Pissed off and fed up. Tired really. S stayed the night, I let her despite her insisting she has to get up at 6am. We watched the last episode of Dirk Gently, which was fun, and I wouldn’t mind watching another series if they’ve made one. I’d also downloaded El Camino (the film sequel / closure to Breaking Bad) so I had my evening sorted but S retreated from the French retreat crowd and Christiana giving us the PC lecture on Brazilian politics. Supposedly telling us about the problems of Amazonia. Another “compulsory” after dinner lecture that I fell into by accident – I’d gone out to help Alistair Cummings, Lord Leitch’s gofer, unload his van full of books and a hideous wooden statue of Saint Luke which we now have to find a home for; not really hideous, just of no conceivable merit; Leitch used it for a hat stand, apparently. Anyway came in to finish my supper and Christiana was in full flood. Apparently, among many other obvious flaws, Bolsanero has a cognitive disorder and is a friend of Trump’s – PC titters and ha ha’s all round. So that’s that then. Not.
So S had made her escape and wassapped me that she’d gone up to the caravan. We had a nice evening watching telly and talking and I let her stay – I really should have made her go when she insisted on a 6 am alarm. And she said again we’d leave on October 24, at which point I got quite shirty. I have no idea why she is so keen not to leave on the 23rd, but she just seems intent on reducing the trip into a long drive to take her stuff back to Basel, instead of a nice couple of days on our own. And I start feeling used, and abused. I told her we leave on the 23rd, or else, and in the small hours “or else” becomes, drive yourself back to Switzerland. I calmed down while we watched Dirk Gently, and we snuggle up and go to sleep. I wake up at 2am, and steadily work myself into a rage about the whole thing. I finally got up and went outside at 3am after thinking about turning on all the lights and making myself a cup of tea and having a smoke, but that seemed childish and unkind. I tried taking a photograph of her asleep in the light of the full moon, she looked beautiful, childlike, curiously sulky, but there wasn’t enough light so I took pictures of the moon instead, through the caravan window.
I sat under the nearly full moon, listening to a really interesting podcast about quantum worlds – Sean Carroll “Something deeply hidden” – which got me believing in the multiple worlds theory and he put forward a plausible quantum explanation for gravity – drinking tea and smoking and not thinking any more about the wickedness and incomprehensibility of S – there was no room in my head while stretching the brain to get it round the Schroedinger equation and the wave function of the universe.
So I’d / I’ve lost distance / detachment from S again, and I’m tired, and feel pretty crap. I’m also sober, and know what I need to do; just keep away from S, and don’t rush to judgement, or try to fix things or myself by doing stupid stuff or making decisions (hasty or otherwise).
I told her last night that I thought I now realised Bonnevaux is my home, where I really want to stay, but I just don’t want to be unhappy here. And all my responses to my unhappiness (booze, running away to Naxos, jumping off a cliff, wanting to have sex with her) are essentially negative. I have no better idea of what to do with myself, and really felt yesterday this is the best place and that it could work out. And meditation has been really good the past couple of days.
And lurking behind a lot of this, and the idea has been there for a while, is the coincidence of the period of my unhappiness, with S and I becoming lovers. Is that like Harry Haller murdering Hermine? That I have to or want to kill the thing I love? And my confusion is just not knowing or understanding what is going on behind S’s mask. It’s like a re-run of The Magus. I said a prayer on Thursday night, that I not fuck this up, that if all this is some kind of lesson, or test, I don’t fail it. Yet even as I thought that, I thought this is not about failure (losing what I love, or what is precious and valuable, or just simply not understanding what is being asked of me) but about something deeper. Although only god knows what.
There’s a fucking fly in the caravan. Yesterday’s sunshine and turning the heater on has woken it up. I’m trying to kill it.
I’m confused. I shall meditate.
A very good lecture yesterday about Kierkegaard, by Hubert Dreyfus. On K’s view of the nature of the self; not soul versus body, the two combined, not united (as the Greeks saw it, and Christians, too, mostly) but as a synthesis / unity. As if soul and body are two poles between which we oscillate, very like Hesse’s idea in Steppenwolf. And the real nature of the self is in how the self relates to itself, which I think I understand. Is the self hiding from or denying the ‘soul’ (the materialist) or the ‘body’ pole (the ascetic / mystic), or is it simply suffering in trying to deal with the synthesis, and the contradictions? What is the self’s attitude to being? Heidegger’s view – that the problem for the human being is Being itself, the fact that we exist at all. Yes.
Anyway, part 1 of 4 so I shall try and find the others.
Finally projections. I saw very vividly on Thursday how the whole of Bonnevaux (everyone, what happens, what I feel about it, the place, the buildings, the ‘project’) is my projection, and everyone else here is doing the same, and we’re all looking in, as if we are living on the inside of a globe, and all our projections and psychic energy are boiling round, contained within this globe, this goldfish bowl – we really should get out more – exhausting and confusing and testing and maybe refining us. So we get tummy troubles, and feel exhausted, and stressed, and desperately want to run away, or control things, or just go to bed. Catherine was very good about that in the Chapter meeting on Thursday, and Richard Rohr in the reading from The Naked Now, that suffering is essentially about feeling we are not in control, and that the cure is simply to surrender, to let go, to let it all be. It certainly hurts. But trying to escape into denial and negativity and distractions and ‘little me’ is just another cul de sac.
The one thing that doesn’t feel unreal, like a part of the projection, is the place itself, this little valley with its beauty. S said maybe this place has some special quality, why the monks settled here in the first place, and I do feel, again, that Bonnevaux itself is directing things, that none of the actors are really in control, which I used to say and feel a lot last year. It also reminds me of an article in Resurgence that I read on Naxos, about the cone of being. At the top are partners, lovers, then family, close friends, then community, then wider society (employment, status, a feeling of belonging to a polity) and at the base of the cone is nature itself. And as these upper layers collapse or break down or fail or disappear, it’s nature alone that supports us. I felt that very strongly on Naxos, and I feel it here too, although less strongly – that it has some kind of objective reality, truth; that if all else fails, it is still true, and can somehow be relied on, sought refuge in. Which may simply be the last illusion.
That we both wanted to be seduced, to fall in love, to make love, to be loved and accepted.
Spending the night with her (or two days in a car to Switzerland) is like sitting beside a bottle of whisky and not being allowed or able to drink it. But if I did, I could at least go down to Super-U and buy another. I’m addicted and dependent and wretched and the only cure I can see is to push her away. Why isn’t just waiting until she leaves an answer? It might be, but not if she’s in my bed, and my head. How to just let go . . . and is there an ego thing there? That I hate the fact that she decided to leave, and my deciding not to go to Basel with her, or to let her come to London is just my ego wanting to take control, kick back, not just let her do to me what Sukie did, and Pol, and actually all of them (starting with Ma?)
And what is she up to? Is she taking some weird kind of revenge on her father through me? Is that why I latch on to these women, because they mirror what Ma did to Da (and what was Ma’s problem? I thought she was always Daddy’s blue eyed girl. She was, and so were they all – or wanted to be. They all have father issues, and I’m their revenge. So why do I keep putting myself in harm’s way? To try and work out what Da couldn’t? To fix Ma? Are Sukie and I a good model for Joe and Aden? Felicity? How do we not repeat the mistakes of our parents? The sins of the fathers (and mothers).
So. Don’t drink. Detach. Do something? Like cancel Switzerland, or London, or both.
I gave up on the flies and hung up a fresh paper. Three dead. Two still free. Fucking irritating. I don’t care about my karma.
It / she is just like booze. A day of calm, distance, of feeling in control, and I think I can cope with her for the night. And I fall apart, wake up with an emotional hangover, all churned up. Is the not being in control / letting it just happen to me the real way? Isn’t that what I did with Sukie and Pol, and look how well that turned out?
I’m going to do something. Cut rock first. Then maybe go down to the Abbaye and do something useful. Or not.
So S had made her escape and wassapped me that she’d gone up to the caravan. We had a nice evening watching telly and talking and I let her stay – I really should have made her go when she insisted on a 6 am alarm. And she said again we’d leave on October 24, at which point I got quite shirty. I have no idea why she is so keen not to leave on the 23rd, but she just seems intent on reducing the trip into a long drive to take her stuff back to Basel, instead of a nice couple of days on our own. And I start feeling used, and abused. I told her we leave on the 23rd, or else, and in the small hours “or else” becomes, drive yourself back to Switzerland. I calmed down while we watched Dirk Gently, and we snuggle up and go to sleep. I wake up at 2am, and steadily work myself into a rage about the whole thing. I finally got up and went outside at 3am after thinking about turning on all the lights and making myself a cup of tea and having a smoke, but that seemed childish and unkind. I tried taking a photograph of her asleep in the light of the full moon, she looked beautiful, childlike, curiously sulky, but there wasn’t enough light so I took pictures of the moon instead, through the caravan window.
I sat under the nearly full moon, listening to a really interesting podcast about quantum worlds – Sean Carroll “Something deeply hidden” – which got me believing in the multiple worlds theory and he put forward a plausible quantum explanation for gravity – drinking tea and smoking and not thinking any more about the wickedness and incomprehensibility of S – there was no room in my head while stretching the brain to get it round the Schroedinger equation and the wave function of the universe.
 |
| the moon, through a glass darkly |
So I’d / I’ve lost distance / detachment from S again, and I’m tired, and feel pretty crap. I’m also sober, and know what I need to do; just keep away from S, and don’t rush to judgement, or try to fix things or myself by doing stupid stuff or making decisions (hasty or otherwise).
I told her last night that I thought I now realised Bonnevaux is my home, where I really want to stay, but I just don’t want to be unhappy here. And all my responses to my unhappiness (booze, running away to Naxos, jumping off a cliff, wanting to have sex with her) are essentially negative. I have no better idea of what to do with myself, and really felt yesterday this is the best place and that it could work out. And meditation has been really good the past couple of days.
And lurking behind a lot of this, and the idea has been there for a while, is the coincidence of the period of my unhappiness, with S and I becoming lovers. Is that like Harry Haller murdering Hermine? That I have to or want to kill the thing I love? And my confusion is just not knowing or understanding what is going on behind S’s mask. It’s like a re-run of The Magus. I said a prayer on Thursday night, that I not fuck this up, that if all this is some kind of lesson, or test, I don’t fail it. Yet even as I thought that, I thought this is not about failure (losing what I love, or what is precious and valuable, or just simply not understanding what is being asked of me) but about something deeper. Although only god knows what.
There’s a fucking fly in the caravan. Yesterday’s sunshine and turning the heater on has woken it up. I’m trying to kill it.
I’m confused. I shall meditate.
A very good lecture yesterday about Kierkegaard, by Hubert Dreyfus. On K’s view of the nature of the self; not soul versus body, the two combined, not united (as the Greeks saw it, and Christians, too, mostly) but as a synthesis / unity. As if soul and body are two poles between which we oscillate, very like Hesse’s idea in Steppenwolf. And the real nature of the self is in how the self relates to itself, which I think I understand. Is the self hiding from or denying the ‘soul’ (the materialist) or the ‘body’ pole (the ascetic / mystic), or is it simply suffering in trying to deal with the synthesis, and the contradictions? What is the self’s attitude to being? Heidegger’s view – that the problem for the human being is Being itself, the fact that we exist at all. Yes.
Anyway, part 1 of 4 so I shall try and find the others.
Finally projections. I saw very vividly on Thursday how the whole of Bonnevaux (everyone, what happens, what I feel about it, the place, the buildings, the ‘project’) is my projection, and everyone else here is doing the same, and we’re all looking in, as if we are living on the inside of a globe, and all our projections and psychic energy are boiling round, contained within this globe, this goldfish bowl – we really should get out more – exhausting and confusing and testing and maybe refining us. So we get tummy troubles, and feel exhausted, and stressed, and desperately want to run away, or control things, or just go to bed. Catherine was very good about that in the Chapter meeting on Thursday, and Richard Rohr in the reading from The Naked Now, that suffering is essentially about feeling we are not in control, and that the cure is simply to surrender, to let go, to let it all be. It certainly hurts. But trying to escape into denial and negativity and distractions and ‘little me’ is just another cul de sac.
The one thing that doesn’t feel unreal, like a part of the projection, is the place itself, this little valley with its beauty. S said maybe this place has some special quality, why the monks settled here in the first place, and I do feel, again, that Bonnevaux itself is directing things, that none of the actors are really in control, which I used to say and feel a lot last year. It also reminds me of an article in Resurgence that I read on Naxos, about the cone of being. At the top are partners, lovers, then family, close friends, then community, then wider society (employment, status, a feeling of belonging to a polity) and at the base of the cone is nature itself. And as these upper layers collapse or break down or fail or disappear, it’s nature alone that supports us. I felt that very strongly on Naxos, and I feel it here too, although less strongly – that it has some kind of objective reality, truth; that if all else fails, it is still true, and can somehow be relied on, sought refuge in. Which may simply be the last illusion.
That we both wanted to be seduced, to fall in love, to make love, to be loved and accepted.
Spending the night with her (or two days in a car to Switzerland) is like sitting beside a bottle of whisky and not being allowed or able to drink it. But if I did, I could at least go down to Super-U and buy another. I’m addicted and dependent and wretched and the only cure I can see is to push her away. Why isn’t just waiting until she leaves an answer? It might be, but not if she’s in my bed, and my head. How to just let go . . . and is there an ego thing there? That I hate the fact that she decided to leave, and my deciding not to go to Basel with her, or to let her come to London is just my ego wanting to take control, kick back, not just let her do to me what Sukie did, and Pol, and actually all of them (starting with Ma?)
And what is she up to? Is she taking some weird kind of revenge on her father through me? Is that why I latch on to these women, because they mirror what Ma did to Da (and what was Ma’s problem? I thought she was always Daddy’s blue eyed girl. She was, and so were they all – or wanted to be. They all have father issues, and I’m their revenge. So why do I keep putting myself in harm’s way? To try and work out what Da couldn’t? To fix Ma? Are Sukie and I a good model for Joe and Aden? Felicity? How do we not repeat the mistakes of our parents? The sins of the fathers (and mothers).
So. Don’t drink. Detach. Do something? Like cancel Switzerland, or London, or both.
I gave up on the flies and hung up a fresh paper. Three dead. Two still free. Fucking irritating. I don’t care about my karma.
It / she is just like booze. A day of calm, distance, of feeling in control, and I think I can cope with her for the night. And I fall apart, wake up with an emotional hangover, all churned up. Is the not being in control / letting it just happen to me the real way? Isn’t that what I did with Sukie and Pol, and look how well that turned out?
I’m going to do something. Cut rock first. Then maybe go down to the Abbaye and do something useful. Or not.
 |
| the rock on its Way |
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