I live in the woods out of necessity. I get out of bed in the middle of the night because it is imperative that I hear the silence of the night, alone, and, with my face on the floor, say psalms, alone, in the silence of the night.
It is necessary for me to live here alone without a woman, for the silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love, and out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world. I have an obligation to preserve the stillness, the silence, the poverty, the virginal point of pure nothingness which is at the center of all other loves. I cultivate this plant silently in the middle of the night and water it with psalms and prophecies in silence. It becomes the most beautiful of all the trees in the garden, at once the primordial paradise tree, the axis mundi, the cosmic axle, and the Cross. Nulla silva talem profert. [No tree brings forth such.]
It is necessary for me to see the first point of light which begins to be dawn. It is necessary to be present alone at the resurrection of Day, in the solemn silence at which the sun appears, for at this moment all the affairs of cities, of governments, of war departments, are seen to be the bickerings of mice. I receive from the Eastern woods, the tall oaks, the one word DAY, which is never the same. It is always in a totally new language.
After dawn I go down into the valley, first under the pines, then under tall oaks, then down a sharp incline, past an old barn, out into the field where they are now planting corn. Later in the summer the corn will be tall and sacred and the wind will whisper through the thousands of leaves and stalks as if all the spirits of the Maya were there. I weep in the corn for what was done in past ages, in the carnage that brought America the dignity of having a “history.” I live alone with the blood of Indians on my head.
The long yellow side of the monastery faces the sun on a sharp rise with fruit trees and beehives. I climb sweating into the novitiate, put down my water bottle on the cement floor. The bell is ringing. I have some duties in the monastery. When I have accomplished these, I return to the woods. In the choir are the young monks, patient, serene, with very clear eyes, thin, reflective, gentle. For fifteen years I have given them classes, these young ones who come, and grow thin, become more reflective, more silent. But many of them become concerned with questions. Questions of liturgy, questions of psychology, questions of history. Are they the right questions? In the woods there are other questions and other answers, for in the woods the whole world is naked and directly present, with no monastery to veil it.
Chanting the alleluia in the second mode: strength and solidity of the Latin, seriousness of the second mode, built on the Re as though on a sacrament, a presence. One keeps returning to the Re as to an inevitable center. Sol-Re, Fa-Re, Sol-Re, Do-Re. Many other notes in between, but suddenly one hears only the one note. Consonantia [harmony]: all notes, in their perfect distinctness, are yet blended in one.
In the refectory is read a message of the Pope, a strong one, denouncing war, denouncing the bombing of civilians, reprisals on civilians, killing of hostages, torturing of prisoners (all in Vietnam). Do the people of this country realize who the Pope is talking about? They have by now become so solidly convinced that the Pope never denounces anybody but Communists that they have long since ceased to listen. The monks seem to know. The voice of the reader trembles.
In the heat of noon I return through the cornfield, past the barn under the oaks, up the hill, under the pines, to the hot cabin. Larks rise out of the long grass singing. A bumblebee hums under the wide shady eaves.
I sit in the cool back room, where words cease to resound, where all meanings are absorbed in the consonantia of heat, fragrant pine, quiet wind, bird song and one central tonic note that is unheard and unuttered. Not the meditation of books, or of pieties, or of systematic trifles. In the silence of the afternoon all is present and all is inscrutable. One central tonic note to which every other sound ascends or descends, to which every other meaning aspires, in order to find its true fulfillment. To ask when the note will sound is to lose the afternoon: it has sounded and all things now hum with resonance of its sounding.
I sweep. I spread a blanket out in the sun. I cut grass behind the cabin. Soon I will bring the blanket in again and make the bed. The sun is overclouded. Perhaps there will be rain. A bell rings in the monastery. A tractor growls in the valley. Soon I will cut bread, eat supper, say psalms, sit in the back room as the sun sets, as the birds sing outside the window, as silence descends on the valley, as night descends. As night descends on a nation intent upon ruin, upon destruction, blind, deaf to protest, crafty, powerful, unintelligent. It is necessary to be alone, to be not part of this, to be in the exile of silence, to be in a manner of speaking a political prisoner. No matter where in the world he may be, no matter what may be his power of protest, or his means of expression, the poet finds himself ultimately where I am. Alone, silent, with the obligation of being very careful not to say what he does not mean, not to let himself be persuaded to say merely what another wants him to say, not to say what his own past work has led others to expect him to say.
The poet has to be free from everyone else, and first of all from himself, because it is through this “self” that he is captured by others. Freedom is found under the dark tree that springs up in the center of the night and of silence, the paradise tree, the axis mundi, which is also the Cross.
PART V
“Hermit in the Water of Life”
May 1965–December 1965
May 1, 1965
Perfectly beautiful spring weather–sky utterly cloudless all day–birds singing all around the hermitage–deep green grass. When I am here, all the time the towhees and tanagers are at peace, not worried, and with their constant singing I always know where they are. It is a wonderful companionship to have them constantly within the very small circle of woods which is their area and mine–where they have their nests and I have mine. Sometimes the woodthrush comes, but only on special occasions–like the evening of St. Robert’s day. Last evening I interrupted my meditation to watch half a dozen savannah sparrows outside my bedroom window.
Today I finished a first draft of an article on “Contemplation and Ecumenism” for the Dominicans in California. A copy of the Black Revolution in Catalan came in. This has appeared in the following languages and in this order: (1) French; (2) English; (3) German; (4) Catalan!!
Rumors are going around the monastery about Johnson claiming to have discovered Communist missile bases in Santo Domingo and having sent in the Marines. I wonder to what extent this is deliberately trumped up to foment more excitement and favor his “escalation” policy in Asia. Today I read a xerox copy of Hermann Kahn’s article on “Escalation” from a recent issue of Fortune. It is fantastic. His peculiar vocabulary makes it, in the first place, extremely comical. A parody of this technological doubletalk could hardly be more incredible. Yet it is all very serious because he is close to being the official spokesman for the government and the Pentagon.
It is all in the dispassionate language of the game theory of nuclear war. At no point does he suggest that the possible millions of victims are people. The main point is that he explicitly treats various “reasonable” ways in which all kinds of “conventional” acts of war and harassment, and also nuclear weapons, can and may be used “for bargaining”–including the mass evacuation of cities (to make “the adversary” convinced that we intend to bomb his cities)–in spite of an official “no cities” strategy “which is neither clearly understood nor firmly held even here.” Where it gets really interesting is “slow motion counter property war,” “constrained force reduction salvo,” “constrained disarming attack,” then of course “slow motion countercity war” in which the game becomes “city trading”–a nice “test of nerves.” As long as it is “controlled” and does not become “spasm or insensate war” he conceives it as “thinkable,” i.
e., practicable. And here the word control will be enough to convince a number of Catholic theologians and bishops that this is a perfectly legitimate application of double effect. The moral theology of hell!! What bastards!
The more one considers all this the more there appears to be only one drastic solution. But as for me, all I can do is sit here in the country and think about it and pray and wait to see what happens, and hope that I will know what to do. His plea is that one “has to have an alternative between cataclysm and surrender.” Has he ever heard of making peace? Evidently the real meaning of this article is that Washington plans climbing on to some of the rungs of Hermann’s ladder quite soon in Asia, confident that Russia will join in and play according to rule. And I have no doubt this issue of Fortune was carefully read in the Kremlin. I wonder if there are really intelligent human beings, maybe, in Peking?
May 10, 1965
Already a most beautiful week of May has gone by. For part of it I was ill again, with the same bug that had me in the infirmary at the beginning of Holy Week. It was a good thing, for this time Father Eudes gave me an antibiotic which seems to have cleared it up properly. Last time it really stayed with me (my stomach remained quite upset even though I was “well”). So for a couple of days I lay around in the warm green shade of the end room, with no desire for any food, and read Martin Ling’s book which he sent me (Ancient Beliefs and Modern Superstitions), a good chunk of De Lubac’s Exégèse médiévale (Vol. 1) and the early part of Herbert Read’s Green Child. The most exciting for me was De Lubac.
J. Laughlin came last Monday (May 3) and on the Tuesday we went to see Victor Hammer (a pleasant drive), taking a few pictures of barns on the way. J. likes the parts of the Chuang Tzu book that have now been typed for him and I must get at the rest of it. It was he who lent me the Green Child, in case I could think up a photograph for the cover of the new paperback edition he is doing.
Yesterday, Third Sunday after Easter (already!) is my favorite, or one of them. The Introit and the Alleluias especially. The afternoon was warm and glorious with the new summer, the brand new summer, the wheat already tall and waving in the wind, the great cumulus clouds. And all the things one cannot begin to say about it–the new awareness that I am not the “object” that “they” think or even that I think, and that the I which is not-I is All and in everyone, and that the outer I must not assert itself anymore but must be glad to vanish, and yet there is no division between them, as there is no division between the surface of the pond and the rest of it. It is the reflection on the surface that seems to give it another being–and its flatness, etc.
What the whip-poor-will (actually rather an owl I think) really says is “Where’s the widow! Where’s the widow!” And he says it very peremptorily.
“Tam dictis quam factis praedicator resurrectio” [“The resurrection was predicted through the word as deed”], says Tertullian and proceeds to speak of things in Exodus which seem to have very little to do with resurrection except remotely (Moses’ leprous hand, etc.). This is, however, the way typology speaks: all the Bible is preaching, announcing truths and events, not scientifically proving them, not formally “predicting” them (except in certain cases). Understanding of this depends on one’s capacity to understand prophecy as witness to a central truth, rather than as linear prediction. If you say “Because God first said this would happen, then made it happen, and because I can prove this from Scriptures, I am convinced,” you may have the whole thing backwards, and you may start either falsifying Scripture or emptying it in order to prove what you need to prove. On the other hand: “This is what happened, and it is what God everywhere pointed to, it is the central event and all others gain their true meaning when this is seen,” then you have an access to the Scriptures in peace and contemplation–without the need to prove anything, which does not mean that proofs may not have their place. But the place is not central, just as reasoning is not central, but understanding, seeing.
May 11, 1965
Tomorrow Sts. Nereus and Achilleus: I said their office in anticipation in the fresh green woods after work clearing brush, where the fire still smoked. I will always remember their little empty church in Rome, half in the country, on a spring afternoon in 1933.
“Radices gentium superborum arefecit Deus, et plantavit humiles ex ipsis gen-tibus” [“The Lord has plucked up proud men by their roots, and planted the lowly from the peoples”] Eccli. 10: 18[15].1 (cf. the Magnificat–“He hath put down the mighty…”)
If I were more fully attentive to the word of God I would be much less troubled and disturbed by the events of our time: not that I would be indifferent or passive, but I could gain the strength of union with the deepest currents in history, the sacred currents which run opposite to those on the surface, a great deal of the time!
“De ea re quae te non molestat ne certeris; et in iudicio peccantium ne consistas” [“Do not quarrel about a matter that does not concern you; and when sinners judge, do not sit in council with them”] Eccli. 11:9.
This, especially, strikes me: “Cave tibi, et attende diligenter auditui tuo, quoniam cum subversione tua ambulas; audiens vero illa, quasi in somnis vide, et vigilabis” [“Be wary, take very great care, because you are walking with your own downfall; when you hear such things, wake up and be vigilant.”] Eccli. 13: 16[13]. It seems to me that at the moment I very much need this kind of “attention” and “listening,” for I have come to the most serious moments of my life.
May 15, 1965
A busy week. Yesterday Father Xavier Carroll and Edward Noonan, a Chicago architect, were here–the Poor Clare Abbess in Chicago wanted them to discuss with me the plans for their new monastery, which in fact looks very attractive and which involves some big changes in their approach to the contemplative life.
Thursday Sister Luke was here and we talked about the revised Schema for Religious (which as Council Observer, she had obtained from Bishop Huyghe of Arras–not from any American bishop).
Wednesday a short visit with Dom Philip, Benedictine Prior of Vally-ermo in California. He had good things to say about monasticism in Africa–and about the group on the Island in Lake Kivu–from Père Erwin’s place in the Landes. Sounds fine.
Brother Edmund (Buchanan), postulant from the Navy (officer on a Polaris submarine), left. Brother Ignatius (Ortwein) is in guest house trying to reenter.
May 20, 1965
Paschal Time is going by fast. We are in the fourth week already. There was more rain the other evening (as I came back from Louisville) and everything is very green. Jt is spoiled by the number of people who want to visit here all of a sudden. I would not mind seeing them far apart, but they all want to come at once. I can’t very well say no to Zalman Schachter, and then Dan Berrigan wants to come and I think I should see him. And another one, charity seems to demand it, etc. But if I see everybody where is the famous “solitary vocation”? For once the contradictions in my life (which usually do not bother me) are suddenly painful and I see I must really do something about them. And there is no question I must stop the visits–all except a few that will remain really necessary, and far apart!
Working on Chuang Tzu I see how far I am from the kind of suddenness he talks about! Really the problem is there: in uniting a “hidden life” that is not after all hidden but famous or notorious. I do not want both, but I want one in such a way that the other goes with it and this is serious. I cannot shrug it off, and I almost seem to be helpless to really negotiate it, since it is so much my nature (as a writer) to get into this dilemma. Yet I see no need to get anguished about it. It will work itself out. I am certainly getting sick of the contradiction.
May 22, 1965
Grey dawn. A blood red sun, furious among the pines (it will soon be hidden in clouds). That darn black hound is baying in the hollow after some rabbit he will never catch. Deep grass in the field, dark green English woods (for we have had good rains). The bombing goes on in Viet Nam. The whole thinking of this country is awry on war: basic
conviction that force is the only thing that is effective. That doubtless it is in many ways not “nice” but one must be realistic and use it, with moral justification, so as not to be just gangsters as “they” are (the enemy). Thus there is determination to settle everything by force and this being taken for granted, to make sure one’s use of force is verbally justified. Hence a huge war effort with no sane reason, except that war is the only thing these people can believe in. Can a war with China be avoided? Only if China is determined to avoid it at a humiliating cost. Washington is certainly not working hard to avoid it, though suitable gestures of consultation and consideration are occasionally made for the benefit of the (unimpressed) public. What we need now is another Pearl Harbor: at present we are doing our best to provide them with one.
At this point it is not altogether easy to make an act of faith that all of history is in God’s hands. At this point, and on the level where I have just been standing, the level of current opinion, where history is thought to be made by President Johnson and McNamara and Bundy and the Pentagon. But history is in the hands of God and the decisions of men lead infallibly to the full expression of what is really hidden in them and in their society. The actions of the U.S. in Asia are God’s judgment on the U.S. We have decided that we will police the world–by the same tactics as used by the police in Alabama: beating “colored people” over the head because we believe they are “inferior.” In the end, an accounting will be demanded.
Dancing in the Water of Life Page 32
