Far down, a bright-nosed armed jet goes by very fast.
Six thousand dead sheep.6
Utah. Something I saw shining alone in a valley a moment ago could have been our monastery.
“New secret poison gas harms no one but the enemy.”
Six thousand dead sheep.
Over the Nevada desert, nothing.
A long compacted serpent of cloud running north-south dominates, presides over the other looser clouds floating below relaxed, flaccid, and abandoned, flying slowly from west to east.
Six thousand dead sheep.
Real desert, not snow.
Salt.
A copper mine:
Red involved shamanic sign inscribed on the flat waste.
A sign of a stream ending in nothing. Pure dead, unsigned flats. Nada!
San Francisco. Two daiquiris in the airport bar. Impression of relaxation. Even only in the airport, a sense of recovering something of myself that has been long lost.
On the little plane to Eureka, the same sense of ease, of openness. Sense of relaxation while waiting because this is a different land, a different country, a more South American or Central American city. Significant?
A. Stern says of Sartre, “Each philosopher can only give the truth of his own existence. That is to say, philosophy is not a universal or impersonal science. Each individual perspective requires the others as its complements. The existentialist world view is determined by his actions and his means of action.”7
Unamuno said, “Philosophy is a product of each philosopher and each philosopher is a man of flesh and blood who addresses himself to other men of flesh and blood like himself, and whatever he may do, he does not philosophize with his reason alone but with his will, his feeling, his flesh and blood, with his whole soul and his whole body. It is the man who philosophizes in us.”8
Contrast Hegel, who said, “The teaching of philosophy is precisely what frees man from the endless crowd of finite aims and intentions by making him so indifferent to them that their existence or nonexistence is to him a matter of no moment.”
Consistency.
Is the pseudomonastic experience an attempt to convince ourselves that we are somehow necessary?…Justification by monastic works or by a metaphysical consciousness?
Sartre said of the Salauds, “They tried to overcome their contingency by inventing a necessary being.”
Monastic discipline: Learning to exist as a subject without a world? Primacy of the conscious subject, creating a certain consciousness to justify our existence instead of appreciating the primacy of existence as concrete, subjective, given, not to be acquired!
Fatal emphasis (in a monastic life) on acquiring something. What about this imperative? Does it make sense? “Convince yourself that you exist!” Baloney!
May 7, 1968
It was quiet flying to Eureka yesterday afternoon in a half-empty plane. One jet flight a day to this forgotten lumber town. Distant presences of Lassen peak and Mount Shasta, especially Shasta…like great silent Mexican gods, white and solemn. Massively suspended alone, over haze and over thousands of lower ridges.
The redwood lands appear. Even from the air you can see that the trees are huge. And from the air, too, you can see where the hillsides have been slashed into, ravaged, sacked, stripped, eroded with no hope of regrowth of these marvelous trees.
We land in Eureka, a windy, vacant field by the ocean. Vast sea, like lead, with a cold steady, humid wind blowing off it…almost as if there were no town at all; a few low wooden buildings, and a palm tree, and rhododendron in bloom. I see Sister Leslie and Father Roger at the gate. Sister compliments me on wearing a beret.
Eureka, a curious low town of wooden buildings—strange leaden light. It is a fine day for Eureka. You can see the sun. Most of the time it is hidden in fog.
Signs.
A baroque yellow and black Victorian mansion which I five times photographed.
The place strangely reminds me of Little Neck, Long Island, or maybe Alaska, or maybe Siberia…God knows. The strange desolate windy low-slung non-town, yet with stores. We get a couple of cans of beer.
Driving down through the redwoods was indescribably beautiful along Eel River. There is one long stretch where the big trees have been protected and saved—like a completely primeval forest. Everything from the big ferns at the base of the trees, the dense undergrowth, the long enormous shafts towering endlessly in shadow penetrated here and there by light. A most moving place—like a cathedral. I kept thinking of the notes of Francis Ponge on the fir forest of Central France. But what could one say about these?
May 13, 1968
I am on the Pacific Shore—perhaps fifty miles south of Cape Mendocino. Wide open, deserted hillside frequently only by sheep and swallows, sun and wind. No people for miles either way. Breakers on the black sand. Crying gulls fly down and land neatly on their own shadows.
I am half way between Needle Rock, where there is an abandoned house and Bear Harbor, where there is another abandoned house—three miles between them. No human habitation in sight on all the miles of shore line either way, though there is a small sheep ranch hidden beyond Needle Rock.
North, toward Shelter Cove, a manufactory of clouds where the wind piles up smoky moisture along the steep flanks of the mountains. Their tops are completely hidden.
Back inland, in the Mattole Valley at the convent, it is probably raining.
South, bare twin pyramids. And down at the shore, a point of rock on which there is a silent immobile convocation of seabirds, perhaps pelicans.
Far out at sea, a long low coastal vessel seems to get nowhere. It hangs in an isolated patch of light like something in eternity.
And yet, someone has been here before me with a small box of sun-kissed seedless raisins and I too have one of these. So this other may have been a nun from the Redwoods.
A huge shark lolls in the swells making his way southward, close in shore, showing his dorsal fin.
Faint cry of a lamb on the mountain side muffled by sea wind.
When I came four or five days ago to Needle Rock, I told the rancher I would be out on this mountainside for a few days. He had just finished shearing. All the sheep were still penned in at the ranch. Now they are all over the mountain again.
This morning I sheltered under a low thick pine while sheep stood bare and mute in the pelting shower.
Song sparrows everywhere in the twisted trees—“neither accept nor reject anything.”
(Astavakra Gita)
Low tide. Long rollers trail white sleeves of foam behind them, reaching for the sand, like hands for the keyboard of an instrument.
May 14, 1968
Sister Katryn danced barefoot in the choir Sunday after Mass. Beauty of these Flemish nuns and of the American nuns too. More beautiful in their simple blue and gray dresses without veils than in the affected and voluminous Cistercian habit—the cowl and choker. But they wear light cowls in choir and can wear such veils as they please. Some, like the chantress, a dignified mantilla. Others, a headband, others, nothing.
I told them I wanted to ask my Abbot’s permission to spend Lent in the abandoned house at Needle Rock. Sister Dominique said they would all fight one another for the chance to bring me supplies.
Yesterday afternoon, late, waiting by the small barn with gray, well-weathered redwood shingles. The calm ocean with high cumulus clouds reflected in it and swallows circling the barn in the sunny air.
Not to run from one thought to the next, says Theophane the Recluse, but to give each one time to settle in the heart.
Attention. Concentration of the spirit in the heart.
Vigilance. Concentration of the will in the heart.
Sobriety. Concentration of feeling in the heart.
Bear Harbor is in many ways better than Needle Rock—more isolated, more sheltered. A newer house in better repair, with a generator. You reach it finally after barns, and the tall eucalyptus grove.
Flowers at Bear Harbor. Besides wild ir
ises three or four feet high, there are calla lilies growing wild among the ferns and the strange bank…and a profusion of roses and a lot of flowering shrubs that I cannot name.
Bear Harbor—rocky cove piled up with driftwood logs, some of which have been half burned. Much of it could serve for firewood.
When Father Roger drove me out here this morning, it was low tide. Four cars or trucks were parked by the old dead tree at Needle Rock and people were fishing for abalone. Two other cars met us on the road as we went down. That’s too many.
There were even two cars at Bear Harbor and two pair of young men…one of them a teacher interested in Zen.
About a mile from Bear Harbor, there is a hollow in which I am now sitting, where one could comfortably put a small trailer. A small loud stream, many quail.
The calm ocean…very blue through the trees. Calla lilies growing wild. A very active flycatcher. The sun shines through his wings as through a Japanese fan. It is the feast of St. Pachomius. Many ferns. A large unfamiliar hawktype bird flew over a little while ago, perhaps a young eagle.
I called Ping Ferry in Santa Barbara last evening. He spoke of birds, of the shore, of Robinson Jeffers and told me the name of the big jay bird all dark-blue with a black crest which I saw yesterday. It is called Steller’s Jay. Does the jay know whose bird he is? I doubt it. A marvelous blue!
My piece on the “Wild Places” is to be printed in Center Magazine.9
Two ailing lombardy poplars, an ancient picket fence among the thistles: there must have been a house here once. Behind me a high wall of wooded mountain, green firs with many solitary, burned masts standing out above them. Wild fox gloves by the stream just where it sings loudest.
Yesterday, when Father Roger came to pick me up, he brought the mail. Most of it useless. There was a letter from Naomi Burton who said that the Journal of My Escape from the Nazis passes from hand to hand at Doubleday and nobody knows what to make of it. She likes it but the rest are idiots.
Lecture édifiante [edifying reading]. The Russian priest Sylvester wrote a famous book called the Domostroy. This Sylvester was the advisor of Ivan the Terrible but before he became terrible, so says the author I am reading. Domostroy seems to be the Russian equivalent of Good Housekeeping. Good Housekeeping for a Tzar whose housekeeping is not yet terrible.
Eugene Popov, honorary member of the Ecclesiastical Academy of St. Petersburg, taught that it was “a sin to make the sign of the cross with gloves on.”
I wonder about the definition of Orthodoxy as hostility to rules worked out by Yelchaninov and quoted at the beginning. I wonder.
Eight crows wheel in the sky. An interesting evolution of shadows on the bare hillside beneath them. Sometimes the crows fly low and their dance mingles with the dance of their own shadows on the almost perpendicular olive wall of the mountain pasture. Below, the sighs of the ocean.
“How many incarnations hast thou devoted to the actions of body, mind and speech? They have brought thee nothing but pain. Why not cease from them?”
(Astavakra Gita)
Reincarnation or not, I am as tired of talking and writing as if I had done it for centuries. Now it is time to listen at length to this Asian ocean. Over there, Asia.
Yesterday, in this place, looking southwest, I thought of New Zealand and the Wahine and my Aunt Kit getting into the last lifeboat. It capsized.
I was sitting in the shade near the spot where the jay cried out on the branch over my head yesterday and awakened me as I was dozing in the sun. A red pick-up truck came up the dirt road. The owner of the land was in it with his wife and said he would be willing to rent me his house at Bear Harbor if plans work out for him in September, but he can’t commit himself until then.
Frank Jones, Box 81, West Port, California.
May 16, 1968
I am flying over snowy mountains towards Las Vegas and Albuquerque and I read Han Yu’s versatilities about mountains in the book of late T’ang poems I got yesterday at City Lights.
The snow suddenly gives place to a copper-colored desert.
We drove down together this time yesterday from Thorn. Mother Myriam is going reluctantly to the Chapter of Abbesses at Cîteaux. Sister Katryn drove. Al Groth, the neighbor, with the Heineken’s beer rode in the back seat. I cashed Dan Walsh’s check at Garberville together with another small royalty on the Bellarmine book, the symposium about the Council.
Eel River Valley. Redwoods. Redwood tourist traps, but also real groves. After lunch at Ukiah we went among fruit-growing towns, old brown wineries, conservative Cloverdale with a few oranges still in the trees and signs saying, “Impeach Earl Warren” and “Don’t sell anything to the Reds.”
Below, now, Death Valley.
At Santa Rosa, four gamblers were yelling in a cool Hofbrau. Draft Löwenbraü! Then we went to a place for prescriptions by the hospital. Then off on the bright freeway to the city.
The fine wide ranches, low white houses, eucalyptus, pepper wood pine, fruit trees. We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge in bright sunlight, the whole city clear.
A man, chased in vain by a painter who wanted to prevent him, had jumped off the bridge about an hour before.
Downtown San Francisco. I walked about a bit while the sisters went to find Portia, their postulant with whom they were to stay. Portia was getting off work at Penney’s.
I called [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti. I went first to City Lights but he was not there. I got the T’ang poets, Heilo, something on Zen, William Carlos Williams, “Kora in Hell.” We had supper at an Italian restaurant, Polo’s. Ferlinghetti came after we had finished the bottle of Chianti. I went off with him to an Espresso place on Grant Avenue, the Trieste, where a young musician told of some visions he had had. Good visions, and not on drugs either.
Below, completely arid rocks, valley floor streaked with salt, bone dry. Twenty minutes from Las Vegas.
Turbulence at lower altitudes, we hear.
And some, like champions, Fen or Yü.
When the stakes are down, eager for the prize ahead,
The foremost and strongest rearing high above…
The losers looking foolish and speechless with rage.
In the little Italian restaurant in the North Beach area where I had an early breakfast today, a Chinese man, looking as though bewildered with drugs or something, ate repeated orders of macaroni with bottles of beer. It was seven o’clock in the morning. Much comment in Italian by the staff and the patrons. One of the hatted Italians whirled his finger next to the temple and pointed to the man, “you’re crazy.”
“I fear that heaven, just like man can lose its sight by lusting after beauty.”
(Lu Tung)
We bump down into Las Vegas over burned red and ocher canyons. Interesting rock peaks—like Sinai. Turbulence.
I stayed overnight last night at City Lights publications offices. A bedroom with a mattress on the floor, a guitar and a tape recorder and a window opening on a fire escape—a block from Telegraph Hill. Noise of cars roaring up the steep streets all night. Finally it got quiet about 1:30 I think I slept from 2 to 5 and also an hour somewhere around midnight.
Morning. Lovely little Chinese girls going in all directions to school, one with a violin.
A wide meteorite crater in the Arizona desert, like a brown and red morning glory.
I am the utter poverty of God. I am His emptiness, littleness, nothingness, lostness. When this is understood, my life in His freedom, the self-emptying of God in me is the fullness of grace. A love for God that knows no reason because He is the fullness of grace. A love for God that knows no reason because He is God; a love without measure, a love for God as personal. The Ishvara appears as personal in order to inspire this love. Love for all, hatred of none is the fruit and manifestation of love for God—peace and satisfaction. Forgetfulness of worldly pleasure, selfishness and so on in the love for God, channeling all passion and emotion into the love for God.
Technology as Karma.
What c
an be done has to be done. The burden of possibility that has to be fulfilled, possibilities which demand so imperatively to be fulfilled that everything else is sacrificed for their fulfillment.
Computer Karma in American civilization.
Distinguish work as narcotic (that is being an operator and all that goes with it) from healthy and free work. But also consider the wrong need for non-action. The Astavakra Gita says: “Do not let the fruit of action be your motive and do not be attached to non-action.” In other words, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. Work to please God alone.
Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita, “By devotion in work He knows me, knows what in truth I am and who I am. Then having known me in truth, He enters into me.”
The states of life. Brahmacharya. The life of the student in chastity under his Guru. Grhastha. The life of the householder begetting children, practicing Karma Yoga. Vanaprastha. The forest life. My present life. A life of privacy and of quasiretirement. Is there one more stage? Yes. Sanyasa. Total renunciation. Homelessness, begging. The Sanyasin lives only on food given to him. He is freed from all ritual obligations. The sacred fire is kindled only within. No household shrine. No temple. He is entirely turned to deliverance, renouncing all activity and attachment, all fear, all greed, all care, without home, without roof, without place, without name, without office, without function, without reputation, without care for reputation, without being known.
The Other Side of the Mountain Page 13
