Crocuses still there, wide open in the warm sun.
March 11, 1967
Did I mention anywhere here Zukofsky’s two letters.8 They were beautiful. He liked my revisions (at which I was most happy) and promised to send books. So I sent a scrawl from the hospital saying “send books!” He wrote back with all kinds of family advice about bursitis (the way he and Celia fight back with aspirin and something else, some mystery of Squibb) and then the books came, and they are perfect. I am reading the early “A’s” [“A” (New York, 1967)] and find them more moving than any other modern poetry I have read. The ground of his verse: a whole musical family. That makes the difference. He never reaches to make anything “musical” or “poetic”; he just touches the words right and they give the right ringing and tone. And all the rest too, the humorous drawing. Ben Shahn.
The fir trees grew around the nunnery,
The grille gate almost as high as the firs,
Two nuns by day, passed in black, like
Hooded cameras, as if photographing the world.
[from “A6”]
And “A-7” a perfectly beautiful Easter figure, says everything, lovely. Easter all through the “A’s” or the early ones. And spring. So many resonances and intersections of everything.
March 20, 1967
It is Holy Week. I need a little garret. Sy Freedgood was here three days last week. Wednesday he got in late after cracking up a hired Hertz car in the rain. And I found him bandaged and sinister Thursday morning but able to get around. We went to Lexington, principally to see Victor Hammer, who has been ill but who was cheerful, up and around. Had lunch with Guy Davenport and Gene Meatyard in the Imperial House – good. Saw Gene’s photos of me – strange and good. Went to Guy’s place for a little – Buster Keaton poster and Zukofsky’s little booklet of Job. Got home late and tired and with a cold that began to get bad in the night, which was largely sleepless.
Sy kept telling me I needed to get out and see things and meet people – and he is probably right. But he seemed to think I should put up a big fight for this and I have neither reason nor motive for doing so. Nor would it get anywhere or do the slightest good. The most I would want in any case would be the freedom to travel once in a while to very special places and to see exceptional people. For instance to visit Sidi Abdesalam, or to go to the Zen place in Japan.
A week ago I was in Louisville to get my stitches out – gave some material to Marie Charron to type – met her at lunch at O’Callaghan’s. A nice spring day, when daiquiris tasted very good.
McGruder came for a while again today and dug a little. He swears he is nearly finished. He has found water (though perhaps much of it is from a cave).
March 21, 1967
Tuesday in Holy Week. A cool, rainy spring night. I like the spirit and intentness of these days. Yesterday finally wrote to [John] Hunt9 at the Saturday Evening Post that I could not see any way to doing the article he asked for. Part of the whole question of what I am trying to do in my situation. It is strictly my own situation and other people’s answers won’t do. Though Sy is right, I ought to be able to get out and speak to people and see with my own eyes and hear with my own ears – and I would like this – [but] it is better to do without it if it would only mean getting caught up in endless nonsense, lectures, conferences, dinners, etc. Who needs all that?
Rosemary R. seems to think that, the “world,” is what is “real.” The world of the body, the senses, etc. turns out after all to be the world of Muzak. It seems to me that here in my woods I have a more authentically bodily and even “worldly” (good sense) existence than they do. Sure, reality is historical – but it is not simply identified with this. An uncomprehended surface of history. Who understands it? Certainly salvation is a matter of decision in history: but decision made with a definite perspective.
For more people – for me – the idea that life is worth living is identical with the idea “God is.” “Christ is risen” etc.
But for others, today, the perspective “God exists” equals “life is not worth living.” And consequently – to make life worth living one must get rid of God. True, if “God” is the spook that religious make him seem to be – an object – an onlooker – a malicious manipulator and hostile scorekeeper. But of course that is the devil.
If we can agree that when the devil becomes God life is not worth living, then we can perhaps understand ourselves and our situation a little better. But the devil “becomes God” not only in religious shapes – he has more interesting and more up-to-date secular shapes. And apparently our radical Christians do not see the problem.
March 22, 1967
It is true as Sy F. says that I need contact, a broader community than just here. It is true also, as he voluntarily said, that I “live among idiots.” Yet that is not the point. My community is here, idiots or not, and who is to say I am any less of an idiot than the others? Also I realize very strongly in my own heart that I cannot arrogate to myself the right to travel around and go where I like, to demand the privilege – which would certainly upset others in the community. What matters is for the community as a whole to come to a decision on greater openness and mobility. And until it does – or until I get orders from higher up, there can be no question of demands on my part. And how do I know this need for “openness” is actually of the Spirit? I am sure that some of the possible trips and contacts would be. But how could I ever avoid tedious, stupid, deadly organized conferences and academic or ecclesiastical social rituals that are only a mockery? Yesterday afternoon, walking about in my own field and in the hollow where the deer sleep, and where a big covey of quail started up in front of me, I saw again how perfect a situation this is, how real, how far beyond my need of comment or justification. All the noises of all the programs, or of all the critics, do nothing to alter this.
March 23, 1967. Holy Thursday
Last night – remembered the Wednesday of last year’s holy week, in the hospital – the rainy evening when M. came to say good night before going to Chicago and when I was so terribly lonely, and lay awake half the night tormented by the gradual realization that we were in love and I did not know how I would live without her. Last night too I lay awake – not long though – thinking of her. Obviously I am still in love in a quiet, deep, hopeless sort of way: but it is no longer passion and it no longer troubles me (or her, I think). I called her last week from Lexington (and Louisville on this Monday). Her father is ill and may have cancer.
The quiet of the long afternoon of Holy Week. Yesterday I burned some brush in the woods near the hermitage. I love the woods, particularly around the hermitage. Know every tree, every animal, every bird. Sense of relatedness to my environment – a luxury I refuse to renounce. Aristocrat, conservative: I don’t give a damn. Those city Christians can live in their world of Muzak and CO2 and think they are in touch with “creation” – nature “humanism”! I admit that it is a reality one must acknowledge but am not so sure it is better for self-confrontation.
The new books that came in from Herder & Herder strike me more and more as superficial, contrived, thrown-together trifles, straining to be “new” and never quite managing to convince. For instance [Raymond J.] Nogar’s Lord of the Absurd [New York, 1966] seemed to me to be very thin, chatty stuff, and I can’t see how so many people (?) are impressed by it: except of course that it accepts evolution – but what is so marvelous about that? It’s a hundred years late. And now our “adaptation” of Babin’s Options (“Approches de Dieu”?). An earnest effort to show the Gospel is still news, but news in the same terms as space-flights are news. An exceedingly self-conscious Christianity, a Christian modernity: the Christian always at every moment asking himself how can I be more creative, dynamic etc. How can I see the infinite Christian dimension of my two weeks’ vacation.
Good article in a recent Encounter on Camus (by M. Cranston). Ping Ferry sent it.
March 31, 1967. Friday – Easter Week
A warm, summery week.
Redbuds coming out. And everything is beginning to get green – first faint clouds of green in the woods. Much singing of birds.
Holy Saturday was very warm and quiet and I spent some time in the sun. Easter Night – things went fast. One becomes critical of the liturgy now that everything is presumably addressed to “twentieth-century man.” OK – then why so much fuss about a candle? The whole thing makes sense in Latin but it begins to be suspect in English.
Easter Day Fr. Flavian came up and we talked a little and then I went for a walk in the sun, I forget where – a walk. Said the Day Mass alone in the Library Chapel.
Easter Monday morning Pee Wee McGruder came up to finish work on the well digging. They put in the casing after welding it there on the new grass. And then in the afternoon I went for another walk but not far away, only on the dirt road around behind St. Joseph’s hill because I had to give a conference. And I gave it on community life, which was perhaps silly. (Palm Sunday I talked on the Easter service from Sound and Fury – Dilsey’s illumination. Better.)
In the afternoon I found a note that Donald Allchin had come – (a day early). Saw him briefly in the evening – we talked of the Epiphany Philosophers etc.
Tuesday it rained most of the day and we sat in the Gatehouse. Wednesday it was bright and lovely and we went for walks – even to the top of the Lake Knob. He does not take the “Secular City” people seriously yet admits it is the same absurd superficiality that is after all serious in America. He said this country, religiously speaking, still seemed to be in the nineteenth century.
Thursday – yesterday – I went to town to the Dr. and gave Donald a ride in to the Baptist Sem[inary]. Pleasant spring day. Sat and said office in the sun on terrace outside the Medical Arts overlooking the Parkway – cars going by quietly and fast, planes sliding down to Standiford field. I had just called M., who was going to the dentist and who is moving into an apartment with another nurse – it is good for her to get away from her mother I think. Says maybe she will take a vacation on Cape Cod in September.
The bursitis operation was not finally successful. The arm still hurts and I cannot do much with it – less than before the operation, – and the X-rays show some calcium still there. I have to rest it. So back to hot water bottles – and also I will get in the sun I guess, but I can’t type and there is a lot of work to be done! No matter I’ll read more, and write more in notebooks, and build up more material.
Fortunate that Jim Wygal was too busy to have lunch. I was glad. And Fr. John was out of town, and the line at O’Callaghan’s was busy and so I changed my mind about going there. Since I had some money I had lunch at the Old House (a very good omelette) and the Negro headwaiter was talking about how they are reading Bonhoeffer in their Church study group.
Then went across the street to the Cathedral for a while. A Busy Busy Mass was just ending. Then run run. Parade Parade. The Body of Christ. Up to the tabernacle to get more. Down again. People marching up and marching back. Brusk. Tense. Business-like. And one still gets the impression of duty done more than anything else (yet it is not duty and they obviously mean the best). In other words, as “sign” it is still not there, and what happens is inside the people. Could be worse. What happens? Conditions are realized and a job is done. Then most everyone marched out – a few other ones stayed to pray quietly. There is a new bishop. The place looked as if it had been painted. I have not been there in quite a time.
Then to buy paperbacks, and read and some science fiction – why I don’t know. Probably because I imagine I need to read some science fiction precisely because I haven’t done so in twenty-five years. And it is an important literary form I guess.
Beer at the cooler in the hallway behind the liquor store in the Heyburn Building. People from the building. The amiable blonde girl who brought us all beers “just because she wanted to do it.” Very nice.
I got home in the evening with my arm hurting and carrying packages. So intent on getting the packages to the hermitage that I did not notice the well-rig was gone. Did not realize its absence until dawn this morning. I could not believe it had not been there the evening before. Did Pee Wee McG. steal it away in the middle of the night? Impossible! Now they have to put in a pump and a track and a sink and a tap and maybe I’ll have water. Because carrying gallon bottles of water up from the monastery is no help to bursitis and I think I am beginning to get it in my remaining good arm.
Hunt wrote from the Post that they want to see [Thomas P.] McDonnell’s interview.
Today is the anniversary of the day I first saw M. in the hospital. March 31 last year was Wednesday in Passion Week. That day she was assigned, as student nurse, to take special care of me, change the dressings on my hip etc. She came in and made a little speech about how I was “her patient” and I little realized how true that would turn out to be. I remember those days when we talked and laughed and got on so well that in a week we were in love. And I can’t find it in me to regret that part of it. Certainly I made mistakes and we could have made plenty of worse mistakes. But the fact remains that we love and understand each other and still in some sense need each other, though obviously it is all over.
April 1, 1967
The sun is high on a lovely green spring day.
Long-legged shadows of chairs on the porch.
Doing some notes on Camus’ Plague – (background) for the booklet I am to write this summer. Left arm painful – I wonder how much typing I am going to be able to do. It is possible I may get a tape recorder and may perhaps learn to work with that – but I cannot see the point of just reading into it: a new kind of work altogether? Crazy tape – mosaics? Tape notebooks. Singing, swearing? Is it providential that I have sore bones? A liberation from type and ink? (Can do some drawings too perhaps.)
The life of a solitary is in a certain sense without limits. All one needs is to know how to turn one’s space ship in a certain direction and blast off again: yet the very absence of obstacles can become the biggest of all limitations.
The tinkle of water in the well (as I sat in the moonlight on the porch trying to meditate). Water is dripping from one of the small caves into the deeper hole.
John Slate is supposed to be coming out next week to help me make my (literary estate) will. I don’t yet have my ideas all in order about this. So much of the stuff to be left is junk – material to be kept perhaps but not published.
April 6, 1967
Too much visiting. It has been hot. The dogwoods are coming out. The trees are green ahead of time. Last evening driving with Slate down Eastern Parkway and seeing the thermometer say 84 near Howard Johnson’s at the corner of Preston. We had been to Bellarmine, where I was recognized by too many people and had to sign autographs. Went to the airport taking Fr. John and Pat Welsh (who takes care of the M[erton] room) and had a good supper at the Luau Room. Stopped on the way to St. Joe’s for a letter (which I did not get – one I wrote to Eshleman returned). At the Luau room I was happy – and was in a position to watch the planes this time but there were few. Argued with Slate about God, Vietnam, and everything else. The place where M. and I were, where we sat on the grass all alone, has become a parking lot and was full of cars. Sense of desolation and loss. Coming back in the dark got home very late, worried about S. who shouldn’t drink and did. (And at one point roared down the dark empty turnpike at around 100 m.p.h.) However, I have some hope that the estate business will finally get settled in a way acceptable to everyone. One bright spot – at St. Joe’s I ran up to 2E where I had the back operation and said hello to a couple of the nurses – R. and T. (who was a student with M.) and sad-eyed little Mrs. L., whose name haunted me one sweaty, sleepless night the water ran in the walls.
On Saturday and Sunday Winston King was here from Vanderbilt. Had some good information about Zen people – [Sen ’ichi] Hisamatsu, [Keiji] Nishitani, and Masao Abe etc. All of whom I greatly respect. My Mystics and Z[en] M[asters] came yesterday morning. With a photo on the back cover, which makes me mad.
We need rain – only a little black water left in my buckets. The well is good for plenty of water but I still can’t get at it as there is no pump etc. Haven’t had time to read much of anything.
April 7, 1967. On being – “Hesychast”
Certainly there are strong “hesychast”10 tendencies in me. Last evening, relieved and quiet, alone again with the pines after all the talking, I certainly have to recognize the fact that when I am talking a lot and running around here and there I am simply not myself, and act and speak in a way which is not true to myself and to my inner grace. On the other hand I can no longer make quiet an absolute, and I try as far as possible to be free and unconcerned everywhere (said my office riding on the turnpike not disturbed by Slate having the car radio on – psalms I like better [than] rock n roll).
The trouble is that I tried to feel guilty of my “hesychia” and probably this makes some sense too. A mere question is not good enough. I do react too much to the attack of these activists upon everything “contemplative” and I do see that the appetite for withdrawal and quiet in the monastery (the appetite of the Abbot and many monks – just not wanting to be disturbed) is equivocal. What I really do need is the inner freedom that is tranquil and unconcerned in everything – and I certainly have it more than ever, in a way. Yet I am careless, untrue to myself, undisciplined, free with the wrong kind of freedom, drink and talk too much, use bad language too much, etc.
So I doubt too much. I value silence and prayer and then worry whether I ought not also to conciliate “the world” with some of its own gestures. Foolish statement I sent to St. Louis, on priests marrying. Sure I think they ought to be able to marry if they want to. But why do I have to make noise about it? Probably means getting into a very stupid argument.
Learning To Love Page 27
