I hope I have not given the impression that I am always trying to find out “what is wrong” with myself – or with her. I don’t think that really there is a great deal “wrong” with either of us. It is just that we are hurt and broken up inside and are trying to get ourselves together without getting a great deal of help from anyone, and often doing the job badly for ourselves. Inevitably, when one is lacking in wholeness he tries to pull himself together in such a way that he keeps himself broken (because he sees only a part of himself and thinks this is the whole. Trying to consolidate a part in itself, means breaking it off from the rest which one does not apprehend or realize in himself). We could have helped each other a great deal by the realization that our love had given us, of the wholeness of the other (not by any means the ability to diagnose and analyze). We could have brought about that wholeness by simply loving – though it is always possible that we could have used love to consolidate partial aspects of our own selves, and this would have been useless and destructive. Were we beginning to do this? I don’t know. It is still possible for our love to fulfill something of this function: helping each other to be “whole” and “complete” in some way. But much more difficult without contact, without talking, without communication. Perhaps not really possible.
“Possible.” “Not possible.” Why do I keep struggling with these two ideas? The one thing that is not possible, for me, for both of us, is turning back. There is absolutely no going back to the old self, the old habits, the old anxieties. There is no going back to the time when I did not love her. All these other considerations are foolish. They seem to show that I hesitate on this point. As if there were some need to turn back, as if I had to turn back, and had to find some way of making it livable for myself. This is out of the question. I cannot turn back and even if I tried I could not live with it. There is only one way to go and that is forward, even though I have no notion where it will go and who it will involve. Everybody else says “turn back,” as if there were some norm in the past that I had to recover. That is what is impossible, there is no “back to normal.” The normal is now, on the way to the unthinkable. To what I cannot know because it has not even begun to develop. I beg God that it may develop in us both together and that we may somehow share it, and that it will be only one thing: love.
(Thursday Evening)
It has been a hot afternoon. Stuffy, stupefying. I have forced myself to get some letters out at least: letters to De Martino (authority on Zen asking me to write for Suzuki’s new magazine – or revived magazine), to a Benedictine Prior in the Congo, to a French girl who was writing to me for direction when she was at Mount Holyoke and has now gone back to France (a friend of Daniélou’s) and so on. Had to force myself to write the letters. Everything has been going into letters to M. or poems, or things like this journal. Doesn’t matter. But there are other people in the world too. Then said the office of St. John the Baptist with joy, though God knows if he would recognize me as anything but a sinner needing the whip. Went down for supper, raided the kitchen for peanuts and potato chips and then discovered that I had some chips left over from Ascension day (our marvelous picnic in the woods). I have a few cans of beer so since it is a hot night …
I have been rereading these pages. Badly written, incoherent, but there is still something there. Or perhaps I only think that because I am feeling mellow and uncritical. Anyway, I think I have said what was going on in me, but not all, and not the deepest. Just the worried, self-searching part of it. I suppose I have been trying to find myself again without her, to recognize myself as entirely and unequivocally solitary. Not an easy job.
So I go and get another beer. The supply is already running out. I only had five cans. It is a hot night. Where will I be when the dark falls and the dragons come and there is no more beer?
Darling, at this point I could easily get garrulous. A kind of shame prevents me. I don’t want the beer to do all the talking. You know, always with us it has been someone else doing a great deal of the talking. I mean we have not talked much at all. Perhaps we ought to have said more. But yet our love said everything. Or did it? In a way it did, and yet you can’t trust affection to tell the whole story. It would have been good if we could also have just sat around and talked. Yet it was so wonderful to hold you, and I knew it would not last. Each time might be the last time. Yet that put a wrong perspective on it, or at least a distorted one.
Why can that beast Raymond have all these people coming out to see him every day? And not I? It comes of this crazy racket of being a hermit. There are people in the house who are hoping to be hermits one day (wait till they find out) and they have all their hopes pinned on me. There is a “hermit movement” (God help us) in the monastic orders and I am supposed to be a shining example. Here I am crazy mad with love and sitting around the hermitage drinking beer like a damn fool. (Running out though.) Thus I have to be a model, I am a pilot project. If they want to go on the rocks, just let them follow me.
This is silly. I don’t mean it that way.
It has been a long time since I just sat and drank beer. Years in fact. It takes me back to the time when … (Oh God, there we go again) … I was a kid on Long Island and so on.
There is no point wasting time and paper on that kind of stuff. It seems to me very likely, dear, that if we had got married you would have found yourself hooked to an alcoholic ex-priest. That would have been very unpleasant. It is better if I continue to be a bit exalted. If I live in woods and seek stimulation from Sufism or something. More entertaining and less destructive. And doesn’t do any harm to other people.
The fact that I have not discarded the last page is positive proof of my heroic trust in you. That is absolutely the worst writing I have ever done in my life: as bad as the song I wrote. (Why?) There is no question that there is a flaw a mile wide in me somewhere. But there is no point in a prolonged self-examination on that point now.
They have now got an irrigation pump going on the other side of my place, nearer and louder. This is going to be an interesting night.
I can now see with absolute clarity how easy it would be, living alone, to become a completely non-existent thing, a non-person. All you need to do is take yourself seriously. And try to exist. Will it. Get God to back you up in your insane project.
Why do I live alone? I don’t know. The whole question of my love for M. has got me backed up to the wall on this particular choice. As if there were a choice. Actually there is not even a choice, really. I have to lead this absurd existence. In some mysterious way I am condemned to it. Not as to something wonderful and mysterious, but as though to a vice. I cannot have enough of the hours of silence when nothing happens. When the clouds go by. When the trees say nothing. When the birds sing. I am completely addicted to the realization that just being there is enough, and to add something else is to mess it all up. It would be so much more wonderful to be all tied up in someone, to work for someone, to come home and love her to have a child, and I know inexorably that this is not for me. It is a kind of life from which I am absolutely excluded. I can’t desire it. I can only desire this absurd business of trees that say nothing, of birds that sing, of a field in which nothing ever happens (except perhaps that a fox comes and plays, or a deer passes by). This is crazy. It is lamentable. I am flawed, I am nuts. I can’t help it. Here I am, now, sweated up, in a misty foul summer evening when all is loused up to the neck, happy as a coot. The whole business of saying I am flawed is a lie. I am happy. I cannot explain it. I cannot justify it by pretending I am guilty. I love you darling, I love you in this mad life that I lead. I miss you, I wish I could see you, I wish I could hold you and love you, but I cannot be tied to any living being. I just cannot be tied. And I cannot let myself be tied. I am a wild animal, and I know you know it, and I know you don’t mind. I know in fact that you love me for it, and that it is the deepest thing you love in me. And I am happy about it, even though you may not be able fully to admit it to yourself. You are in love with a fox
, or a deer, or a squirrel. Freedom, darling. That is what the woods mean to me. I am free, free, a wild being, and that is all that I ever can really be. I am dedicated to it, addicted to it, sworn to it, and sold to it. It is the freedom in me that loves you. If only you were wild in the woods with me. If only we were never trapped in any way. But we cannot be free and wild together, because I am afraid of it. I am afraid I would be held and imprisoned. Darling if only you lived in the woods near me, and I could come and seek you out when I liked, and when I was not compelled, and when there were no demands, and when we were like little kids. When we did not know what we were doing. As soon as I know what is happening, I am lost. I am no longer free.
Darling, I am telling you: this life in the woods is IT. It is the only way. It is the way everybody has lost. They have all lost their way and ended up in Coney Island, with the distorting mirrors and the clowns with cattle prods that sting them up the tail and make them run to their shame. Here from morning to night nobody tells me what to do, nobody tells me what to think, nobody tells me what to eat. If I want to I can starve to death. I can die of the nonsense. I can go crazy with illusions, and who cares? There are no laws in the woods except you have to watch what the hell you do when you are around hornets and things like that. It is life, this thing in the woods. I do not claim it is real. All I say is that it is the life that has chosen itself for me.
(June 24, 1966 – Friday)
The night did not turn out to be as hot as I feared. I slept more or less (began waking up around one). Dreamt a series of dreams that were more or less about the community. For instance: I am at the hermitage and down in the valley are some people (monks) who are trying to signal to me by semaphore, wig-wagging and whatnot. I do not know how to read the message. I make helpless gestures about not knowing “the rules.” I really don’t care that much, I just want to show I would like to be in communication with them if it were possible. Later I dream of the Abbot and Fr. Flavian (my confessor), we are walking around more or less friendly and open to each other, talking pleasantly about the hermit life and its possibilities.
Got up, and during my meditation (having killed an enormous centipede on the wall of the front room – would not like that to crawl down my neck while I was sleeping) thought about the letter from Urs Von Balthasar yesterday. His complaint of being theologically isolated from the people in fashion ([Karl] Rahner, [Hans] Küng, etc.). Realized to what extent my own theology goes along with that of Balthasar, and I should read him more deeply. (I now have his Herrlichkeit [The Glory of the Lord] in French, so I can handle it.) He has been very friendly, is writing a preface to the German selection of my poems, is happy about Bro. A.’s translation of his article on vows etc.
Looking back at the pages of this journal I wrote last night: curious the way I hit that bump in page 26 [Thursday evening]. A real crash. I wonder what happened. For a moment all spontaneity was impossible. Self-conscious, tongue tied, paralyzed, and trying to break out of it with a diagnosis (well, I am diagnosing now but it is different). I don’t know what the matter was, but the way I feel about it now is that I was starting to tell lies. The lies begin after I mention “that beast Raymond” – who in fact has all the visitors he wants apparently, though I know he has a bad time with mail too. It is not a lie that I am regarded as sort of “pilot project” in monastic eremitism. But that whole concept is to me phony and absurd. Was I buying it for a moment? I don’t know. It is nevertheless a fact that people think in those terms, and this has to be taken into account. I think where I was lying was when I pretended to be guilty about a) being in love and b) drinking beer. Actually I do not really feel guilty about either, deep down. I know that neither of these fits anyone’s standard idea of what a hermit ought to be, and if I take such an idea seriously I am bound to feel confused, guilty, embarrassed, whatnot. But I don’t think that in loving or in drinking beer I am at all untrue to myself and to what God wills for me – except in details. Because I can see too that I don’t need for instance to drink beer, or five cans of beer at one sitting, while being here. I am really not all that lonely. I am certainly not unhappy. I do not have to drink to be happy. I think probably what I was really doing was slipping back into an act I had given up long ago, “when I was a kid on Long Island,” playing a very old role that was so phony that even I could detect it.
The real wrong is playing these roles and taking them seriously. I do not think I take any role too seriously, but still, one has to play roles in order to communicate with the rest of the world. The beauty of the solitary life (this business of trees that say nothing and skies that are neutral) is that you can throw away all the masks and forget them until you return among people.
The mask I was putting on at that moment was the very old, worn out, dilapidated one of my Columbia days: I am the guy who finds his happiness in drinking and in love. But I am not. I have never been able to convince myself that either of these produced happiness. They just go along with it. When they do, they are fine. As soon as you try to use them to produce happiness, to make yourself happy, it becomes a lie and the whole thing breaks down. Maybe that is what I was doing. I don’t know.
Since the thing that is most important to me is the deepening and the exploration of consciousness, then obviously if I catch myself lying about that I will be deeply embarrassed. Perhaps that was part of the bump too. Pretending that sitting here drinking beer was actually a sort of enrichment of an unhappy solitude. Nuts. Or, conversely, that it was a reverse enrichment by dilapidation: the modern poet pitch, the deepest experience is that of going to the dogs. It would be ridiculous to pretend that I am going to the dogs, or on the rocks, or whatever else. It would take more than five cans of beer, at any rate. When I take the beer cans to the dump this morning I will also take the following masks: the monastic failure; the poète maudit; the ex-priest alcoholic driven to drink by M.; the loner misunderstood by everyone; and I might as well add the wild faun bit while I am at it.
So I went out on that mission and have returned. It was a beautiful walk. Seven o’clock. Sun high, but yet not high enough to overtop the tall. majestic trees of the wood at the top of the long field. Mist everywhere: it is going to be hot and foul today. Wet grass. I walk thinking of you, darling, and with you (you are just going to work). With that simple presence of you that has become a living part of my own psyche, and is such a precious gift to me. The thing is that we did not play any part, we did not wear any mask – except perhaps the very unconscious ones that went with our deepest compulsions. But on the whole we were very clean and straight with each other, and that was one of the most wonderful things about it. It was what made it possible for us to be present to each other in that direct and deep psychic presence. I hope we will never lose this. We know each other well, and we love each other as we know each other, without conditions and without pretenses: and there is nothing better on the face of the earth. Perhaps things would have got too complex for us to handle in this simple way. I don’t know. There is no point in surmising. But at the point where we are now, we can go on forever with the love that is ours and I don’t think we will ever be able to go wrong with it or destroy it. It will remain a real force in our lives. I am so happy about that. In this sense, your love has really made me happier and I count on it to continue doing so. I also want my love to always make you happy in this way, or to enable you to bring forth out of yourself the happiness that is in you, in your essential self: there is a great spring of happiness and joy there, dear, and I hope it will always be available to you and to those you love with a true love.
(Later)
In the last analysis what I am looking for in solitude is not happiness or fulfillment but salvation. Not “my own” salvation, but the salvation of everybody. And here is where the game gets serious. I have used the word “revolt” in connection with solitude. Revolt against what? Against a notion of salvation that gets people lost. A notion of a salvation that is entirely legal and extrinsic and can be achieved
no matter how false, no matter how shriveled and fruitless one’s inner life really is. This is the worst ambiguity: the impression that one can be grossly unfaithful to life, to experience, to love, to other people, to one’s own deepest self, and yet be “saved” by an act of stubborn conformity, by the will to be correct. In the end, this seems to me to be fatally like the very act by which one is lost: the determination to be “right” at all costs, by dint of hardening one’s core around an arbitrary choice of a fixed position. To close in on one’s central wrongness with the refusal to admit that it might be wrong. That is one of the reasons why solitude is a dangerous thing: one may use it for that purpose. I don’t think I can. I am not that stubborn. I am here for one thing: to be open, to be not “closed in” on any one choice to the exclusion of all others: to be open to God’s will and freedom, to His love which comes to save me from all in myself that resists Him and says no to Him. This I must do not to justify myself, not to be right, not to be good, but because the whole world of lost people needs this opening by which salvation can get into it through me.
Learning To Love Page 44