Merton learns a little about Trappists and doesn't like what he hears . . .
“Last summer,” said Dan, “I made a retreat at a Trappist monastery in Kentucky. It is called Our Lady of Gethsemani. Did you ever hear of it?”
And he began to tell me about the place—how he had been staying with some friends, and they had driven him over to the monastery. It was the first time they had ever been there. Although they lived in Kentucky, they hardly knew the Trappists existed. His hostess had been very piqued at the signs about women keeping out of the enclosure under pain of excommunication, and she had watched with awe as the heavy door closed upon him, engulfing him in that terrible, silent building.
(From where I sit and write at this moment, I look out the window, across the quiet guest-house garden, with the four banana trees and the big red and yellow flowers around Our Lady’s statue. I can see the door where Dan entered and where I entered. Beyond the Porter’s Lodge is a low green hill where there was wheat this summer. And out there, yonder, I can hear the racket of the diesel tractor: I don’t know what they are ploughing.)
Dan had stayed in the Trappist monastery a week. He told me of the life of the monks. He told me of their silence. He said they never conversed, and the impression I got was that they never spoke at all, to anybody.
“Don’t they even go to confession?” I asked.
“Of course. And they can talk to the abbot. The retreat master talked to the guests. He was Father James. He said that it was a good thing the monks didn’t have to talk—with all the mixture of men they have there, they get along better without it: lawyers and farmers and soldiers and schoolboys, they all live together, and go everywhere together and do everything together. They stand in choir together, and go out to work together and sit together in the same place when they read and study. It’s a good thing they don’t talk.”
“Oh, so they sing in choir?”
“Sure,” said Dan, “they sing the Canonical hours and High Mass. They are in choir several hours a day.”
I was relieved to think that the monks got to choir and exercised their vocal cords. I was afraid that so much silence would wither them up altogether.
“And they work in the fields,” said Dan. “They have to make their own living by farming and raising stock. They grow most of what they eat, and bake their own bread, and make their own shoes...”
“I suppose they fast a lot,” I said.
“Oh, yes, they fast more than half the year, and they never eat meat or fish, unless they get sick. They don’t even have eggs. They just live on vegetables and cheese and things like that. They gave me a cheese when I was there, and I took it back to my friends’ house. When we got there, they handed it to the colored butler. They said to him, ‘Do you know what that is? That’s monks’ cheese.’ He couldn’t figure it out, and he looked at it for a while, and then he got an idea. So he looked up with a big smile and said: ‘Oh, I know what YOU all mean: monks! Them’s like goats.’”
But I was thinking about all that fasting. The life took my breath away, but it did not attract me. It sounded cold and terrible. The monastery now existed in my mind as a big grey prison with barred windows, filled with dour and emaciated characters with their hoods pulled down over their faces.
“They are very healthy,” said Dan, “and they are big strong men. Some of them are giants.”
(Since I came to the monastery I have tried to pick out Dan’s “giants.” I can account for one or two easily enough. But I think he must have seen the rest of them in the dark—or perhaps they are to be explained by the fact that Dan himself is not very tall.)
I sat in silence. In my heart, there was a kind of mixture of exhilaration and dejection, exhilaration at the thought of such generosity, and depression because it seemed such a drastic and cruel and excessive rejection of the rights of nature.
At this point, Merton has no idea that what his friend Dan is describing to him will be his home, his life. That these silent men, giants or otherwise, will be his closest companions for the majority of his years. It's sort of like hearing somebody describing the Empire State Building. Until you are actually standing on the Top Deck observatory, looking down at the M. C. Escher Manhattan landscape below, you simply cannot wrap your mind around the experience. That is Merton in this passage.
Snow fell yesterday, last night, on my little part of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Heavy and wet with Lake Superior moisture. March came in like a lion, as the saying goes. Every once in a while, this place I call home needs to remind everybody who's in charge. And it isn't any hairless creature walking around on two legs.
For several years now, I've been working on a manuscript of Bigfoot poems, as many of you know. It's a book that shrinks and grows, hibernates and roars to life. When I started the project, I never thought that the big guy would be my companion this long. Six or so months ago, I set the collection aside for a while. I needed some space from it. I thought it was near completion, but I wasn't sure. And I wrote other things. Poems about starfish and catfish. Elephants and butterflies. My bald head. Sand castles.
And then, about a week ago, Bigfoot entered my life again. I didn't expect him to show up, but he did. And it felt like Thomas Merton visiting Our Lady of Gethsemani for the first time. As if I'd returned home after a long trip abroad. After walking around the coastline of Africa for a while, I'd come back to a landscape I knew like my children's breath. A winter landscape, full of snow and glacial lake water.
I'm not sure if this means that I'm finally going to make the push to finish this book up, or, like Walt Whitman with Leaves of Grass, I'm just going to keep coming back and back and back for the rest of my life. I'm hoping it's the former, but it just may be the latter. I may be poetically chasing Bigfoot forever.
So, tonight, I am home. On my couch. Covered in an electric blanket. And Bigfoot is sitting next to me, smelling like old fish and rotten eggplant. An old friend.
Saint Marty gives thanks for the miracle of this homecoming.
Bigfoot Multiple Choice Haibun
after Todd Kaneko
by: Martin Achatz
Bigfoot growled last night in my backyard. No moon-blind snow. Banks hunched like marble surf, a cemetery of ice. My dog, fur a mini-map of the world, squatted in a yoga pose of defecation. I stood, stared into midnight's mouth, heard it. Low as the separation of sea and shore, crabapple and crawfish. It rolled over us both, a haired wall of mud and sand and God's toes. My dog sniffed, raised her muzzle, buried her nose in constellations, made the sound pharaohs made when they were sealed in their pyramids, a wail that opened the gates of Duat. And I knew I was about to become a footprint, a skunk-filled memory.
Question: What do you do when Bigfoot growls?
a) Let your dog eat a meteor.
b) Sink into earth like salt.
c) Become an eardrum.
