Dancing in the Water of Life

by Thomas Merton

  Anselm’s Vita and letters are a great support, however. How solid his letters are. How solid everything is in him, compared to our shifting, fluid ground in which there is no foothold.

  Visited Brother Chrysostom’s parents briefly at the gatehouse yesterday after dinner and it came out that Diem, the dictator in Viet Nam, had been murdered and the whole tribe with him. A miserable business. Sickened by these corrupt “Catholic” bosses hungry for power, cynical, greedy, slick, working with Church power, running little countries supported by American guns. What an appalling scandal and symptom of our own decay! What can be done? The lessons of Ezekiel–how inexorably true they sound! Our society is under stern judgment and we have no light! May God have pity on our darkness!

  November 10, 1963

  Ngo Dinh Nhu, brother of the President of South Viet Nam, husband of “that woman,” and the real pawn in the country, assassinated with Diem on All Saints’ Day–was a Catholic intellectual who had once nourished his mind on [Emmanuel] Mounier. He had studied at the École des Chartres and claimed he got the idea of his “strategic hamlets” there. His was an aggressive Catholicism, the kind we see so much of, friendly to the rich, rough on the poor and on non-Catholics, a Catholicism that consisted above all in militant anti-communism. The formula is much too familiar. It spells nothing but blindness, stupidity, obstinacy and disaster–especially where it operates with a semi-secret fascist party, a rigidly controlled police state, and a state Catholicism (in a state where all but 20% are Buddhist!). Universal horror of this regime in the U.S. because of the spectacular suicides of Buddhist monks. And the Catholic press trying to prove that Diem and Co. were “not doing anything wrong”! A sickening affair.

  Finished some notes on Zaehner’s Teilhardian pamphlet on Matter and Spirit which is good in intention, poor and hasty in execution. Have added this on to the material on Zen for the winter Continuum.8 Graham Carey wired that he wanted some of Art and Worship in Good Work.

  November 12, 1963

  Going over the Zen article has been a grace. It has brought me back to myself after a long while! Along, futile, round and round peregrinatio [pilgrimage] all around nothing–just because I somehow got obsessed with a need to get somewhere and do something (God knows what). In the first place, too much writing, or rather too many useless projects. And my study has been a bit absurd, due to my getting so many free books for review and imagining it important to read most of them. In a word, my ailment is this: I become anxious to keep up with all that is being said and done, and I want in my turn to be “in there”…to play my own part, and contribute my own words. Once in a while I get a glimpse of the folly that is really at the heart of this “zeal”!

  On the other hand I think that reading Sartre’s L’Être et le néant is going to be important for me. (However, I did not read it.) Also, translating some opuscula [short works] of Nicholas of Cusa (if I can keep at it. He gets away from me when he seems too intellectual and dry). I will not abandon translations (hope of translation) of a few letters of Anselm, and maybe the article on Grimlaicus.

  In the council: last week a piece of dishonesty on the part of some curia officials was joyfully unmasked. The fools had simply cut out all the really significant part of a schema, without the approval of the proper commission, and tried to push it through. I don’t know the details–but anyway it shows how these authoritarian characters, who always rant about obedience and authority, are mostly “obedient” themselves only in so far as authority sees things their way. I am glad someone is finally opposing them (without Paul VI the opposition would not have any meaning).

  What a weary, silly mess. When will I learn to go without leaving footprints? A long way from that: I still love recognition and need to preach, so that I will believe in my own message, and believing that, will believe in myself–or at least consent to find myself acceptable for a little while. Absurdity, and very dishonest on top of it. I wish I knew how to be otherwise!

  Funny how I came to this, quite in spite of myself and in spite of everything, after several days of desperation (half-felt) and perplexity. Peace in seeing the hills, the blue sky, the afternoon sun. Just this and nothing more! As soon as I move toward anything else, confusion. Those asses and their active philosophy and their itch to get on every stupid bandwagon! Yet how I am influenced by them in spite of myself! They are so sure that is Christianity–that parading and gesticulating, that proclamation often thousand programs!

  November 14, 1963

  Yesterday–dark and cold, flurries of snow. All Saints of the Order. A delightful day. I moved out of the infirmary last night and the hard bed was good to get back to, also my own cell, the special stone one, at the head of the stairs to the novitiate dormitory, hanging in the air, a hole in the rock, a caverna maceriae [cave in the wall]. The traction affair was rigged up by Brother Anthony, and I have a reading light. Paradiso [paradise]. Blankets, quiet (except that corn blower roars in the daytime).

  Nicholas of Cusa: opening up. Magnificent discovery. I have been on to him for a while, but not realizing how much was there!

  Later–a telegram arrived today that Dom Gabriel Sortais, the Abbot General, had died last night–Feast of All the Saints of Order. I suppose he was exhausted from work, the Council, etc. and all his usual illnesses. He was in many ways a great man, a warm and generous person and I am indebted to him for many things though I certainly got annoyed at his arbitrary ways with the censorship of books. He was certainly not one of the “new men” in the Church: the old, authoritarian, absolutist, centralist type. Wanting a firm grip on every detail of everything that went on in the Order–and yet the General Chapter is the real authority in the Order, or it is supposed to be. But he ruled “his” abbots with a firm hand and gave them the devil if they did not do everything his way. Not to mention the mere subjects. He was often angry with me, and I must say I was often angry with him. He had the good grace to listen if I was in earnest, and sometimes when I was wrong he told me so without unkindness. I suppose in a way I was very fond of him, and my memories of the Beaux Arts, and his honest, Trappist spirit, and his acceptance of the Order in all its madness. He never caused a thousand hair-raising stories about the madness in our various houses. He and I lived in a different Order. I was annoyed at his encyclicals, and his pontifical reasoning, and above all his busy, bureaucratic little secretary. The King of all the censors. Yet after all I have managed to say a lot more than many writers in the Church have.

  Well, now he is dead, and the Order will miss him. I can say I have lost a friend, and the Order has lost a great man, whose generalship will be significant in the Order’s history. God alone knows how much good he did, or tried to do, and he certainly must have been a strong support to many people. It is out of place now to suggest that perhaps the support they needed was something different–not that of an all-powerful will in a high place, but that of more light, reason, understanding. In any case many will have cause to be grateful to him. It is due to him and Dom James that my attempt to leave the Order and go to Dom Gregorio was blocked, and perhaps not too justly or rightly.9 I do not say I am grateful for that. Perhaps it was for the best, however. Who can say? He was strong enough to make a Roman Congregation change its mind. But that is not unusual, I imagine.

  November 16, 1963

  Yesterday, feast of the Dedication of the Church. Father Charles English, from Georgia (Conyers monastery) and formerly of Catholic Worker, spoke in chapter, warmly, and then had a heart attack afterwards. He is in Bardstown hospital.

  First copy of Emblems of a Season of Fury10 was handed to me by Brother Simon [Patrick Hart] just before High Mass.

  Today, a solemn requiem mass for Dom Gabriel.

  [Jean] Cocteau, dead. Did I already say this? Moved by a picture of a party, in 1930’s or early 40’s–Cocteau, Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, champagne, smiles, 1939 hairdos–a kind of gaiety that doesn’t seem to exist any more. Another picture: National Guardsmen in Birmingham, marching
: fat thugs, inexpressibly stupid and brutal faces. Even Nazis look more intelligent. Here these strong grown-up nitwits taking their bellies and muscles seriously as they have been taught by TV What a piece of work is man!

  November 20, 1963

  All our students in Rome, except Father Chrysogonus [Waddell], have written letters about the death of the Abbot General, how he was taken with great pain in the cloister of Monte Cistello after supper, went to hospital and died a few moments after getting there. Long offices of the dead, solemn masses, first for the General (yesterday) and for the November anniversary (today).

  Yesterday a woman got through the authorities to visit me on the grounds that she was a distant relative, which seems very doubtful. I cannot account for her on any score. A remarkable, beatnik, Charles Addams, hair in the eyes type who turned out, in the afternoon, to be a nymphomaniac. She gave me a wild time–a real battle, at times physical, and finally, when I got away alive and with most of my virtue intact (I hope!) I felt shaken that a woman should still go to such lengths over me, even though a deranged one. Only later did I realize how futile and insufficient were my own attempts to do something for her. Words sounded so foolish and absurd. Her mode of communication was with her whole body and all her strength.

  All kinds of feelings, of shame, confusion, bewilderment, resignation to the final absurdity of it. Above all consternation at the awful ease with which the situation produced itself. Almost unthinkable: here was temptation not in essence or in the mind, but in full existence, concrete, utterly real, and yet behaving like a phantom. I can understand some of the Desert Fathers’ stories a little better after that! What can I say about sorrow and pity for her–and my own complete and stupid helplessness to do anything that would make any difference to her?

  Began Anselm’s De Casu Diaboli–not because of yesterday, but I have been interested to get to it for a long time. Very profound book on freedom, grace and sin.

  November 23, 1963

  There will be another solemn requiem Mass today, this time for the President.

  When I came in from the woods yesterday, Brother Aidan met me at the door of the novitiate and told me the president had been shot and died, in Texas, an hour and a half before. At first I did not believe it. But there was a notice on the board, and later I saw Father Abbot. Leo Gannon on the phone told him, while I was there, that the gun and three empty cartridges had been found in a building overlooking the route Kennedy traveled. It was in Dallas, Texas. Of course it had to be some idiot place like that!

  Again, the whole thing leaves one bewildered and slightly sick. Sick for the madness, ferocity, stupidity, aimless cruelty that is the mark of so great a part of this country. Essentially the same blind, idiot destructiveness and hate that killed Medgar Evers in Jackson, the Negro children in Birmingham. I do not know what was the motive of this absurd assassination–whether it was over the race question or not, or just fanaticism. The country is full of madness and we are going to know this more and more.

  As for Kennedy–what shall one say? He was a good president, vigorous, honest, fairly shrewd, with undoubted limitations, but trying to go in the right direction. Why should they hate him enough to kill him? Is a little honesty that dangerous? Basically I think the root of it all is the blind animosity of the rich and the greedy, influencing a lot of crackpots who are not so rich, but who want a totally selfish and irresponsible society to continue at all costs for the benefit of those who love money and power. The country is corrupted by the love of wealth, and the image of power. Men will do anything for this love, and nothing else matters.

  Brother Colman just told me that the one suspected of the murder of Kennedy is a Communist, a twenty-four-year-old ex-marine, supposed to be pro-Castro. That puts a different complexion on the whole thing; at least it was not a fanatic ultra-patriot who would have a large following inside the country. On the other hand the super-patriots will turn this to their advantage against liberalism.

  November 25, 1963

  The curious adventure with nausea last Tuesday still stays with me, and sure. At moments I see it as no less absurd than anything else around me, for instance the talks in chapter and various celebrations or contacts in community. It shocked me most of all as a break in the safety and routine of the usual silliness: but such a shock is salutary, since it reminds me of the need to break out of all routines and molds–not arbitrarily or anarchically, but by grace and sense, which will be given and are “here” if my eyes can open to them.

  This active sweatered body with hair in her eyes who came and went suddenly and changed my phantasm of one of the most pleasant fields, is a reminder not to people the whole place with sweet and solitary adventures (though it is comforting to be surrounded with contemplative animation). Contemplation is otherwise serious, and is in neither involvement nor void.

  And the insanity of the country! Yes, the suspected murderer of Kennedy was a Marxist, had been in Russia, was on a Pro-Castro committee (Fair Play for Cuba), etc. But I say he “was” all these things because now he too has been shot. This time the super-patriots did get into the picture. “Jack Ruby, a prominent and anti-communist business man,” shot Oswald in the stomach as he was being taken by the police to another jail. Everyone, so it seems, saw this on TV.

  Later–gradually and in bits and pieces one learns news, as it gets from Leo Gannon’s TV over the phone to Father Abbot or to Brother Colman and thence in one way or another to me and through me to the novices. The one who shot Oswald was called Rubinstein, a Jewish owner of two nightclubs in Dallas, and he was a friend of the police. Standing between two detectives he shot Oswald when he was about a foot away from him. In any case, a super-patriot.

  I had to call Jim Wygal in Louisville, not at his office. He was at home watching the President’s funeral on TV (Kennedy’s body was being taken to Arlington). Everybody is terribly upset–the least upset are perhaps the Kennedys themselves. It is a real spiritual, moral, and emotional crisis for the entire country. I have never seen anything quite like it.

  The speech Kennedy was to have read in Dallas is being read in the refectory. In Goldwater country it had to be a strong speech, and strong it was. All about our strategic weapons, our tactical nuclear weapons, our conventional weapons, our readiness to destroy any and every aggressor, our better preparedness to stop all attackers, saboteurs. Assassins were explicitly mentioned.

  It took a German rifle and two bullets. (Plus one for the Governor of Texas.)

  Hunters are all over the place, again. I chased some away on Friday, and another from behind the hermitage Saturday. They all turned out to be meek, apologetic men, and all claimed to have permission from prominent churchmen–(e.g., Father Mitchell, the assistant at New Haven, or Brother Frederic [Collins] in the farms building). But guns still bang merrily all over the place.

  I picked up a cartridge box yesterday and on it read: “These copper-plated cartridges have a high velocity and increased pressure. They should be used only in a high-grade gun in first-class condition, certified by the manufacturer to be suitably constructed to withstand such increased pressure and velocity…Caution–range one mile–be careful!” I found it about three hundred yards from the monastery.

  Everyone asks me if Dan Walsh went to the President’s funeral–as if I knew!

  How close is the tricherie [trickery] of Sartre to the rectitudo of St. Anselm? Is there any correspondence between Chapter XI of De Casu Diaboli (on the meaning of “nothing”) and Sartre’s néant [nothingness]?

  I got back to the monastery and found death had built another nest in the news. This time old Joseph Kennedy, the rich one, the Ambassador and the President’s father, had died of a heart attack, after the murder of his son.

  November 26, 1963

  But it turned out that Kennedy senior did not die after all. That at least was a false rumor.

  Read Sartre’s Respectful Prostitute. All I had ever heard about it ran it down, but it is a smasher! Best thing of his I ha
ve read, and one of the best on the race question. Certainly it is farcical, arbitrary, in a way “propaganda.” And yet it is true. Simple: it has to be simple. And no Southerner has ever stated the Southern case as simply and blandly as his characters, the Senator and Fred. Maybe it is little more than a vaudeville act, but a very good one. The main thing wrong with it is that no signature would have been necessary to save the white man who shot the Negro.

  The new President is of course Lyndon Johnson, former Vice-President. Sworn in hurriedly in a plane on the airfield at Dallas, shortly after Kennedy’s death. Will he, like Truman, be the one left to carry out a momentous and destructive decision that may affect, and radically so, the whole future of the world?

  November 27, 1963

  A letter came from Cintio Vitier, written November 16, postmarked the 21 st. I suppose it was censored in Cuba. A most moving letter, and with it another envelope containing poems of mine which he and his friends had translated into Spanish. A whole little group of most charming people. Cintio had translated “O Sweet Irrational Worship,” Eliseo Diego the “Elegy for Thurber,” Octavio Smith “Song for Nobody,” Cintio’s wife Fina [García Marruz] “Seven Archaic Images” and the young Negro poet Roberto Friol the whole “Early Legend” of which they sent me only Part IV, most touching to have chosen this–the meeting of the strangers. I feel they have profoundly understood everything and I love them. He spoke of them all busy translating when my letter of October 4 came. Referring to that (and the notes for Grinberg [“Answers on Art and Freedom”], from whom I have not heard).