Thursday, June 12,2003
At 8 a.m. I record a couple things from the night’s tape recording.
I’m lying here, not dreaming, not asleep, yet all this stuff has been going through my mind generally, gradually. I don’t know where it comes from.
Something very appropriate in my lying here in sleep mask and earplugs. It’s like isolating myself from everything around me for this purpose. But I’ve done that my whole life, without the results I would hope for, and I’m thinking, maybe I need to go more into the world. Perhaps if I could find a proper venue I could write an article about the spiritual nervous breakdown caused by the Protestant revolution and the materialist revolution that followed.
It would be an unusual mixture of elements because it would take for granted that:
- we are many lives joined, and that
- these lives contend within us, and that
- changes in civilization result in parts of ourselves fighting violently or actively or quietly or in whatever manner, against each other, we being the battleground.
Stuff the guys have told Rita and me would be much background on it. And I begin to sense that the book on what they have said has more to do with this than with the fact that they said it. Perhaps the book has lacked a point of application to individuals, and this is it, or part of it.
A view across to Mull
After breakfast I find what I have been looking for: a comfortable bench to sit on; a view of town and sea and Mull ahead of me; sunlight so bright as to require sunglasses for the first time.
But then I find a gate that leads inward toward the hills. A local woman says it is all right to go through as long as I tie the gate firmly behind me. So after a while I am perched looking westward at one more set of hills that overlook the Atlantic. But between me and them is not only a valley but a fence. A good excuse to stop here anyway. Another lovely day. I left Dun I yesterday when I saw clouds coming in. I didn’t want to be caught out in the open with hills to climb and descend in the rain. I suppose I exaggerated the danger (it’s a small island, after all) but how much space does it take to break your leg or arm – or your neck, come to that. It’s hard, in unfamiliar surroundings, to estimate risk.
An Iona hillside
I have found a spot with no one in sight or sound of me. Just grass, or whatever it is, and rock, and sky — and sheep droppings. Paradise? I invite David to talk into my tape recorder. Nothing. Then a few minutes later I feel him come through:
“If by transformation you think that you mean walking to a place, becoming instantly transformed, and walking away a different man, your ideas are more romantic than realistic. It is as your friend Richard said, you go to a holy spot not to go one person and become another, but to be infected, and by being infected be able to then infect others. You know in a different part of your mind that this is what you’ve been doing at Iona; at Machu Picchu [in 1999]; at Avebury; Salisbury [both in 2001]; at Monticello [various times], for that; at Skye [in 1970], long before you knew what you were doing – nor did you have any part in the planning of it; at Sligo; at Yeats’ lake; at Yeats’ tower; in the Ox mountains; Galway Bay; Connemara particularly [all in 1976];
“If you will remember, every time you went to any tourist place, you attempted to feel your way into that time, and came away always discouraged because you did not feel that you could do it. You wished away the asphalt and the cars, the airplanes, the buildings, all of 20th century America – even your fellow people; even to a degree yourself. All of which of course is impossible and undesirable.
“But while your conscious mind was attempting to pretend that it was back in another time, another level of yourself was using the physical locality as a means of re-connecting with another person. Most particularly the time in Wyoming when you were there with your friend and your wife and your sister-in-law and you went prowling around the perimeter of a bygone fort, feeling stirred but not knowing why, wanting to connect and not knowing how, and this I should think would be obvious.
“So on one level you are accomplishing exactly what it is you want to do, because on this island you will find that there is a pattern to be discerned. First you went south, then north, now you’re in the hills in the center. As you pin down precisely where you’ve been – particularly the two hills – you will find a grounding at each place, a grounding in a certain order.
“Now, you will also notice that your unaccustomed silence, your uncomfortable and perplexing silence at breakfast times, is connected with the reconnection with other places and other times. This is not to go into ‘why,’ but it will uncover itself. Your inability to communicate in an easy, human way with your fellow pilgrims, your inability to overcome the “ministership” of one of your pilgrims particularly, will reveal itself as intimately connected with the process that is going on here.
“You seem strange to them. It’s not the kind of strange that repels, it’s the kind that somewhat fascinates, at least interests. Anyone looking at you can see that you’re not (I hesitated to say) entirely here. But after all, you just opened your eyes in the midst of this and found yourself on this rocky crag somewhat to your surprise, as has happened repeatedly. When you first closed your eyes and meditated today, and opened your eyes again, where you are, where you have been, where you’ve not left, seemed somewhat strange to you. You needn’t fret yourself so much about getting something done, or accomplishing something by a given moment. Living and enjoying the moment is [wind noise drowns out the word].”
Then I go clambering around, and after a while I come down near the Iona Community gift shop. I do a little more shopping, and give a copy of my novel Messenger to the woman I’d offered energy to on Tuesday, who I will call Susan. (I had brought it for Robert but somehow hadn’t gotten it to him.) She invites me to supper at the MacLeod Center at six. This I take to be something happening at last.
The 2 p.m. boat around the island again doesn’t go out (conditions too rough) so I decide to sit and quietly read.