New Orleans 8.3.1994: Sweet Mockingbirds and Paschal Mysteries

Sitting out back at Kathleen and Abner’s, in their patio with its carved Porta Coeli sign and odorous dog turds on the bricks. Ivy and Moses-in-the-basket spill over the walls. On the drunken trollop’s side of the house, a baby screams frantically. On the other side, the bearded Yankee neighbor is assiduously cleaning house. I see the cabinet open, with its array of cleaning stuffs. I’m embarrassed to see him, since Steve and I have just been arguing, I raising my voice shrewishly.

Pleasant March sky. A mockingbird singing very sweetly behind me, and some more raucous bird (a jay?) cawing nearby.

I think of all the sad days I sat reading and writing in just this spot in 1984 when Steve left me here, as I struggled to write the dissertation. I decade later, I feel no wiser. It was Holy Week when I arrived in 1984: a long paschal mystery since then. I just don’t see its meaning.

To wit: yesterday, Pat R. called Kathleen and Abner to ask for our phone number. It was the first time we’d heard from him since 1978, when we lost contact . . . .

This makes me ponder even more a question I ponder and ponder after my talk the other night, when people from every layer of my life came to hear the lecture—Bill D. from my undergrad days (saying, Why is Bill Lindsey not a symbol of Loyola’s achievement?), Rick B. from the prayer group days, LIM students, Dorothy M. from my time teaching at St. Dominic’s.

What does it all mean? What’s the claim of all this life-lived on me? I’d like to see each layer as separate, each episode as a closed book. Now they’re all flowing together.

I can only conclude that flow is the word. As I wrote in my journal soon after New Year’s in 1993, when I was about to get the terminal contract, something flows strongly under my life, through it. A river, grace, life itself, in its sweet, strange, maddening incomprehensibility.

And in, through, every life. It’s so chastening, and yet so endearing, to see that, somehow, I’ve touched some of those I’ve taught in a way that influences their lives. Deep calling to deep; the depths running underneath my existence eddying and pooling with their depths.

Where to go with this; what to do with it? I don’t see. Thomas Moore says that, in being baptized, Jesus gave himself to the stream. I would (I hope) do so, if I knew how, where. I don’t see.

But maybe this is what this awful time is about, in part. It’s about letting oneself be carried by that river even when one doesn’t see. It’s about learning how life is a force running through one’s limited temporal-spatial boundaries.

I keep thinking of Rilke, and the call to be conscious, the struggle to live so stretched awake that we see, hear, taste, feel. We bought the Robert Bly translation of Rilke the other day, and I was bowled over by his title poem for the songs collection—if we don’t sing, what’s left to us?

And a tiny slug just fell on this journal as I closed it, reminding me that corruption trials through every word I wrote, because my heart is corrupted—with self-infatuation. And my pen suddenly drips black ink. My words, my thought, my heart are hardly sine macula.

Hamburg 17.6.1998: Lawns with Buttercups, Turkish Vegetables

In plane en route from Hamburg to Brussells, where we change planes to Dublin. Yesterday taken up with preparations for the seminar I gave in the evening—a vexatious, even harrowing, day preceded by fitful sleep, nightmares, stomach turmoil. I am so insecure teaching, and feel so hollow these days, so disoriented, so much the half-released spectator and not the participant.

Hamburg: green everywhere. With Nienstedten’s passion for English gardens, one never forgets one’s in northern Europe: green, damp, shade, cool are all around. Lawns aren’t mown this time of year, or rarely. The one outside our apartment is dotted with buttercups, those surprising little ranunculi with their shiny porcelained petals. Other lawns have tiny white daisies.

Wolfram W. incredibly, extraordinarily nice, as ever. Took us to lunch at a Turkish restaurant yesterday (vegetables, glorious vegetables!), and let us get our email from his computer. I feel so linked to him, and afraid of and embarrassed by the depth of my feeling, lest it appear to be something other than what it is, a friendship in which feeling runs very deep on my side.

And the German soul is mystical, I see in the faces of the seminar students. But also intently practical. In Nazism, the two interacted horribly—that mystical attraction to the dark-forested myth of the Urseele of the nation, coupled with efficiency so hyperdeveloped it could create gas chambers, and use them pitilessly, rationally, meticulously, to kill people.

And who am I? Rilke talks of feeling God’s call to write, even in his childhood—to transmute pieces of ugly childhood memory and experience into this and that, the stuff of poems. And I? Will I ever feel less tired? Will I ever find a place?

Ireland: I expect restful landscape, and positively exult in the opportunity to hear my own language spoken again—though, truth to tell, after Bayern, Steve and I haven’t had to function in German very much at all. Will there be some play in Dublin we might attend?

Little Rock 16.5.05: There and Back Again--Old Skin, Itchy Selves

I need to bring this travel narrative to a close. I keep thinking of things I want to say in it, then I don’t take time to do so. Up early again due to the jet lag; we haven’t slept past 5 A.M. since our return, and are going to bed before 9 each night. Past two days, I’ve taken long, stuporous naps in the afternoon.

So, the trip is over and done with, and I’m back, but betwixt and between, neither fully here nor there. My old life and old comforts (and old certainties) slip around me like a skin whose contours are very well-known. But the skin is also confining.

One should come back from a journey different. It’s a theme as old as the Odyssey. And not just different as in bearing gifts or trophies to demonstrate to envious friends that you have been “there”: different in some essential human way.

I know all the clichés, and they’re as true as any cliché is true: travel broadens; we see things differently and realize our perspective is limited and culturally determined; we encounter cultural artifacts that transform heart and mind.

But for me, this trip needs to mean more. I feel stuck. Yet something in the trip made it all “better”—the grand tour as 19th-century cure for nervous prostration. What is that something.

In part, it’s the chance to live as a different person, an unknown entity, someone without a past, drifting dreamily through days and nights. All the more so when you’re in a foreign country speaking a foreign language. As Rilke says, to learn other tongues is to assume other, new souls.

This experience renews, precisely because it does take you out of your skin. I feel a renewed sympathy for other human beings against whom I’ve been bumping blind in the night, a resumed sense of all they mean to me. I feel a renewed civility, a willingness to engage in the small rituals that ease the discomfort of human encounters—hello, pleased to meet you; thank you, how lovely, etc. One cannot travel without assuming that persona—at least, not travel successfully. One should bring something of it back.

Travel also reduces life to its bare essentials much as a retreat does. At least, a certain kind of travel does this. Where shall we get food? How shall we ask for it? We need it to fuel our bodies as we walk. And you do have to walk: to buy bread, to mail a letter; to obtain stationery. What comes easily in the everyday—what is already at hand—is obtained as you travel at a certain cost. It demands effort.

Travel is about fulfilling basic needs—for food, shelter, warmth, human companionship. It’s about relearning basic steps: Wieviel kostet das? How much is 2 € in $? Let me remember: does halb neun mean 8:30 or 9:30?

It is good, if sometimes very uncomfortable, to have to deal with such bedrock realities of everyday life. Travel can burst the oh-so-insulating bourgeois bubble.

But then there’s the self at the end—the itchy, irascible self you began the journey with, glowering and pouting and expecting you to pick it back up. To my shame, I always do. I’ve never been able to integrate that new self I become briefly and gloriously as I travel, and the self I always seem to carry around with me.

I feel I’m waiting, as always, for the summons. When will it come? And will it take me away from Little Rock, where things feel stifling?

On the other hand, there’s that deep need for once to dig my heels in and stick it out, to have a pied à terre. I’m betwixt and between two powerful currents here.

As I am with the quandary—always there—of choosing Narcissus or Goldmund, the aesthetic or the politically engaged. Both are powerful impulses. I don’t know how to decide between (or balance?) them.

Hamburg 2.1.2000: Die Pilgerin and Living into the Millennium

On the train home new year’s morning, all the sodden and sedate revelers around me, all I could wonder about was how people forget. How do we forget the 8 million Jews? The mentally and physically challenged, the gays, the Slavs, the Gypsies?

How have we so quickly forgotten the sheer facticity of slavery? How have we—our churches—forgotten segregation, which we defended? How does anyone celebrate again, with such unatoned-for guilt hanging over us?

+ + + + +

A detailed dream last night, visiting my father’s law office, with an inner dialogue going on inside me: I recognize that I give too little honor or attention to my father, and that it would mean much to him to have these; and at the same time, his drunken meanness has leached respect out of my heart.

It strikes me as I record the vivid details of this dream in my journal that I’ve now lived beyond the year in which my father died—i.e., 13th December of my 49th year. The dream/my inner self invites me to make peace with my father? As I write that it would be important to him for me to show honor, I actually write important to me.

My father’s gone. I live on. How to do so, the dream seems to ask? My vocation’s teaching, but in the dream, my office is contiguous to his, and I am not even sure of the office number—muddled, befuddled, in terms of vocation and purpose. He wanted me to choose the law as a vocation, and I defied him to do . . . what?

All this vs. the German context, travel, nature, new experience, these lazy decompression days, which enable me to dive deeper. The depths of inner calling will keep reasserting themselves.

The dream occurred on the 4th floor, the top floor: the final quarter of my life? It does feel that way. I’m not sure this is the floor I belong on, with my father who’s dead!

And why is he dead? He felt defeated, too, a failure like me? Dealing with him, making peach with him, is making peace with his own life and its torments.

All this against the context of teaching, too, which I seem to do well—but less as teacher-scholar than as therapist of troubled classes. What is my calling?

+ + + + +

Barlach museum: his wooden frieze figures—so much emotion compressed into such a compact space. IF only I could write poems like that. (Rilke did.) I especially like the old blind woman—the studied mildness of her expression, her folded, composed hands.

I like, too, the simple worn leather bench I’m sitting on—leather-covered, that is. The Germans do things like this so well, so carefully, and yet at the same time, with a throw-away air of insouciance.

(Now at the postcard display in the foyer): turns out I was wrong. The blind woman was Die Pilgerin. However, what I wrote about her features, her hands, seems even more appropriate, now that I know she was a pilgrim. I’m also struck by the figure of a believing man. Maybe the goal for me this millennium is to be a better pilgrim and believer?