April 21, 1967. St. Anselm
Heavy rain in the night. A woodthrush singing in the rainy woods at early morning. Naomi Burton has been here since Wednesday the 19th. Two fine days. Wednesday and Thursday. Yesterday we had a picnic at the lake with Fr. John Loftus, Ron Seitz and Tommie O’Callaghan. Brilliant sun and I got my head sunburned, took a bunch of probably useless pictures on Naomi’s Nikon. Fr. John’s involved in the demonstrations over open housing in Louisville and the situation there is rather hot, though I have not seen the papers. Ron Seitz was stoned in a demonstration (stoned: i.e. hard stones thrown at him – largely by Bellarmine students).
Today I had to go to Dr. Lucas and Naomi drove me. Very heavy rain on and off all day. Found Lucas etc. had moved out of the Fincastle Building to the new South Medical Tower and a bit of the new building was not yet fully finished.
I called M. from the Brown Hotel – and talked to her in her new apartment where she lives with another nurse. Again things have moved on inexorably. We tend to talk as if it were still the same but of course it is not – and I sense an air of confusion at her end, not without self-contradiction. The important thing, however, is that her fiancé is back, and she has still not decided what to do about the engagement. The impression she gave was that she would go on with it. Though she does not exactly love him she “can make him happy,” but I told her that talk like that did not really make sense – I doubt if she can really mean it that way. And she added that she was a “sort of a masochist,” which made it all the worse. It was all a bit disturbing and I suppose it was meant to be – deliberately ambiguous. I don’t know if she can really seriously mean to marry or if she has real authentic motives for doing so, but at the same time I see that I really cannot contribute anything but more confusion and I’d better keep out of the picture. So once more another inexorable step has to be taken and I must make sure it is ended. It is. But it must be more definitely so. Yet I haven’t the courage to face the idea of never calling her again. I am certainly set on not going to any lengths to see her.
I see again that real loneliness is all that is left for me and I must fully accept it. Nothing else will do. I am tired of having visitors. Talking just wears me out and seems utterly pointless, though with Naomi there was business to be settled etc. She suggested a book on Sufism and that is all right with me.
April 22, 1967
Evening. A full moon rising over the sharply outlined valley. Everything cool, green and very clear. I should have gone out for a long walk this afternoon but I had to write letters and then I have acquired a tape recorder and had to fool with it a little to make sure I know how to work it. It is a very fine machine and I am abashed by it. I take back some of the things I have said about technology.
I have made this day a sort of perplexed celebration – said mass for M. and her fiancé and honestly hope they will get back in love again, in fact by now they probably are. And that they will be happy in marriage some day soon … and so on. I am sure there is no real problem. At least I tell myself so. M. may want to hold on to me sentimentally in some way but I am convinced that the real love is more or less over between us, though we shall always be fond of each other I am sure.
So in a way it is a liberation day – and I have made up my mind to be what I am supposed to be. (Finally!)
Actually it is a most happy evening – could not be more perfect. I have some bourbon (Tommie O’Callaghan brought some) and am playing an ancient [Django] Reinhardt record that brings back the thirties. (Regression?) Perhaps in a little while I shall go out and stroll around under the trees. And try to tell myself that I am not really sad at all.
April 24, 1967
The other night I ended by sitting up late and making all kinds of naive experiments with tape. I think I am getting on to it and that it has real possibilities if handled with care. One good thing about it: it may cool down my emphatic attitudes. I will do less underlining, do not have to try to be so definite, so decisive, a kind of freedom can come from being nicely relaxed, cool and open. I have this interiorly and can be this way when not speaking and not thinking. Important to be that way while speaking and thinking, why so urgent?
My urgent vocabulary. “MUST. Must make sure. Definitely. Certainly. Nothing but. Have to. Had to. Proven. My duty. In a crisis. Won’t allow. Exactly. Discouraging. New things happening. Encouraging. I sang. Moves me deeply. Utterly different. Against. Devastation. The times are trouble. I was shaken. We were stopped. A good thing. Ought to have been done differently. You realize of course. Business to be settled.”
Try the urgent vocabulary, the non-words, on tape. (The too loaded words that are non-words because they insist.) Disturbing. False. Never again. First time in my life. Not fully warranted. Restless. The guarantees. How do you know?
Yesterday, colder, grey in the afternoon, the vast long field to the South bought from what’s his name, Webb Bowling (“You know me, Father, I’m Webb Bowling!”). Walked along the hedge next to Boone’s for a while and turned back lest I found myself down on the highway. Sat on a cinder block up against the old farrowing house and realized that I had hit a kind of suckhole of despair. Utter sadness, loneliness, hopelessness, no prospect of any human joy left. Drained of any trust in the love that has held me up. The silly interior singing that was after all a kind of comforting context, a locus, a place to live in, an atmosphere. Blank. Went into a kind of stupid daze. Got up again and walked, feeling better. Dark sky in the SW, with peculiar shark-shaped low clouds underneath the general black. Flying Saucers. A big fishbone missile of cloud pointing down to Charlie O’Brien’s pasture, and the hills behind Athertonville Distillery, that promise in the snow – November. Depre[ssion]. Sadness. I will at least keep praying for her to be happy. I wandered around the front of the Cross hill to the Dehy[drator]. Read a little Eliade on the coincidence of opposites. Came back. Office. Conference on Sufism.
Well I think the tape will shake things up a bit. Read a bit of [Samuel] Beckett on tape and played it back – it was illuminating and helpful. Beautiful simplicity in drabness.
April 26, 1967
The other day in Louisville I saw the headlines “U.S. planes bomb Haiphong” – but did not pick up a paper at the stands on the street for the papers were soaked in rain – and didn’t get time to go in to the Brown for one (forgot when I was actually there calling M.). Now I hear that a U.S. plane was shot down over China. I haven’t read about it all yet, but I have an uneasy feeling that things are getting close to a big war – as if the V.N. one were not already monstrous in terms of killing, but everything indicates that Johnson and the establishment are not averse to a big war in China. Probably the computers are telling them they need this war to go on and get bigger and that it can be fought without serious danger to the U.S. – on the contrary that it will be very profitable. Of course a lot of Americans will be killed, but then that will be a good way to get rid of a lot of unpleasant characters, Negroes, peaceniks, and those who disagree with the current philosophy. A big war will also get patriotism steamed up and dissent will not be tolerated any more. The latent fascism of many Americans can be encouraged etc. The prospect is not consoling. Once again – I don’t know what to do. The kind of protest that is available seems to be plainly useless. Revolutionary violence cannot get anywhere beyond ghetto rioting. Perhaps in a while the Negroes may go in for more massive sabotage, or something, but what will it accomplish beyond a tightening of police repression? And a certain disruption of the comfortable life on streets.
The V.N. war has made this country richer than it ever was before. It is keeping the economy up, preventing a recession, prolonging the longest period of expansion we have ever known.
Corruption in V.N. itself is fabulous (bad enough in U.S.), military and civilians in V.N. are making thousands of dollars on black market etc.
One thing is certain: the country as a whole is making piles of money out of this war – business, labor, all are in it. What real motive do peop
le have for wanting peace? They naturally are not too interested in preventing a war from escalating even to “world war” scale if it remains in Asia and it might well do so – without becoming a nuclear war.
The brutal truth is that the people of America by and large have no real objection even to a war with China as long as things go on as they are here now. Of course there is a lot of dissent on the part of a large minority and not everyone has an easy conscience even among the majority. But money is coming in and as long as it keeps coming …
I face the fact that I am living in an immoral, blind, even in some sense criminal society which is hypocritical, bloated, self-righteous, and unable to see its true condition – by and large the people are “nice” as long as they are not disturbed in their comfortable and complacent lives. They cannot see the price of their “respectability.” And I am part of it and I don’t know what to do about it – apart from symbolic and futile gestures.
The marches and riots stopped in Louisville the other day, Dan tells me.
Denis Goulet – from the U. of Indiana – was here yesterday. A lovely young guy with a lot of good ideas – interested in development of 3rd world and the sociological-religious problems involved. But has a scientific capacity to deal with these things on a professional level. I envy him – he gets all over the place – got a doctorate in Brazil, married a Brazilian girl, involved in a cooperative in Patagonia, lived a while at the fraternity of the Little Brothers in the desert – at – El Abiod, worked in Algeria, Lebanon (?), Bolivia, stayed with some Indians in the Amazon jungle. The world of the 60’s is a pretty lively one for people who can get money from universities and foundations etc. to go wherever they please. Keenly feel my own isolation and “imprisonment” – but it is what I have to accept and work with. Anyway Goulet is an interesting and worth while person, not a square, not contaminated by his professional milieu, honest, open, with ideas of his own and an intelligible speech.
Bursitis bad – or noticeable anyway. Rectal trouble bad. Tired of visits. Want to get work done. Tired. Writing some verse. A newspaper story on the illnesses etc. of Carson McCullers (clipping under my napkin the other day) made me realize my own troubles are insignificant.
April 28, 1967
I am reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X, which is an impressive book. Took it out into the sun in the wood’s edge this afternoon after writing one or two necessary letters. Yesterday I was in Louisville again – this time to see Dr. Roser. Got one audiogram and found that whatever is causing my colon trouble it does not have its sources in a sinus infection as Dr. Lucas thought. Have to see an allergist next week. Tedious and time-consuming – but the implications of my current trouble makes it necessary.
In the public library, skimmed through some poems of Robert Duncan, whom I like, and looked at a couple of books by Paul Bowles. Nothing much in the news. Sob story of Johnson: he would gladly stop all the killing if only the wicked aggressive North Vietnamese would agree to negotiate.
First time I have been to town in a year without even trying to call M. In fact barely even gave it a thought.
May 3, 1967
May came in with floods of rain, night and day, especially in the night. Monday May 1. Talked in the afternoon with Jan Yungblut from Atlanta and Dr. Young from Anderson, S.C. Jan Y., a Quaker-friend of M. Luther King, from whom he brought messages – exceedingly deferent but very nice. We discussed his ms. on mysticism which has good things in it. Will have to try to write him something on the Christological problems it raises but that is a subject I am shy of (as with Rosemary in her letters).
Reading [Frantz] Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth [New York, 1963]), Malcolm X and beginning Soul [on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver (New York, 1967)], all in view of an essay on war for a symposium edited by someone at Drexel.
Yesterday had to go (late afternoon) to an allergist in St. Matthew’s. Spoke for a few minutes again with J. Yungblut and now also with his wife. June also is staying in Bardstown while she is here. She is doing a dissertation on [Samuel] Beckett, working under Cleanth Brooks, and I found her very interesting and likeable.
Dr. Tom Jerry Smith – the little office at St. Matthew’s – the mysteries of allergies expounded – injections in the arm – the rigorous milk-free diet (disconcerting) – TOE whatever that is – fungus – fermentation – “allergic state.” – The cow. I do not succeed in pulling it all together. Avoided bread at breakfast. Fortunately had some rye crackers apparently with no trace of milk in them. I hope.
May 4, 1967. Ascension Day
Reading Fanon – and in contrast – stuff about Hippies in S.F. and an illuminating critique of Salinger by Mary McCarthy (in Dommergues). Hate stuff, Love stuff, all marketable, all advertised, all publicized, all disturbing to the consumer who lives in his suburb, and all of it – I wonder if it means anything? (Except Fanon who talks out of another world not of surfeit and drugs but of hunger and desperation.) Now synthetic visions which are supposed to be real. Not orthodoxies and anti-orthodoxies and visions of life which one is supposed to purchase this morning. Attack on [Lewis] Mumford in NY Times because he is not [Marshall] McLuhan. Names. You have to know Names. The Grateful Dead and the Quicksilver Messenger (whom I can’t find in the Schwann catalogue). My own kind of surfeit with all this. Yet not knowing it is no advantage. Nor is knowing it. Nor is judging whether or not it means anything. Maybe it does. Does one ask if there is a “lesson” in it? Or if one is seeing things? One needs a whole new language – and after that one can also go off and talk about not this but something else.
The whole damn business is a fabrication.
Evening. This afternoon – wrote something for the Dahlberg Festschrift, to send to Jonathan Williams at Aspen tomorrow.
Then went out for a walk in the woods.
Contrast with Ascension Day last year – weather very much the same, bright, not too hot. Last year that ecstatic afternoon in the woods with M. – almost unbelievable. I kept thinking of it. But I don’t regret that today was entirely different! Peace, silence, freedom of heart, no care, quiet joy. Last year – there was joy and turbulence and trouble which turned to confusion and a deeply disturbed heart because I knew I was wrong and was going against everything I lived for. Today I looked up at the tall treetops and the high clouds and listened to the silence – and was very glad indeed to be alone! What idiocy I got into last year!
Still I wonder how she is, and what is developing in her life. I worry a little about her.
May 6, 1967
“Le matin du 16 avril, le docteur Bernard Rieux sortit de son cabinet et butta sur un rat mort, au milieu du palier. Sur le moment, il écarta la bête sans y prendre garde et descendit l’escalier. Mais, arrivé dans la rue, la pensée lui vint que ce rat n’était pas à sa place ….” [“When leaving his surgery on the morning of April 16, Dr. Bernard Rieux felt something soft under his foot. It was a dead rat lying in the middle of the landing. On the spur of the moment he kicked it to one side and, without giving it a further thought, continued on his way downstairs. Only when he was stepping out into the street did it occur to him that a dead rat had no business to be on his landing ….”]11
Very curious. This morning I begin my work on Camus’ Plague and last evening coming up from the monastery I found a dead mouse on my doorstep. I tried to figure out what had killed it, but there was no indication, it was just dead.
A white-footed mouse.
This morning severe colic though I have carefully followed the allergist’s strict milk-free diet.
A dead mouse on the doorstep. Very curious.
“On the morning of the 16th of April Dr. Bernard Rieux …”
“Le lendemain, 17 avril, à huit heures, le concierge arrêta le docteur au passage et accusa des mauvais plaisants d’avoir déposé trois rats morts au milieu du couloir.” [“Next day, April 17, at eight o’clock the concierge buttonholed the doctor as he was going out. Some young scallywags, he said, had dumped three dead rats in the hall
.”]
Today is Derby Day, a day of pleasantries. To begin with, rain threatens. And then in Louisville the Negroes have threatened to disrupt the horse race (for the edification of the white race). Today is Derby Day, a day of pleasantries.
Several times this spring I have said the “Mass in Time of Pestilence,” which I feel to be quite appropriate for our age.
Rain is now falling.
Yesterday I finished the Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Note that there is Bubonic Plague in Vietnam. I don’t know how many cases, but quite a few. But the moral plague there is serious enough!
“Did not Diemerbroek know of people stricken with the plague who had been cured by music?”
[Michel] Foucault. Madness and Civilization [New York, 1965]. p. 179.
May 7, 1967. Sunday within Octave of the Ascension
Mystery of the Ascension moves me more this year – back to a sense of its meaning.
The mystery for the monastic life, [Louis] Bouyer said (whatever happened to Bouyer?).
Yesterday, Derby Day, light rain began in the morning and turned to floods of rain in the afternoon, so by post time for the race the track must have been a river. I don’t know what happened and don’t care. But the Negroes who were preparing to demonstrate and disrupt things probably did not have to do much – the Derby was already ruined.
In the evening I began reading Gerald Syke’s book The Cool Millennium [Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1967] – with which I agree so completely that it can hardly be called something new. Yet it does have a good effect, because it makes one realize more than ever how fortunate I am in my life in the woods, and what a chance I have to be really free. That I don’t need to prejudice my peace and freedom with recriminations against society. I am as out of it as one can be and still live in the USA. And there is no likelihood of my changing anything by my clamor. On the other hand I do have enough of a hearing to reach quite a few individuals and help them. (Yesterday another letter came from Smith [College] – another of those girls. They move and charm me with their understanding.)
Learning To Love Page 29