Asheville, North Carolina 18.3.93: Appalachian Spring and Winter of Discontent

Back from the blizzard. For the week of 7-14, I had won the use of the college’s timeshare condominium in Asheville. On the 12th, it began to snow in the evening. All night, it thundered, lightened, and poured snow from the sky, as the wind blew fiercely.

In the morning, there was over a foot of snow on the ground. It snowed steadily all day, and the wind continued to blow heavily, so that by night there were nearly three feet of snow, and, in places, drifts of four feet and more. At one point, we tried to go out and walk, but as we did so, we knew that we were in a blizzard, and turned back.

From Saturday to Tuesday evening, we could not drive out. We had been scheduled to leave on Sunday, but all roads were closed out of Asheville then, and, in any case, we could not have gone, because the narrow, winding path back to the condo was under a ton of snow.

By Monday, we walked to the store and could see traffic moving, but it was not till Tuesday that the hotel cleared the road to the condos. Then we had no trouble driving on the freeway, though there was still snow all the way to Spartanburg.

Washington, D.C. 20.2.1993: Neocon Boors, Silent Chapels

Steve gone, and I alone in the hotel room. He’s at an interview. . . .

I made a point today of going to the Georgetown campus chapel and praying as devoutly as I could for a sign to light my way, for help, for wisdom to discern, for new doors to open. Somehow I thought as I prayed of some utopian “high” place—a place ringed by hills, with meadows and orchards and gray stone buildings, a place to write. Fantasy, I fear—a sheer fantasy. But some place I could wish to find, to settle in with my books and plans to write, before my life is over. . . .

+ + + + +

Just returned from supper. Seated behind me an obnoxious Baltimore family. Pater familias told a joke re: how a class in Virginia was asked recently who said, “Four score and seven years ago.” The only student to raise her hand was a Japanese exchange student, who said Lincoln, then gave the date. Teacher scolded the class and turned to the blackboard, and a boy yells, “F—k the Japs.” Teacher turns to ask, “Who said that?” Boy yells, Harry S. Truman, 1945.”

A conversation ensued re: how we had to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then it gets to the recent convention of conservatives in D.C. The family was apparently there. Mater familias quotes with approval Oliver North, who said we must take this country back from the homoerotic ethic and return it to its Judaeo-Christian ethical roots.

Bombing the Japs? Insulting gays with impunity—since this loud conversation took place in a restaurant in a mixed neighborhood, where the Blade is available in the restaurant lobby? These boors, and their relatives across the land, who are legion, represent the Judaeo-Christian ethic? They proceeded to laugh re: how the first child can come anytime, the rest nine months at a time, so it’s not transgression of sexual norms in general that disturbs them.

Washington, D.C. 18-19.2.1993: Drowning Dreams and Watching Angels

At the Hirshorn Museum, after a morning in the National Archives, and very weary, dissociated.

All night, I dreamt I was writing some kind of “breakthrough” letter to the college, saying now is a time of national debate, and also of crisis for the college.

For both reasons, discussion of the college’s identity seems imperative. Yet it’s being blocked, often by demonizing of the new, and by sheer refusal to discuss, as we manage conflict.

This is unjust. A college is a community—bound together, etymologically—and requires free shared discourse to be what it purports to be. Moreover, refusal to discuss covertly privileges a few, and allows power centers to manipulate, rather than invite discussion.

+ + + + +

At National Gallery of Art. Very moved by a series of allegorical paintings by Thomas Cole, 1842, on the four phases of life. In each, a guardian angel—in childhood, with the child; in youth, on the shore as the youth’s boat pushes off on the river of life; in midlife, watching solicitously from the clouds as the boat shoots dark rapids to a dark ocean; in old age, rejoining the boat as it enters the ocean.

There’s a type of thought about pictography. Not a new notion, I know—evident to anyone who looks at any primitive” art, that we depict in order to think. And yet think very differently from anything commonly called rationality now.

This is thought of the dark, moist, fertile self below rationality. Because it’s powerful thought, we need to suppress art in our “civilizations” of technocratic managerialism.

I don’t know how to give myself to the thought of the dark, camera oscura, pictographic self. It kills me to do so. I do so only in painful and voluptuous dreams in which any sense of self I have is so painfully fragmented and shattered, that it’s almost a violent wrenching of my body—literally so, some days—to awake. I drown in dreams, in a stream that seeps simultaneously into every crack and crevice of my being, showing me mad illuminations of the many facets of my experience that I simply cannot tolerate, or seem to connect in daytime without actually going mad.

New Orleans 13.3.1994: Wild Synchronicities, A Room of One's Own

At New Orleans airport, waiting for our flight and bathing in glorious sunshine over my shoulders, from the high clear windows and sparsely clouded blue sky.

Wondering how one becomes a cloister to oneself, a reserve of green peace and recollection in which a fountain flows quietly, unobtrusively, regenerating all around it even when the world beyond the walls is mere chaos. A not inappropriate question in the madness that is New Orleans, the insanity that is New Orleans Catholicism. . . .

What does it all mean? Over and over in our days in New Orleans, it has been that experience about which I’ve been writing—circles of my life overlapping with and opening onto other circles.

E.g., Sean D. asked Steve if he can share our story with Luis C. Ralph went to high school with Luis in Concord . . . . Would anyone reading this journal even realize how wildly coincidental all this is?

Also, Bill A. and Stan K. both mentioned Jean M. and her trip to Russia—less coincidental, but nonetheless striking. (Bill does hilarious imitations of Jean M. talking about needing new dripes for her parlor. Doesn't totally remove the pain from her ugly behavior towards me on that trip, but it does allow me to put it into perspective.)

And on Thursday, we had coffee with Clarita R., who recommended I write Bard College for a job—a place I’d never heard of. That night at supper, Stan K. referred to Bard; then before bedtime, I read James Merrill’s memoir, A Different Person, and came on a passage about—yep, Bard College.

What does it all mean? Or does it have to mean? Why did R., the Trinitarian with whom Bill A. lives, and whom Landrum picked up in Audubon Park, mention Kyle S. last night?

I feel I could develop mad, crazed theories to account for all this synchronicity. Or I can simply live in the current producing these eddies. My fear about the latter is that all insight and enthusiasm seems immediately to be swallowed up by the everyday, once I return to it.

I have to think I’m in a moment of extraordinary grace, whose contours I simply cannot discern. In such a moment, we must pray to be like those paper things that catch wind and sing.

Writing, my heart tells me, is key to all this. We went to Beckham’s Books yesterday, and Cary B. and his partner Alton C. almost begged us to return to New Orleans, though we hardly know them. They’ve bought a house two blocks from our Dorgenois house.

Somehow, this stirred in me again that deep, deep sense that I’m to write. I want so much to have time, space, freedom, to write. If I have that, I feel nothing can stop me: it’ll pour out.

Time/space/freedom from the church and the persona I’ve been forced to adopt as a gay theologian who sees and can’t say what he sees, in this structure. I just don’t want to babble it anymore, or be inside it. If anything, I want to look on it all with wry, amused irony.

(If the church comes to me, after I’ve written, and lets me be me, and teach from that vantage point, well, then . . . .)

Time/space/freedom: money. I need it with an almost physical hunger. Never thought I’d feel this way; it’s so crassly materialistic. But I need it to buy the freedom from the material that I need in order to write, to be free of crippling anxiety, to have a secure place, to be surrounded by some peace and beauty and tranquility, to be free to travel. And yet what fantasies! As if what we need drops down from heaven as we need it.

New Orleans 11.3.1994: Dream Claims and Soul Windows

What claim do my dreams have on me? What claim do any dreams—or does anything—have on me? I feel such dearth of soul.

At face value, they seem so simple, so banal—as I myself am. Guilt associated with sex since puberty, sibling rivalry, a sense of being out of control re: being gay and Christian. I don’t know how to relate what these windows show about my inner soul with anything in my external life.

Except. I was intensely nervous most of yesterday, especially when the Jesuits at Loyola suggested Steve and I go to Africa and work in their missions. A building nervousness, lunching in Thomas Hall and then meeting with LIM faculty. The old symptoms, for the old reasons: who am I in this setting, as a gay theologian?

Then I awoke today angry at Steve and have remained so all day—at his unresponsiveness, inaccessibility, slowness. Or is it anger at myself? Am I inaccessible to myself, obtuse and confused?

The soul window provided by dreams seems to show me some things that are underneath all that I feel and think and experience now. I’m not sure they’re “related” at all—it’s as if the blockage of so much in my life, of fruitful introspection, vision, forward movement, opens up vistas on energies always present inside. . . .

Could I take this story and turn it into a story re: energy, and not re: blockage and confusion?

New Orleans 10.3.1994: Scheming Bishops and People's Liturgies

I need to pay more attention to what is comprised by the act of listening. Somehow, reason—Enlightenment reason as a tool of domination—is connected to this interest, for me. Listening and domination are antithetical to one another. In order to become a culture (or church) able to listen, we have to reject the dominative impulse in Enlightenment reason.

+ + + + +

Yesterday, Sean D. told Steve he has been disciplined because he invited an AIDS patient to speak to the seminarians’ spiritual formation group, as well as a Pax Christi person who spoke about the people’s liturgy. When seminarians complained to conservative bishops, Sean’s office was split in half, and W. Maestri took over the spiritual formation work.

Then, oddly, in the evening as we had dinner with Al A., Al told us that John B. had spoken to the seminarians at St. Ben’s re: Al’s people’s liturgy, and T. Rodi responded with a letter informing them that the liturgy is unorthodox. Two more names from our past flowing together with the present: Sean, a friend of C.J. McNaspy from our present, and T. Rodi, our bête noire at Notre Dame who even then was headed to a suave, good-looking bishopric, and John B., husband of Karen C.

What can it all mean? It’s as if I’m inside something whose contours I can only barely see. But as M. Wolf said yesterday, if we could see, we’d be dead.

Yesterday, Kathleen also showed us the newsletter H. Cohen sends out for his “Closer Walk” ministries. It has a column written by him screaming about birth control, militant homosexuals, the threat to the family, which is the cornerstone of American society, and on and on. It screams about being “truly” Catholic with the pope, Splendor Veritatis, etc., etc. Clearly, lots of money backs all this tripe, like the money (Paul N.’s) that bought Hannan a personal radio station.

What does it all mean? The only way I think I can hope to “figure it out” (how little the phrase fits) is to tell the story from inside, as I see it, tracing the contours with my hands in darkness. M. Wolf says we must speak now. She says Schulte is eager, eager to hear the CUF people. Al A. says he and other theologians have gotten warnings from Schulte, saying that he is bishop and they answer to his definition of orthodoxy. Al’s was in a hand-addressed envelope, unlike others’, a sign of the special attention his radicalism merits. Schulte has spies in Al’s classes.

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.