Jan. 10, 2000
Dear Father James,
. . .Sorry for the delay in answering your letter. Some interesting
things are happening and unfortunately they have interfered with my correspondence.
I don't remember if I've written you of the dream I had, the one in which the
dead came, nameless and beyond number, to watch in silence as I made love to
Clare. They watched as if they knew a secret, their eyes compassionate despite
the pain of their desire, as if mortified, paraylyzed by the need that still
possessed them and the pain in their haunted eyes that their hunger precluded
them from being fully dead.
It is a dream that has stayed with me as you might imagine. For ,if the dead
are unconsolable, then what of us ? I have no answer for that question of course,
except that we are in fact here and in the end our struggles may be the same
as theirs. I cannot imagine the dead are miraculously changed by death. They
possess the same desires they did on earth, though they have no body, no means
to satisfy those desires. And so they often suffer as they hope for love, and
that hope is, in the end, what compels them to return. I think that was the
sadness I felt in the dream: the sorrow of eternity sighing behind the mirror.And
my desire grew because of it. And in the dream I died, and a light enfolded
me and I did not understand.
Of course I am telling you this because you always listen. And to make the point
that my continuing struggle with God is still without an end. As for Clare she
is well, but seems restless lately. I don't know what it is-- she has never
been big on self disclosure and I cannot coax it out of her, so it is probably
better not to try. My work, as usual, is a source of frustration and solace.
It is a paradox I love, and certainly one of the central attractions of being
a therapist, and reason enough to write fiction on the side. So enclosed you
will also find a piece of my latest effort toward that end. It will be a novella
I think, an attempt to reconcile my childhood with the spirit that seemed to
echo in every action then. . .a way of understanding the love and dread. Well,
I hope all is ok with you and you are well supplied with your favorite opiate:
work. And since "religion is a defense against a religious experience"
I know you will sleep quietly tonight and give my regards to the church.
Yours with affection,
Steven
Jan 18, 2000
Dear Steven,
Will you ever let me off the hook for the priesthood? After
all these years I doubt it, in fact I wouldn't know how to act if you did. Suffice
it to say that I have made my allegiance known, and though I have powerful reservations
about the institution, that the church is built on the rock He signified and
celebrates the transubstantiation is enough. The church is history, and history,
in the end, will be saved by the Christ. Of course you know that personally
my religion has cost a lot. I think often of our undergraduate days, when you
were the third wheel and Clare and I an item. Those days seem a thousand years
ago do they not? Of course your dream moved me deeply. I felt like paraphrasing
Pogo as I read -- "I have seen the dead and they are us." In fact
I have felt the same fierce hunger, the empty ignominy, the essental embarrassment
at the hands of lust. I once thought the priesthood would offer solace from
that, but I have discovered that I am still human underneath this robe, a recognition
that will probably not come as a shock to you, but was a profound shock to me,
and regrettably, still is.
As for my asceticism and avoidance, well, I am going to tell you something you
may have never guessed, something it took many years of meditation for me to
understand: I am the more social of the two of us Steven. My need for affiliation
is what has driven me throughout my church career. It has always surprised me
how content you are in your comfortable introversion, your safe life with Clare.
In fact I have had more than a few moments of jealousy about that. Though when
I read your novella my jealousy crumbled. I was moved to tears for the life
you had when we were both so young and our friendship was all there was. Though
I say prayers for you daily it is not enough. May we meet someday beyond desire
and the tears of lust.
Yours,
James.
Jan 29, 2000
Dear James,
It was good to hear from you! Though your tone was somber, sad. Ought I to be worried about you? You seem more thoughtful than usual, more in touch with a pain that seems beyond ordinary discontent. Diogenes came to "debase the coinage" but you run the risk of reminding Christianity of its content. Be careful James-- they hauled Meister Eckhart before the inquisition for that. And though today they don't kill outright (do they?) they still have ways of neutralizing influence.As for me, things are going well. I am up to twenty clients a week, and most of them I enjoy working with. Clare continues to be distant at times, and continues her habit of talking around it, but for the most part she is available, warm and considerate. We recently had a fight about you though. I said you were depressed, she insisted you were fine. " Just the inevitable adjustments in the life of an ascetic." And it is true you have lived with privations I could never accept, believing as I do, that a life in spirit must be inclusive, must confront itself in the doing, unraveling repression regardless of cost. I have leapt into that void more than once, and all of life was there-- the Good, the cold, the fulminations of desire. And the void grinned back with its own pale grin and though I saw the void it did not care. I realized then that the measure of the good man or woman is how much reality we can hold and still be kind. I think you may constrict yourself in that regard and that is my reason for believing you are depressed. At any rate, I worry, perhaps because I see so much sadness in my work, perhaps because I feel like I'm being strangled whenever I think of church. In any case, I will spare you any last minute jabs at your career. Take care of yourself and write me soon. The silence be with you and the fullness of its moods.
Yours,
Stephen
Feb 5, 2000
Dear Steven,
It was good to hear from you. I appreciate your concern more than you
know, though there are times when it is difficult to accept it, difficult to
admit to myself that I am feeling anything but a kind of fatherly benevolence.
Yet my moods are very strong and they get the better of me sometimes. I have
even been known to cry(As a therapist I am certain you will take that as good
news) and sometimes I am overwhelmed by guilt at my humanness. You know, it
has always amazed me to realize that I am an organism capable of self perception,
but it amazes me more to realize that what I see and hear, taste and feel is
also who I am, also part and parcel of my experience of myself. Perhaps this
seems naive to you, since you doubtless spend a lot of time encouraging people
to give expression to their instincts. But for me these are impulses that I
do not know how to trust, and to give them to God is my only answer, though
I often wonder why I should do that at all, since it is clear that in the final
analysis, it was God who gave them to me.. . .I don't know. But I do know that
to "leap into the void" is not the sort of thing I am particularly
interested in. In some ways I am a more timid soul than you. I don't trust my
constitution enough to take that risk, though I must admit there is something
appealing about it and there are even times when I feel like I can't escape
it, as if my avoidance compels me toward it and the void knows that and waits
and grins, taunting me as I resist and my very resistance is what pulls me in.
I will give you a "for instance". The other night I dreamt that I
was giving confession. A young woman came in, a very beautiful, sensual woman.
She wore a silken white blouse and I could make out the outline of her breasts
through the material. She began her confessions in the usual way --"Bless
me Father for I have sinned...." but before she could finish I saw she
was not a woman but a beast. That in fact she had never been a woman, but that
I had only seen the feminine half of her. She was in fact a thing both male
and female, and it twisted and writhed in its attempts at contrition, arousing
itself all the more as it moved. At that point, I woke up, both excited and
terrified. I prayed. Read outloud. Listened to music. Nothing I did could lift
me from my mood. The next day and the next, that terror held me: the terror
of seeing something I did not want to see, and the excitement of seeing something
I was not supposed to. It was a shattering dream, not because it held some intellectualy
eye- opening content (after all, Carl Jung's work ,with which I am fairly familiar,
is well informed of the bisexuality of the soul) but because the experience
of it was so intense, so painfully strong, that I was left with no way back
to the way I felt before.
Frankly, Steven, I do not know why I am telling you this. Perhaps I am hoping
you can shed some light on it, or maybe I'm hoping that by telling you I can
let it go. Whatever the reason, I'm sending it on. If you can be of any help,
please feel free. Above all I hope this letter is not too revealing, too much
an imposition. Well, I will close for now, as I have prayers to lead. Take care
of yourself, and give my regards to Clare.
Yours,
James.
Feb 11, 200
Dear James,
Thank you for your letter. How beautiful and how sad. The dream
is of course a full-on look at what you have repressed through your religion:
your sexual nature, its hunger and your fear of it. Perhaps it is even a suggestion
of something you saw early on. How beautiful, how utterly, vulnerably human.
I thank you for describing it to me, and urge you to keep a notebook-- to write
these things down. But before I start to talk like a therapist, which is not
what I want to do, (after all, you are as aware of the theoretical importance
of such a dream as I am) I want to remind you that though I joke with you about
your calling to the church, I have a certain respect for what you do. But to
repress so much of yourself for the sake of dogma! That is something I do not
support you in, you or anyone. I do acknowledge that that same repression is
what has made society possible, but look at the society we've made: it is vain,
murderous, irresponsible. This is my argument against "respectability",
and it is one of the chief problems I have with being a therapist as well, because
in that position I am often expected to be a moral "Mr. Fixit", who
patches up the needy and sends them back into the world to be the good nurse,
or teacher, mechanic or draftsman. I am expected to do my part for society by
fixing its broken pieces ( pieces that, more often than not, society broke in
its pursuit of an image of decorum). The implicit (and insane) message here
being that the "norm" is the good. But the people like yourself who
are questioning the values that they have been forcefed since infancy-- those
are the people that society needs more of. These are people less likely to judge,
more willing to love honestly, more able to see what is there and not what they
are told to see. Yet to dive into that morass conciously, willingly, is much
easier for someone who hasn't got much to lose-- someone like me.
Well I'm talking too much now, and its all about me. I want to tell you before
I go that I admire you for remembering your dream. And I admire the way you
have always made your own choices, in spite of my chiding and my gross resistance.
You are as headstrong as I am , yet less didactic, as strong as you need to
be, as loving, and as brave. I hope this letter finds you hopeful and rested,
that you have digested what you can from this rude disturbance of your sleep!As
for me, my own dream-life is rather bland these past weeks and my waking life
continues more or less on course. I am still writing my novella and will send
you a new installment soon. Clare sends her love and I do too.
Stephen
Feb 20, 2000
Dear Steven,
Your last letter was timely to say the least. I am feeling much better,
more rested, more sane. But that was definitely not the case three days ago--
a Thursday. That day I woke suddenly from a difficult sleep. I do not know why.
No dream stayed with me, only a vague unease, a sense that the darkness in my
room as I slept had been a little darker than it had ever been before. All day
I experienced a profound sense of displacement, a subtle feeling akin to grief.
I remember I woke and dressed, went to Lauds and then to eat. (You know we eat
silently, communally in the morning.)I remember saying the Lord's Prayer with
particular concentration that morning. Though it was as if my attention were
perfectly split, because out of the corner of my eye (which I opened almost
automatically, involuntarily if you will, or rather as if it were being opened
for me) I was able to see, perfectly sharply, perfectly clearly, the raw dirty
sleeve of the man next to me. His name is Brother Roberts and though it is my
prejudice, and one I am not proud of, I have always thought him slightly effeminate,
and because of that have always regarded him as someone frivolous, someone to
avoid or at best to tolerate. Though I have avoided him not only because of
his feminine gestures and stance, but also because he strikes me as far too
disconnected, as if his disconnectedness were a judgement that he did not need
the rest of us, an attitude almost disdainful or arrogant. Yet that morning
as I prayed, I could not look away from him, yet what I was drawn to was insignificant--
a minor detail inside a minor scene. My eye was continuously drawn to his dirty
sleeve. It was raw and worn, gray with dirt and stains, a few loose threads.
I could not look away from the worn sleeve of his robe: the sorrow, the pathos,
the implicit injury in its careless unraveling, which unraveled at the same
time the work of so many strangers, a relentless driven entropy that murdered
time, entwined hell and heaven. Such meaning in an insignificant thing! A detail
that before had passed unnoticed had suddenly blossomed for me into a rapture
of loss, a figure of dissolution. And in that moment I saw that he was human
like me and that Christ is all we have, all there is to keep us sane.
It was noon of that same day I got your letter. I thank you for your concern
about my dream. But I am feeling better now, much better, having seen the end
of days, the apocalypse in a ragged sleeve, and knowing that that same end is
mine, that to welcome it is all I have, and ultimately all I need. Again I thank
you for your support and concern. I am fine now. Fine. I am in love with the
Church.
James
Feb 31, 200
Dear James
I am writing this during a lull at work. I am sitting at a window
which looks out on the town. It is snowing . The town is white with snow. It
falls and falls, and in its falling there is grace, and in that grace there
is a path through the peerless sadness of people and things. Up the street a
man is shoveling his driveway. At the corner a car idles, its white exhaust
floating against the grey of clouds. The weather continues as we continue James,
I am sad and happy, empty and full. You know that I believe and that I do not
believe. Or rather that I do not know how to approach the believer that I am.
Yet I have always had a sense of what God meant to me, a rather apocalyptic
sense at that, in which the spirit, such as it is, wears the world like cothes.
It is that sense in me that I cannot shake,which is why I am so attracted to
the "mystical" perspective and why I am inevitably opposed to the
duality of the church. It is all one thing to me: God and earth, life and death,
breath and orgasm, the silence and the roar. It is all one thing, one organism.
And we are what knows that, what comes forward in the lurch to say the words.
I love you James, I have always loved you, since that first fight we had when
we were eleven years old, when I hit you in the mouth, after we had agreed not
to hit each other in the mouth at all. I am writing to tell you that I'm worried
about you. I knew it vaguely when I read your letter, but it hit me square in
the face when I stepped out this morning into the cold. You are too much in
love with the crucifixion. There would be no Christianity without resurection.
There would be no love without the intention to love. As someone once said to
me before I had given up my orthodoxy: you are a man running out of a bible
James, and when the bible is gone what is left is the world, sublime and terrible,
naked and disturbed. That is the world we live in everyday, and if we cannot
live there, we cannot live anywhere. The snow is so calm and white and strong.
I can lose myself in it, I can move through the snow to the end of days. Though
I do not want to wander like a snow-blind thing. I do not want to die. I do
not want to falter in its godly haze. There is far too much world for that,
too much clarity, too much sun. I offer you this letter out of concern and love,
it is my way of reminding you that you are loved,
that human love is God's love also, and entropy is not enlightenment, as despair
is not virtue. Take care of yourself James and please write soon.
Love
Stephen
March 5, 2000
Dear Stephen,
Thank you for your letter. It was well written, well said. Yet
I maintain that my experience was of value. I gained a great deal. Though I've
settled down somewhat since then, and can understand that what I experienced
was less revelation than fear. At least, that was the feeling I had-- a fear
of the unraveling in Brother Robert's sleeve, the fear of each unraveling thread,
as if each strand was experiencing an excruciating pain. Was it a projection?
I guess so. Yet it was still a lesson for me, a lesson about life and death,
about the inevitability of suffering. And the thought that made it tolerable,
bearable, was a thought that seemed so obvious then, but now deeply surprises
me: I was comforted by the recognition that I would die too. Not just that I
would die, but that as I died, I would understand pain as a kind of joy, and
love as a silence the way water is a silence, holding the freshets of the spring
and shadows of the sea, the shark, the blowfish and the anemone.
It is quiet tonight and very late. I have been thinking about the story you
sent me recently, about the scene at the canal in the middle of the hurricane.
I remember it very well as I'm sure you knew I would --how it was near midnight
when we arrived at the river and that, as usual, you had been drinking more
than me. The wind wailed in the trees the kind of wail a man makes when he has
lost something irretrievably and no light or hope can ever bring it right again.
It was a grave scene indeed, my first inkling of the power of the elements,
their frantic roar, their inhuman desecration of our human monuments, our petty
gouges in its dead cold clay. I do not remember any sense of sublime power or
transcendental grace, only the wailing of a wind propelled by its mechanics,
and the massive gurgle of the canal water as it drained away. Later I wondered
at the way you spoke of it, but it is late and I am tired, and I do not know
if you are crazy, or if I am, or if the silence that is the natural world is
so completely open to interpretation that you could project your own howling
insanity onto it, at the same time I was shivering at its relentlessness. I
don't know, but I envy you your certainty, at least the certainty you described
in the book. And though I guess I"ve just insulted you a little, ( when
will we ever work out this antagonism we've always had?) I ask you to remember
that you have always been proud of your "craziness" and that I am
taking liberties that you yourself have set in motion. At any rate I will send
this on, with thanks for your recent letter, and appreciation, despite my crankiness,
for the love that I know is always there. Please accept my love and my regards
for Clare. It is late. I'm yawning. It is time for prayer.
Yours,
Stephen`
March 12 2000
Dear James,
Of course I knew it was a risk writing you the way I did. You
were never a fan of the end-around, and though you can be more tactful than
most people I've ever met, subtlety from your friends have never been a favorite
of yours. Besides I wouldn't have liked it if someone had written me that way.
So It is easy for me to understand your "crankiness", and I do not
feel insulted by your reference to my insanity. It is a legacy I made for myself
through the "excesses of youth" -- the drugs, the drinking, the women,
the despair. But I was worried about you . What was I supposed to do? Listening
is not something that comes easy for me with you, though I listen everyday to
my clients, without judging much, without trying to change them or fix them,
which would ,in the end, only take their own power to change away from them.
But with you I want to help, to make it all ok. You helped me so much when we
were kids. If I could possibly do it I would take away your pain.
But I can't and I never could. So I will have to stand the strain and wonder
how much to say, and when to say it, and how much to hold back and finally to
wonder if it is enough in the end. That is my commitment to you, and it is also
my apology. I am not happy if I offended you, not happy about questioning your
own intimate experience, an experience that you confided to me in hopes that
I would be of some use to you about it. I am very glad
you are feeling better. I hope your days continue to improve.
As for me, I am getting along fine, though my consternation at Clare has grown
larger in these past few weeks. She appears listless, morose and less
talkative than usual. She buries herself in her work, taking client's files
home with her. I do not know what to do. I am concerned about her, but don't
really know how to approach my concerns. As you know, talking to Clare can be
like pressing on mercury-- first it's there and then it's across the room. In
that regard she is far too much like my mother was, and I must admit it frightens
me to approach her in this mood. Though I am lonely because of it, and I suppose
I could tell her that her mood has taken her away from me, that I am no Lazarus,
faithful and dead until I hop up from doom, though I can't see how that would
help matters right now. Rather I believe it would start a fight that neither
of us could finish. Well, that's enough of that. I won't bore you with it any
longer and though it sounds bad right now it's been worse before. I'll write
you soon and let you know it's over.
Yours
Stephen