel the anguish of falsity. But to extinguish the feeling of anguish, in any way whatever short of straight lucidity, is to favor ignorance and non-existence. This is my central fear and it defines my task in life.
Wednesday Afternoon
It is hot. I have been uneasy and depressed, especially since after my Mass, when it seemed to me that my blunt and hasty letter of yesterday must have hurt M. unnecessarily (she must have received it at about that time). It was a carelessly written, almost thoughtless letter, done in a hurry in order to get something on paper to send her, and in the midst of worry about whether I could legitimately send it. In the end it was probably more of a shock than a consolation to her. It was intended to comfort her. To tell her that I love her. All it told her was that I was worried and mixed up and that it was very likely that we would never really be able to see each other again except perhaps for a brief moment – and that would perhaps only be to say good-bye. She has perhaps not realized this, though it has been plaguing me for the last week. It is simply awful to think that something so good, so rewarding, so helpful, has to “end” as far as its outward expression goes. And it is awful, too, to think of the risk that in trying to accept this we may hurt each other more. One thing is sure: that I will never stop loving her, and that our love in that sense cannot have an “end” even though we may not be able to meet, or to embrace or even to call on the phone, or exchange letters (except perhaps very rarely and surreptitiously). It is awful that it has to be like this, but once again it cannot change our hearts, or the love that is in them, if we do not let it.
Still, the whole thing has got me feeling miserable about everything. About myself, my life, everything. It seems to me that I have made a mess out of everything. I have not been either a good monk or a good lover. I have been nothing. I have tried to be things that were incompatible and have ended up only hurting her and leaving her sorrowful, confused, pained. In getting the pieces of my own life together, I have really done little that can help her: except I honestly feel that in being myself I can help her best. But what will she make out of all these notes, assuming I can give them to her somehow? Will they just make things worse? This is one of those wretched afternoons when everything seems wrong, in fact seems completely ruined. Part of this is due to the fact that I have not heard from her, have not been able to, and do not know what she feels or thinks (I am sure she loves me, but still it is nice to be told so) or what is going on in her heart. Yet this is going to be our usual condition from now on, for long periods. But I do think we are entitled at least to hear a little from each other from time to time, to exchange a few words at least, to say we have not forgotten each other.
All this shows, once again, that you cannot love without getting hurt. But if I start complaining about getting hurt, then does it mean that I regret loving? No. In the first place it does not worry me that I am hurt, but that I may be hurting her. And in the second place, we both know enough to anticipate that we would be badly mangled in this inevitable separation and we went toward it
with our eyes open. The days we had together in May especially, and early June too, were the reward for taking that risk. They were days of perfect love. Now we have to be mangled a bit. If we can only remember what that love meant, we can see that the fact that we are a bit torn by this brutal separation need not mean too much. We can survive it and our love is stronger than the hurt. It will continue, and will even grow, if we only let it. But the trouble is that I am weak and insecure and let myself get shaken: and then let her see that I am shaken, and this may perhaps unnerve her and make her start blaming herself – as if there were anything to blame herself for. We both went into all that we did with our eyes wide open. We knew what it meant and what it might cost, and I think we have accepted it realistically. But it still hurts, and we are still shaken, and confused, and in pain. Poor darling, don’t let me hurt you by my stupidity and uncertainty. I do love you and will never stop loving you, and I believe in your love too. The pain will change nothing, and we can stand it because in our hearts we are not separated, we are suffering it together.
(Wednesday Evening)
Well, I did some work (preparing conferences) and then went out to empty my mind and do a little Zen for a change and get limbered up. Got my mind good and free (what mind?) when suddenly a couple of hawks came along and did a little sharp ballet overhead, slicing here and there through the quiet sky. It was very pretty. After that I was thinking of what some old Zen joker said about “until you know the mind is no mind you do not understand it” and of course he is right: all the worried thoughts I have had today are not “my mind” and the thinking that goes on when I am like that is not “my mind.” Whatever it is, it is not I. And then I realized how free one can really be. All these worries and anxieties have nothing to do with love either. I can bog down in them if I want to, but when I do I need not kid myself that this is “love.” On the contrary, love is quite free and unconditional. It loves without seeking to explain itself even to itself. It does not, in other words, look for conditions under which it is reasonable to love, or right to love, it simply loves. And that is how I really love M. I love her unconditionally, straight, and always will. Because I will not be looking for conditions that will change it. True, externally we are hindered, but that does nothing to the essence of a love which is unconditional, for I do not say I will stop loving when I cannot see her or hold her close to me. I simply love. And all these worries about it are silly. Of course, there remain my vows. They are certainly a condition. But external, and they too do not need to affect the heart of my love for her. There is nothing in my vows that says I cannot love her in my heart, for her own happiness and salvation in God.
June 23, 1966
What will I be without her? What will she be without me?
First of all, we cannot really be without each other any more. There is something completely permanent and irrevocable in our lives: the love that we have known in each other, that has changed us, that will remain with us in a hidden and transfigured – transfiguring – presence. “Derby Day is always beautiful.” The beautiful “day” of our love, love’s creation in our lives, will remain as the day in which we most deeply live and walk together. I will never be without the mysterious, transcendent presence of her essential self that began to speak to me so stirringly and so beautifully those early mornings in May between sleeping and waking. She will always be to me her soft voice speaking out of the depths of my own heart saying that the central reality of all is found in our love that no one can touch and no one can alter.
Hence no one can say that our love has nothing to do with the truth of our lives – as if it were something like an attack of flu or an unfortunate accident. That is the logic behind the prohibitions that have been inflicted on me. (I do not deny there is a certain logic in separating us, but why can’t we sometimes write to each other, or talk to each other on the phone? If things were not so unreasonable here, we would have gone less far, for we would have been visiting nicely like everyone else within view of the gatehouse and talking properly like good children. It could have gone on a long time and no damage to anyone.)
I have needed this love, and being without it is something I cannot yet grasp – that is, being without the chance to see her at all. Frankly, if things were not what they were, I can see that it would be terribly right and important for me to change everything and live the rest of my life with her. From a certain point of view, that is what should have been. But that was impossible. Hence all the ambiguities that follow. To be without her is to be without the fulfillment of the deepest love I ever experienced. It is in a sense to be deprived of a central meaning in my life. It is to remain incomplete and to some extent maimed. But also I probably could not have coped fully with the problems that would have arisen from our social situation. Anyway, what is, is.
Being without her, on the other hand, puts me in a state of permanent trial, facing the question whether or not the whole religious life and all it implies is not a big illusion. Whether or not I have simply missed all the boats there were to miss. From a certain point of view it can be put this way: “You had your last chance to get with reality. You found what few people manage to find, someone made for you, for whom you were made. You should have had the courage to throw everything overboard and simply go and live with her. You should have gambled on love, and you would have won. As it is, you are stuck with a futile and absurd existence in which besides knowing your failure and your ambiguities, you will now spend the rest of your life manufacturing alibis.” If that is true, then I am really up a creek. And if the temptation is to manufacture alibis, then I had better not start arguing about it, or I will manufacture alibis.
All I can say is that I don’t honestly feel in my heart that I have either missed a boat or got on one. To me, frankly, the possibility of going and living with her – marriage being more or less impossible by Catholic standards – remained a pure abstraction, mere theory. It would be simply impossible for me in fact. It would destroy me completely. If I experience this so deeply, then it is at least a fact to be taken into account. (Alibi?) I experience it, and I feel guilt about it, as if I should have been above all contingencies: as if life expected me to somehow jump over all the barriers, sweep everything aside, etc. Well, I didn’t.
In the quiet morning air I hear a woodpecker drumming on a tree. Once again the sun is rising on this misty valley. Is this right or wrong? The question turns out to be completely stupid. I hear a crow down the valley. A car passing on the road. Good or bad? I live a life that ought to train me not to ask such questions at all.
So too in love: I think it is the nature of love in our society today to raise a lot of irrelevant questions. As if from the moment one kissed someone there were ultimate problems to be solved: the whole question of life and death and the universe, heaven and hell, Christ and antichrist. It comes from the feeling that one risks his life in loving another. He puts his life in the scale with love. He sticks out his neck. This is true, but mostly on the level of social illusions. (An illusion is a fact after all, even though it remains an illusion.) The problems of love arise out of a certain popular mythology about love: the “they lived happily ever after” myth, or the more modern one about sexual fulfillment, etc. We can’t help thinking in those terms, we are conditioned that way. In my own life such thinking is supremely misleading, because I have chosen a different way, a different dimension. You can’t judge by five standards at once.
Hence for me a supposed choice between a religious ideal and an ideal of marriage is a mere mental game. I am caught in fact between two unsatisfactory legal conditions neither of which offers me any real fulfillment: and what I really have to do is the same thing I have always had to do: to find my own way, without a map, taking neither this nor that except in so far as I have to, and working it out as I go along. As I understand it, this means in fact living as an absurd kind of hermit when I am really not a hermit. Living as a writer when I am not sure I want to write any more, or what I want to writ
e, living as someone who is identified as a typical monk when I have the most serious reservations about everything that is going on in the monastic life, etc. etc. What is this? It is only my usual condition. What is important is that, in this condition, I have been to some extent accepted, understood and truly loved by another person who lives in other contradictions, and who is capable of understanding what I go through. If we can continue to share this understanding, life will be easier and the way plainer for both of us.
The tyranny of diagnosis: the diagnostic compulsion which makes us think of everything in terms of cause and effect, pathological cause and effect. Not only do we always uselessly ask questions about good and bad, right and wrong, but we immediately look for the reason, the cause, the source of “what is wrong.” Maybe there is nothing wrong. Maybe the guy is just trying to live and grow and to come to terms with his own inner truth. But we substitute an artificial, mythological norm for our own inner truth, and when it blocks our growth and happiness, we look for mythological reasons. We diagnose in terms of myth, to justify the myth at our own expense. Science, or society, has to be right. Or what we have told ourselves about ourselves has to be right. We depend on the myths we fabricate (with the help of others) and block our lives by resorting to them. To diagnose is to “decide” arbitrarily that such and such is wrong, and for such and such a reason. Once one has “decided” one conducts himself accordingly – in such a way as to make it plain that one decided right. Thus one destroys himself. And perhaps there was nothing whatever wrong, from the very beginning. (Note: “wrong” does not mean necessarily “morally wrong”; one can live by a rigid and doctrinaire myth of amorality and pseudo-psychology. There are even more compulsions in a society where ethics have become vague and indistinct. Compulsions that are more elementary, more crude, more haunting, more rooted in the body, more gripping, more destructive and above all more convincing. It is in terms of these compulsions that we diagnose everything.)
Learning To Love Page 43