May 17, 1968
I am at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, Abiquiu, New Mexico. I was bombarded by impressions getting here yesterday. The vast sweep of the Rio Grande Valley.
Sangre de Cristo Mountains, blue and snowy.
But after Santa Fe, marvelous long line of snowless, arid mountains, clean long shapes stretching for miles under pure light. Mesas, full rivers, cotton woods, sage brush, high red cliffs, piñon pines. Most impressed of all by the miles of emptiness.
This monastery is thirteen miles by dirt road from the nearest highway. In that distance, only one other house is passed—Skull Ranch. Around the monastery, nothing. Perfect silence. Bright stars at night dimly light the guest room. The only noise, the puttering of the pilot light in the gas heater. The adobe building is full of beautiful Santos [images of saints in sculpture or painting], old ones and new ones, serious as painted desert birds.
New Mexican workman on the lovely chapel whose roof recently fell in. It has to be redone.
Nakashima’s placing of the chapel: working its lines into the setting of cliffs, is great. Inexhaustible interest of the building from all angles and in all lights. It is the best monastic building in the country.
There are only two monks here now: Dom Aelred, the founder, and Father Gregory. Both from the founding group at Mount Saviour. They were previously at Portsmouth Priory. There is also a hermit, Father Denis [Hines], a Cistercian from Snowmass in Colorado whom I have not yet seen.
Yesterday I said good-bye to Mother Myriam and Sister Katryn at the airport in San Francisco. Her plane left two hours after mine for New York and Brussels and for the General Chapter of Abbesses at Cîteaux which she expects to find hopelessly frustrating. Our Abbot General is trying to keep her at any price from going and talking to anybody in Rome. In fact, he is trying to prevent her and all the others from going anywhere, making contacts, getting experience, exchanging ideas.
“All blue is precious,” said a friend of Gertrude Stein. There is very much of it here. A fortune in clear sky and the air…so good it almost knocked me down when I got off the plane in Albuquerque.
Father Roger, at the Redwoods, could not pronounce Albuquerque.
Alone, amid red rocks, small pine and cedar, facing the high wall on the other side of the Chama canyon. But east, the view opens out on distant mountains beyond the wider valley where the monastery is.
Light and shadow on the wind erosion patterns of the rocks. Silence except for the gull-like, questioning cries of jays.
Distant sound of muddy rushing water in the Chama River below me. I could use up rolls of film on nothing but these rocks. The whole canyon replete with emptiness.
“When the mind is stirred and perceives things before it as objects of thought, it will find in itself something lacking.”
(Astavakra Gita)
To find this “something lacking” is already a beginning of wisdom.
Ignorance seeks to make good the “lacking” with better and more complete or more mysterious objects. The lack itself will be complete as void.
Not to deny subject and object but to realize them as void.
The alleluia antiphon for Terce at the Redwoods Monastery, composed by Sister Dominique, stays with me and is associated with the monastery.
The young redwoods clustered outside the big window of the chapel and then the ocean, Needle Rock and Bear Harbor.
The sun on the vast water, the sound of the waves. Yet the sound of the wind in the piñon pines here is very much the same.
The liturgy at the Redwoods was excellent. I enjoyed the daily concelebration with Father Roger, with the nuns coming up to stand around close to the altar at the end of the offertory and one of them extinguishing the candles as they retired after communion.
I have not yet concelebrated here at Christ in the Desert. That is to be this evening when I go back from the canyon to the monastery. In spite of the cedars and piñon pines, this is real desert in which one could well get lost among boulders, except that the end of the canyon is well in sight.
Just as in California around Thorn, I could see hollows and valleys like those of Kentucky, so here the view out at the end of the canyon is something like that from my own hermitage…a straight line of dark green hills with hollows and open patches. Only here, there is also a red wall of cliff and it is all much higher and the air is much clearer.
For the first time since I have been away, I now have the feeling that I might be glad to get back to Kentucky, but not to mail and visitors and invitations that I will have to refuse and other things that I will not be able to avoid.
A gang of gray jays flies down into the canyon with plaintive cat-like cries over my head. Some stop to question my presence. They reply to one another all over the canyon. They would rob me if they thought I had anything worthwhile. Gray Jay, “Whiskey Jack,” a camp robber, inquisitive, versatile (says the bird book).
May 18, 1968
When I got in from my day in the canyon yesterday, after passing the goat barn and reaching the adobe building of the monastery guest house, I saw Father Gregory with some people and he introduced me to Don Devereux and his wife—Ping Ferry’s friends from Santa Fe. There was much talk of Indians at supper.
Today in Don’s old truck, we went to Abiquiu. I mailed six rolls of film to John Griffin to develop and we drove around the plaza—saw the adobe walls of Georgia O’Keeffe’s house, the garden full of vegetation. Then, down the road, the site of the old pueblo that Don knew about, and two shrines. The site was superb, high over the valley, and one could imagine something of the way it was in the ancient civilization. The east opening of the shrine toward distant snow-covered mountains where obviously the sun rises at the June equinox. I came away with pockets full of pottery fragments and a tiny, almost entire obsidian arrowhead, like black glass.
I have run out of black and white film and had to get color film in Abiquiu. I took pictures of a lot of odd volcanic rocks lying around on Ghost Ranch. Vast sprinklers were watering the alfalfa and the lawns, neat houses of the Presbyterians, conference rooms and so forth of this religious center.
Don was telling me about the Alianza and Tijerina, an attack on a courthouse and a murder. Tijerina fled to the mountains and was interviewed secretly in his mountain hideout by Peter Nabokov, the young newspaper man whose book on the Indians I reviewed.
Simmering unrest in all this area. People set fire secretly to the government forest. There is much resentment about the land being taken from them—land which was granted to their ancestors by the Spanish crown.
Mexicans are working on the damaged church at Christ in the Desert and there is a water problem there.
I got up in the middle of the night with stomach cramps and ran barefoot down the cold pebble path to the hut with the toilet in it not knowing whether the toilet would flush. Fortunately, it did.
Arsenio, the Indian cook, makes fine breakfast for the workmen.
Father Aelred bought some beer the other day and Arsenio drank up a whole case of it in one night.
This morning I began looking at the copy of [René] Daumal’s Mount Analogue, which Ferlinghetti just published and which he gave me in San Francisco.
Up the canyon from where I now sit, a couple of miles below the monastery, there is the heavy, domed architecture of a fat mountain ringed with pillared red cliffs, ponderous as the great Babylonian movie palaces of the 1920s, but far bigger.
Fresh wind, song of an ordinary robin in the low gnarled cedars.
May 19, 1968. Fifth Sunday after Easter
From Mount Analogue: “How it was proved that a hitherto unknown continent really existed with mountains much higher than the Himalaya…how it happened that no one detected it before…how we reached it, what creatures we met there—how another expedition pursuing quite different goals barely missed destruction.”
Last night at dusk, the three tame white ducks went running very fast through the green alfalfa to the river, plunging int
o the swift waters, swimming to the other side, standing up in the shallows, flapping their white wings. Then the fourth discovered their absence and followed them through another corner of the alfalfa field.
The calls of the crows here in New Mexico as in California, are more muted, more melodious, briefer, less insistent than in the east. The crows seem to be flying at a greater psychic altitude, in a different realm. Yes, of course, a realm of high rocks and stunted piñon pine.
The curvature of space around Mount Analogue makes it possible for people to live as though Mount Analogue did not exist. Hence, everyone comes from an unknown country and almost everyone from a too well known country.
Georgia O’Keeffe did not come to the monastery to lunch today since she had to wait at her house at Abiquiu for a framer. Others came. Peter Nabokov, and so forth. We ate a large salad in the hot sun. I went quickly to rest afterwards to escape conversation.
This morning I had a long and rather funny talk with Father Denis at his field-stone hermitage by the river. He has a nice red cat. We talked of the Cistercian Order and of the monasteries and people in it—a discouraging topic.
May 20, 1968
Evening. Sun setting over Memphis Airport. I have come in a slow prop plane over flooded Arkansas country from Dallas. Between Albuquerque and Dallas, I finished Mount Analogue, a very fine book. It ends at a strange moment, a sign for the eschatological conscience—or it does not end, for the climb has only begun.
Peter Nabokov came to the monastery in the afternoon yesterday. I was glad to meet him and talk to him. There was much to say about the Poor People’s March, for he had been at a demonstration in Albuquerque the day before. He said Albuquerque was very sweet—sweet, he meant, to the poor people.
May 22, 1968
All the time in the Chama canyon, I was looking out for rattle snakes. It is full of sidewinders. I went gingerly among the rocks and looked everywhere before sitting down. I thought they would like best the heat of the day and the burning rocks, but Denis said they preferred dusk, evening, and the night, yet the nights are cold. In the end, I saw no rattlers except at the zoo in Ghost Ranch Museum. There, a huge ugly monster of a diamondback and three indescribably beautiful others, whose name I forgot—long, lithe, silvery, sandy snakes with neat rattles, lifting up their heads gracefully with swollen sacks of poison. They were too beautiful, too alive, too much themselves to be labeled, still less to have an emotion, fear, admiration, or surprise projected on them. You would meet one in the rocks and hardly see it, for it would be so much like the silver, dead, weathered cedar branches lying everywhere and exactly the color of sand or a desert vegetation. I understand the Indians’ respect for the snake—so different from the attitude ingrained in us since Genesis—our hatred and contempt.
In the desert one does not fight snakes, one simply lives with them and keeps out of their way.
The buildings of San Francisco, the two-spired church in North Beach, the apartments and streets of Telegraph Hill in warm, pale, South American or desert colors—snake colors, but charming and restful. Pretty as Havana and less noisy, though there was plenty of motor noise at night with cars climbing those steep hills.
Poulet says, “The starting point of the comic art of Molière is situated in the occasion in which a being is comprehended only through his actions.” A demeanor, proper to an occasion, a basis of judgment, for instance: “This is a flying doctor.” How do you know? He has a stethoscope. He flies. He is non-conformist.
Picture of South African heart-transplant patient passing a ball to international rugby players, who grin. When will we know if his heart now beats differently for his old wife! It is a Negro heart! Comedy: demeanor and misdemeanor!
A demeanor is therefore a misdemeanor. A misdemeanor in another is a cause of satisfaction to one whose own demeanor is not missing. We are not accustomed to seeing gentlemen act like this: which proves that we ourselves are gentlemen. (Not flying doctors or heart transplants with Negro hearts.) Until such time as the very fact of being a gentleman itself becomes ridiculous.
He is no menace to existence, clinging to a vanished order! Only the menace is to be taken seriously.
The gentleman is funny! And long-haired students sit in the office of Grayson Kirk at Columbia smoking his cigars as if they liked cigars. Rut then, you see, the gentleman can also eventually call the police, thereby reestablishing some claim to reality, and it is the long-hairs who are now funny (in jail?).
Thus says Poulet, “The comic is the perception of an ephemeral and local fracture in the middle of a durable and normal world.” Well, that remains to be seen.
“Let the painter come to terms with his impatience.” Words of Molière on The Painter of Frescoes and the comic playwright. Nominalism of Molière. Repeated hammering on one point until the character is depersonalized, generalized: “miser! miser! miser!” This is also the art of torture-in the police state. To repeat an accusation until it sticks and the accused is both generalized and objectivized by pain.
To “make an example of.”
“Now the soul is pleased when it makes an example of somebody else.” Words of Poulet.” It will renew in itself the idea of the very lively pleasure it tasted that first time.” Comedy is indeed close to torture!
And the French are now perhaps succeeding in making an example of de Gaulle, who first of all, made an example of himself.
“Par exemple [for example]!” the two meanings—qui peut servir de modèle [which can serve as a model] or châtiment qui peut servir de leçon [punishment that can teach a lesson].
But de Gaulle was always the pure exclamation, the par exemple! with the kepi on his head, who the other day exclaimed (as I saw in the San Francisco paper): “La rèforme, oui; le chienlit, non [Reform, yes; vulgarity, no]!”
Somewhere, when I was in some plane or in some canyon, Dan and Phil Berrigan and some others took A-I draft files from a draft center in a Baltimore suburb and burned them in a parking lot. Somewhere I heard they were arrested but I’ve seen no paper and don’t know anything, but an envelope came from Dan with a text of a preface to his new book, evidently on the Hanoi trip, saying he was going to do this. It was mailed from Baltimore, May 17th, and had scrawled on it, “Wish us luck.”
John Griffin sent one of my pictures of Needle Rock, which he developed and enlarged. I also have the contact. The Agfa film brought out the great Yang-Yin of sea rock mist, diffused light and half hidden mountain—an interior landscape, yet there. In other words, what is written within me is there, “Thou art that.”
I dream every night of the west.
May 30, 1968
The country which is nowhere is the real home; only it seems that the Pacific Shore at Needle Rock is more nowhere than this, and Bear Harbor is more nowhere still. (I was tempted to cross that out but in these notes, I am leaving everything, permitting everything.)
And are you there, my dears? Still under the big trees, going about your ways and your tasks, up the steep slope to the roomy wooden place where the chasubles are woven—Sister Gerarda on a bicycle to the guest quarters, Sister William to bake hosts, big warm Sister Veronica in the kitchen, Sister Katryn to be an obscure descendent of Eckhart’s Sister Katrei. Sister Katryn and Sister Christofora were the ones who seemed to respond the most knowingly whenever Eckhart was mentioned.
Sister Dominique, the impulsive, the blue-dressed, the full of melodies, who drove me in the car to the store to buy Levis; big gentle Sister Leslie from Vassar and blue-eyed Sister Diane from Arizona interested in Ashrams and Sister Shalom and Sister Cecilia, who came later to the party—and Mother Myriam, the Abbess, was responsible for this wonderful place. Which ones have I forgotten besides the two postulants, small dark Carole with the Volkswagen and big Portia from San Francisco?
Near the monastery, the tall silent redwoods, the house of the Looks and another house, neighbors by the Mattole River. The county line: here Mendocino, there Humboldt. My desolate shore is Mendocino. I must
return.
The convicts came in an olive drab bus to cut brush along the roadside by the guest house. Smoking remains of green bonfires all along the limits of Al Groth’s place. I did not see the convicts working—I was at the empty shore that day. I returned only after they were gone.
As we approached Sausalito, on the highway to San Francisco, someone pointed out San Quentin as the place where the convicts came from. A sinister white building on the bay.
Again I remember the Hofbrau outside Santa Rosa—the German Hofbrau in a wide Mexican valley by the American super highway. We took the wrong turn, got in the wrong parking lot, then out again into the right parking lot. The nuns waited in the car.
All around the hospital in Santa Rosa, the low offices of the gynecologists.
When I came, the convicts were cutting brush five miles northeast of Thorn. When I left, they were working and leaving bonfires near the monastery. Father Roger said: “They will not cross the stream.”
I remember the desk smelling uf oranges and my money in the top left-hand drawer in the old Bond Street wallet my guardian gave me on my 18th birthday before I started for the Riviera and Italy.
The narrow shower and the waste can full of orange peels, squeezed grapefruit, the sponge un the wash basin, bed heavy with dreams, the window curtain that pulled the wrong way, the dish of fruit on the bedroom table, the broken vase of roses replaced by field flowers, mail to go in a cardboard box in the utility room of unit one, mail read and thrown in the waste baskets smelling of oranges. Instant coffee at 4:30 a.m. with the Japanese coil—Do not touch for a few seconds after.
The Other Side of the Mountain Page 14
