The Other Side of the Mountain

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The Other Side of the Mountain Page 11

by Thomas Merton


  It turned out Freddy Hicks was outside with a couple of shaggy boys cutting up and removing the pine trees that came down in the storm the other day. So chainsaws were on the tape, too, but not too loud I think. As we made the tape we drank beer. Sue 5., the girl who was promoting most of it, was very intense, asked a lot of leading questions on fashionable topics—pre-marital sex, etc. And we finished the tape in good style and decided to go over to Bardstown to Hawk’s place [Hawk Rogers’s restaurant] for steaks, and I got a bottle of bourbon and we made a night of it. In the end I took them over to Thompson Willett’s and we drank some more whiskey. By the time we were going home Sue was drunk and lit into me hysterically for agreeing (politely—in order not to argue) with T.W.’s conservative opinions.

  Then, after a haunted sort of night in which I barely slept, went down to the monastery in the rain—brief conversation with John Ford who was on a weekend retreat, then off in the rain to Bardstown with the girls to say Mass in the house of Beatrice Rogers since I had promised her to do so the evening before.

  That part of it was good. The Rogers are a Negro family and Beatrice works at Willetts’ as well as at Hawk’s—and I am fond of her and her husband. The mass was fine and so was the breakfast after—a true ecclesial experience, much peace, everyone getting along, the girls, the Willetts’ etc. It was a real grace, though I had no permission…Still, in post-conciliar liberty I thought” OK—this is what I do.”

  Then the girls drove off to St. Louis in the rain and I came back to the hermitage, prepared a conference for the novices on Cassian and went down to give it.

  But I remained upset about Sue, her attack, her neurosis, her mini-skirt, buxomness, etc., etc. Obviously the two of us could get in a lot of trouble and make each other thoroughly miserable. I must take care.

  Later in the week she called Fr. Jim Gannon, a former monk and student of mine who was in her home parish in Akron and gave him a glowing account of her visit to me. He wrote me a troubled letter saying I was preaching heresy, etc., etc. So that is the way the whole thing is: crazy, neurotic, absurd. The other girls were quieter, sweeter, all good kids: but I felt it was perhaps a mistake to get involved with them. Except for that Mass at Beatrice’s: and that was good. I’ll never forget it. That was Passion Sunday.

  Morning—news came through about Johnson’s announcement that he would not run for President—that the country was dangerously divided by dissensions. That he felt he must sacrifice himself to settle the Vietnam War. And he stopped the bombing in North Viemam. The feeling of relief was tremendous. But the next day Dan Walsh, who has a lot of inside knowledge of the Democratic Party, told me it was all a ruse, that the plan is for Johnson eventually to be “drafted” again at the convention and this is a way of circumventing Bobby Kennedy. That was depressing.

  Monday I wrote my preface to Richard Chi’s book on Shen Hui—the first draft. Went over it Tuesday and gave it to Fr. Hilarion for typing. And I began reading the Joyce books I have to review. It was exciting to get back in touch with Joyce after all these years.

  .Tuesday-quiet. I went for a walk on the old Linton farm, in the orchard over there. Some wild cherry trees in bloom in the woods on the edge of it. Looked down through the thicket at Fr. Flavian’s hermitage. Wished my hermitage were over on that part of the property which is more inaccessible. Women can’t get to it as the only road there goes through the enclosure. But I suppose if I were there I’d have them drive around to the Tobacco barn and then walk through the fields! Why do I always end up with women? (Friday, when I spoke to the Abbot—Fr. Flavian—he was saying: “Maybe you ought to change your hermitage to a different place.” I wish I could. But would it really help? And would it be right or reasonable to build a new one? The only alternative would be to move into his, and I don’t particularly like it. Maybe he’d like mine, as being more convenient!)

  Fr. Flavian told me that Dom James in his hermitage is writing many voluminous letters, including a seven-page Easter circular. This made me laugh like crazy since Dom James was always preaching so furiously against letter-writing. And his letters have to be dictated on a dictaphone and typed by (his former) secretaries.

  Wednesday—also quiet. Read a bit on Joyce, with some letters. (I have never preached against letter-writing, and my correspondence is a pain in the ass.)

  Wednesday evening Donald Allchin arrived (late) with a seminarian from General Theological Seminary, N.Y. Thursday we had planned to drive to Shakertown and did in fact do so. But when I got up Thursday it was raining in torrents and the rain continued all day. Apparently it was the end of a tornado that had hit Arkansas and Tennessee. We started out nevertheless, and got to Pleasant Hill, walked from building to building in pelting rain. The restaurant wasn’t open and we went to the Imperial House in Lexington. Then when the seminarian went off to the U.K. to hunt up a long lost cousin, Donald and I sat in Gene Meatyard’s shop. After that we stopped briefly at Carolyn Hammer’s and went to a place called Lum’s for supper. By then it was evening.

  Lum’s was a curious sort of goldfish-bowl glass place out in a flat suburb near a railway viaduct. Serves all kinds of beer—we drank Carlson’s (Danish). The TV was on for the news. Some tanks plowed around in Vietnam, then Martin Luther King appeared-talking the previous night in Memphis. I was impressed by his tenseness and strength. A sort of vague visual, auditory impression. At almost that very moment he was being killed. We left, and right away on the car radio came the news that he had been shot and had been taken to the hospital in a “critical condition.” Later, long before we were in Bardstown, it was announced he was dead.

  So then we decided to go to Hawk’s, and there we sat for two or three hours talking to Hawk in an empty section of the place (a party was going on in the other section). It was a moving and sad experience. Got home late again (about 11:30) and again slept little—barely two hours.

  Lum’s in Lexington. Red gloves, Japanese lights. Beer list. Bottles slipped over counter. Red waistcoats of Kentucky boy waiters. Girl at cashier desk the kind of thin, waitlike blonde I get attracted to. Long talk with her getting directions on how to get to Bluegrass Parkway. While we were eating a long, long freight train went by, cars on high embankment silhouetted against a sort of ragged, vapor sunset. A livid light between clouds. And over there a TV with now (after the excitement of M. L. King) the jovial man in South Africa who just had the first successful heart transplant. He said he had been down to the beach to “get a little ozone.” Didn’t sound English, didn’t sound anything. His smile looked fixed, wax. But he was real. He had an African Negro’s heart in him, beating along. They asked him if he felt any different towards his wife and I really fell off my chair laughing. No one else could figure out what was funny.

  When I was in Lum’s I was dutifully thinking, “Here is the world.” Red gloves, beer, freight trains. The man and child. The girls at the next table, defensive, vague, aloof. One felt the place was full of more or less miserable people. Yet think of it: all the best beers in the world were at their disposal and the place was a good idea. And the freight train was going by, going by, silhouetted against an ambiguous sunset.

  So the murder of M. L. King—it lay on the top of the traveling car like an animal, a beast of the apocalypse. And it finally confirmed all the apprehensions—the feeling that 1968 is a beast of a year. That the things are finally, inexorably, spelling themselves out. Why? Are things happening because people in desperation want them to happen? Or do they have to happen? Is the human race self-destructive? Is the Christian message of love a pitiful delusion? Or must one just “love” in an impossible situation? And what sense can possibly be made by an authoritarian Church that comes out 100 years late with its official pronouncements?

  Rainy night. Big, columned Baptist churches. Highway with huge lights and wrong turns. Radio. Nashville. Louisville. Indianapolis. Jazz, news, ads. M. L. King gradually coming dear through all the rock ’n’ roll as definitively dead. And southerners probably
celebrating, and Negroes getting ready to tear everything apart.

  Hawk with his arm around me saying “This is my boy, this is my friend.” Beatrice asking me to do the Rogers coat-of-arms for her hallway. I could cry.

  “Did you get all those girls straightened out?” said Hawk!

  Today was peaceful. The sun finally came out after dinner. I went out to the woods, read some Rene Char in view of the translation I am to do for Unicorn Press. Was by the remote little pond deep in the knobs. Silence. Aloneness. Sun. Feet on crumbling shale. I took my shirt off and got the sun on my shoulders-together with a fairly cold breeze. Bro. Benedict made me a sign that Negroes were rioting in fifteen cities.

  Yesterday I wrote a letter to Mrs. King and sent it via June Yungblut. June had written a letter Wednesday from Atlanta—a curiously sensitive and prophetic letter: (she and John had been urging M. L. King to make a retreat here).

  “Martin is going to Memphis today…. He won’t be back until the weekend so John won’t see him (i.e. about the retreat) until next week. I hope both he and Nhat Ranh will soon go to Gethsemani…. If Martin had taken a period there he might have had the wisdom in repose to stay out of Memphis in the first place, and it was a mistake to go there. He had done no preparation and came in cold to a hot situation where the young militants had him just where they wanted him…. If there is violence today Memphis will be to King what Cuba was to Kennedy…. If Memphis is to be Martin’s Jerusalem instead of Washington, how ironical that it is primarily a nightclub for Mississippi which is dry wherein the crucifixion may take place and that the Sanhedrin will be composed of Negro militants.”

  And after that, maybe, the deluge.

  April 9, 1968. Tuesday in Holy Week

  More rain yesterday. This morning, a fresh, marvelous spring morning, clear pre-dawn, mist hanging low in the next field, coming right up to the rose-hedge. Trees beyond the field stand clear over the mist, against the red streaks of the East. The air and wet woods ringing with a din of birds, mad song of a mockingbird in the nest, cardinals, wrens, and the solemn drums of a big woodpecker.

  Palm Sunday was rainy. Talked with three young men from the Hough (ghetto) area in Cleveland where they are “living like monks,” one white, two Negro—the latter seeming very solid and alive and interested in meditation. They said Hough was peaceful. But there were very serious riots in Chicago, Washington, elsewhere. The funeral of M. L. King is today. June wrote again, about the calm and heroism of Coretta King. John Howard Griffin—a shocked note from a Motel in Utica “when will they also shoot the rest of us?”

  Yesterday—in Louisville—Alex Peloquin came down from Boston and played his setting he has done of my Four Freedom Songs-this was at O’Callaghans’. The songs were good, tough, would make a good TV show (Belafonte, possibly??) They were to have been first presented at the Liturgical Conference at which M. L. King was to have been present.

  Still no more work on the wing of my building. Maybe today?

  April 14, 1968. Easter Sunday

  The last three days of Holy Week were beautiful, brilliant days. The finest of all the spring. My redbuds are in bloom and the apple trees are in full bloom down by the monastery beehives. It was wonderful today walking under their great dim clouds full of booming bees.

  Parrish’s men poured the floor of my chapel Holy Thursday and put tar on the roof Good Friday. Now the inner wall needs to be finished and the room has to be painted.

  Holy Thursday afternoon I rode over to see Dom James’s hermitage which is nearly finished. It is a curious place, and there are many things I would not like about it. But they have taken a lot of trouble with it—and it has built-in air-conditioning…

  As I was coming back to the hermitage from the monastery after dinner, a deer, a big doe, flew down the field in the bottoms head up, white-flag of tail erect, passing in front of me barely fifty yards away.

  Last week I finished my review of Altizer’s book on Blake for The Sewanee Review. The second issue of Monks Pond is in the works. I keep getting good letters about the first one. Must now write my essay on “War and the Crisis of Meaning” which I have been preparing for a long time.

  It is a delight to be in the Easter Office again—almost unbelievable, the first day or two, each year. It is Easter! The Alleluias are back, the short lesson from Hosea, etc.

  April 16, 1968. Easter Tuesday

  Easter Day, grey and stuffy, ended in thunderstorms while I was having supper (and reading the Confessions of Zeno). Yesterday was cool and clear, and today too, the same bright, sharp, cool dawn full of birdsong. Everything is breaking into leaf, the dogwoods are coming out, the flowers still greenish white (the one in the monastery yard is the first one to be fully white). Yesterday I went for a walk over to the distant little hidden pond on Linton’s farm and stood there a while in the sun. Came back to give a conference. Met Andy Boone, who stopped to give me his view on world affairs: “The Bible says the last shall be first” and so, he contends the colored people of the world will take over. Closer to home and of more immediate concern: “When the Niggers get through busting up the cities they’ll come out in the country and there’s plenty of white trash around that’ll join ’em.” Thus for Andy it’s a class war, not a race war, and he has identified himself with those the revolution is against. He advised me to get a radio—indeed even TV—so I’d know “when they was comin’.”

  He assured me that a fire in Louisville was somehow connected with these apocalyptic events. “A big building-a big six-story building.” (It turned out to be a bar on Broadway.) Nothing to do with rioting. However, the riots after M. L. King’s death were widespread and a lot of information about them was withheld (in many cities no information about casualties, arrests, etc. was available).

  April 18, 1968. Easter Thursday

  There was a violent thunderstorm about midnight and it went on a long time. Big downpour. This morning, before dawn, misty moon, mist hanging low over the wet fields and bottoms, and a towhee waking in the hedge. Black wet trees against the clouds.

  The workmen came yesterday again (after another interval), put up a bit of partition. I hope they will soon be finished. I planted a lot of bulbs that the novices dug up out of their garden and were going to throwaway: a bad time to transplant them! I hope a few will survive. The work hurt my back, and for some reason I felt extremely tired, unable to do anything. Lately I have noticed this tendency to fatigue, with pains in the chest: I wonder vaguely if I am building up to a heart attack. But examinations generally show my heart is in perfect condition, and I have no intention of worrying about it. Maybe I’ll get a check-up later this year when there’s more time.

  Last evening at supper I finished Lenny Bruce. Sometimes he is really inspired—sometimes just dull. And, though he is in some sense a kind of “martyr” for honesty, yet I think his gospel of excess was delusive and self-destroying. That is the problem! Also read the last half of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents—a truly prophetic book! A bit of Ibn Battuta, whose travels are sometimes marvelous. But I don’t read much these days.

  Reading a good book by Nasr on Islam. And this afternoon, in the sun, out on the quiet bottom by the creek, began the Ashtavakra Gita—very much what I have been needing. This morning, in the mail, a mysterious telegram, probably not phoned in, asking me to meet someone tomorrow “where we were before.” At first could not identify the sender. It was from a suburb of St. Louis and I thought it might be one of the college girls, here a few weeks ago. Then it occurred to me that it must be the woman from California with the apocalyptic mission. Very embarrassing! A sort of clandestine meeting is suggested. I’ll leave a note for her at the Gatehouse, I think, explaining why this is entirely impossible.

  All of which brings up the problem of real solitude: I don’t have it here. I am not really living as a hermit. I see too many people, have too much active work to do, the place is too noisy, too accessible. People are always coming up here, and I have been too slack
about granting visits, interviews, etc., going to town too often, socializing, drinking, and all that. All I have is a certain privacy, but real solitude is less and less possible here. Everyone now knows where the hermitage is and in May I am going to the convent of the Redwoods in California. Once I start traveling around, what hope will there be?

  In this morning’s mail was a letter from [Ernesto] Cardenal, asking me once again to come to Solentiname, assuring me the solitude is real there (and I certainly believe it is-there could hardly he a more hidden, more inaccessible place—an island on a tropical lake in Central America). I have to seriously think about this. At any rate, I ought to be able to spend a few weeks there some time (perhaps on the way to Chile, if I can get sent down there to “help out” temporarily). I really wish something could be worked out. My situation here is not really satisfactory. And moving to another part of the property is no real solution. At least I want to see what’s there on the island. It is certainly isolated. Only problem is I am getting old, might have a hard time adjusting to a tropical climate, diet, etc., and am very susceptible to dysentery.

  But I honestly feel I may have to move somewhere else. Or make some pretty firm rearrangements here. As it is, I have a lot of people to see. Dom Damasus Winzen is supposed to be coming tomorrow. [W. H.] “Ping” Ferry next week. Carolyn [Hammer] was here today with Jonathan Greene, but her visits are brief, not too distracting and I think they fit my life all right. Ping, too. Wherever I go, some visits will be unavoidable. But here I have far too many, too much mail, etc., etc. Of course, things are so much better and quieter than when I was in the monastery, it is an immense improvement. But much more is needed and more discipline on my own part.

 

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