I see that I am floundering around in the dark, and need to pray and meditate a great deal. And that it is true that this summer I have done some very foolish and dangerous things.
Still using P. Erwin’s Directory for his Brothers of the Virgin of the Poor – Au coeur même de l’Eglise [At the Very Heart of the Church]. It is very good. I need it.
September 4, 1966. XIV Sun. after Pent[ecost]
Retreat continuing. Two things are definite.
1. It would be better to make up my mind not to try to do anything about seeing M. again, not to arrange or plan anything on my own initiative. If something just pans out, well, that is another matter perhaps. I don’t know! And it would also be better not to run a kind of guerrilla campaign to get mail in and out. Not that I am doing that – but still: not to be in direct conflict with Superiors on this point, not to be planning ways to outsmart them etc.
2. Though I have admitted this verbally, today I could see in my “right mind” that if I had been really aware of the meaning of my vows and my commitment, I would not have let my love for her develop as it did at the beginning. The wrong steps began with my first love letter, and the phone call on April 13 arranging to see her in town on the 26th.
Yet even as I say this and admit it, there is a sense in which I see it was almost inevitable. I had fallen so deeply in love with her already that it was difficult to do otherwise – yet I suppose I could have made another choice. And yet too – I am glad I didn’t. I am really glad it worked out as it did. To have spent those days with her, known her so intimately, to be loved by her and love her now – all this has been so perfect and precious. I can admit it was out of place, yet I cannot altogether repudiate everything about it. Least of all can I in any way repudiate, or seem to repudiate her. She is the chief value in all this, her person, her heart, her love, her involvement with me. One can no longer speak of the situation as of a purely objective moral case. It is totally other, and far deeper than that.
Yet if it were a “moral case” I would only be able to say: that letter should not have been written, that call should not have been made. They were, objectively at least, infidelities. And yet … I simply cannot say it without qualification. Was I being faithful in an obscure way to some other and more inscrutable call that was from God? Somehow I can’t help believing that I was. The conviction won’t leave me. For that very reason – I must never let the same thing happen with any other woman, for if my love for M. and hers for me is from Him, then there can be no “others.”
And that is the main point of a moral case anyway, practically speaking: as a guide to future action. The past is what it is and I cannot really regret anything in it except what my conscience sincerely regrets – the day in Wygal’s office.
I went for a walk to the woods. These days “to the woods” means – along the track by Dom Frederic’s lake and around to the place of the Derby Day picnic – flat, steady, quiet and somehow very recollected full of awareness, peace – “holiness” – awe. A place of life in which both M. and God are more present and I remember His gift to me – her love – and the way that love (against all that the books say) seemed to bring me (and still does) closer to them.
There I could not help questioning the idea that the love of a human being necessarily comes in conflict with the perfect love of God. Of course I know St. Paul seems to say this: what exactly does he mean? Certainly I know that in my own case a fully involved erotic and sexual love for M. – completely fulfilled and frequently so – would turn my life and my vocation inside out. But the affection I have for her – with the explicit sacrifice of sex and of erotic satisfaction seems to me not to conflict with God’s love, but to be in harmony with it. In other words that I have made the sacrifice of what had to be sacrificed, and my affection and love for her as a person to whom I am obviously bound in a special way, is not to be sacrificed. On the contrary – it seems to be a great good for both of us. Is this true? I believe it is.
(Night)
Tonight I decided to read over this Journal to see if I could make any sense out of it or see my affair in any kind of perspective. There are things that are not said here that come back to me reading the rest. First: how terribly lonely for M. I was the first days after I left the hospital. The letter I left asking her to write. My anxiety to hear from her. The impact of her first letter where I saw she loved me really (as I had suspected in the hospital). All the hospital stuff is in another notebook. We were in fact extremely intimate in a way – and this even got mentioned (obliquely) in her evaluation – a lot of people seemed to notice we were very taken up with each other. The agony of loneliness for her on Holy Thursday and Good Friday. Real trauma when I got home. Most of this came out (but very obliquely) in the poem “With the World in My Bloodstream.”
Also I realized how, when I began to call her on the phone, my body got very upset and excited, stone pains etc. – and I was emotionally upset by it, knowing that there was a very powerful drag of passion at work in me and trying to rationalize it. Yet at the same time there was an obscure sense that she was somehow supposed to enter deeply into my life and I into hers so we could “be with” each other in the depths of our hearts in the midst of no matter what loneliness. A sense that this kind of union was possible and desirable. Really strange! Because that in fact is what we seem to have achieved now, and in great peace, really. (At least it is peaceful for me, though apparently more difficult for her – to judge by her last letter – yet essentially the same for us both.)
At the same time – our completely unrealistic, impetuous willingness to consider absurd possibilities! Reading the pages in early May I think we must have been half out of our heads. And yet there is no question – there was something fabulous about those days: the evening at the airport and the picnic on Derby Day – I have never experienced such ecstasies of erotic love (except later on other days with her).
As it goes on (Ascension Day) I see how imprudent and careless we were, and how in fact I was forgetting the real essence of my vowed life while desperately trying to keep the mere letter of the vows. And the moments of miserable confusion, half-hearted attempts to get free and control this thing. What really saved us was not any reason or restraint on our part but the fact that S. could not (or would not) drive her out here on Whitmonday, or on those Saturdays when she hoped to come! We would infallibly have got ourselves into a frightful mess, and it is true that I was emotional, unstable, irresponsible and did not really see it.
The one thing that troubles me most in it all – I see my instability and a certain dishonesty. That hits hard, because I think of myself as honest, sincere, direct etc. But there are some awfully ambiguous moments there when I am doubting and trying to get free. Those weeks in May were much more troubled even than I realized – and I did suffer a lot. Yet though this all had some basis in her character too – I love her all the more when I see how she has struggled with herself and how she has (I think) in many ways changed (I have some idea of how she was with others) and how sincere she is in her own troubled way too. We were really two messed up people! And we could have done each other awful harm! Yet we did not – and instead our love deepened, and has continued to deepen, and I think now it is very real, though we are isolated and God knows what will become of it.
I remember how upset I was around Pentecost – and the merciful guilt of the long afternoon Whitmonday on the Tobacco Farm. The discovery of the phone calls really did get me off an impossible hook (she sensed this too!!). I had no will to resist if we had got together as we were doing. Yet when we separated our love grew and the afternoon in Cherokee Park is one of the best dates with her I remember – we were on a much more serious level really! In fact that day seems to have confirmed us in a genuine love – more solid than the emotional and “ecstatic” experiences of the other days (though nothing can equal May 5th or 7th, which were miracles of innocence and spontaneity. Paradise Feasts!).
But we are two very complicated people
! Poor dear M.! I love you anyway, completely – and nothing has changed – only that I love you more deeply, more peacefully, and the anguish is gone – and I will have to be very sober and careful about all this in the future!
The overall impression: awareness of my own fantastic instability, complexity, frailty, and the nearness to disaster in May and early June. Providentially we were saved from real danger. Dom James was more right than I was willing to admit and after all pretty kind and not too unreasonable! (He was scared by the problem too!) The worst thing was that afternoon with Linda Parsons when I got drunk and was irresponsibly misbehaving in a way that made me very ashamed (as an infidelity to M. really – but I was really acting crazy!). (In fact also nearly drowned in the lake when we went swimming, I was so drunk! This was really frightful!) And in the end: respect for M. and for our love, gratitude for it, sense of the underlying reality and seriousness of it, sense of immense responsibility to her, desire for her happiness, realization also that in spite of all my hectic confusion (and her seductiveness), I owe a great deal to her love and this is a lasting reality that cannot be denied – and we do belong to each other. In a way for keeps!
September 5, 1966. Labor Day
A very bright morning. Sun just rising over the valley full of mist – tops of the hills just inside over the wash of mist like a faint outline in a water color. Bells at the Abbey for a solemn Mass – departure of five for Chile, finally, where the Las Condes foundation is being taken over. I concelebrated yesterday and that was my farewell. Fr. Callistus is to be the superior there.
Last night I was up late (until 10:30 or 11) reading the journal and reflecting on the really overwhelming experience of the summer – experience in which I do not fully recognize myself – and in which I think there are signs of something strange in my life. However, it is there, and the fact of M.’s love and mine is there – to be understood and grappled with I suppose. A deep reality and a disconcerting one, for which I was not at all prepared – and which, as I now see it, could really have thrown me. Remains the fact that we do love each other in spite of the strangeness and disorder of the whole business, and that this means commitment to and care for each other in spite of separation. God has been most good to us and has greatly protected us against ourselves and has brought our love to a kind of quiet stability I think – so that now we can go on more or less safely. And perhaps I don’t need to fuss over it so much. Sitting up and reading tonight through all this was, however, a kind of shattering experience in its own way – seeing the whole thing all at once in all its frank and pitiable confusion yet also in its goodness and joy – and above all in its danger, so much greater than I realized – yet at times my own fears were terribly acute. But they were not really “reasonable” and they were unconscious reactions sweeping through me without my really understanding them. In all this I have the impression of having been swept along where I thought I was going ahead by my own direction and volition. And I did decide, that is true. Much more was decided for me!
Can I hope that I am now in a new area, and traveling more securely, and that my commitment to the hermit life will be something more than a comic gesture? Because that is the real trouble. Is the whole thing just a fantastic private comedy? I question myself and my whole life very seriously. The real absurdity of it all! The unreality of so much of it. I mean especially the unreality of years I look back on when, being master of students for example, my job gave an appearance of substance and consistency – but actually I was floating in a kind of void! I think I enjoyed it to a great extent – but if I had been more fully aware I would probably have not been able to cope with it.
In a word, what I see is this: that while I imagine I was functioning fairly successfully, I was living a sort of patched up, crazy existence, a series of rather hopeless improvisations, a life of unreality in many ways. Always underlain by a certain solid silence and presence, a faith, a clinging to the invisible God – and this clinging (perhaps rather His holding on to me) has been in the end the only thing that made sense. The rest has been absurdity. And what is more, there is no essential change in sight. I will probably go on like this for the rest of my life. There is “I” – this patchwork, this bundle of questions and doubts and obsessions, this gravitation to silence and to the woods and to love. This incoherence!!
There is no longer anything to pride myself in, least of all “being a monk” or being anything – a writer or anything.
September 6, 1966
Too much analyzing. I think that this view I have of my love for M. in this Journal is a bit distorted by self-questioning, anxiety and guilt. Perhaps I have too much of a tendency to question myself out of existence. Anyway, when I get too close to my own worries everything is out of perspective. This is the case in the last four or five pages. I think I really understand the whole thing better not when I read my own notes but her notes and her letters, because these are necessary to complete my own ideas and aspirations and love. Also I write much more sanely when I am writing not just for myself (as here) but for her – as in the typed Midsummer Diary and the other Retrospect I sent her. That is where a more balanced view of our lives needs to be sought. This book is too shortsighted – and perhaps ought to be destroyed. (It is certainly not for publication.)27
PART III
Living Love in Solitude
September 1966–December 1966
Somehow in the depths of my being I know that love for her can coexist with my solitude, but everything depends on my fidelity to a vocation that there is no use trying too much to rationalize. It is there. It is a root fact of my existence.
November 16, 1966
September 10, 1966
The days of my retreat were bright, calm, unforgettable. Early walks, late walks. Early to St. Malachy’s or St. Edmund’s fields. Clear blue sunlit skies over the knobs. Meditating on Fr. Erwin’s (Little Brothers of the Virgin of the Poor) good monastic directory (I must thank him!) and then reading René Char.
Killed a small rattlesnake near the lake one afternoon.
Afternoon walks to D[erby] D[ay] place.
A final day of rather tormented struggle and inner letting go of my selfish hold on M. or wrong need (I hope).
Thursday the 8th I made my commitment – read the short formula I had written (simplest possible form). Dom James signed it with me content that he now had me in the bank as an asset that would not go out and lose itself in some crap game (is he sure – ? The awful crap game of love!). A commitment “to live in solitude for the rest of my life in so far as health may permit” (i.e. if I grow old and get too crippled an infirmary room will count as solitude??).
After that I was at peace and said Mass with great joy.
For M. – I have a happy, friendly and loving affection deep and non-obsessed (I hope) and it will last. I love her but no longer crave her. At least that is how I feel at the moment. But to what extent do I know myself? I know enough to know I may be kidding.
The Bob Dylan records Ed Rice sent finally reached me Thursday and Thursday night I played some of them. Rich variety of things. I like best the “middle” (so far) protest songs like “Gates of Eden” which is full of a real prophetic ardor and irony. And power! But the newest baroque obscenities, the dead voice, the noise of rock, the crowding in of new fashion, this is very intriguing too. Intriguing is an extremely bad word. One does not get “curious” about Dylan. You are either all in it or all out of it. I am in his new stuff.
His song “I Want You” rang through my head all day yesterday in Louisville. Another bright day. Went to Dr. Mitchell for X-rays. Operation is perfect. Other bad disc above it not that bad yet. Avoid making it worse. Bursitis better.
I am through having lunch with Wygal (who is anyway in Maine) and that is in a sense a liberation – though it was always good to have a good meal and talk of my woes. Still, great peace being alone and able to go about with my antennae picking up the sounds and presences of the city and the hour. (Nothing new �
� bombs closer and closer to Hanoi – the Texas killer had a tumor on the brain, yes, but that was not the decisive “cause” – does the Pentagon have a tumor on the brain? Maybe. Tumor of power.)
Long wait in the sun for a bus outside Medical Arts Building – lump in my throat as we go by St. Joe’s and Lourdes Hall – the place out in front of Lourdes H. where I last saw M. standing looking back with such hurt eyes at our parting in July.
In the U. of L. library, read Sartre on bad faith (can use it – but oversubtle??). Then found the Bingham poetry room (new) and looked through the Random House René Char. Quiet and peaceful in there – no one at all there and all the lamps lit. Must go back.
Learning To Love Page 17
