If we were all being pulled into the vortex of that fight, it was being
done slowly and gradually. I was surprised when my brother was cast back
into the solid area of peace—relative peace. It was one rainy night in the
fall that he appeared in Olean in a new shiny Buick convertible roadster
with a long black hood and a chassis that crouched low on the road, built
for expensive and silent speed. The thing was all fixed up with searchlights,
and as for my brother, he was not in uniform.
“What about the Navy?” I asked him.
It turned out that they were not giving out commissions in the Naval
Reserve as freely as he had supposed, and he had had some differences of
opinion with his commanding officers and, at the end of a cruise to the West
Indies and after an examination of some sort, both my brother and the
Naval Reserve were mutually delighted to end their association with one
another.
I was not sorry.
“What are you going to do now, wait until you are drafted?”
“I suppose so,” he said.
“And in the meantime?...”
“Maybe I’ll go to Mexico,” he said. “I want to take some pictures of
those Mayan temples.”
And, as a matter of fact, that was where he went when the weather got
cold: to Yucatan, to find out one of those lost cities in the jungle and take a
pile of kodachromes of those evil stones, soaked in the blood that was once
poured out in libation to the devils by forgotten generations of Indians. He
did not get rid of any of his restlessness in Mexico or Yucatan. He only
found more of it among those blue volcanoes.
Snow comes early to St. Bonaventure’s, and when the snow came, I used
to say the little hours of the Breviary walking in the deep untrodden drifts
along the wood’s edge, towards the river. No one would ever come and
disturb me out there in all that silence, under the trees, which made a
noiseless, rudimentary church over my head, between me and the sky. It
was wonderful out there when the days were bright, even though the cold
bit down into the roots of my fingernails as I held the open Breviary in my
hands. I could look up from the book, and recite the parts I already knew by
heart, gazing at the glittering, snow-covered hills, white and gold and
planted with bare woods, standing out bright against the blinding blue sky.
Oh, America, how I began to love your country! What miles of silences
God has made in you for contemplation! If only people realized what all
your mountains and forests are really for!
Both Merton and his brother are searching for some kind of inner peace. Difficult to do when the entire world is going to war. His brother heads to Mexico to photograph Mayan temples. Of course, Merton's description of the "evil stones" reads now as colonialist and racist, and he is imposing his Christian dogma on another culture, lest we forget that he was a Trappist monk. But that's not the part of this passage that struck me tonight. I love the almost Whitmanesque closing lines where he goes into rapture over the "miles of silences" America contains.
It is Independence Day weekend in the United States. (That's Treason Day, for all of my British disciples.) Tomorrow, in my hometown, there will be a parade, community picnic, and fireworks at dusk. So different from last year, with its lockdowns and overrun hospitals and rampant outbreaks of virus. While I'm not completely comfortable with the way Americans are throwing their doors wide open and having street parties, I also understand the impulse. I led an in-person poetry workshop last night, and I was able to hug a poet friend that I hadn't seen in almost 18 months. We held on to each other a long time, and when we let go, there were tears in both our eyes.
Yet, I think there's also something of the monk in me. I enjoyed the seclusion of the pandemic. That stripping away of artificial society. I understand Thomas Merton's ode to the silences of mountains and forests. Life was simpler these last 18 months. When your main mission every day is not contracting a deadly virus, you tend to let go of other things that seemed important.
As I sit typing this post, I can hear fireworks going off down the street. The staccato rat-tat-tat-tat of firecrackers. If you've read my recent posts, you know that I've been really struggling with some personal stuff these last few days. For some reason, I'm conflating my private turmoil with this holiday weekend's opening up. As if the pandemic somehow held my problems at bay, and now the entire country is throwing parades and fireworks to celebrate the fact that my life seems to be unravelling with each sparkler that's lit.
I will attend my town's parade in the morning. And I'll grab some blankets and a good book tomorrow evening and go watch fireworks fill the night sky. Because my kids love it, and I don't know how many more parades and fireworks displays they'll be willing to attend with me in the years to come. I'll do it because of love. My family is my all, and I've done everything in my power for over 30 years to keep us together.
I've always believed that love wins in the end.
What I'm learning now is that maybe there's no such thing as endless love. That it's just a sappy song played at the end of a mediocre 1981 movie. Is it possible to love too much? Too hard?
Saint Marty is reminded of the last lines of one of his favorite James Wright poems, "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota":
. . .
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
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