The central idea in Camus is that revolt is the affirmation of man in his common nature (not enough emphasis on person) as against the historical process, or against revolution itself which always degenerates (due to its nihilistic elements) into the police state. Revolt saying “No.” The refusal of resignation, places a man in the open, in his isolation and vulnerability, his capacity to unite with other “revolters,” and this creates the only situation in which new values become possible, i.e. creates an authentic chance for renewal. The only alternatives are madness and death, outside of this creative revolt.
Question arises – is Camus also a Steppenwolf? Perhaps. Sartre prefers power to liberty.
In a sense this applies to my own situation – if I don’t dramatize it irresponsibly.
I am in an ambiguous, uncertain state of revolt. It is not effective because first of all I am conscientious about my vows. Hence it is not so much “revolt” as “reflexion” and “reflexion” creates no new values.
Just enough revolt to invite reprisals! Useless! Self-defeating. Perhaps Camus or (Hesse) is the only answer in my position. The plight I am in is so ridiculous – so truly absurd. An effete, ambiguous, mixed up, self-questioning form of traditional monasticism, held together by a few determined and traditional minds facing inevitable discredit and collapse. My own highly ambiguous and in fact ludicrous hermit experiment (in which I have nothing but happiness and this is the crowning joke). My solitude really does not rate as revolt, I guess. Perhaps if I can simply accept its happiness and its humorous possibilities, that will be enough.
Went to confession to Fr. Flavian today instead of Friday. He said people are wondering what is the matter with me – and some are saying “The abbot is giving him a hard time.” I don’t know how much of the real story has got around. Fr. F. frankly admits he “can’t stand” Dom James. At my Mass, however, I was reflecting how far I failed in meekness and nonviolence: not the external acceptance but the interior peace. Too much interior fury at the possible wrong motives I can guess at (rightly or wrongly) and no real desire to come to a peaceable agreement. I want him to be proved wrong! It is all silly.
In the afternoon went especially to see Fr. F.’s new hermitage which is almost finished and is very nice indeed. Much slicker and more modern comforts than here – inside toilet, shower, water of course and his own chapel. I still have to wash my dishes in the rain bucket – and myself too for that matter. And because of my misbehaviors Dom J. refuses to let them dig me a well.
I walked out in a broad open field in the East Farm (Linton’s) and watched the high cool clouds, and said aloud several times the word “Revolution” to see how it sounded. Then I read in the Book of the Poor in Spirit [by Johannes Tauler] how by many deaths we must come to see God.
August 8, 1966
There were letters in my box about something of mine in Life. I had not seen it. I know a piece of Conjectures (this Journal in fact) was to be there. They have paid some huge sum for it. At dinner, by the kind bounty of Dom James, there were tearsheets, doubtless from his own copy, or from Leo Gannon’s. The polite kindness was tempered by the fact that he must have seen this already last Monday when he bawled me out for being a non-hermit (because of Loretto chiefly but perhaps even because of this). Now I suppose this is his next move after my note of Sunday and the outline of hermit rules he requested.
Anyway I was glad to see it and the chief reason why I was, was that I knew M. would see it and be happy and proud – it would serve almost as the letter which I can’t write. That was some consolation in any case.
August 13, 1966
Rain. The Hammers planned to come over but perhaps the rain will prevent them. I will say Mass earlier in any case.
Today is M.’s graduation day, and I have been thinking of her even more than usual. Yesterday we had planned a last picnic in Cherokee Park but I gave it up and canceled the plans after the big showdown two weeks ago, as I had to finally settle everything and get straight with the management here. I miss her terribly, think back repeatedly of the few wonderful days we had together, the perfection of our love, our obligation to one another …
Yesterday my arm hurt so much I could hardly type a letter (to Dame M[arcella Van Bruyn] at Stanbrook and to [Robert] Lax). Two days ago finished the first draft of an article on Camus (and went over it again yesterday and today making additions). I like his notebooks. Intend to write to Jean Grenier. Hope to write on “Zen and the Cloud.” Got Edwin Muir’s Autobiography from the U. of K. and it is most impressive.
Fr. Abbot said Thursday that I could make my “commitment” or quasi-profession as a hermit. I was happy about this. It means stabilizing myself officially and finally in the hermit state and for many reasons I want to do this – first there is no other kind of life I am interested in living. Second, by way of a deeper consecration of myself to God. (I might even make a vow; but think it is simpler not to). Third – so that there is a clear understanding between me and the community – and any future Superior. I am happy too that we seem agreed and settled and that there will be no more strain and tension (I hope) over my misdeeds.
A present: clusters of delicate mauve lilies almost like orchids have suddenly bloomed in front of the hermitage. A surprise – from some of the bulbs Eileen Curns sent last winter I imagine. Only one or two lemon lilies ever appeared.
In the mail about the Life article – a hard-hitting book The Negro Man by one of the editors of Ebony. His wife, a Catholic, and a fan from her schooldays, sent it. It seems things look stormy this fall in the South.
August 15, 1966. Assumption
A big indefinite thunderstorm is moving in from the S.W.
The Hammers came Saturday and there was heavy rain, but we sat in the Tobacco Barn on bales of straw (bales they were picking up on the New Farm Whitmonday when I was out there). We have given up the idea of printing the love poems. They said J. was worried about me – they were glad the affair with M. was all over. Yet I still have terrible agonizing fits of loneliness and have to get in touch with her. If only I could talk to her, or even get a letter from her! And I keep wondering how she is feeling. She is now gone home to Cincinnati. I think of her still almost constantly.
Big SAC plane goes over low flying before the storm (which is still no closer) goes off into the east, a pale impressive silhouette in the more lurid sky there.
I walked in the woods (D[erby] D[ay] place) for a while; read some bits in a selection of Protestant Mystics – liked Rufus Jones and especially an anonymous Anglican woman called Aurelia who seems to be right on target! Then read more Montale. The “Eastbourne” poem. His motets are exquisite – one, a still life of Pompeian souvenirs, is as pretty as Mozart
Nella valva che il vespero riflette
un vulcano dipinto fuma lieto.
[A volcano
painted on a seashell smokes
brightly in the sunset.]23
Letters about the Life piece are still coming in.
I like the Abbey much better without the steeple. It is a much simpler, more modest, less forbidding place – it even has a strange charm, nestling in the trees instead of trying to dominate everything with a big false spire.
But last night I dreamt they were putting the spire up again – temporarily – for a festival of some sort. The frame rose up with the ease of the work of an umbrella, but the spire was top heavy and I saw it was going to fall. There were many workmen up in it, and I cried out to God to prevent it from falling. Still it fell and all the workmen with it. Hundreds of workmen were lying on the ground injured. I went to the nearest of them – three negroes – and wanted to help them. I wanted to get a car to stop to pick them up but no car would do so – even one driven by a Negro woman.
I thought “what a stupid thing it was to try to put that old spire up again! Typical of Dom James!” I woke without knowing any more.
August 18, 1966
Have had difficulties for some time with the verse of René Char – fi
nding it impenetrable. Today I think I have broken through – and precisely with this short poem.
Un oiseau chante sur un fil
Cette vie simple à fleur de terre
Notre enfer s’en réjouit.
Puis le vent commence à souffrir
Et les étoiles s’en avisent.
O folles de parcourir
Tant de fatalité profonde!24
[A bird sings on a wire
This simple life on the earthly level
Our hell rejoices.
Then the wind begins to suffer
And the stars take notice.
Oh crazy ones for traveling across
So much deep fatality!]
Why did this click? Not just because of the birds that sing on the powerline to my house. The middle couplet, I think, affected me first. But at any rate I recognized my own kind of poetic world, which, in many French poets, I simply cannot. But this is exquisite. Though exquisite is not my kind of a word. Well, what is it then?
But after this they all connect and I laugh.
Dans l’absurde chagrin de vivre sans comprendre
Écroule-moi et sois ma femme de décembre.
[In the absurd chagrin of living without understanding
Tumble me down and be my December woman.]
August 20, 1966
Went to town yesterday for a cortisone shot for the bursitis. Operation put off. He still thinks it can be avoided perhaps. I hope so. Going to the hospital especially in Lexington involves complications. I would be unable to resist letting. M. know I was there, or her friends would let her know – I would love to see her, but it would complicate things again. Yesterday I made a long distance call to Cincinnati and talked to her – it was wonderful and in a way shattering. Her voice was full of choked up emotions and my heart was all churned to pieces by the time it was over. She has sent several letters but none have got through to me. Said she loved the “Cherokee Park” poem25 and the piece in Life. Has to come back to Louisville to take an exam. Oct. 28–29. It was a relief to hear her voice, yet I came home disturbed and troubled.
What troubled me most was the time spent with Wygal – his insistence on driving to his house when I explained that I had been forbidden to go there, sitting around stupidly drinking and playing with color TV (idiotic the color comes on and off – it was an inane soap opera etc.). Finally as a climax of absurdity I looked at a couple of copies of Playboy and was utterly repelled by the whorehouse mentality of it. The whole business was saddening. I can see there is absolutely nothing for me in all this and I have to just avoid it in the future. Hate to offend anyone, but I have to have the courage to break with something that has nothing whatever to do with my real existence – I don’t mean just Playboy (!) but this whole business of visits with Wygal and so on. It is absurd.
Sense of having encountered miasma in the city (fury, traffic jams, sadism on radio, confusion), returning to the woods as though wildly plague-stricken, hoping my awareness and suffering are a good sign and that they promise recovery …
August 22, 1966
Yesterday – a fine sunny afternoon full of white and blue cumulous clouds. Went out to the D[erby] D[ay] place in the woods, thinking of M., read some Eckhart – and concluded that I had to simplify and unify everything by making no further plans to get together with her or to keep in habitual contact (but only to take what obviously came by itself). Principle – that what we renounce we recover in God.
Then read more René Char. He has to be read aloud. Compact, rich, intense, full, much music, more austere and self-contained than Saint-John Perse. I must really read him now. It will take time and attention to absorb all that is there. Perhaps a long course of reading, in the full afternoons out under the trees!
This morning – rain. Everything dark green. Took out my new Japanese umbrella (sent a few weeks ago by John Reynolds of Jubilee) and walked in the rain saying Prime and then the rosary. Wonderful contrast between the luminous gold and white aura created by the Bangasa and the jade green of the pines. One walks in a world of special human light, deepness and comfort in the midst of wet and dark nature. The kind of atmosphere in which I walk with M., or the thought of her – in the woods alone. Though I know it is foolish to try to keep up steady contact, I love her deeply and I can see that the purity of this love does really demand the sacrifice of human comfort and consolation. I can’t say I understand how to do it, and how to avoid hurting her – and myself – more than necessary. Perhaps really the definite break is the more merciful thing, yet one cannot just “break.” In the circumstances, I cannot possibly say anything that sounds like “I do not want to see you or hear from you again.” It simply is impossible. And a lie! But we are in fact prevented. And I think clear acceptance of the fact is more or less required of us both.
August 27, 1966
Bright cool days all week. My Feastday Thursday. Wrote poem on Miguel Hernandez (whose poetry moves me deeply) and finished first draft of an article on Camus and the Church.26 Seminarians barged in here I think Tuesday, much talk of Camus and Suzuki on the part of two at least. Camus is widely read, including by (young) Catholics. Perhaps I will send this article to the Catholic Worker when it is typed out.
The spell of Cesare Pavese, a novelist. Italian hill towns in the north or rather villages in the foothills of the Alps. Passion. Intensity. The Harvesters is a racking, smashing book. Curious, undecided, circular movement of The Moon and the Bonfires.
Letter from a nun in Covington who knows M.M. had been to see her given her the poems etc. I am glad M. has some one to talk to. “She is numb,” Sister K. said. Letter was conscience, looked as if it had been opened, I was surprised it got through. M.’s conscience letters have been stopped, perhaps opened and read.
Yesterday a letter came from Juan Liscano of the magazine Zorca Franca in Caracas and I sent him something. They have published a very good lot of authors – South American and European. Almost no North Americans. You can’t call T. S. Eliot North American. Mary McCarthy and David Riesman the only names I clearly recognize. Mary Ellen Walsh is probably a N.A. name too. And that’s it! Except an interview with Henry Miller by a nun(?!).
Writing more poetry now.
Yesterday in the woods, after chores (book list, letter to Liscano, papers to send out, portable stove for Flavian) went out to woods, and read René Char. Two splendid poems: the “Meteor of Aug. 13” and “La Sorgue.”
August 29, 1966
Dom [Jean] Leclercq is here and is on his way to Cuernavaca, where Dom Gregorio is in trouble over his psychoanalysis – delated to Rome, falsified documents, dishonest accusations, condemned as contumacious, supposed to be imprisoned in Maredsous, resisting with help of his Bishop etc.
Dom L. lectured on iconography of St. Bernard and some ideas of St. B.’s art which seemed to me fanciful (visual pictures of words, members, acrostics etc. maybe so!).
His conversation is naturally full of the whole business of monastic reform, politics to defeat. And Card[inal] Antoniutti and get the vernacular for all the monks etc.
All this is of course important and yet it seems to me completely trivial. I can’t get involved – first there is the fullness of my own solitary life in which I am mercifully delivered from all this communal worrying and politicking. (Yet remember it is because of the politics of people like Dom L. that you are here!)
Then there is the emptiness in me that opens out toward M. in her distance and which makes these other desires seem totally unreal.
Camus in Notebooks, planning a novel: “ … that void, that little hollow in her since they discovered each other, that call of lovers toward each other, shouting each others’ names.”
Exactly: that discovery of each other. Like May 5 at the airport. The discovery that in each other we find the meaning of life and the universe – that we are capable together of being a microcosm, a whole world, a summary of it all. And then to have the history of this world cut short – we spin in space like e
mpty capsules. And yet no. There is a certain fullness in my life now, even without her. Something that was never there before.
September 2, 1966
Day before yesterday M. got a letter through to me – totally different kind of envelope etc. so they did not stop it. I don’t know if the Abbot has been reading her conscience letters or just throwing them away. At least two were sent in August and did not reach me. This one did and I was happy with it, happy to be loved and told so – happy to know she could get through. Poor darling, I can see how rough this is on her – in some ways worse than it is for me. And in some ways not as bad. But one thing is sure where love is serious, there is real suffering. I don’t know what to do except to go on loving and occasionally slipping a letter out to her somehow. This I think I owe her, besides needing it myself. I think a love like ours demands some human concession. In any case I take this responsibility for communicating with her and do so because I think it is necessary. In a way it would be much easier to break it all off, which is what everybody thinks; I do not think that is right. It would be a betrayal of her love.
This afternoon typed out some of the very wild free poetry – very irrational and absurd – I have written lately and find it not so good. Sometimes the incoherence does find a kind of queer logic of its own and it is satisfying. Often it is quite banal.
Next week (on the 8th – Feast of Our Lady’s Nativity) I am to make a permanent commitment as hermit and am trying to prepare by a sort of retreat. Was in the woods early today – an unusual time for me, usually I go out in the afternoon. Was meditating on “My food is to do the will of Him who sent me and to accomplish His work.” This was a whole new perspective since Vatican II. Before it was unconsciously interpreted – around here at least – as if it could not mean anything but blind submission to a static established way of doing things. As if all initiative were wrong – or at least highly “imperfect.” Now everyone is beginning to see that seeking God’s will is a much more risky and unpredictable venture. I know that there are certain defined limits for me, but within those limits almost anything can happen and can be “God’s will” and a summons to obedience: and not in terms of simple, blind submission only. I see how much I need prayer and grace to face this and be constantly open. And know well how easy it is to kid myself – so much so that I hardly like to think about it! What really is God’s will for me? To live where I am living – to remain here – to be faithful to the grace of solitude – yet also a certain fidelity to my deep affections for M. – though this seems to involve a pure contradiction. And yet it does not per se. Only in a selfish exploitation would it become wrong: and then of course it could be disastrous for us both. So it is certainly His will that I take great care to avoid any such harm to her and to myself.
Learning To Love Page 16
