Letter upon letter from Dom James, read in refectory. I hear some of the material – yesterday for instance – there was a long disquisition on the questionnaire that everyone was supposed to answer last winter. I did not answer it, because one look at the questions showed that the whole thing was a waste of time – it was not in a form that could possibly be tolerated. No result was even conceivable. Apparently about 50% of the Order answered. Jealously, faithfully, and some in a pathetic outpouring of words, complaints, hopes, etc. The chief effect of Dom James’ letter was to pour scorn on these as malcontents, neurotics and even “paranoids.” (Well, obviously we have plenty of those!) The letter was typical: on one hand it sought to justify the questionnaire. The argument boils down to this: the questionnaire was useful because it was a very instructive example of how not to conduct a questionnaire. In other words it was useful precisely because it was useless. The establishment being thus justified for its stupidity, he proceeded to mock and insult (sweetly of course) those who went to the trouble of answering. Most answers were useless, and this, so he suggests was somehow their fault for wanting to express ideas of their own in any case. Finally, it was suggested, there will be a new questionnaire, but this time much better – and it will not ask any questions about the essentials of our life because to question the essentials would be a kind of revolt! So that just about ties up the package! The next one will also be useless, but this time it will give a nice tidy “result” which can be used in the Order to keep everything clamped down, with the unassailable argument: “This is what you yourselves have asked for!”
June 21, 1967
A hot weekend – big rain at the time of the Sunday concelebration.
Lots of helicopters hovering around these days – Tours of inspection?
The abbot is coming back sooner than he told me he would – is in New York now visiting rich friends – after returning from France via Chile.
Yesterday I was in Louisville again and I think now the doctor has the allergy shot right, so I won’t have to go back again for a while. And glad of that! Found the Kosher foods in St. Matthew’s A&P, so had Kasha for supper, and now am supplied with matzoth, potato pancakes etc. I called M. from the U. of L. and now she doesn’t want to marry her fiancé after all, [ … ] And she keeps urging me to leave the monastery so that I can “be myself.” There is probably something to that, but is it quite so simple? I doubt that: the whole massive politic of getting out and getting established elsewhere is beyond me now, and there is really nowhere else I want to live but in this hermitage. I’d like to be a little more free of the system here, and able to circulate a little and find some other people who are awake and doing something: but I do have quite a few such coming here.
I know my gut allergies are to a great extent revolt against my predicament here and they get more violent and drastic every day – though the shots do help: but only help me to hold my own. I have to keep up with shots every five days to maintain the semi-comfort I had, say, last year. Certainly I had much less trouble all around when I was seeing M. – last year, apart from the back operation and bursitis, was one of the best as far as health went!
June 25, 1967
Quiet, rainy Sunday morning. 6th Sunday after Pentecost.
I am reading De Lubac’s book on Teilhard de C. – Commonweal has asked for a review. Maybe I should not have accepted – I’ve been doing too many reviews. But it is interesting. And I need to understand T. In many ways I find him “sympathique,” but I can’t get excited about his mystique, though it has its good points. It strikes me as a bit romantic, and all the queer neologisms – super-Christ, christic center, hominization of the cosmos etc. and the basic activism involved seem to me to give a very tinny kind of a sound when you tap on them to see what they are like. Maybe the book will finally make him quasi-established. He is in fact very much part of a certain kind of establishment thinking.
Yesterday I went over again to see Victor Hammer in Lexington. He was very thin, tired, quiet, yet in good spirits. It does not seem possible that he will survive another heart attack. He did not say much. It is sad to see him drifting away like this and not be able to do anything for him.
Guy Davenport came over to Hammer’s, then we went to the Meatyards’ for a couple of drinks and to look at more photographs. Gene and Madie are two of my favorite people, and he is certainly a marvelous artist. Day before yesterday read Ronald Johnson’s long poem The [Book of the] Green Man, which I think is one of the best poems written in this century. I wrote to him about it. Got a letter from Lewis Mumford in London about my letter to the Times Book Review – on the idiotic review of Mumford’s book. Apparently a lot of his friends were angry at it. The kind of review where you press a button and get all the current clichés of Marshall McLuhan.
The other afternoon, Friday – in the heat, enjoyed singing all the antiphons for 1st Vespers of St. John Baptist. Indeed the feast means a lot to me this year. I am tired of going out and around. Fortun[ately] I don’t have to go to Tom Jerry Smith anymore – I hope – as these shots are now working all right. May have to see Mitchell again about the back but I’ll try and put it off with exercises, traction, bufferin etc. I definitely do not intend to try to see M. or do anything more about her – maybe call once in a while to see how she is doing, that’s all. Mail censorship is to begin again I hear. I knew Dom J. would not be able to keep his hands off the mail. He’ll be able to blame it on the General Chapter, of course! (Probably brought up the question himself.)
June 26, 1967
Importance of really studying Kafka’s Trial is dawning on me. First of all for work – comparison with Camus’ Stranger and for the ideas on language, war etc.
Also for my own evaluation of my own position. My own neurotic attitude toward society and my own guilt. A deep [indecipherable] in existential psychoanalysis! And on the idea of “original sin,” solitude, identity etc. How K. goes to work and constructs the identity they seemingly “want” him to have (do they “want” anything?). In other words, by resisting one can effectively affirm whatever it is one is accused of and, in a manner, submit to the accusation. (Fr. Kavanaugh’s book). The utter uselessness of that kind of righteousness. Du Bay also. It is clear that no one affirms the clerical state in all its absurdity more firmly than Du Bay with his idiot idea of a priests’ union.
So too in non-institutional matters. We perpetuate our sickness, our failures, our pathologies, so that our efforts to struggle with them may be recognized as useful for others. So that our remedies may not become obsolete, we take good care to perpetuate our sickness. But there are unfortunately some ills that go on without us, remedies or no remedies. Yes: but we want to be remembered as having recognized them.
Innocence consists in not having to answer, and therefore in not even thinking about an answer. But if you already have an answer prepared you are already guilty. “Responsibility” as an admission of guilt, as a desire for it? We overdo “responsibility” and “irresponsibility.” But unfortunately that is our condition.
July 3, 1967
Yesterday, the Visitation, also Sunday. Two very heavy rainstorms and other lighter showers. Had a short conversation with the Abbot of our New Zealand Monastery, Dom Joachim, whom I had met before – and who seems a bit naive. I realized to what an extent many of the Abbots themselves are little better off than the monks and are dominated by a highly authoritarian system. Dom Gabriel etc. (and Dom Celsus of Mt. Melleray dictating the smallest details of observance!). At the concelebration, for some reason I was thinking back over the past years here – and the people who have left – and the decade of the fifties when there was so much false optimism and real anguish – and how that has all been exploded now. Yet in the singing I could still hear that same pathetic Gethsemani voice – so much desire, so much good will, so much determined illusion. And yet there is something real here, but to find the reality one has to subvert the official illusion, the image of ourselves that is acceptable to (because
created by) authority.
There is more fighting (on a small scale) in the Near East. Russians pouring planes and weapons back into Egypt to replace what Israel destroyed three weeks ago. I suppose one must learn to live with this kind of thinking which keeps man constantly on the edge of a new World War. But living with it seems to mean – for so many – a false optimism and a resolution to ignore the real danger. Yet one cannot live in perpetual fear either. To do so is to give in to the forces of irrationality and contribute one’s own share to the confusion, the general illness.
Monsignor Chatham – (from Jackson, Miss.) – here last week. A courageous man in his sickness – but again: so happy, so convinced about the fact that Johnson and Kosygin had conversations that lasted four hours instead of two. His eyes were shining! As if those conversations meant anything! People seem determined to clutch at everything symbolic of “friendliness” and “togetherness” (no matter how deceptive) and ignore the fact that everywhere men hate and kill and arm for more killing, and that the machinery for reaching agreements simply does not work any more, because it is used by the haters for their own purposes.
It is one of those wonderful, bright summer mornings – sky without a wisp of cloud, pure blue (except, little storm on the horizon for everything is wet and sparkling). Birds singing. Distant roar of an occasional car on the road. On my Ikonenkalendar [icon calendar] – a beautiful, subdued, hieratic ikon of Cosmas and Damian, the healers.
Got a very good letter from Ron Johnson the other day, in reply to my letter about his Green Man. (This is a perfect Green Man morning. I intend to read Kilvert, Sam Palmer etc.) He spoke of having met R. S. Thomas in Wales – lovely description of his unearthly Welsh wife. Last week too I was happy with the poems sent by the little girls in California and their “underground paper.”
I am curiously fond of little Diane O’Callaghan – all of those children, but somehow especially Diane, who for some reason I sense to be more complicated and more vulnerable – there is a great curiosity between us, and a strange sort of attraction which at times makes her moody and aloof, and then suddenly breaks out in a kind of childlike passion, as when we were playing in the water and she swam to me and began climbing all over me and holding onto me desperately saying “You’re all warm, you’re all warm.” She is I think nine years old, or ten. I feel a great tenderness and care for her, and I want her to grow up happy: and I think she will probably know a lot of anguish. But she has a mind of her own and a precocious heart.
July 4, 1967
Having got a couple of New Yorkers from the Hammers when I was in Lexington, I read this morning a report from Jerusalem by Renata Adler, on that fast little war. You can’t get away from the fact that the Israeli Jews are in reality Europeans and Westerners. And in the background is World War II, with Hitler, the Nazis, etc. And the bourgeois world. Good, courageous people who make us feel that one culture makes sense, that we are courageous, resourceful, sacrificing, etc. And it is true that they did a courageous job and defended themselves successfully – more than successfully. And incidentally it appears that Nasser really had plans for genocide … I certainly sympathize with the plight of the Arab refugees, and all the poor people who have again lost their homes and their hopes. I can understand the Arabs feeling bitter – but the fact remains that it should be possible for them to get along with Israel if they wanted to and that if there were a little give and take there could be cooperation between them. And that Israel is not unwilling to try this. It is people like Nasser who are, at times, implacable. And they keep the hatred of the ignorant and helpless always inflamed, so that they think destroying Israel will somehow help them solve their problems. The Russians concur – and provide weapons.
Joke – (reported as told by an Israeli scientist at Weizmann institute first morning of the war).
A Jew is walking down the street in tears.
Someone meets him and asks what is the matter.
“I am an optimist.”
“If you are an optimist why are you crying?”
“You think in days like this it is easy to be an optimist?”
I think back to the morning of June 5 when I was driving along the Watterson expressway with Joe Carroll and the radio was on, giving the first news of the war – alerts at Tel Aviv, shelling in Jerusalem etc. Bright, sunny morning – flat land – a few new buildings rising stark and without character in the sky: a new motel going up etc. It might have been Tel Aviv itself, for all you could tell by the look of things. Also: how fortunate it was that Israel won so fast, that by the next day everything was already settled: indeed it was already settled that morning when we were coming into Louisville. One among the scattered reports, was the right one and it seemed the least likely at the time. Some Israeli spokesman had said that “our plans are succeeding remarkably well!” or words to that effect. If it had been longer and more complicated, it would have perhaps involved everyone.
Meanwhile also, I reflect on my own strange position: I hear a bit of news here and another bit there and then come back to the woods and it all cooks in my mind. But I don’t get in the full stream of it, and don’t have the same content as everyone else. Of course, if the news is not real news, this doesn’t matter. In the real events, though, I cannot help but lack perspective. Not that this perspective of everyone is necessarily the right one.
July 5, 1967
Yesterday turned into a very happy day: it was bright and cool all day (the nights have been almost cold – between 50 and 60). Early in the morning I heard a truck coming up through the fields and could see my new bookcases swaying about the cab. It also meant that the sink and cabinet were arriving (I still use the outhouse, however; no indoor toilet). So my kitchen was finally fixed up, the water connected, and I cleaned up the whole place, gathering up the books that were piled all over chairs and everywhere. The new furniture smells marvelously of fresh cedar and the place is really transformed by it. At last the kitchen is a real kitchen, and I don’t have to wash dishes in a bucket on the floor. It took six months from the time the well-rig first got here, to the time I first washed my hands in the new sink. To celebrate I had supper of chop-suey and rice, and walked in the clear cool evening utterly at peace and happy with the cottage. In fact I stayed up late, not for any special reason, but just walking around smelling the good smell of the cedarwood, looking at the new look of the rooms, and loving the place to be as clean as it (for once) is!
Yesterday morning, too, instead of reading, I got on to the typewriter and finished my review of De Lubac on Teilhard: and that was a good thing, because if I had left it until later I would not have done anything on it (the plumbers being here etc.) and would have felt very frustrated.
Also I am back reading Camus – Actuelles I and Kafka’s Trial – and will keep working toward the Camus book I want to finish, if possible, this year.
It is good not to have to go to town again. I have been in there too much and it has got me out of the real tempo of my solitary life, which I am, I hope, now recovering. Today a long quiet day.
Terribly sad and poignant statements and poems of the Buddhist nun, Nhat Chi, who burned herself to death May 16. Utterly tragic – and no one pays any attention: her death is meaningless to them. That is the real tragedy – not her immolation, but that it is taken for granted, ignored, not even known, perhaps, to people who simply don’t care about such things. Once, a few years ago, it was a novelty! … That her death was an extreme cry for peace is not even regarded as significant. The complete inability of people to attend to any such thing. Communications media reduce everything to zero and there is no more communication, only a cloud of grey, shapeless, undifferentiated images, all meaningless.
It rains. A letter came today from a girl in Lanza del Vasto’s “Communauté de l’Arche.” A seven-day fast is being planned for December. Seven days of complete abstinence from food. They want me to join in and get others to do the same. I certainly want to try, though I have never gone tha
t long without food, or even half that long. It will need some preparation! Whether I can manage seven days or not, I think it is a good idea to get back to some real fasting. I have not fasted much at all since last year. That business with M. really threw me off my track in a crash. Now I no longer look back on it with longing and desire, but just with embarrassment. It was really a stupid thing – though I recognize that it had a lot of good points because it brought out the things that had to come out and be recognized. It would have been much worse had they remained hidden. Still I began drinking more than I should – whenever I had a chance to, at least. And really lost all serious discipline except for the one thing: solitude. Keeping to the woods was what saved me.
Beautiful letter from Margaret Gardiner today in the Orkneys.
July 8, 1967
Fasted yesterday (morning) and found I did not get much useful reading done without that morning coffee. Yet it is certainly good to feel empty and hungry. I do find I am eating less anyway.
Steady downpour of rain Thursday. I got permission to have an altar and say Mass in the hermitage. Went over to Buck Murfield, the cabinet maker at Athertonville, to order the altar in a hurry in the hope of getting it some time like next week – perhaps to say my first Mass here on the 16th, which is the Feast of Our Lady of Carmel (Sunday this year), patronal feast of the hermitage. (The feast has been dropped from the Cistercian Ordo, where it used to be on the 17th.)
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