Coming home late called M. who had had the day off, had been reading Robert Frost (“Bereft”) and kept saying we should go on talking to each other as before (with love) and that she had dreamt of me. But I still have doubts about writing her with much affection or so frequently, and I know she has hesitations about our seeing each other – or at least about her driving down here. So it is calming down anyway, but I was glad to talk to her and on the phone she sounded happy.
May 21, 1967. Trinity Sunday
My breakfast reading (which is supposed to be “light” and informative) is now a new book by [George] Gamow on Quantum Physics. It dazzles and baffles me – but Niels Bohr & Co. are definitely among my No. 1 culture heroes. This magnificent instrument of thought they developed to understand what is happening in matter, what energy really is about – with their confirmation of the kind of thing Herakleitos was reaching for by intuition. It is terribly exciting, though I can’t grasp any of it due to the fact that I never had even high-school physics, and the equations are just hieroglyphics that represent to me no known answers. What sharks are they hunting? I don’t know, but when the shark is caught I try to focus on him my bedazzled reason.
What a crime it was – that utterly stupid course on “cosmology” that I had to take here (along with the other so-called philosophy in Hickey’s texts!). Really criminal absurdity! And at the time when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima! Surely there were people in the order who knew better than allow such a thing! Dom Frederic, no. He couldn’t help it. The whole Church still demanded this, and God knows, maybe some congregation or other still does.
I am thankful at least for the elementary astronomy and geology I got at Columbia.
A letter is appearing in the London Times with a quote from my letter to Margaret Gardiner – a protest against V.N. war signed by Lord [C.P.] Snow and others. I am all for his brave idea of dialogue between the two cultures and today could write him a fan letter. But won’t. The Chem[istry] department at Birmingham U. (England) is putting out a magazine which is ½ literary and the editor (David Kilburn) is after me and Lax and Reinhardt etc. for poems, art – this too is exciting. He [is] a good poet. This is the sort of thing that makes life very enjoyable.
May 22, 1967
Finished Foucault Madness and Civilization – a really remarkable book. Not sure that I have got more than a tenth of it. The material itself very rich, and his own handling of it subtle and masterly. One thing: the nineteenth-century asylum and its positivistic assumptions has very exact analogies to Trappist monasteries as organized by nineteenth-century French abbots. I’d like to do a paper on it. But for whom? No one would publish it and Superiors would fall off their chairs – which would be a good thing no doubt. If I could think of something to do with it. Meanwhile, just sitting down and getting it on paper is out of the question until I have done other more urgent things. But today Tommie O’C[allaghan], and Gene Meatyard etc. are supposed to be coming (promised both) – I have got to get free of “social” commitments. Yet the poet [Andrei] Voznesenky is in the country, would like to see me. I would like to see him …
May 27, 1967
A beautiful May morning. Limpid clarity. Silence. Birds. Air thick with the sweetness of honeysuckle. Thank God I have had a few days of quiet. Reading a life of Niels Bohr, finished Izutson on Ibn Arabi and returned it to Wenjyko at McGill. I can’t say I am totally happy with the 6th century Palestinian monasticism described in clarity. Too much political struggle – and I mean struggle for power. There is a great difference between a monk speaking out on a moral issue and a monk or community thrown bodily into a violent struggle for power with bishops and other monks.
The Times letter appeared Tuesday, May 23. I got a copy from Margaret Gardiner in London yesterday.
Yesterday – dipped into the ms. that Julian Muller at Harcourt Brace and World wanted me to comment on – nuns used as whores by Viet Cong etc. – a sort of breezy Morris West treatment, popular and tough, with some nasty monsignors and good tough Jews etc. etc. The correct mythology that assumes a compound of oversexuality, crude violence, honest bourgeois privatism, native American honesty, a bit of lesbianism for kicks. In other words a pile of stupid shit. What revolted me was not so much the sex as the attitude – the mixture of superficial objectivity and Time-Life self-righteousness – and the suburb sophistication. America as she sees herself. The kind of America that makes Norman Mailer vomit – and me too (man at U. of Minnesota sent me an essay he had written on me and Mailer).
It always gets back to the same thing. I have dutifully done my bit. I have been “open to the world.” That is to say I have undergone my dose of exposure to American society in the 60’s – particularly in these last weeks. I love the people I run into – but I pity them for having to live as they do, and I think the world of U.S.A. in 1967 is a world of crass, blind, overstimulated, phony, lying stupidity. The war in Asia gets slowly worse – and always more inane. The temper of the country is one of blindness, fat, self-satisfied, ruthless, mindless corruption. A lot of people are uneasy about it, but helpless to do anything against it. The rest are perfectly content with the rat race as it is, and with its competitive, acquisitive, hurtling, souped-up drive into nowhere. A massively aimless, baseless, shrewd cockiness that simply exalts itself without purpose. The mindless orgasm, in which there is no satisfaction, only spasm.
So I have done my bit and looked at what they have to offer and want no part of it. Yet I remain part of it. But I do not have to be so divided or so doubtful. Why not go ahead with my own business, which is not writing but living and meditating and breathing, and believing? Obviously the divisions are more critical and more far-reaching than I understand. And new rifts open up. Catholicism itself is to me more and more of a problem. Not a theological one – it is on the level of culture and of psychology. American Catholicism – the American Catholic mind and consciousness. The American Catholic Spasm! Again, aggressively, a forbidding, combative stance, now legalist and more pseudo-liberal (the liberal publicist itch). The whole thing revolts me.
Yet the new bishop is obviously a nice guy. His football tackle henchman standing impatiently by the car as big and shiny as a dreadnought waiting to open the door. Car sleek as a millionaire’s or a gangster’s.
And I have to keep going to the allergy man who looks like a musician – and I guess he is smart with all his needles – tucked away in a corner of St. Matthew’s. – Needles. Props. Bottles. Woodcarving of grotesque demons which are at once allergies and patients – and the doctor’s own problem. The Ray Harm picture of pelicans and the same people waiting hours and kidding about it with some acidity.
I ought to learn to just shut up and go about my business of thinking and breathing under trees. But protest is a biological necessity. Part of the allergy maybe.
May 30, 1967
It is Decoration Day – looks like rain. Misty. Cold.
Will Campbell and Jim Holloway here yesterday. Will drove his red farm truck up into the shade by the hermitage and we sat in the breeze talking – mostly about his work preaching “to the Klan.” Crawford (?) the head of the clan, accepts him though “liberal.” Curious stories – guns and so on. The Kluxers convinced that there must be shooting (and the Black Power types equally convinced). Doubtless the shooters will start by shooting in different places, not on each other. Curious times are coming.
I haven’t heard much about the Middle East crisis lately.
Things obviously don’t get better in Viet Nam.
Will Campbell had his guitar and sang “country music” – curious, hopeless, sentimental songs all about betrayal and death – women doing their men wrong, evil boys with dying pet doggies, etc. General theme of forsakenness, loneliness, death – curious stuff. Such a different temper from the (Negro) Blues!
Last night – curious dreams.
One – I am in a place where there are Buddhist nuns, separated from me by a curious, paper-thin sort of iconostasis or printed par
tition, behind which I hear their soft erotic laughter as they are aware of me there. Sense of being drawn to them.
The other dream. The monastery building (Gethsemani) is on fire. The fire burns slowly on the inside of the building, but threatens to become violent. Meanwhile there are still people in the building. I think “Why don’t they get out?” I myself am there, moving through small patches of fire, but get to safety. The building is not destroyed but all that is inside is consumed, more or less.
More changes in the Mass – elimination of a lot of signs of the cross, kisses of altar etc. In a way it relaxes tensions – is more honest – more true to the non-hieratic feeling of the modern America – but I had no real objection to the old formal ritual gestures either. This speeds up the Mass too. Perhaps I’ll try to go more slowly and reflectively, with more quiet pauses to replace the old “actions.”
May 31, 1967
May comes to a cold end. Rain. Train in the valley.
Have just been reading of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Persians in 614 a.d. Since Helena, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the True Cross had been a center of the Christian Empire and the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross in September was second only to Easter – an Exaltation of the Empire! I realize the crucial importance of the history of the East in the centuries when Islam was about to begin – and know nothing of this history. It is probably the key to a lot of things. (Death of Muhammad, 632.)
June 1, 1967
Precisely on June 1 the day lilies began to open. But it still rains.
Yesterday a letter from Dom James in Europe. The Apostolic Delegate is inquiring about my connections with the National Association for Pastoral Renewal, which is considering a poll on clerical celibacy and is in hot water with Spellman. I guess there is going to be a rumpus. Frankly I can’t say I really care one way or another. I sympathize with those priests, and I think the continued opposition to them is going to mean trouble. But in the long run I don’t know if a married secular clergy really solves anything for the church—or for the clergy. My own feeling is that it does not matter that much and I am not deeply enough involved in the issue myself to get into a fight about it. I am an “advisor” of the NAPR—i.e. a name on a list—and able to be “used.” That is the extent of it.
Evening. It has been a cold quiet, wet day, as cold as in November.
I sit here with a wind breaker on. It is dark. As far as I am concerned it was a good day – quiet. Began writing the booklet on Camus’s Plague for Seabury Press.14 The Plague itself is impressive on second reading. A clearcut job. Reading [Ernst] Benzon Evolution and Hope [Garden City, NY, 1966]. The absurd hope of some nineteenth-century optimists. The future has to be better, man has to become a superman. Article of faith! Every bit as naive as the most naive myths about Adam and Eve.
This evening there is nothing terribly hopeful about things. I was content until I went down to the monastery. Confusion – the weekly routine which seems to me a bit absurd. Why not let people go to confession when they feel a need to, instead of this regular once a week business? But anyway Fr. Matthew was a bit depressed – General Chapter going on, not much hope of anything really happening. Weariness with this elaborate business of pretending to reform etc. Worse than that – a sort of hopelessness and a growing realization that it is almost impossible to do anything significant within the kind of framework we have. And even the good things that are being done: Fr. Placide’s foundation at Aubazine – what will they really amount to? What is the point of taking over an elaborate, cumbersome Oriental liturgy just when the Roman (Cistercian) liturgy is being completely simplified?
What seems to be growing on everyone is the disturbing realization that this whole business – the whole monastic institution – may now be finished. In trying to save it they have thrown out some of the same things that made it seem coherent, and now the incoherence and insecurity of the whole thing are getting obvious. In fact, Gethsemani is to a great extent held together by the emotions, the willpower and the personal delusions of Dom James, who firmly believes in himself as Abbot. It suddenly dawned on me why he is going around telling people he hopes to retire: he always makes sure to tell it to the right ones – the ones who will implore him not to! They are the ones who are content with his fantasies and his games and his abbatial “presence.” Actually there is no hope of any real development as long as he is there. He will generate a certain stability, it is true – he will keep the place from falling apart – but perhaps he will only exhaust everyone who might have good ideas, and when he goes the place really will fall apart. Perhaps that is what his supporters sense. And it is true, hardly anyone is crazy enough to even think of taking over such a hopeless job.
Meanwhile – there is the crisis between Arabia and Israel which seems to be fairly real and no mere pseudo-event. And the racial tension in this country. The ever worse situation in Vietnam, where the war gradually becomes more and more serious and it seems inevitable that China will eventually get involved. What idiocy! And people are now so accustomed to the war and the general pattern of violence and affluence that they expect no real change – they stop thinking about it. I am not so resigned: on the contrary, I feel as disturbed as I was in 1962, and once again have the sense of real growing crisis. And perhaps this time we shall not get out of it as easy as we did with Cuba.
As for the race situation: it is now clear that none of the really rational, humane, decent settlements are possible. The “nice” clean way of settling everything in a bright, friendly atmosphere of cooperation – all that our democratic myth had led us to believe, is simply out of the question. What we are going to have instead is crude, stupid hate, mutual harassment, an impasse of force and resistance, and a mess that cannot be arranged. If at the same time there is war … a big war …
June 3, 1967
Still raining.
Last evening: eating sardines and drinking a couple of cans of Schlitz, and reading the life of Niels Bohr, I was again astonished at the “nearness” of the whole development of atomic physics, to my own life. Things going on at the Cavendish Lab at Cambridge when I was there. In January 1939, when I was taking my exams for the M.A. and had presented my thesis, the uranium atom was split in an experiment at Columbia (Jan. 25) and I knew nothing about it (though it got into the papers). At that time there was an immense ferment going on in Germany and the U.S. over the atom. Bohr had just arrived for 3 months at Princeton. Everyone was splitting the uranium nucleus and wondering if Hitler was on the way to producing a bomb. I had no idea that it went back that far. A sense of awe at the fact that people like Bohr were so much at the heart of what was happening – so truly “prophetic.” For this is a truly modern kind of prophetism: I mean in men like Bohr, [Werner] Heisenberg, [Leo] Szilard etc. who grasped all the consequences of their discoveries in a widely human way. As opposed to this kind of narrow scientism which sees only a short range and purely technical consequence. Bohr had the ability to translate his discoveries into a language relevant to everybody, to all humanity, and to the deepest and most critical problems of man then and there – here and now.
All this was happening on my own doorstep and I knew nothing about it! Yet I think it was surely related in some mysterious way to the spiritual ferment in my own being – my groping toward a religious adaptation to crisis – my real awareness of the crisis on another level.
I am just discovering other well-known facts: for instance as far back as 1927 it was known that genetic mutation could be artificially induced by X-rays, and now it is known too that it can be done chemically. So that there is a very real possibility of drastic genetic change in the near future, whether deliberate or accidental.
So that once again it becomes imperative that there be some concerted action by the best minds everywhere to control this power in view of the interests of man. Not let it be used haphazardly by individual nations or groups – or by cliques of madmen! – for what they conceive to be the right ends.
&
nbsp; June 6, 1967
How do you begin to say that you think World War III is now going on but that you are not sure – ?
Perhaps the simplest way of saying it is that is feels like 1939 all over again. The sick feeling that the big machine has gone on the rampage again and no one can really control it: because though they think they want to stop it (the rampage is inconvenient and not according to plans), they have set up all the causes which put it out of control.
Like I am almost ready to write and say goodbye to everybody.
Yesterday, riding into town to see the doctor again (the end of that is finally in sight, at least for deciding what allergy shots I need) – radio announced the fighting – on all fronts – between Israel and UAR. A meeting of the UN Security council was supposed to convene but I had reached the library before it did. Air raid alerts in Tel Aviv, but it was bombed. Artillery in Jerusalem. Cairo bombed (airfields) and Damascus airport. Planes fighting. Troops fighting in desert. Israel apparently attacked – but provoked by the blockade. Reports, Counterreports. Bright June day bright as that September morning on the Rappahannock in 1939 when we heard London talking and all was said to be quiet …
The unreal subtle buildup. State Department says of course the U.S. is neutral but White House, without formal contradiction, refuses to confirm this. Russia is neutral but “warns” … Arabs say oil will not go to anyone who seems to be not quite friendly … Obviously the situation is very nasty. No, planes from the U.S. 6th Fleet are not involved and so on.
Same reports all day, with slight variation. Making up the public mind. Gradually everyone gets the same confused picture – same subliminal hopes, fears, determinations. We know where we are all going – so we think. We are taking a firm stand. Confidence in our President who is being firm, watchful, will stand no nonsense from a bunch of rug-salesmen, gypsies and semi-muggers. What today? I have no ideas. I am back in the woods, with my own deep and unquiet sicknesses. I do not try to figure anything out – I only try to come to terms with the idea, now more disturbingly real than ever before, that at the next moment I may go up in smoke with the gold of Fort Knox and all the fissionable material stored there (20 miles? 30 miles? 15 or 20 in a straight line? I don’t know).
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