Then Dan W[alsh] came back from Toronto from a Theology Conference for everybody, with lots of Bishops etc. giving bad talks and being hooted. Not surprising, and yet I don’t find it very inspiring either. There is too much spite, envy, pettiness, savagery, and again too much of a brutal and arrogant spirit in this so-called Catholic renewal: too much conceit and hubris, and in the end the same old authoritarian and intolerant ways in a new form. I don’t especially like it and I don’t want to get mixed up in it.
According to Dan (who must always be taken with a grain of salt) people at the conference were down on Pope Paul VI, fed up with him, calling him all kinds of names, saying he was “psychotic or at least neurotic” etc. and passing around a lot of denigration. And Dan with stories – apparently straight from [Bernard] Häring – about Carmelite cloistered nuns now having to go out and teach or something. Again – wait and see. You know Dan’s tales!!
But the whole blessed thing adds up to a climate that is not healthy, smells bad. The air is gassy and polluted. I prefer the air of the woods.
I feel with the greatest seriousness that we are in for difficult times, for violence, confusion, nastiness, mess, blood, destructive maneuvers everywhere, in everything – in the Church and outside it (I don’t say people will kill each other in the Church!!). And I feel that there is nothing I can do by talking about it, or trying to intervene in it. I have said what I know how to say and it wasn’t much. Now I see no point in trying to cope with piles of mixed up and unconnected information and opinion or to keep up with what “everybody is thinking.” It is exhausting and pointless and totally unreal as far as I am concerned. Better to stay out of it, not be used, do what I am really supposed to do and live the life that has been given me to live. That is the important thing – if I can do it. I’ll have plenty to do writing poetry, meditations, criticism, and the thing I hope to do on “Cargo,” for instance. Or Camus.
September 2, 1967
Great serious days continue – bright sun, bright sky. I am not on retreat but might as well be. I have put work aside and am taking long walks and praying in the woods. Had to write some necessary letters. I keep away from the monastery as much as possible, though today I had to go to the shoe shop, since the heel was falling off my right shoe.
Fasted today – this is always good not only because of the “penance” but because of the change of tempo and perspective. Instead of dinner – being out in the woods, seeing everything in the light and silence of noon – in the universal quiet – all machines stopped. Walked barefoot in a mossy spot under oaks and pines reading a new book of which a review copy came today – Two Leggings [edited by Peter Nabokov, New York, 1967] about a Crow Indian, his fasts, his efforts at acquiring vision and “medicine.” I could use a little medicine myself!
Inner problem, deep problem about the validity of staying here under someone like Dom James. Is it really a defeat, a defection, a failure of my vocation to stay rather than to leave? No way of really answering. If I had anything else definite to do … But one does not just leave for the sake of leaving, and the hermitage, as far as I am concerned, is fine. Even though he has obviously intended it as a way to make sure I am kept from encounter and participation – in monastic renewal. For instance, I was invited last week by Fr. Aelred to come to Christ of the Desert in New Mexico – though I would like to go: not a hope, the way things are now. But no: isn’t that wrong? Isn’t it wrong for me to go on accepting it? I wish I knew. I don’t think it’s clearly wrong. I wish I were sure it was right, and not an evasion.
Obviously, all you can do is choose, on the basis of what you know. So I choose to continue in the hermitage, under conditions that are from a certain viewpoint political, fraudulent (i.e. on the part of authority). Something like Pasternak in his dacha. He did not repudiate communism, or rather Russia, as many would have liked him to do.
Began Claude Lévi-Strauss Mythologiques I yesterday. Very exacting. Real new and stimulating beginning after my morning reading had more or less bogged down.
Lord Northbourne wrote the other day about Garabandal, which he too has discovered. Dan Berrigan is teaching at Cornell. Haven’t heard form Sy or Slate in a longtime. Suzanne B. was distressed over Brian Epstein’s death and asked me to say a Mass for him. Picture before me, of Louise Gosho’s two entrancing little girls, Japanese and Western faces, very lovely. Mystics and Zen Masters to be in Japanese – at least the part on Asian stuff. – This the first request for translation rights. I’m glad. Martin Marty’s “Apology” in NCR [August 30, 1967]. (My reply next week.)
September 7, 1967
I found the first ceremonies in the Church last Sunday beautiful but trying. Got there late for the consecration of the high altar and watched from the side as the five little heaps of incense flamed on the big black stone. That was pretty.
During the Mass I was strained and depressed. But I am glad the Church is finished and that it looks nice.
I have been praying a lot over the problem of this place.
Then suddenly today Dom James told me he had reached his decision about what he wanted to do: he is planning to resign and live in a hermitage over in Edelin’s place. I was surprised, and respect him for the decision! In fact I envy him the little place Clement has planned for him, out on a high spur – and it will be much more solitary there than here. (Now I hear the roaring of the motorcycle on the road, 1/4 mile away. Houses are going up on monks’ road everywhere – and soon I suppose I might as well be at the edge of a small town!) But there may be a dam at Howardstown, and lake water may back up to Edelin’s hollows – so there will be motor boats out there. Solitude may be much more rare in ten years’ time – if I am still alive.
I wanted to collect my thoughts but had to work in the afternoon finishing a re-reading of the Journal of My Escape from the Nazis, which I want to get copied, and submit for publication after all these years. (It reads well, for the most part.) After supper, with a gut full of Kasha, I walked on the brow of my hill and looked out over the valley and mused on everything. Certainly it is better for Dom J. to retire. He has been abbot there for nineteen years. It will be a relief to get someone younger. But who? Fr. Anastasius is rigid and uncooperative. Fr. Eudes unpredictable and too many don’t like him. Fr. Matthew enthusiastic but maybe not emotionally stable enough. Fr. B. has no brains, and is too wavering. Fr. Callistus is practical and good hearted but perhaps not yet experienced enough. Who else? For my part I certainly would not accept the job of Abbot. Fr. Flavian might be the best in many ways: but he is a hermit, and would they vote for him now?
September 10, 1967
“I don’t need any paper. I know who I am,” says a sailor in [B.] Traven (sudden big fuss about Traven – again fabrication – publisher’s gag – Ramparts collaborating). Still, in terms of book providence, I can learn. It comes at a time of special absurdity: a tension of varying absurdities and questions that are probably useless, and yet raise themselves now. About the monastery, myself, my life, what is happening, the country, people I know, the Church etc. All the patterns fuller of clash and shock: that, anyway, is certain.
My more constant depression, disillusionment, realization that there are no structures and no projects worth hoping in, not within reach.
Ad Reinhardt’s death.
Ed Rice – the collapse of Jubilee, the awful dirty deal he got from the Herder people.
The monastery – its problems and its future (if any).
The misguided questions of mine.
And now yesterday the very negative, almost hostile bearing of Thompson Willett of all people! No explanation, nothing I can think of, perhaps I caught him at a wrong moment; in the midst of a personal crisis of some sort, but got a very cold reception and was for all intents and purposes thrown out. This is a new experience, in recent years! Don’t remember anything like that since college days! Anyway his whole bearing was (within the limits of his indelible surface politeness) implicitly insulting. As if I’d tried to
rape one of his daughters or something. (Suppose someone had invented some crazy story and he’d believed it!) The only thing I can think of – Fr. U. (who has been out of the order for several years now – no one can get along with him, he causes trouble everywhere he goes) is a friend and classmate and was visiting there recently. U. detests me from way back – ever since the novitiate, with the cold, self-righteous neurotic hate of a deeply frustrated being. And maybe he took occasion to express some ideas about me and what I have been doing! I can imagine from the patterns of the past! He would do a thorough job of discrediting me.
So anyway, I don’t know and there is no way of guessing.
Wounded and perplexed – telling myself “I know how niggers feel.”
And above all realizing the stupidity and inner contradiction involved in my going there at all! It is only another product of confusion and conflict in myself and I don’t even know what I am looking for. So that made the humiliation complete.
This morning I am able to laugh at it, though several times during the night I woke up thinking about it.
In the end – it just seems I’ve reached a corner I’ve got to turn, and there is a whole suburb that has to be left behind and never revisited. I am heading for some other city and had better get going!
After meditation – a good one in an anguished way – went to the Bible needing comfort (am reading Isaiah again – seem to read it over and over) and my pericope for today was Isaiah 44:21–22. None would have been better. Deo gratias [Thanks be to God].
“How terrible for life to force deceptions upon an honest man,” says Judy Shine in the Ramparts article on Traven. Well, that is no consolation. We “honest men” are not so much made deceivers by life: it is that in the end (with everyone else collaborating) we prefer to let the deceit in us come out and we come to terms with it in one way or another so that we can deceive acceptably and not get too badly caught. And some of us, in despair, have to act this out in a self-defeating rather than self-justifying way. Do we want to get caught, for the sake of having some kind of company? Or just for the sake of an official state of “isolation.”
Oh well. There is a magazine called Reality which offers to tell you (among other things) all about the sex-life of J. Edgar Hoover.
Talking all around it: but the one thing that has to be said, and I don’t quite know how to say it. A feeling of great violence is in the air everywhere. We are really on the verge of a blow-up. And this time it is the real blow-up. No one yet quite knows what it will be, because there is no fantasy to prepare us for it. Bolshevism, Fascism, Nuclear War, Civil War, these are all inadequate or misleading. One year, two years … Something unparalleled and unspeakable is getting ready for birth. Life is not going to be comfortable for anyone, but least of all for dissident writers, mavericks, non-conformists, people who look and act different. Different from who, from what? All depends where you happen to find yourself at the moment when people are throwing things, shooting, parading, coming down in helicopters, racing about in fast armored cars …
Everywhere you go you meet the eyes of truculent people and eyes say “You are one of the bastards we’ll be shooting tomorrow.” (Beam in his Bardstown store! Probably thought I was thinking the same of him.)
September 11, 1967
The last couple of days have been extremely painful and difficult.
But now I am on top of it and I can see the whole thing has been good – the kind of good anguish that squeezes and sweats a lot of nonsense out of you. But at one point I wondered if I were going to go crazy. Except: what would be the point of cracking up? What would it get you? There comes a time when one simply has to stand firm and face the fact of mistakes and wrongness and madness. I have felt a kind of anguished despair at the hopelessness of trying to make real sense out of anything. No matter where you turn you run into the blank, rocklike absurdity (this whole situation of T. Willett and Fr. U. and all that!) – the absurdity of social life. For instance – ever since last December T.W. has been urging us to come over there, asking why I did not come, offering to come and drive me over, etc. I have consistently been conservative and cool about it – and even then have felt it was far too much and it was. Now, I presume, Fr. U. told him what was the letter of the law here, the old business of stealthy egress and sin: and knowing Fr. U. I am sure he laid it on as thick as he could and persuaded T. I was committing a mortal sin by going over there. So then I ran into this implacable, angry man, ready to defend his whiskey with his life rather than give me a drop of it etc.
Of course, the truth is that I had no business going there: not that it is a sin but it simply is none of my business and not part of my vocation. By yesterday’s concelebration I had come to my conclusions on that: no more visiting. You can’t trust people; and in any case I don’t want it or need it, it is only a distraction. Part of the trouble comes from taking the new-think too seriously and being “open to the world” and all that: it can be pure nonsense. I see the whole pointlessness of it – and that adds to the absurdity.
More absurdity. For a couple of weeks I could hear the pounding of McGruder’s well-rig over at Fr. Flavian’s. Finally after 125 feet they gave up. No water. This morning, bright and early, he was banging away at Fr. Hilarion’s I was ready to double up with laughter – but I didn’t have that much real laughter in me, I’m afraid.
The main thing: yesterday afternoon – day of recollection – thinking very seriously about everything: one other absurdity was that Dom James proposed I take up a hermitage on the next ridge to him over at Edelin’s. I can think of nothing worse! Having him watching everything I do, or just being in the same acreage. It would drive me crazy. Possibly one reason: his intentions are secret, still, and if I were going there he would explain the activity by saying a place was being set up for me.
Yesterday afternoon I decided to submit an alternative proposal. A request to be allowed to go and be a hermit at La Dehesa in Chile. This brings up the old South American idea of 10 years ago which I had practically given up (though I asked if I could go to Chile, perfunctorily, last year, and was instantly brushed off!).
Reasons –
1. Real solitude, wild mountains, another country.
2. Desire to serve God in South America.
3. Desire to get out of the U.S., be in a country that does not have the Bomb, to renounce U.S. citizenship and stop being part of the world’s richest society.
4. Desire to get out of the essentially unhealthy and sterile situation here, and find at least a slightly better milieu – with more breadth and less obsessiveness.
I wrote this in a note – usual way to present such things – and will discuss it with him tomorrow probably.
Tonight, after some work, a walk in the sun, a supper of rice, chop suey and Chinese tea, I am feeling much better. Not that I don’t like this hermitage – but it would be a good sacrifice to leave it too. In any case I am ready to go, and feel perfectly free one way or the other. I do not intend to put pressure on him, but I do want a real answer, not just a brush off and it may take a little work.
In my opinion, Dom James will probably try to engineer things to be sure that his candidate is the next abbot – and will keep him under control from a distance. That candidate is probably Fr. Baldwin.
There is a chance that Dom J. may see some point in my going to Chile, only to get me out of here before the elections. In this I agree and I shall make a point of it – I’d like to be as far from here as possible when the voting takes place!
September 14, 1967. Exaltation of the Holy Cross
I always like this feast – beginning of the monastic “winter.”
Of course Dom James refused permission to go to Chile. Told me to stay here and convert warlike Americans from within. That so many in the community were edified by my presence. That so many people felt this was where I belonged. That it was just not God’s will etc. I could have told him that the exact same line of reasoning could have been advanced against
his becoming hermit (as it was in the past against my becoming a hermit). But why bother? I really don’t think Chile is any special kind of answer. I don’t think there are any real answers. Except to live here and meditate and take advantage of the silence of the woods, which have been very peaceful and quiet these last days.
This afternoon Joe Carroll came up and cut the grass, cleaned out behind the woodpiles and I enjoyed walking out there after supper. (He cuts with big tractor.)
Mary Ann Schmidt, who has been doing some typing for me – and I sent her my first tape for typing the other day – suddenly sent me a scarf she had knitted for me. Very sweet of her. It is rather heavily scented, however, and this is a sort of feminine invasion of the hermitage. I don’t mind. But I come around the corner and run bang into it and start laughing. Absurd. Absurd! Yet somehow a whole picture of someone’s sufferings and confusions is involved, and I think of her with fondness.
Tommie O’Callaghan had a baby boy on Wednesday – and Dan is going to baptize him.
Ed Rice sent a long obituary of Ad Reinhardt from the Times. Poor Ad. I wonder if any of our bunch will live much beyond sixty. I don’t have much confidence in Slate or Freedgood doing so after the way they looked (tired, overworked, overwrought) this year.
I expect I’ll die just tired of sheer silliness at about 56 or 57. 4 or 5 years.
Today I finished that Easter Homily for the Argus recording.18 It had been hanging over me for several weeks. Did a poor job on the first draft but may be I can improve it before sending it to be typed. Guilty about not getting my work done on Camus, but there’s time for that. Illtud Evans wrote about my contributing to the new theology supplement in the revamped Our Sunday Visitor. Yzermans taking over. I just can’t get into that. It would be stupid for me to do so. I’ll write to tell him. Refused permission for Catholic Digest to reprint “Day of a Stranger” from the Hudson Rev[iew].
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