More here than comparison of Babylon and a volcano. More than prophecy of a moment of cataclysm. In the cataclysm is revealed the inner nature of the mountain of plagues and poisonous snakes. A valid replay? Only another poem and other symbols in the same tone. Meaning what? More than one knows. What “turning” from this morning’s lectio? That if I will advance into these thickets of symbols which I think I know, I will find myself lost in what I do not know and that perhaps I will find myself different, and walking in a new way. But this must be dared, with patience and belief. (For after reading some of it once or twice one ceases to believe there is “more,” and this is the danger.)
August 21, 1964
Father Abbot is back from the Abbatial blessing at Oka. The Encyclical was finished in the refectory yesterday. The last part, on dialogue, was the best, and made up for the compromising beginning to some extent. After a couple of hot days, now a windstorm, clouds, or little rain.
This morning I finished proofs of Seeds of Destruction which, after many delays, is scheduled for January. Bob Giroux is now a partner at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I am happy for him.
Another nice letter from Nora K. Chadwick yesterday. Her sister was a Carmelite at Waterbeach for sixty years or so. Am finishing two excellent books Nora K. Chadwick recommended. [James Midley] Clark on St. Gall [The Abbey of St. Gall as a Centre of Literature and Art, 1926] and Dudley Simpson on the Celtic Church in Scotland (demythologizing St. Columba’s mission–restoring others to importance). Have been reading about the Hebrides (G[eorge] Scott-Moncrieff [The Scottish Islands, 1952])–would like to see them someday. Astonishing number of monastic settlements used to be there–exactly the place for small, eremitical communities! Many especially on Tiree. I wonder why? Will I ever see the place?
August 24, 1964
A wonderful sky all day beginning with the absent expressionist Jackson Pollack dawn–scores of streaks and tiny blue-grey clouds flung like blotches all over it. And before my conference (on Liturgy–a recent Reinhold article) deep, clear blue with astounding small luminous clouds, than which I never saw lighter and cleaner. Exhilarating coolness and airiness of these clouds. New Directions 18 came in, and the “Early Legend” looked better than I expected. Laughed at the Russell Edson stories.
For our Abbots’ meeting in October–I have to think up something about the ability or inability of modern (young) postulants to settle down in our life. It is a real problem. They come here often seeking their own identity and find themselves in a life that explicitly frustrates the quest of identity. Systematic fabrication of non-persons by this rule when it is understood and applied rigidly and without understanding. But when the spirit of our usages is precisely this-even the “new” usages which, though very slightly simplified, represent no serious improvement. A mature person can handle the situation fairly well. It seems to damage the young ones–sometimes quite badly. Perhaps it would not do so if they all came from a stable and secure Catholic environment. But their background is always ambiguous. As for the supposed security the Rule seems to promise–this promise cannot be kept if certain basic problems are left unresolved: the human and social problem of the insecure American teen-ager. And yet the new one just in from a farm in Michigan seems completely carefree and happy.
There is oak wilt in our forest, and a lot of it too, suddenly. Both in the white oaks and in the black. I have got Brother Aelred started on some of them this afternoon, the ones in the fine straight stand on the hillside, on the way up from the sheep barn to the hermitage. I hope we will not lose too many but six or eight are affected in that one acre.
August 29, 1964
This afternoon–worked on abstract calligraphies–perhaps too many. Some seemed good. I took a batch to the Frame House on Thursday with Ulfert Wilke, who was a big help in showing how they should be framed. Afterward we had lunch and went out to his studio in Pee Wee Valley, in a Garage next to a gambling club. Some fascinatingly calm, large abstractions which I cannot describe. A calligraphic economy of points and small white figures on large black or maroon backgrounds (some lively red and yellow ones but the somber were more serious and profound).
Have not done much writing except letters for the last two weeks. Have to get back to it next week. Am finishing off footnotes as an afterthought, for the “Pilgrimage to Crusade” article. Had to emend “Monk in Diaspora” for French translation (by Dom Leclercq). The General doesn’t like it. Today for the first time in years seriously imagined a project for a novel. But I doubt if it is sound. And it would interfere with more important things.
Today a good letter (rare one too!) from Dom Damasus [Winzen]. About the monastic crisis in the Cistercians and big Benedictine houses. Certainly there is one. Five monks of Conyers were at the Liturgy Conference in St. Louis I hear (why not, after all?) and Father Bernard [Murray] came back suddenly from Notre Dame des Prairies.
September 1, 1964. St. Giles
I said his Mass in a lovely starlit pre-dawn, cool, silent. The old moon, and the liquid silent morning star. And now it is a clear September day, warm, bright, and one feels that the year has turned and is going toward the fall. There are moving passages and sentences in the [Meriol] Trevor biography of Newman that is being read in the refectory. Particularly prayers, and lines from his Journal. I feel closer and closer to him, yet with an even deeper respect for his religious depth.
It has been a busy day: after Vespers there was a Council meeting, and then I had to go and talk to a Cuban family brother who had become psychotic. Was shouting and breaking dishes and pounding on the walls, and said the wrath of God was coming down on this place because it was “too rich.” And why all this impieza [cleaning] in the guest house? I suppose that long hours of work left to himself, and his inability to talk English, and his intense meditations–on the threats and promises of Fatima, on the Apocalypse, and on Castro–had finally cracked him. He tried to demonstrate how in Roman numerals the Apocalypse number 666 spelled out Fidel Castro Ruiz–which I was not able to see. He is supposed to leave for Cincinnati today–for a place in Covington where there are Cubans.
Then in the middle of the morning, just as I was getting down to type the footnotes for “Pilgrimage to Crusade,” the Tiller family from Jackson, Mississippi, arrived. She is a convert who had been writing to me, he is an Episcopalian minister, and it is a lovely family. We talked for an hour or so, and I got some idea of the difficulty of the moderate Southerner who wants to do what is right and who is caught in the grip of totalism and prejudice, so that the slightest misstep puts him out of touch with his neighbors, and yet he does not know who to trust among the insiders. It is a very difficult position, and they really mean well, and have a lot of courage.
Yesterday J[ames] W[ygal] was out here with a problem in the afternoon. Several oaks are down, along the path up to the hermitage. (Cutting for oak-wilt.)
This morning I began [Hans Urs] Von Balthasar’s Herrlichkeit–a long book to try to read in German, but the first pages are very promising and I respond to them completely. Perhaps this is the theology we have been waiting for. And I was reminded also of my studies on the School of Chartres two years ago (looked briefly again at my notes. I must write them up).
September 4, 1964
José the Cuban stayed a few more days, and today I spoke to Father Nieman who is taking him to his Boys Home in Covington. José is apparently better since we decided he must leave. Father Nieman said there were four days of race riots in Philadelphia–the worst ones yet, worse than Harlem and Rochester. I don’t know any details. The situation in Viet Nam is “worse” in the sense that it may seem that the U.S. will be asked to get out. Whether that is worse for the prestige of the U.S. or for the people of Viet Nam I am not really certain! But they are in no position to solve any problems, with or without us.
Yesterday Father Abbot gave me several sheets of notes–proposals for the Abbots’ and Novice Masters’ Meeting in October: Notes extracted from Letters of the participants,
indicating points they thought important. Theoretical (and rather useless) points attacking the Maritains’ ideas on Liturgy of several years ago. Vehement pleas for the vernacular, a very testy demand for immediate action and an end of “gradualism” in dealing with the Brothers, as if the question of the Brothers were identical with that of civil rights. The one who wrote it (probably Dom Eusebius of Vina) insinuated that “certain Abbots” wanted to keep the Brothers as a reservoir of “slave labor.” (Actually it was Dom Columban of Oregon.) In actual fact, at least here the Brothers want to keep their status as a guarantee of a certain amount of freedom, to be left to themselves and not herded into choir. I am rather depressed by all these notes which bear witness to a style of life and aspirations in which I have no interest–a form of monasticism in which solitude, contemplation, etc. are treated as irrelevant and all that matters is a lively and interesting choral service, well-organized work, a big lively booming community, etc.
Father Arnold was taken ill on Sunday and went to Bardstown hospital Monday or rather Tuesday. I hear he is having blood transfusions but do not know what the matter is. Perhaps hemorrhaging ulcers. He was in theology with me and is close to my time though I have never had much to do with him. He is one of those who are always “around” and regarded as “characters”–the kind that in the end are the backbones of monastic communities, though eccentric. (He cultivated with great energy a small unofficial flowerbed outside the professed Grand Parlor.)
September 5, 1964
Hot, bright, clear, quiet. I was going to burn some wastepaper, but it is too dry a day. Sent out to the girl [Donna Mae Miller] at the University of Arizona the review of African Genesis [“Man Is a Gorilla with a Gun”] she asked for. I was not able to ignore this request. There is something good and special in this small, unprepossessing attempt at running a magazine (of all places in a Department of Physical Education for Women). I don’t quite understand it, but there is something there. A sense of genuineness and humanity in spite of the clichés.
An afternoon to listen for a poem or just to be quiet (in fact, however, I will probably answer the letter I got the other day from Dom Damasus Winzen). Dom Emmanuel, Abbot of Bellefontaine, is supposed to be coming here tonight. Today–in conference–drawing primitive Celtic crosses on the blackboard. They seemed to enjoy it.
Poison ivy is eating my thumb again. Cannot get rid of it.
September 10, 1964
For the third time this summer poison ivy has taken the skin off my forefingers and thumbs and this time it seems to be spreading further. Had something akin to it on my face–some allergy.
Czeslaw Milosz was here yesterday. Same face as on the new French book (Une Autre Europe) but considerably aged. I am enthusiastic about the Polish poets that he has gathered into an anthology (Anne Freedgood is doing this for Doubleday). A great deal of irony, depth, sophistication, intelligence and compassion. This seems to me to be real and human. I react to it as I do to most Latin American verse: or to something belonging to my world. (I can hardly say this for most American or English poetry except Stevie Smith and Peter Levi.)
Abraham Heschel sent a memo on the new Jewish chapter. It is incredibly bad. All the sense has been taken out of it, all the originality, all the light, and it has become a stuffy and pointless piece of formalism, with the incredibly stupid addition that the Church is looking forward with hope to the union of the Jews with herself. As a humble theological and eschatological desire, yes, maybe: but that was not what was meant. It is this lack of spiritual and eschatological sense, this unawareness of the real need for profound change that makes such statements pitiable. Total lack of prophetic insight and even of elementary compunction.
It is precisely in prophetic and therefore deeply humiliated and humanly impoverished thirst for light that Christians and Jews can begin to find a kind of unity in seeking God’s will together. For Rome simply to declare itself, as she now is, the mouthpiece of God and perfect interpreter of His will for Jews (with the implication that He in no way speaks to them directly) is simply monstrous. It is perfectly true that the Church in the highest sense can indeed speak a message of prophecy and salvation to the Jews. But to say that the few blind juridical niceties of curial officials and well-meaning Council Fathers are the only source of light for the Jews today–this is absurd misunderstanding of the Church’s mission. Reflect that the Church in this rather imperfect sense (of Bishops, etc. speaking more or less humanly and politically) delivered the Jews over to Hitler without a murmur (here and there helping a few individuals to escape, to make it less intolerable to conscience).
September 12, 1964
Everything that a September day should be–brilliant blue sky, kind sun, cool wind in the pines. But I have to wear white gloves because I cannot go near the woods without getting more poison ivy. I seem to have become extraordinarily sensitive, and if I am within fifteen or twenty or thirty feet of it I seem to get more. On my face too, but I shall go with face bare. If necessary I shall make myself a mask out of a little bag with holes in it and come into solitude looking sinister like a Ku Kluxer. Tiny, delicate fishbones of clouds in the sky. Harps of sound in the sweet trees. Long shadows on the grass. The distant bottomland flat and level and brown, ploughed and harrowed. The hills.
Last night on Night Watch read about Olduvai, the discovery of Zinjanthropus in the National Geographic. Fabulously wonderful. I found this religiously stunning–600,000 years ago was this man evolving and making tools out of pebbles. And was strong, bigger than I. Lived in great African rains (and there were glaciers in the north and south). And pigs as big as rhinos–most wonderful stories, more fabulous than the stories of the old days. Magic, tradition, racial memory. Truth in them. Dragons for instance!! I wonder how many of our stories, stories we heard as children go back all the way to Olduvai? That idiot Ardrey thinks Zinjanthropus was an ape and that Australopithecus, with his bone club, was a better and more progressive ape. Now I will revise an article on race riots.
Yesterday got a long letter from Dom Ignace, the Abbot General–“If you have such a lot of ideas, tell me what they are!” Well, I wrote at once, some three pages on monastic changes, and suggested a committee to study the formation of an American hermitage. This will probably meet all kinds of opposition, first of all from Dom James. I don’t expect to get anywhere with it but why not at least bring it up? If he wants to know what I am thinking. All this started with “Monk in Diaspora” which turns out after all to have been a bit of a time bomb. Heard from Brother Pachomius at Erlach about it today (translating it into German). Books from Von Balthasar. Wonderful.
Censor at New Melleray (Shane Regan) says I am “written out,” know no theology or philosophy, have nothing to say, etc., etc. but grants nihil obstat [“nothing stands in the way,” approval by censor] to Seasons of Celebration.
Dom James in chapter today, has highest praise for those who simply “run with the herd” (his own words), do not think for themselves, conform (he regrets that “conformism” is regarded as a bad trait by those who seek only “liberty” to “do their own will”). And he wonders why he has problems with the monks leaving! And I am supposed to give a magic talk at the Abbots’ meeting, to dissect the mind of youth, show where all their trouble comes from. I honestly think he expects me to say, in some way, that it all comes from radicals and self-will which is the only answer he is prepared to believe.
September 13, 1964
Last night before going to bed I was struck by a line of Job I had never noticed before: “Lampas contempta apud cogitationes divitum, parata ad tempus statutum” [“In the thought of one who is at ease there is contempt for misfortune. It is ready for those whose feet slip.”] Job 12:5. Its mysteriousness intrigues me. What is it about? And this in Wisdom 5:7: “Lassati sumus in via iniquitatis et perditionis: et ambulavimus vias difficiles, viam autem Domini ignoravimus” [“We have left no path of lawlessness or ruin unexplored: we have crossed deserts where there was no track, but the
way of the Lord is one we have never known”].
How true of all human life, especially now. Certainty and uncertainty of the Viae Domini, certain where one least expects (the certainty is then His gift) and uncertain where one imagines they should be clear. “Ipse novit et decipientem, et eum qui decipitur” [“The deceived and the deceiver are his”] Job 12:16.
“Qui revelat profunda de tenebris, et producit in lucem umbram mortis” [“He uncovers the deeps out of darkness, and brings out to light the shadow of death”] Job 12:22. There is still an incomparable poetry in the Vulgate text. Such substance, and so moving.
One of the most pertinent lines of the Bible for us, with our ready answer to everything: “Numquid Deus indiget vestro mendacio?” [“What need does God have of your lying?” Job 13:7] All is there!
Sunday morning, bright, windy, fresh. Brother Alcuin saw smoke to the north before Prime. He and I and Brother Colman drove up to see where it came from–on Andy Boone’s land. Brush burning on a hillside in a little pine grove. He just set it alight and left it. A small pine tree was on fire, but it did not seem the fire would go anywhere. We went to the farmhouse, then to the barn (I had not been to the house before). A little orange-colored puppy came running out on the grass, in silence. Lovely Sunday silence and peace over everything. Vistas of the stunning and blessed hills, of the clear, quiet valley. Hills and woods. Small houses, looking wiser and safer for the Lord’s Day. Andy shaved and at peace, after Mass, bringing in some fodder for his cows. It was his sixty-second birthday. I missed Chapter and was not downcast, for the Sunday Chapters are awful. “Pro Deo iudicare nitimini?” [“Will you contend for God?”]
Dancing in the Water of Life Page 19
