Necessarily, there are always new questions when you have not decided all the answers in advance. This is what they want me to do, and if I won’t do it, then they are determined to do it for me. And the trouble is that my position is so ambiguous that they can still do this and I have to put up with it, hoping that God will open one after another all the doors they have closed. But He will probably not open all of them.
Night is falling on an impossibly beautiful day without you. We will probably never spend this kind of day together again. I have given up trying to understand it. When we began, we knew it could not be understood. As we went along we wanted it to be understandable, and it never was. There is nothing understandable in love: just joy and then sorrow and then if you are lucky, more joy.
(June 18, 1966)
The bitter and lucid joys of solitude. The real desert is this: to face the real limitations of one’s own existence and knowledge and not try to manipulate them or disguise them. Not to embellish them with possibilities. To simply set aside all possibilities other than those that are actually present and real, here and now. And then to choose or not, as one wishes, knowing that no choice is a solution to anything but merely a step further into a slightly changed context of other, very few, very limited, very meaningless concrete possibilities. To realize that one’s whole life, everybody’s life, is really like that. In society the possibilities seem infinitely extended. One is in contact with other people, other liberties, other choices and who knows what the others may suddenly all choose? Who knows but that someone may come up and give me a check for a million dollars? But has this ever happened? It always might.
In society, in the middle of other people, one can always imagine he will break through into other liberties and other frames of reference. Other worlds. But today everyone realizes that this is illusory to a great extent. The solitude of the other is like my own: there is no real way of deciphering it. Except to get down to the same radical desert perspective: what are our possibilities here and now, what do they mean, where do they lead? Nowhere except into another small, slight pattern of other very limited possibilities. But we have trained ourselves to think that we live at every moment amid unlimited hopes. There is nothing we cannot have if we try hard enough, or look in the right place for it.
But in solitude when accurate limitations are seen and accepted, they then vanish, and a new dimension opens up. The present is in fact, in itself, unlimited. The only way to grasp it in its unlimitedness is to remove the limitations we place on it by future expectations and hopes and plans, or surmises, or regrets about the past, or attempts to explain something we have experienced (and the revived, warmed-up experience) in order to be able to continue living with it. Live with it? To live with something past is to put a limitation on the present. And yet the past does enter into the present: as the limitation against which we must assert our liability. How?
It is all right to tell myself this. But her. Do I owe it to her to choose solitude only in terms that accord with her own loneliness? This is a false question. She thinks that when I accept being alone in the above sense, I am rejecting her, I am thrusting her out of my solitude. This implies the illusion that I can reject her. But that is impossible. I cannot put her out of my mind and see no reason for even trying to. That is another unreal possibility. The idea of a perfect, empty solitude in which there is only “mind” is preposterous. The only solitude is the solitude of the frail, mortal, limited, distressed, rebellious human person, made of his loves and fears, facing his own true present. What is my own true present? A present without her, in which she is loved as absent, as needed, as trusted, as remembered. As a value and a reality of great mystery and preciousness that can never be changed. She asks of my solitude that it have in it a place for her in which she is always known, reverenced, loved, valued, prized for herself as she is in her actuality. I will never refuse her this: it is the root of my commitment and my fidelity to give her this anchor in my own sea of loneliness. Forever.
“To take up the marvelous, heart-rending wager of the absurd” (Camus). Yet I am not sure I agree with the stoic limitations the hero of the absurd must impose upon himself. He must not “leap” (into the unknown). But Camus is perhaps deluded with his own supposed lucidity. To assume the known is only absurd seems to me not much different from leaping into the unknown, trusting it will be coherent. It generally turns out to be so. This too is a form of the absurd. Luck is absurd. We have a lot of luck.
Here is the real problem: what is the root nature of solitude? The whole predicament I am in is the result of conflicting ideas of solitude. In giving me permission to live alone, they gave me only the permission to restrict myself to their idea of what a man is when he is alone. They gave me permission to live alone in such a way that it would justify them, not save my own soul.
M. is caught in the middle, desperately rebelling against their idea, not sure that she accepts and understands mine, and in the end saying that I should leave it all behind and settle for love. But at this stage of the game, to face the absurdity of life in this other form is much too complicated for me. I have lost any ability to hope in that kind of happiness, because as soon as love gets fixed, stabilized (as society wants it to be), then it commands its own battery of fictions and illusions. One would have to pretend something else, something more complicated even than what I try to avoid pretending now.
Their idea of solitude is fundamentally this: the hermit is a man who out of spite has made himself completely unavailable. He can do this with complete assurance and deadly complacency because he has on his side an unavailable God who is in fact secretly and magically available only to him. The solitary is then in a position of unassailable spiritual comfort. He lives for and with God alone. He is the totally consoled, by a consolation that he wills to accept by a blind leap into the decision to be consoled. To be able to achieve this autistic feat is the sign of a hermit vocation. Or, I might add, of paranoia.
What I am fighting for is the idea that the solitary is also available to everyone in a certain kind of way. Paradox, because one must preserve the authentic reality of aloneness, that is the true sense of the absurd in Camus’ terms (and more than in his terms, which exclude any faith). To drink every day the bitter wine of the absurd, and to revolt (solitude is a revolt and an acceptance of the absurd: acceptance of the necessity to revolt, to protest). To abandon solitude and then to sink into what is imagined to be the warm comfort and forgetfulness of social occupation would be, for me, the denial of my own life, my own need for lucidity which resembles that of Camus – and is totally different because of faith. Availability in love, in compassion, in understanding. The solitary must be open to the hearts of those he loves.
The great question, the baffling one now, is in what way my solitude is still “open” and “available” to M. When of course the whole idea is to close it off, make me totally unavailable, make love impossible. They are insisting on their own definition of solitude. I am not allowed to quarrel with it, for if I do so openly I shall have no solitude at all. The answer is in Camus’ principle: that the absurd man is without (human at least) hope. His hopelessness isolates him in the pure present. And makes him “available” in the present. They have done me the favor of blocking off all avenues to a certain kind of hope, which in fact would have implied restriction. The unfulfillment of the solitary life is necessary if the solitary is to be available. But how? I don’t know, I am not supposed to know everything. I accept what I don’t know as unknown (like Camus) and I do not contaminate the acceptance by inserting into it imaginary hopes. I differ from Camus in the immense, unknown hope that is my own aspect of the “absurd” – and comes not under knowledge and stoicism but under faith. Faith and revolt are inseparable. Faith is the fundamental revolt. But of course to many Christians this is the most unbearable of the Gospel truths and it has had to be swept under the rug a long time ago.
If God has brought her into my life and if God has willed our love
, then it is more His affair than ours. My task consists in not forcing my love into a mold that pleases and reassures me (or both of us), but in leaving everything “open” – and not trying to predetermine the future.
Today Victor Hammer and Carolyn came over from Lexington. They are two of my oldest and best friends in this area: he is one of the finest craftsmen living. A hand printer, type designer and painter, an old Austrian. We had a picnic and I took them out to the place where we were Derby Day: on the flat ground, among the dry leaves, under all the tall straight trees. It was cool and nice – and I could think of M. better. In fact I told them about the situation, and they understood perhaps better than anyone except J. and Nicanor [Parra]. But like everyone else, in the end, they said it could not get anywhere. That we had reached a dead end, and the only thing to do was to accept the fact. Even Carolyn, who is not Catholic and is normally in favor of the runaway monk in novels, was saying: “but you have given up everything on entering here.” Everybody knows this, and it is a most inexorable fact. There is no getting around it even though, as she suggested, there would be a lot of (non-Catholic) people who would be very sympathetic.
They brought a few copies of the New Yorker. I flipped over the pages to read the cartoons (before settling down to a long report on China) and the sight of the ads just turned me inside out. I was in complete revolt against them and all that they imply, the attitude, the values, the suppositions, the axioms so to speak behind them. This is a realm that I cannot take, I cannot be part of. I am ashamed of feeling that way, I hate myself in a way for feeling it, but my entire being says no. I am not as open as I thought. Whatever it may mean, I simply cannot go back to the kind of society where that is accepted as normal – and that is after all not bad. There is a certain taste, a sophistication, a refinement even, which I am attracted to (the ads in some other magazines would just revolt me period, without any attraction at all). I am ashamed of myself, but I am set in this. I belong in the woods. There is no other way left for me. Except perhaps that impossible island.
Then suddenly today I realized that there is no longer any problem about our love. It is no longer a problem, just an impossibility, on one level: and a pure fact on another. On the level of impossibility: we cannot see each other, we cannot meet, we cannot hold each other, we cannot bring our lips together and cling to each other warmly, helplessly, in a long embrace. That is all over. On the level of pure fact: we love each other as we have never loved anyone else, and the love remains. Neither of us will do anything to destroy or falsify it. It will live as long as we live, and we will live forever. Your presence in me is pure and quiet and secure, the more so as I myself am free, attuned to the reality and absurdity of my own life, and obedient to God. Now that it is practically impossible for us to be together physically, we remain together spiritually without difficulty: or at least so it seems to me. It is true that all this will one day be less intense, less a matter of obsessed consciousness (it is no longer an obsession anyway, just a pure fact, a presence, like one’s own being). And it will be just love without need and without name. We will no longer need to identify it and to name it. We will be part of each other always.
When I told Victor and Carolyn of the poems I had written about our love, immediately they wanted to print them. We discussed the various problems. Of course there would have to be an assumed name. The identity of the poet would have to be carefully concealed, unsuspected by anyone. Can this be done? Nobody knows. But we discussed the thing as a possibility. It would certainly be a very elegantly printed, strictly limited edition: a real work of art. Not more than fifty or sixty copies in all. They are very eager to do it, and I am very eager to have it done: but can it be done? Let’s hope so. Few people will have had such a memorial to their living love. They will write to J. for copies of the poems. Then we will see. J. may have ideas about it.
A touching letter came today from Nora Chadwick – this is one I really love, though I never actually met her. She is an old retired Cambridge professor in her eighties and an authority on Celtic monasticism. She is busy writing still, and another old friend, Eleanor Duckett, a prof from Smith, is there with her writing too. All about the old monks. She writes that she is delighted that I am living the same kind of life as the old guys she writes about: that there actually should be something of the sort in the world of today. This is important to me. For she knows what monasticism is, and she respects the reality of monastic solitude (not just the ersatz and the institutionalized forms that have survived today). That there should be men willing to live in real solitude … Seeing it through her eyes, I am deeply moved by the meaning of this strange life. Here I am in the middle of it. I know I have not been truly faithful to it in many ways. I have evaded it. Yet who can say what its real demands are other than the one who must meet them? And who knows what were the failures and problems of those forgotten people who actually lived as solitaries in the past? How many of them were lonely, and in love? The stories of the Desert Fathers are full of material about all that!
All I know is that here I am, and the valley is very quiet, the sun is going down, there is no human being around, and as darkness falls I could easily be a completely forgotten person, as if I did not exist for the world at all. (Though there is one who remembers and whom I remember.) The day could easily come when I would be just as invisible as if I never existed, and still be living here on this hill … And I know I would be perfectly content to be so.
Who knows anything at all about solitude if he has not been in love, and in love in his solitude? Love and solitude must test each other in the man who means to live alone: they must become one and the same thing in him, or he will only be half a person. Unless I have you with me always, in some very quiet and perfect way, I will never be able to live fruitfully alone. See how necessary you have become to me! I cannot even be a hermit without you!
Another letter, and an important one, came: a message from a Moslem Shaikh (Spiritual Master) – actually a European, but formed by one of the great Moslem saints and mystics of the age (Ahmad al’Alawi). That I can be accepted in a personal and confidential relationship, not exactly as a disciple but at any rate as one of those who are entitled to consult him directly and personally. This is a matter of great importance to me, because in the light of their traditional ideas it puts me in contact with the spirit and teaching of Ahmad al’Alawi in a way that is inaccessible just to the scholar or the student. It means I have a living place in a living and secret tradition. It can have tremendous effects. I see that already. Here again, the Shaikh attaches considerable importance to my life in solitude.
So for you too: I am of no value to you except in so far as I am this absurd man all alone on a wooded hill, with the darkness falling all around him, the stars coming out over his head, a man difficult for anyone to really approve of, a friend of Zen monks and mixed up with a secret Moslem sect, a man in trouble with his Abbot and somehow inexplicable to his community, a man who has no clear ideas about God but just hangs around waiting to be struck by God as if by lightning … That is what you have chosen to love, my darling, and that is the strange being who will love you forever, even when the lightning strikes: and there is something fierce about the One with whom no other is to be compared, the Moslem vision of Allah the One God. Don’t worry, I am not practicing a lot of Moslem disciplines on top of everything else: but there is this spirit of stark adoration and blinding desert fury which is another aspect of the absurd and the absolute … Who is like unto Him? Who knows anything remotely like unto Him? Who can dare to be the kind of fool that gets up and talks about Him?
Saturday – Late (June 18, 1966)
I went to bed like a good little monk at eight o’clock. But could not sleep. Arm hurting, back hurting, heart empty and desolate. Lay there thinking. And thinking some more. Obsessed with the idea that M. might conceivably find her way out here though she has never seen the place and could not possibly find it in the dark etc. If only there were a soft k
nock on the door, and I opened it, and it was she standing on the porch. Finally I couldn’t stand it any more and got up, put my clothes on and started wandering around. For a moment I had a strong desire to start down to the monastery and sneak into the office again and make another phone call. But I don’t even know where she is. In Louisville, or where. Perhaps she has gone home for the weekend. I no longer have any idea what she is doing and no way of finding out.
So I went out on the porch. Nothing. Silence. Vast silence of the woods full of fireflies. The stars. Down in the south, the huge sign of the Scorpion. The red eye of Regulus. Just stars. Not a light from any house or farm. Only fireflies and stars and silence. A car racing by on the road, then more silence. Nothing. Nothing.
When a car goes by you can feel the alien frenzy of it. Someone madly going somewhere for no reason. I am a complete prisoner under these stars. With nothing. Or perhaps everything.
I sit on the porch and deliberately refuse to rationalize anything, to explain anything or to comment on anything. Only what is there. I am there. Fireflies, stars, darkness, the massive shadows of the woods, the vague dark valley. And nothing, nothing, nothing.
Is she thinking of me? Loving me? Is her heart calling to mine in the dark? I don’t know. I can’t honestly say that I know. I can’t honestly say I know anything except that it is late, I can’t sleep, there are fireflies all over the place, and there is not the remotest possibility of making any poetic statement of this. You don’t write poems about nothing.
And yet.
Somehow this nothing seems to be everything. I look at the south sky and for some ungodly reason for which there is no reason, everything is complete. I think of going back to bed in peace without knowing why, a peace that cannot be justified by anything, any reason, any proof, any argument. Any supposition. There are no suppositions left. Only fireflies.
I kneel down by the bed and look up at the icon of the nativity. The soft shaded light plays over the shelves of Buddhist books in the silent bedroom. I want to tell you something, and I don’t know how to begin to say it. I am afraid that if I start talking and writing I will confuse everything. Nothing needs to be said. If I try to say what I want to say, not knowing what you yourself are going through (God knows you may be in a completely different situation – you may be in anguish, or you may have forgotten me, who knows?), it may only upset you or confuse you. Or irritate you. Like the letter I tried to write (and yet you got it after all – the one about everything being right there).
Learning To Love Page 40
