Thursday Pee Wee McGruder came to begin drilling for the well but nothing very serious has been done yet. Thirty feet down he seems to have hit a small cave.
Finished notes on “A New Christian Consciousness” – perhaps too long for that Bucke Society newsletter.6 I don’t know what I’ll do with it. I simply cannot write that thing for the [Saturday Evening] Post. I think I ought to stop even considering it.
February 14, 1967
Finishing the Ruether ms.
Really a question of getting new bearings. The book is important – at least for me. And explosive.
Where it is important for me is that it forces me to reexamine the whole question of my conversion, and to distinguish in it the action of God’s word and the attraction of a sacral and traditional and stable culture. This was important especially in my vocation. Now that the stability of these structures is really shaken – and I have done my own part in shaking them – I have to live really by God’s word and by a “true” Christian community (where?) and not cheat by relying on past cultural props which keep me comfortable. The whole Church-world argument in my work has been ambiguous because I bought the idea of a sacred and unworldly Christian culture and set that up against the wicked world. We tried hard to be therefore modern, technological. Technology is certainly able to be even more demonic than, say, the Papacy (see R.’s book) – but the division is too easy.
Anyway, it is much clearer now where fidelity is important. Fidelity to God in the Church – in a certain way against the Church as established and “worldly” and tied up with what is really dirty and demonic (Spellman’s idiotic blessing of the Vietnam War as a “holy” war. That’s what “holy” has come to mean all right!). To live in the church with the realization that the Church itself is nevertheless full of sham and lies. Yet in the way she puts it (following [Gabriel] Vahanian), the position is too subtle and too intricate for most men – in the end it seems futile too. Maybe the only answer lies ahead in revolution and diaspora.
The great question is the right interpretation of a sentence like this: “It is in the secular world, the world which applies no faith issues to itself, that the Christian now finds the free, open, provisional existence into which man is released by the good news.”
Applies no faith issues to itself? What about all the secular myths and dogmatisms. When I was baptized I had a real sense of liberation from them, and so too I really experienced liberation from them on “leaving the world.” True the monastery itself is largely sham, and all the worse because a holy sham: yet it remains nevertheless in many ways more authentic than the degrading and insulting sham outside.
Maybe the hermit life is another kind of defeat – but I certainly feel that here I am relatively more honest and more true than anywhere else and that here I am not being “had” – and though I may be in many ways wrong, I am at least able honestly to try and cope with my wrongness here.
Conception of the Anti-Christ within the established Church – and that we must nevertheless remain faithful to the Church and this very fidelity means saying No to the lie that is in the Church. Not canonize its sinfulness. Non est tam magna peccatrix ut christiana ecclesia [None is so great a sinner as the Christian church] (Luther).
“The objective historical spirit of the Church was constantly against the Holy Spirit because its innate tendency as a human structure is to banish the gospel and to make endless perpetuation of its own natural culture its primary commitment.” (Ruether)
February 15, 1967
Reread Faulkner’s tirade on privacy. I remember being impressed by it 12 years ago when it came out. Matt Scott passed it to me in some magazine (Harper’s). It is a bit inflated – Faulkner’s somewhat schizoid grandilo-quence – yet it is really moving. All that he says has now become heresy (except as he says – it survives in the popularity of a few “mouth sounds”), but he is right in attacking the total bad faith behind the spurious community and public-spiritedness that just makes money out of vulgarity and scandal. Freedom – freedom to run with a wolf pack strong enough to get away with every injustice and indecency – and to make money by it.
There is no question that Faulkner remains worthy of respect and honor for his individuality, his idiosyncrasy. He is also reproved and hated for it, but the fact is here. Part of his greatness was that he stayed in a small town in Mississippi – and when he was not there remained closed and hermetic – and drunk. But I like his Virginia conferences too.
However, his romantic exaltation of privacy vs. government has to be seen in its context – of a kind of romantic Southern conservatism. The danger of his mythology is precisely that it is convincing, and in many ways better, more coherent, certainly more alive and interesting than Northern liberal mythology. It presents a seemingly plausible case for the contrivance of what is completely finished – and can’t get anywhere. The case rests in the fact that this dead thing was capable of generating more esthetic emotion than the ongoing dullness of the big rather stupid and inhuman machine that has taken its place. (The other myth is that the machine is human, delightful, reasonable, loving, and contains all man’s heart can desire: it is the fulfillment of every hope including the second coming of Christ.)
February 17, 1967
Faulkner’s climacteric – late in 40’s, early 50’s. His worst writing in essays and speeches. Especially the speeches! Delta Council Speech of 52 – full of every kind of cant and nonsense: i.e. mythological ethic of “old tough fathers” “standing on own feet.” Scorning the “alphabetical splatters on the doors of welfare and other bureaus.”
The business of taking sides, standing up and being counted, being on the right side – the temptation one has to face above all in his fifties, when he realizes he is on the way out, and tries dishonestly and desperately to stay: to leave behind permanent and noble declarations, to prove he was really there. And really a lot of it is shameful, in a way ignoble, yet I feel he was ironic about it nevertheless. He was just not a Mississippi planter, though he pretended to be on occasion.
The stupidity of my own statements and declarations!
February 19, 1967. II Sunday Lent
Snow the other night. Then two cold mornings. Yesterday – one of those blue, bitter mists hanging low, hiding the tree tops, stinging the nose, tightening the throat. Cleared about 9:30. Then a warm day. Some mail and a walk. Panichas liked the Faulkner essay. A letter came from Sidi Abdesalam. “Where are you?” Hoping I am not bogged down in words, my own and those of others. What is best is what is not said. True, my meditation is still slack, but I do not want to grip a futility and tighten on something merely imagined, arbitrarily decided. I do still wait, and listen, try for a more total awareness, more simple, and no phoney absorption.
The worst thing is, however, this preoccupation with a persona, a constructed professional self. This is the danger. Futility of it. Complete waste. The woods save me and the sun and snow. Lovely songs of birds, melting snowfields yesterday afternoon.
Back to Camus (I have a booklet to write on The Plague. Lee Belford at NYU asked for this). Am glad to get to him again out of the kind of romantic murkiness of Faulkner. “The Fire and the Hearth” is not so wonderful. McGruder has been up and down the hill a few times for desultory work on the well, is down about fifty feet. With the snow, I suppose I won’t see him again until I get back from the hospital, where I am to go next Thursday for a bursitis operation.
February 22, 1967
It is the twenty-fifth anniversary of my taking the novice habit. I have been wondering about going back over the years and writing up some of the things I remember. Certainly a great deal has changed. In many ways we have swung around 180 degrees from the attitude that prevailed when I entered. Good or bad? Both. Neither. The old ways had to be changed but I do not know if the new makes sense. I find that I certainly do not believe in the monastic life as I did when I entered here – and when I was more sure I knew what it was. Yet I am much more convinced I am doing more or le
ss what I ought to do, though I don’t know why and cannot fully justify it.
Elbow hurting. I go in tomorrow for the operation. Rain and sleet tonight. The kettle boils for some tea before I go to bed. I am not planning to see M, or especially hoping she will try to come down. If she does it will just mix things up and we will not be able to be really alone together in that hospital. I more or less hinted at this last time I wrote – and I think she won’t come. Maybe I’ll call her.
Box of Faulkner books came yesterday from Random House. I began The Sound and the Fury, which I had never read. What a book! One of the greatest ever written by anybody. There is the real Faulkner. The Benjy section is fascinating – and beautiful, incest and all. A marvelous piece of work, innocent and strange and immediate and with so many implications for the world of “moral” people.
Monday or Tuesday – finished some notes on Ishi for the Catholic Worker.7 Today, rough draft of a statement on Vietnam (aid to civilian casualties) for CPF [Catholic Peace Fellowship]. Typed ms. of Faith and Violence (collection of magazine articles possibly for a paperback) got to me from Bellarmine and I sorted the pages today, wondering why I had made a book of it. Is it worth the trouble? I’ll see when I read the ms. after hospital.
The sleet is turning into snow. But my crocuses, in their little tight group, have flourished bravely two weeks since Ash Wednesday even in snow and some very cold weather.
March 2, 1967
A real spring day, after some zero weather during which I was in the hospital. Went to St. Joe’s a week ago today. It got cold and a wildly blowing snowstorm began in the afternoon – snow driving across the wide open lots down by International Harvester’s. Operation for bursitis Friday. Not much to it. Woke up in the recovery room with children crying after tonsillectomies and young nurses gazing down at me like mothers. Was able to take some soup by evening (in fact even ate a couple of mouthfuls of chicken at supper time). Two of the nurses from last year dropped in and I called M, in Cincinnati. Was in the hospital over the weekend, and came back Tuesday. Finished a book on Camus I am reviewing for the Sewanee [Review]. I slept in the infirmary Tuesday night but was anxious to get back to the hermitage, so slept here last night and today, apart from a little weariness and a slightly sore and stiff arm – and a dirty bandage – I am feeling OK. Can’t type comfortably yet. And am having trouble getting anyone to help me type in the monastery now. So many good people have left.
March 5, 1967. Laetare Sunday
The crocuses multiply and are still there after nearly a month, with some very cold weather. Bees in them yesterday. I walked in the woods. Woods ringing with distant voices – Fr. Matthew is putting up a tent on top of one of the knobs – where he will build a small hermitage (not to live in but for the days of recollection). Another communal hermitage is to be built in the flat shady spot where M, and I and the Fords had our picnic last May. I have loved to walk there all summer – reading Montale, reading René Char, or just praying and thinking. Now that too will be over. I’ll find other places. My place on the edge of St. Malachy’s field is gone – people will be there for the statues (monument to Jon Daniels). Bro. Giles is working there now, putting in Dogwoods and so on. Anyway I know that all this foolishness of mine must finally end. Though our phone calls were warm and affectionate and M, almost came down Monday (but the hospital called and she had to work). I know that our love affair is really all over and there is no point trying to keep it alive. Certainly I miss her, but one has to face facts. I am humbled and confused by my weakness, my vulnerability, my passion. After all these years, so little sense and so little discipline. Yet I know there was good in it somewhere, nevertheless.
More trouble with Marie Tadié. She has endless capacities for making trouble and it may finally end in the law courts – for she is constantly threatening us with lawyers. [ … ]
Letter from Rosemary Ruether, who is the most fiercely anti-monastic person I know of. Absolute rejection of the monastic idea as unchristian, demonic, etc. Yet allows some place for it in practice as a “service.” The main trouble seems to be the supposed claim (which no monk in his right mind would make in that way) that the monk is the only true and radical Christian. But this is a real question since historically the claim has been made and supported and perhaps even to some extent officially accepted (with certain qualifications) by the Church. That laypeople were good Christians in so far as they adopted a quasi-monastic spirituality. On the other hand R.R. seems to be claiming quite aggressively that she represents the true radical Christianity and on the basis of her own authenticity she is entitled to reject it – which makes the whole thing a little laughable.
The real problem in practice for me is that Dom J.’s policies make it impossible for all to have adequate contact with these other forms of witness and service, to see what they are doing and to learn from them – and learn some kind of fruitful exchange with them. Emmaus House for instance. R.R. is tied up perhaps with SNCC. Or at any rate with Civil Rights work in the South.
Another question – is there a special kind of hellishness that goes with the very claim to be a radical and perfect Christian? History is full of examples – including monastic ones – examples of intolerance, fanaticism, heresy, cruelty, inhumanity, stupidity, love of power, all based on the claim to radical perfection. See the sects after the Reformation. And the same thing in the secular sphere among political radicals.
7:30. Big glaring red sun in the east behind the bare trees. Light rain falling on the roof here out of torn clouds. Everything flying in a warm wind. The pretty squirrels that ran on the lawn last night. The other day the well-diggers got to water down in the limestone.
March 7, 1967
Snow again for the non-feast of St. Thomas Aquinas. Three days of rain turned to snow yesterday when I was in Louisville again to see the doctor. (He looked at the scar of the operation and rebandaged it saying he would take out the stitches next week.) The streets in Louisville and especially the turnpike about 3:30 or 4 were in appalling condition, full of driving wet snow, cars at times traveling helplessly, one out in the middle of a field, one piled up in the middle of two or three others and one even straddling the guard rail – though how it climbed up there I have no way of telling. After Shepherdsville and Bernheim Forest when we got as far south as the first real Knobs, the snow turned to rain and evidently out here it had continued to rain instead of snowing. Floods were beginning all through the Rolling Fork Valley. Got to the monastery and changed in the infirmary and after supper climbed in the cold rain up the flooded path to the hermitage.
Again the big glaring red sun looking over the snow and the ice-heavy trees.
Called M, yesterday and she sounded happy enough, but maybe I confused her with silly oblique statements as if I were trying to say we had really passed into an actively new phase and could no longer be so intimate etc. Of course we both know that, and accept it. But why talk about it or make things worse by analyzing? In the end I found myself riding home sorry and numb and blindly reaching out to cling to her again. Oh M.! I am old enough to be less stupid but I guess it doesn’t matter and it always comes back around to that: though I try to be free again, I can’t yet and my nature is full of devices for trying to hang on. Perhaps hers too. It doesn’t matter. But she really believes in love much more than I do – and is also more realistic about it at the same time – and more hung up on it because after all she has to have a man, she is destined for marriage, and I am not.
March 10, 1967
A warm sunny day. Reading W[illiam] C[arlos] Williams’ Essays in the early morning – they are very informative. Back in the 30’s I was trying for this kind of outlook and could not make it – had to get hung up in some kind of materialism instead. I was simply not ready for Doc Williams then and in any case I don’t remember trying to read him. If I had. I would not have understood, I thought I was looking for Studs Lonigan or something (who remembers that I wonder?). Fine essay of W.C.W. on Gertrude Stein and wh
at she was at.
Wrote to Cid Corman about the Kusano Shimpei poems in Origins, which really impressed me – very alive, simple, sophisticated, honest, humorous. Both Eastern and Western. Universal in that sense.
Walked in the afternoon to the east where I do not usually go – places I had never really explored – up at the far end of our bottom land below Boone’s house, and along the new creek which was manufactured by the bulldozers five or six years ago – or more. Then back through the tangle of my own woods in the “unconscious” hollow behind the house which is a real jungle in places. In the evening found a note at supper (in infirm[ary] refectory) from Bro. Martin, who has been in charge of getting my things typed and mimeographed. Said the Rafael Alberti poem on Rome [“Roman Nocturnes”] which I gave him last week was too much, beyond his “limit,” scandalous, would “cause ill feeling” – he was very upset by it – and obviously didn’t understand it too well. Evidently thought Alberti was in a rage because the whore houses weren’t open or something. And Alberti wasn’t even mad or mean – just pleasantly joking about Rome. So now I suppose this is my signal that there is to be no more secretarial help here in the monastery for me – saw it coming last week. Of course it is a bit silly to mimeograph so many things and send them all around. Might as well give it up, if people are getting annoyed by it. As to typing – I can still, I hope, get it done outside. I hope Tommie O’Callaghan’s friend isn’t shocked at the poems I sent out for typing the other day.
Meanwhile more trouble with Marie Tadié too – but that is the abbot’s headache more than mine. I have kept saying it would be best to have nothing further to do with her. If he wants to continue with her as agent and translator, that is his affair.
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