The Other Side of the Mountain, Page 2

  There was a great deal of rain yesterday, and I talked with J[ohn] Ford, a Louisville attorney, about the estate, the Trust, etc. I hope finally something will get done. We have been at it for three years and nothing has happened. This is a new one—I hope he will act. I should have got a Kentucky lawyer long ago, I guess.

  Last evening at supper (wild rice, barbecued beans, knocked out my stomach) I read some of Leonard Woolf’s Autobiography-the 4th volume (Downhill All the Way). What a job they did with that Hogarth Press! And what their list brings back to me—the days when I bought second-hand novels and poetry in London Bookshops-Eliot, Graves, Lawrence-and Roger Fry whom they published also. Bloomsbury and their friends-and the Royal Hotel which L.W. sued. All this was a world where I was once a citizen.

  Curious contest with the record of Janis Ian sent by a nun at Regina Laudis [monastery, Bethlehem, Connecticut]. Articulate, sensitive, vulnerable, disconcerting: a 15-year-old girl.

  October 23, 1967

  Blazing bright days, cool nights, my face still hot from burn as we sat yesterday at top of the long new farm cornfield-Gene Meatyard, Jonathan Williams, Guy Davenport, Bonnie and I—in noon sun and drank some beer. Hills glimmering with heat and color. Sky deep blue. All distances sharp. White dead corn leaves blowing about in the hot dust of the field, fully ravaged, fully harvested.

  Gene brought some of his photos—including ones taken around the beatup house down the road in June (the house now repaired and occupied, with a pickup standing outside under the locust tree).

  Jonathan had an exciting and beautiful new book of concrete poetry.

  Guy picked up the avocado seed Bob Shepherd [from Lexington] threw away there the other day when it was much colder.

  Telegram from Doris Dana1 sent October 20, reached me (the note of the phone message) yesterday, 22nd. Not bad for here! The other day Rosemary Haughton came out (between lectures in Minneapolis and Chicago). It was curious to meet a theologian who is six months pregnant. In a long black cloak with hair blowing in the wind she sat on the concrete dam of Dom Frederic’s Lake. I hope my picture of that is good.2 She is quiet, intelligent, not the obstreperous kind of activist progressive, concerned about a real contemplative life continuing, etc.

  Saturday, with some satisfaction, finished “The Sacred City” essay (or rather Sunday morning when I added a final half page) on Monte Alban. I enjoyed writing this and it came easy.3

  J.W. Hackett has sent a volume of his English Haiku. I am not convinced Haiku can or should be written in English. His are, it seems to me, somewhat weakened by too many present participles and adverbs. I don’t see how you can make a Haiku out of “-ing” and “-ly.” Dismantle and rewrite as concrete poetry! Then he might have something!

  Last evening after supper—an intruder barged in here, frankly boasting that he had easily figured out the combination of the padlock on the highway gate. Car full of suits on hangers strung across the back seat left halfway up the hill. Had no real reason tor being here except curiosity, wanted to get his nose into everything. Why this? Why that? Why do you live in such a place? Young, boasted about his exploits as a “private investigator”—trailing women to Holiday Inns. Maybe he was investigating me. I thought about it, pacing up and down in the dark, after I had got rid of him. Certainly he has now cased the place, knows how to get in and steal things if he wants to. I don’t think he was malicious or systematic, just nosey and disorganized—a budding operator. He gave his name as Ken Hill and said he came from Chicago. Maybe! I asked where he was going. Vague. Could be Memphis, perhaps. A red car: I’m too dumb to know what kind and I forgot to take a look at the plates.

  October 25, 1967

  I do not have much news of what happened in Washington Saturday-an enormous peace mobilization at which there was evidently some violence. An ex-novice whom I happened to meet outside the gate Saturday said that troops had been called to “protect the Pentagon” and in his opinion this made sense “because of all those juvenile delinquents”! Roger Barnard—who has good judgment—surmises in Peace News that Johnson will sooner or later stop bombing Vietnam and call a Peace Conference knowing that North Vietnam wants something more than that. Then, having “failed” in his “honest” efforts for peace he will flatten North Vietnam. Or try to. An invasion, etc. The stupidity and blindness of American power, which, in its own terms is perfectly “logical”—and yet its terms are fantastically arbitrary and respond only to the “reality” of a thinking that goes on within an artificial and closed system. To defend your own reality and then impose it forcefully on the outside world is paranoia.

  October 27, 1967

  Troops of small lavender clouds in an obedient procession, go off east before a warm wind. The night has been rainy but the morning star shines clear in the gaps of cloud and the troops are ending raggedly. Maybe it will be a nice day to talk to Doris Dana who arrived (or was supposed to) last evening.

  Ted Colteran was in the Washington Peace Mobilization—said it was much less violent and turbulent than the news made it to be, but people were beaten and the troops were scared, edgy, mean. A former monk from here (a name I can’t place) was with him. Mailer was arrested.

  Was in town again Wednesday—lunch with [Dr. James] Wygal and saw Tommie O’Callaghan to talk about the Trust. I want to get this finally set up but maybe I am getting too involved in it. Anyway John Ford seems willing to work on it fast. And since I have started on it I’m going on with it. Useless to leave this hanging in the air. Jim persuaded me to stay in late, and said he would drive me out. I foolishly did. Wish I had come back in the afternoon with George in the truck. Got home tired at 10 after sitting around drinking bourbon I didn’t want in dull place—and finally on the way out in the car spent most of the time arguing with him and the priest whose name I didn’t get about whether I should accept an abbatial election. I am determined not to take it if I am voted for and they had all the obvious reasons why “I ought” to, but they seemed to me foolish. “With your reputation you can do so much good!” Bull shit. It is all part of the same stupid line Jim takes when he says I ought to write a movie or something that would make a big splash and get back in the center of attention. It is childish. And it is against everything I have ever lived for. To become a personage!!

  I keep repeating that there is nothing I can do here to make things any better or to prevent this place from going to seed, and I have no real reason for doing it if I could. Is this institution worth preserving? Maybe-but let someone do it who knows how and is interested. Not me!

  The small clouds have not cleared. They have given place to big ones, and there will be rain.

  October 28, 1967

  It did not rain yesterday. Coldish, windy. Walking in empty cornfield with Doris Dana talking about Jacques Maritain, Kolbsheim, John [Howard] Griffin, Spain, Gabriela Mistral, Pomaire (my Spanish publisher who also does the Gabriela paperbacks), my problem with Tadie,4 etc. Had some fun with a Japanese movie camera she had borrowed and brought down—a beautiful thing!

  Am absorbed and excited by Nelson Reed’s book on The Caste War in Yucatan. It clicks perfectly with what I have been reading of Cargo Cults and with the Black Power movement in U.S. I want to write about this!

  October 29, 1967

  Yesterday, drove with Doris to Lexington and we went out with Carolyn Hammer past Athens (Aythens) to John Jacob Niles’ farm for lunch—and to hear his setting of three of my poems. It was really a moving experience for me.

  First of all the house was a complete—and delightful—surprise. I don’t know what I expected, but this was an entrancing place. We dipped down into a wooded hollow, and suddenly, after a church, and turning a corner, trees and stone walls, I saw this interesting house and realized that we were going to turn in. It is fascinating. Doors carved with statements. Stone walls and steps up and down, brick fireplaces, rambling halls, and the dining room with a big picture window looking into the close hollow, over a lower roof, at a wall of wooded hill,
and in front of the window a bare sycamore and a tulip poplar with a few golden leaves left. A fascinating place.

  Before dinner we drank some of their own cider, which was good, and John played some ballads on a lute.

  As we were finishing dinner the singer and pianist arrived and had coffee. Then the songs. John has set Messenger, Carol, Responsory (1948) and is working on Evening. I thought the settings very effective and satisfactory. In fact was very moved by them. But above all by this lovely girl, Jackie Roberts, who put her whole heart into singing them. What was most beautiful was that! I do think John Niles has brought out a lot of what I wanted to say and made me value my own poems more. It was to me a very intense experience, and to Doris also I think. Carolyn apparently does not like the settings, but she has her blind spots.

  Jackie Roberts in her green dress was unforgettable, and the pianist was a sweet dark girl too. I was so grateful to them for their own response to the music and the poems.

  John Niles is a character and I like him. Carolyn commented on his cockiness, but who cares? He has a good weather-beaten, self-willed face, is a bit of a madman and writes good songs. He said Joan Baez was a whore (about which I put up an argument), and some nut stole his manuscripts. And he can carve messages on doors, besides play the lute and sing a toothy song in a metallic voice.

  It was an afternoon I enjoyed, and I burst into tears at Jackie’s singing. And John said he didn’t like Robert Frost, but that my poetry moved him to tears. So we were all ready to weep and in fact weeping.

  The thing that struck me most—the wonderful pale fall light of Kentucky on the stones and the quiet of the Kentucky hollow.

  November 1, 1967

  Rainy night. Quiet.

  Fr. Chrysogonus [Waddell, of Gethsemani], yesterday, spoke of the Abbots’ meeting, where he had been. Said it was “charismatic.” I hope so. Nothing definite yet about Dom James [Foxl’s resignation. C. said he thought that was discussed in a “session de vie” session at the end. Meanwhile Dan Walsh5 says that Brother Kevin [Shine, of Gethsemani] picked up some news on a phone call from the Abbot, who said the meeting had resolved to ask that the abbatial term of office be limited to three or six years. (Dan said three, but admitted six as possible. I hardly think they would say three. Not practical!) Certainly not for life anyway. I am not sure whether this makes perfect sense in every way, but considering the situation it is probably the best thing.

  Dan is evidently very much taken up with those who say Pope Paul is hopeless, etc. as if this meant anything particular! The whole institutional structure is questionable: why blame everything on the poor man who can’t help being what he is—a curial official trained under Pius XII, with a few lively ideas on Catholic Action acquired in the ’20’s and ’30’s. One almost feels that now the test of true Christian spirit is the willingness to say anathema to Paul! One ought rather to be sorry for him—and for those who think it is relevant to curse him.

  This is not for me. I can’t be part of any of it, for or against. It all strikes me as a bit childish. Meanwhile, the Message of Contemplatives-dutifully printed in the Osservatore, with the usual picture of a monk with his hood up and his back to the camera—has been totally and utterly forgotten—dropped into a well of silence as if it had never been which is proper and right. The whole idea was silly.

  Of course it will be once again dutifully reprinted in the Collectanea [Cisterciensia), etc.

  This morning I read an article of [Gregorio] Peneo on the “Return to Paradise” in the Camaldolese magazine Vita Monastica. The usual, neat, competent rehash of a few texts—from Mabillon’s Benedictine Saints, from Eucherius, Jerome, Peter of Celles, Aelred, etc.—and the usual anonymous sermons dug up from somewhere by Dom [Jean] Leclercq. Practically everything was familiar. The texts are beautiful in the same way that romanesque architecture is—filled with sap and life and sense of symbol and order. They have a rich unexpressed content that one gets from between the lines if one is a “knower” and it is all very satisfying. And yet…

  It has occurred to me to question the value of such an exercise. Certainly it is valuable. But only within a very limited sphere of its own. It has become entirely esoteric, or almost. It belongs entirely to that Latin-Medieval-Christendom which was the basis of European civilization and all that: and no doubt it may be closer to the new African monasticism than, say, the latest in secular Christianity. Certainly it is good to be able to understand and enjoy it. But just as certainly it has to be seen in a much wider context—if at all.

  Certainly, too, I don’t feel impelled to “do anything about it.” I’ll read it from time to time—and appreciate my hermitage in the light of topic sentences from the 9th–12th centuries. Perhaps even regret that my own vocation is not all that simple. But surely I can’t live as if that were all! Or as if the Bible were all, either. (Same applies of course to Eckhart and the Rhinish mystics and John of the Cross—though they can be a bridge to other religious traditions.)

  It rained steadily all day and slowed down in the evening with a fine, full rainbow in the east. I did some work on the Caste War article. Seem to have some arthritis in my right hand. Makes writing painful. J[ames] Laughlin sent a clipping—a letter of Brother Antoninus [William Everson] and the [New York] Times Book Review about “Women” and “Woman” and about how his love poems were after all the sign he had been a “bad monk” etc. Extremely silly. It seemed to me to be unreal and sentimental. Fuss about “Woman” with a capital “W.” But obviously when one is in love there is no telling what will come out of it. Though I certainly disagree with his thesis that what matters is “Woman” and not “Women.” He seems to be rather hung up in the “Woman” business. I certainly hope I have had all my share of it and won’t get involved in any more. I look back in the pages of this journal and read the inanities of last year!! Grief!

  November 2, 1967

  I think I have a good title for these Journals—i.e. for what is to be published (what I hope to put on tape and have typed): The Vow of Conversation.

  Material for anti-haikus on day of the dead

  …Food thunders dimly in the angered gut

  …Back and forth to outhouse in dark rain-mist,

  Splash of blanc gelusil from overflowing spoon.

  November 7, 1967

  Steel grey morning, but not quite freezing. The other day it was very cold—down in the twenties (cold for November). Yesterday there were a few large flakes of snow but nothing like last year: the big fall that broke the trees!

  I have been working on the Ghost Dance canto of Logaire. Goes like a charm! Everything there in Cora DuBois, a mimeograph report from Berkeley. Beautiful, haunting, sad stuff. All you have to do is quote the Indians’ own words!

  Joost Meerloo here this weekend. I was happy to finally meet him, a really alert and creative mind—full of ideas, not bogged down in his profession (psychoanalysis). Tells of the sterility of conferences—academic rituals where no one listens. I am less and less inclined about all that myself. If the rules relax and it comes to me to decide whether or not to accept invitations, I think I shall refuse them. It would be stupid to accept. Nothing to gain, much to lose. The people I need to meet I can meet here (or I can go out to meet them somewhere privately).

  Still, two things—I regret I can’t go to this thing organized by the Blackstone Rangers (Negro gang) on Race, in Chicago (really fantastic!) and regret I had to say “no” to the sweet little girl at Washington University who wanted me there for three days as Ginsberg and Nemerov (?) had been.

  November 12, 1967. Sunday

  Cool clear evening—7 p.m. Formalhaut out bright in the South under my sign, Aquarius, and above me many friends, Swan, Eagle, Perseus and Andromeda, Cassiopeia. There were some new faces in the conference this afternoon-cantors from other monasteries here for a meeting. Still talking on Sufism-was tempted to talk on Cargo Cults, but I have put that on tape. The Burridge book (Mambu) is excellent.

  Naomi [Burton Ston
e] is coming (is in fact here, or should be) and I hope now we can finally wind up all this Trust business, which turned out to be much more elaborate than I anticipated. As usual, I begin to have doubts about it when it is too late. But I think I have done right, though this recourse to law is neither “monastic” nor “anarchic.” Still, I think it would be silly to leave the pile of paper that I have covered with ink merely to rot or get lost in the monastic library. What is left over after my death (and there is bound to be plenty!) might as well get published. I have no guarantee of living many more years. Perhaps five, perhaps ten.

  Walked today again down by St. Bernard’s Lake in the dry brown grass of the pasture, thinking about some ideas of [indecipherable] on contemplation-and about so many other things, too. [John] Slate’s death. The lawyers. The Trust. The dead tree standing in the water. Sr. Thérèse [Lentfoehr, the poet] (here Tuesday, briefly). Tommie O’Callaghan, who called today to say they are all going to Amsterdam for three years—she is one of my trustees!

  Yesterday I hurried down in the rain for an afternoon concelebration and Brother Richard [Schmidlin]’s profession. At the end we all recessed singing “The Church’s One Foundation” which reminded me of dreary evening chapel at Oakham 35 years ago. Renewal? For me that’s a return to a really dead past. Victorian England.