But see the magnificent concrete poem – mobile, visual and conceptual of Lévi-S. on p. 201 of La Pensée sauvage. And this as a mere model of a great cosmic poem based simply on the duality species-individual. (Imagine it with 2 million species working and an almost infinite number of possible individuals: primitive thought really grappled with the world!)
APPENDIX A
A Midsummer Diary for M.
June 1966
I will never really understand on earth what relation this love has to my solitude. I cannot help placing it at the very heart of my aloneness, and not just on the periphery somewhere.
June 21, 1966
jhs
Or the account of how I once again became untouchable. Yet it is impossible for me to be what I was before I met M. The old life is a habit which no longer exists. Habit of isolation, of worry, of intent preoccupation with I no longer remember precisely what. A kind of poetic religiosity and an intention to be interiorly honest. And above all the insistence on being different from other people.
I no longer know what these things mean, or what their opposites might mean. I am not passing from this to something that stands against it. I am not going anywhere. I exist because I have the habit of existing. Perhaps I will in due time put other habits on top of this one, but they had better be more fruitful than, for instance, sitting around drinking Christian Brothers’ brandy out of an old marmalade jar big enough to get ice cubes in and not as big as a whole glass.
The abjection of the hermit life. The what of what?
Yet that is their trouble: acute anxiety about meeting up to prearranged definitions. So they have defined a lot of new ones for me to meet now. “You will not try to contact her in any way whatever, anywhere, either by phone, by letter, etc. etc. You will never go to that hospital again.”
Concelebrated Mass for the Feast of the Sacred Heart. They are ending Lauds in the temporary third-floor chapel and I stand at the sacristy window looking at the beautiful wide valley and the fields in the early morning sun. So peaceful, so convincing: they seem to say I have a place in the world, my place. That everything is OK. The comforting, sad, pure melody of the Benedictus antiphon. The words say that Christ is not consoled. Probably no one is thinking much about the words or about who is consoled and who is not. (Except each one of us individually realizes he is not consoled. Maybe that is why Christ is not consoled.)
At Communion, as I approached the altar to take the chalice, they sang the antiphon: “There was no one to comfort me.” The absolute aloneness of Christ. I happened to look up and there in front of me the Brother who reported my phone calls was receiving the host. A plain, simple, honest guy, obviously the best intentions in the world. Am I supposed to say “I forgive him”? But am I even mad at him in the first place? It would be like getting mad at a tree. It would be absurd to even think of forgiving him. I forgive the main road because it does not take me to Louisville today to see M. Right thing? Wrong thing? He did what he thought he had to do. The Abbot did (joyfully) all the negating he thought he had to do. All the joyful depriving, all the assurances that he knows what I suffer. What I suffer? They all tell me that I suffer, that I am half dead, that I am all covered with blood, that I have been nearly ruined, that I am in terrible shape etc. etc. What do they think about her suffering? It does not enter their heads. Hence I cannot take seriously what they pretend to say about my suffering. It is just they themselves are anxious.
The total loneliness of Christ. I don’t claim that my loneliness is His. Still less that I understand anything about His. Only it is TOTAL.
Furthermore they all tell me what I suffer and they don’t know half the story. They can’t even imagine all the joy that was in it. They know nothing, really, only enough to quiet a few credible scandals for themselves in their own heads.
After Mass I got out of there and went over to the other chapel where I usually say my own Mass. On the way I meet the Abbot’s secretary who gives me the guilty embarrassed smile of one who knows too much for his own little good. And of course wants to be brotherly about it all, and yet at the same time make like he knows nothing. He probably helped the Abbot to decide where your letter came from – the one the Abbot destroyed.
Up in the quiet chapel, dear, you came to me insisting on being present and most real. It was as if your voice itself was speaking with the urgency of a love that cannot be defeated or frustrated, that demands absolutely to be attended to, no matter what. They insist that loving you and loving Christ are different as day and night. To me they are the same, on this level at least, because it is in Him that I truly find you. It is at Communion that we are most one in our love. It is true that all our love has not been completely unequivocal, but I no longer know where one draws lines. Except I do know where lines have been firmly drawn, [ … ]
I am reading Camus on absurdity and suicide: The Myth of Sisyphus. I had tried it before and was not ready for it because I was too afraid of the destructive forces in myself. Now I can read it, because I no longer fear them, as I no longer fear the ardent and loving forces in myself. If they all turn against me I don’t care, but I think for some strange reason they are all for me. As to suicide: I would be delighted to drop dead, but killing myself would be just too much trouble.
All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s song “Silver Dagger.” I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself – and yourself for me, in a way. Dear, I have a terrible desire for fidelity to what has been far greater than either of us. And not a choice of fidelities to this or that, love or vows. But a fidelity beyond and above that to both of them in one, to God. To the Christ who is absolutely alone and not apart from us but is the dreadful deep hole in the midst of us, waiting for no explanation. Sacred Heart? Well, they made that one out of plaster so as to really exorcise and forgo the loneliness: so as to console themselves. But when the consolation is taken away there is this hole that goes deeper than hell and you have to go all the way down into it before you find heaven.
Fr. L., the young cantor who just left for Rome, talked to me before he left. He said he thought the songs of Joan Baez had “sensuality in them.” My eye. I told him that he was hearing the deep archetypal symbols and resonances that come from the love and death planted deep in our hearts: things the monks would rather not hear. Better to calm it all, exorcise the potential worry of it. Just say that Christ is not consoled and then be consoled yourself. It is always safer. It is neutral. To be a monk is to be forever neutral. At least with respect to certain incidentals like life, love, despair, anguish. (But of course we have our home-made anguish too. It keeps us out of mischief. That is the plan for me: return to the habit of a neutral anguish, a life lived by quiet custom, according to precise specifications.)
The specifications are all very precise. There is no sensuality in them. There are no archetypes in them either. Maybe there is a kind of death in them, and maybe even a life comes out of them. I don’t question that there is probably something behind it all. I am still the guy who obeyed in The Sign of Jonas, and still riding in the whale’s belly.
No one can ever prevent us from thinking of each other and from loving each other. No one can change the fact that we belong to each other. That we have been through experiences of an incomparable love upon which no human being is entitled to pass the slightest judgment. No one can prevent me from remembering all these things[ … ]
But they can and do prevent us from knowing what our thoughts are now (though from our deep experience of each other we can still truly know). They prevent us from following, from day to day, our feelings, our hopes, our acts, our conflicts, our encounters with life. We cannot encounter each other directly and thus we are prevented from that which lovers ordinarily can do: orienting our lives by each other’s thoughts and feelings. They have taken away love’s compass and instruments, except the rare and secret ones in our hearts, o
f which we can never be deprived.
Do you wonder what I am thinking at a given moment? Think of the deep and lasting essence of our love: it is the root of all my thoughts. What is passing on the surface I could write in a letter but by the time the letter reached you it would all be changed. The essence remains the same.
What is my life? My solitude? The determination to be lucid and quiet and to wait, and to nourish the unspeakable hope of deep love which is beyond analysis and is so far down it has no voice left. Down there we are one voice: the voice of your womanness blends with the man I am, and we are one being, completing each other, though we no longer can express it by taking each other in our arms. How deeply can we believe this? I think our capacity to believe it is inexhaustible and if it is, we win.
Last night when I was more restless and desperate, for something to do I picked up an article on Russian women by Olga Carlisle, who is a friend of J.’s [James Laughlin]. Someone sent it [to] me on that account. What do I want with Russian women? What I was looking for desperately was you. Any womanness ends up by being for me some indication, some pointer, to the womanness of you. I skipped through the article and the pictures, avoiding the gross and massive women with faces like trains and medals on their stone breasts, looking for something of you in the pretty ones, but there was nothing really, only in one picture one girl was looking with love at her lover, seriously, sincerely. I caught a faint glimmer of your love, our love. But we can no longer look for it outside ourselves.
“The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to” (Camus). That is the real point and irony of my life. They think that I have agreed with them, when I have only obeyed them. To obey with perfect honesty is to express the absurd and at the same time to reject it, to be free from it. Only by this obedience can I attain to complete freedom from the absurdity that is imposed by every form of institutional life. To escape the absurdity here with some implication that life outside would make sense, would be to succumb to the greater absurdity. This is central in my vision of things. Faith begins here. I have nothing to do with a faith which claims to show the absurd really makes sense. My faith is that the absurd is ridiculous and to keep faith with God is to refuse to believe that He is the kind of Joker that would want you to believe that the senseless makes sense. When you are thereby made free by truth, you can begin with God’s grace to make your own sense out of it all. This is a difficult business and it is the life of the desert, which is what I am involved in. Because I am you are too. Don’t ask me to explain. I don’t have any idea whether you will experience it with me. It does not matter that much, as long as you live in me by love. No further explanations are needed.
One thing I must admit: a failure of lucidity in regard to love. It is so easy to assume that love is somehow a solution to a problem. Like: life is a problem which is impossible until someone comes along that you can love. Or man is himself a problem, solved by love. Love is a key to a hidden answer in us. And so on. But is this true? Or is it only what everybody wants to be true? Supposing it is not true, does it make any difference? Maybe love, like everything else, is in large measure absurd. I don’t declare this, but just admit it is a distinct possibility. Does love too have to make perfect sense? In what way does it have to?
The sense that love makes, and I think the only sense it makes, is the beloved. The discovery, the revelation of the absolute value of the one loved. This is not so much a discovery of meaning as a discovery of goodness. To think of love as an answer or a “solution” is to evade the stark directness of this discovery. The fact that you are you is something of absolute value to me. But if I love in a certain way this becomes covered over and hidden with all the operations of love and what happens then is that love takes the place of the beloved. Then love instead of being a solution (which it is not supposed to be) becomes a problem for which there is no solution. For then love stands in the way between the lovers. It veils the goodness of the beloved. It dresses (or undresses) the beloved as desirable object. Which is all right too, except that one loves desire instead of the beloved.
The fact that you are: that you are you. This is all I have left. But it is the whole of love. And nothing can change it.
And you have me your absurd man (in the sense of Camus), your poet, your patient, who has been completely taken out of your hands and whom you can still secretly heal with the power of your love. I am. By that fact I need your love and by that fact I have it.
This afternoon was brilliant, cool, beautiful. I went out to the place where we had the picnic on Derby day. Everything was totally empty. The woods empty of everything except air, light and flies. Not a sound, until some character started with a chain saw on the knob behind the lake. What for? Anyway, I began carefully reading the wonderful poems of Eugenio Montale: dry wine, arid landscape, splendor of Dantesque and austere sincerity. The modern Italian poets: I have a special liking for them, Ungaretti, Quasimodo, and now Montale, the best. Perfection. Yet I still think there is more sap in Quasimodo, I won’t say more fire because there is controlled fire in Montale too. More. I have just read “Mount Amiata.” An inexhaustible poem, that justifies [Robert] Lowell’s rendering. Better than anything by Quasimodo. Maybe better than anything by anybody.
If Zen is absolute affirmation, how can I hope to think in Zen terms? One does not think in Zen terms, one is. It is the thinking that blocks the absolute affirmation. But I think too much, and try to decide too much, because I think there are so many things I have to decide. And in a way there are. I am bound to decisions, and that is the trouble. But the whole life I am living is a life filled with total uncertainty and I have to be constantly re-deciding, because I refuse the fake certainty of conforming and allowing everything to be decided beforehand by others.
What is she thinking? How is she bearing this awful business? I think of the fatal brutality of it. Worse for her than for me. I had surrendered long ago because I surrender easy. She had had a struggle about revealing her whole self, and then did so completely: then what? The building fell in. We are separated. We cannot talk, we cannot help each other, we can do nothing. Desire. Baffling, inarticulate desire. Hopeless. This is something we cope with in entirely different ways, because I automatically say “no” to it, and she is built for “yes.” But it gets into me with a force that can destroy me utterly. Her too. The sense of disaster and helplessness. And one must say it is all right? It is absurd. There is no clear answer to it. The point is not to decide between this and that crazy answer when all the answers are crazy. There is no clear answer. Her fatal propensity is to need an answer. I can do without. Poor sweet kid, if only it were given me just to be the answer. But there is no clear answer, least of all me. I am nobody’s answer, not even my own.
Several times today your presence has come to me suddenly like the cry of someone badly hurt. And I read an Italian poet. But what else can I do?
She has no one to talk to. Neither have I, although everybody here who knows about it, confessors and all the other boyscouts available on the premises, think they are there for me to talk to. I remember my black silence with the Abbot the first time we talked. I refused to say anything except what had to be said. The second time I was more buoyant to show there was “hope” (of what?). But still said nothing, except to take the conditions that were imposed, but taking them if possible in a less absolute sense and then getting out before things got any worse. She has no one to talk to. Or perhaps she has at least some friend, and is better off than I. All I talk to about anything tell me I am ruined.
Nobody seems to think that this involves two people. And that these two people have a right to decide a few things for themselves. No. That is impossible. This is what comes of signing away all your rights in advance by a vow of chastity. The only answer of course is that I should never have written that first (love) letter, but what else could I do? It was only the truth, and I thought we could handle it with ease.
All this torment comes from the contradictions
I have allowed in myself by being open. By not closing all the gates and doors and carefully locking them and then winding myself up in a blanket and going to sleep. All the things a hermit should not do I have done. Should a hermit like Bob Dylan? He means at least as much to me as some of the new liturgy, perhaps in some ways more. I want to know the guy. I want him to come here, and I want him to see one of my poems, he might even use it. I have not closed the right doors. I should be writing the new English version of some hymn nobody is ever going to sing.
Learning To Love Page 39
