A Week in the Word

Patricia Hampl

IF I neglect to take my flashlight up to the monastery chapel for Vespers, I will regret it later when, sloshing blindly through puddles left in the rutted dirt road by the recent downpours, I stumble back in the dark to my—hermitage. The word interrupts with a medieval hiccup this—how do we describe this culture of ours?—this postmodern world, this banquet of possibilities. Just as this week-long retreat interrupts my own life “down there,” as I already think of home. I’m on a mountain, praying, thinking my thoughts—or rather, trying not to think them for once. I am living not simply “away,” in a geographic sense, but out of time, out of modernity, in this California monastery.

Meanwhile, our postmodern culture still revs along, inside me too—so many choices all jumbled together, and just one stomach. We have chosen the name for ourselves: we are no longer souls as we once were, not even citizens; we are consumers, grasping at the disorder of life, all the stuff. Order is not our thing. Only connect, great grandfather (who was a Modernist) instructed. A few generations of only connecting, and here we are.

And what a strange fin de siecle it is. Not exuberant and brainy like the eighteenth century’s mind bounding out of the Enlightenment looking for trouble, looking for progress, and not swooning like the nineteenth century, the Romantic heart sopping up sensibility with its Swinburne. We’re not sad like that; we’re sated.

Maybe we don’t need memory here either. Like order, memory is selective, too constrained. Besides, it is parochial and specific, terribly local. We don’t want memories. We’d rather have theories, constructs, opinions about memory. The littleness of real memories is a burden, also an annoyance. No things but in ideas—that’s how it is with us. Memories (as distinct from “memory”) are the sorry consolation of those who finger their cache of lavender scented old stuff, fuddling over the past which, if not fuddled over, would leave the poor souls scorched with the truth: they’re toast.

We—Americans—hate to be lassoed to the particular like that, like Europeans stuck with their dripping medieval real estate, the grimy pastel villas set prettily on sienna hills, the cobbled corners where their inflamed youth hurtle back and forth on unmuffled motorcycles, rattling the stained glass in the badly caulked basilica embrasures. The kids are trying to get out of there. We understand. Our tradition is to mistrust tradition.

The grotesqueries of leftover cathedrals, the doughty stone enclaves of ancient universities, armless statues, and Della Robbia wreaths—this isn’t our kind of Disneyland either. There is no abstraction to it, no illusion of possibility. Especially, there is no freedom from it. It is beautiful, beautiful! But where is the trapdoor to the future? That is, to abstraction, to imagining oneself, rather than knowing oneself. For knowing oneself, we seem to know, implies acquiescence to limitations. We aren’t ready, not quite, to give in to that—why should we? We’re in charge, aren’t we? “The only super power left,” we say, claiming our tough guy trophy with meaty hands. The vanity of the imperial glitter rubs off on us, a gold dust all the world longs for and fears. We can’t help preening: we’ve created ourselves. We’re nobody’s memory.

Strangely, after all this time of being a country—a “great” country—Americans still prefer the idea of the future to the idea of history. In a way, the idea of the future is our history, or at least a version of our cultural history. The filmy future is a can-do place, our natural habitat. But the past is distressingly complete, full of our absence. We seem to know if you take history too seriously, you’ll never get out. In the place of national memory we have substituted the only other possible story form: the dream. And the essential thing required of the American Dream has always been that it remain a dream, vivid, tantalizing, barely beyond reach. Just the dreaming of it—which costs nothing, absolutely nothing except every cent of our imaginative attention—inflates the soul. Fills it, rather than fulfills it.

The specificity of memory, on the other hand, is humiliating: you can buck that motorcycle up and down those rues, those strasses and borgos, and still you’re caught in your cul de sac, the stained glass Madonna gazing down from her shuddering window with maddening calm. We bolt from the iron apron-strings of history. We wish to be free—whatever that means—and we know that memory, personal or civic, does not promote freedom. Memory tethers.

But I am living—one week, maybe two, tourist time—in a niche of memory. Cultural, not personal, memory. It is Lent, and I am on retreat. This is my hermitage. It is a small trailer. Pre fab, wood panelled, snug. A cell, as the monks still call their own hexagonal hermitages which surround the chapel farther up the steep hill. The idea is not prison cell, but honeybee cell. The hive busy with the opus Dei, the life of prayer.

I am following a way of life, balanced on a pattern of worship trailing back to Saint Benedict and his sixth century Rule for monasteries. And still farther back, into the Syrian desert where the solitary weirdos starved and prayed themselves out of history their own mystic way. Benedict’s Rule drew all that eccentric urgency into the social embrace. Into history. He took the savage hermitage of the Levant, and gentled it into the European monastery. He made a center out of the raw margin the early desert recluses clawed toward. The convent, after all, says frankly what it is: a convention, part of the social compact which claims order as a minion of tradition.

The monastic day here in California at the end of the twentieth century, like the monastic day at Monte Casino early in the sixth century, is poised on a formal cycle of prayers that revolves with the seasons. It is called the Office of Hours or the Divine Office. It divides (or connects) the day (and night) by a series of communal prayer liturgies. This day, like all days, is a memory of the day that preceded it. The day is a habit, the hours reinscribed as ritual. Memory, habit, ritual—those qualities which do not perhaps sustain life (which is elemental, fiercely chaotic), but a life. A way of life, specific, bound to time with the silken ties of—what else?—words. The West murmurs, trying to locate itself; the East breathes, trying to lose itself.

A simplistic distinction, not entirely accurate. After all, the heart of Western contemplative life is silence, and the East, in at least one central practice, chews the word, the mantra. Still, Christianity is undeniably a wordy religion. Lectio divino, sacred reading, the ancient practice laid down by the early patristic writers, is still alive today; it is part of the daily routine here.

Augustine, whose Confessions I’ve brought along on this retreat, is the most passionate exemplar of this practice. He is not simply one of the West’s greatest writers, but its greatest reader. The year is 397, and he is composing the West’s first autobiography, creating the genre which lies at the core of Western consciousness, substituting in place of the ancient idea of a story, the modern literary idea of a life. The omniscient authority of the tale told around the campfire turns to ash in the burning voice of the first person singular.

Augustine is, appropriately, hot with his subject, inflamed with the account of his fascinatingly bad life turned mysteriously good. But he only gives this story the first nine of the thirteen books of his Confessions. Then, without explanation or apology, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the work elides smoothly into an extended meditation on the Book of Genesis as if this, too, were “his life.”

In fact, the movement from his life to his reading is not smooth—it is ablaze. The narrative becomes more, not less, urgent. His story, for Augustine, is only part of the story. There is a clear logic dictating the form of the Confessions which unites the account of his life with his reading of Genesis, though this is not a logic we in the late twentieth century see as readily as Augustine’s late fourth century readers would have.

Having constructed himself in the first nine books of the Confessions, Augustine rushes on to investigate how God created the universe—how God, that is, created him. And all of us, all of this. Reading, therefore, is concentrated life, not a pastiche of life or an alternative to life. The soul, pondering, is experience. Lectio is not “reading” as we might think of it. It is for Augustine, as it was for Ambrose his teacher, and for these California monks in their late twentieth century cells, an acute form of listening. The method is reading—words on paper. But the endeavor is undertaken as a relationship, one filled with the pathos of the West: the individual, alone in a room, puts finger to page, following the Word, and attempts to touch the elusive Lord last seen scurrying down the rabbit-hole of creation. In the beginning God created....

The voice of God is speaking on that page. Augustine, grappling with Genesis in his study, is no less heated—much more so—than Augustine struggling famously with “the flesh.” He invents autobiography not to reveal his memory of his life, but to plumb the memory of God’s creative act.

“My mind burns to solve this complicated enigma,” he says with an anguish more intense than anything that accompanies his revelations about his own life. He understands his life as a model of the very creation that is beyond him—and of course in him. He writes and writes, he reads and reads his way through this double conundrum, the mystery of his own biography and the mystery of creation.

He makes the central, paradoxical, discovery of autobiography: memory is not in the service of the past; it is the future which commands its presence. It is not a reminiscence, but a quest.

Yet how bizarre the truncated modern notion of “seeking a self” would seem to Augustine. Autobiography, for him, does not seek a self, not even for its own “salvation.” For Augustine, the memory work of autobiography creates a self as the right instrument to seek meaning. That is, to seek God. For what purpose? For praise, of course. For if God, the source, the creator, is found, what else is there to do but praise?

Augustine takes this a step further. On the first page of the Confessions he poses a problem that has a familiar modern ring: “it would seem clear that no one can call upon Thee without knowing Thee.” There is, in other words, the problem of God’s notorious absence. Augustine takes the next step West; he seeks his faith with his doubt: “may it be that a man must implore Thee before he can know Thee?” The assumption here is that faith is not to be confused with certainty; the only thing people can really count on is longing and the occult directives of desire. So, Augustine wonders, does that mean prayer must come before faith? Illogical as it is, perhaps not-knowing is the first condition of prayer, rather than its negation. Can that be?

He finds his working answer in Scripture: How shall they call on Him in Whom they have not believed?...they shall praise the Lord that seek Him. Praise, he decides, antedates certainty. Or rather, certainty resides in longing, that core of self from which praise unfurls its song. This is the same core from which streams the narrative impulse of memory: the wonder of a life lived. In the face (or rather, in the embrace) of creation, there is no way to escape the instinct to cry out.

This is where the Psalms come in. They are praise. More: they are relation, full of the intensity of intimacy, the rage, petulance and exaltation, the sheer delight and exasperation of intimate encounter. This is the spectrum of all emotion, all life. The Psalmist reaches with his lyric claw to fetch it all in words.

Words, words, words. They circle and spin around Western spiritual practice. They abide. They even sustain a way of life—this monastic one—which has careened down the centuries, creating families (the Benedictines, the Franciscans, the Carmelites, and others) with lineages longer and more unbroken than any royal house in Europe. The pattern of prayer, handed down generation to generation, has sustained this extraordinary life-line.

Words have proven to be more protean than blood.

The monastic life of the West cleaves to the Psalms, claiming the ancient Jewish poetry as its real heart, more central to its day than the New Testament or even the sacraments. The Psalms keep this life going—the verbal engine running into the deepest recess of Christian social life, and beyond that back into the source of silence, the desert of the early hermits.

The idea here in this American monastery, based on a tenth century reformation of the earlier Benedictine model, is to wed both traditions—the social monastery and the solitary hermitage, desert and city, public and private. It is a way of life based on a historical pattern.

Therefore, this life might be understood as a living memory. It is also a life lived, literally, within poetry. And as it happens, the name of this hermitage is Logos. The Word. The word made home. A week in the word.

Against one wall, the bed. I make it quickly like a good novice first thing every morning, pulling the dorm-room spread square. Suitcase stowed beneath—I’m here long enough to want to obscure the truth: I’m a visitor, passing through. I’ve never liked being a traveler: I take up residence. “I’m going home,” I say instinctively, returning to my hotel the first day in a foreign city. So, here: Logos is my house.

Also here, a round table (eat, read, write, prop elbows on, sling leg over occasionally). Shelves niched in next to the tiny open closet space where I’ve installed my books, what I could lug on the plane: short stories by Harold Brodkey, a writer whose fiction I’ve sought out solely because of his searing AIDS memoir, drawn to the art by the life. Also a new novel by someone someone else said was good (not opened), poems I already love, one new book by Mark Doty, Augustine with his bookmark, Dawson’s Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, plus a dictionary that didn’t have the only word I’ve looked up so far, and Thich Nhat Hanh with yet another volume attempting to calm us Westerners down, out of ourselves: breathe, feel, exhale—there. And like everybody on a desert island, the Bible (the New Jerusalem version).

A rudimentary kitchen runs along another wall; bathroom beyond that, the only other room. And two windows, one to nowhere, hugged by two crowded eucalyptus trees and the vinca-covered curve of the steep eroded dirt road I alone seem to climb to the chapel. The other window, the window that counts, gives onto—paradise. The Western rind of America peels off far below into the extravagant white curl of Big Sur. Where the slant of the Santa Lucia range, where we are perched, cuts off the view of the coastline, the Pacific, blue as steel (it is overcast) or ultramarine (on sunny days), appears to be cantilevered below us, a blue platform leading to the end of the world. Sometimes, roughed up by wind and whitecaps, the ocean loses this quality of being architecture; it becomes expensive fabric, shimmering silver. Then, simply, what it is: the vast pool, brimming to the horizon.

This is where I have come. There was no crisis. No, at the moment, heartache or career impasse. No dark night except the usual ones. Doesn’t everyone wake up maybe two nights a week, mind gunning, palms sweating? In the eyes-open misery of night, sensation gets mashed to a paste of meaninglessness—life’s or one’s own. No anguish beyond that to report. Every so often I just do this: go on retreat.

It is not uncommon in this supposedly secular age. Meditation, massage, monasteries and spas—the postmodern stomach, if not its soul, knows it needs purging. Such places are even popular, booked months in advance. Down the coast the Buddhists are meditating, eating very intelligently. Esalen is nearby too, and the place where Henry Miller discovered the hot tub. I could go to the Buddhists, cleanse in the silence, approach the big Empty which is the great source: I believe that.

But I come here, and follow the Christian monastic day laid out like a garden plot by Benedict at the close of the Roman era. I am Western; I like my silence sung.

In any case, the day itself is silent. The only words are the chanted ones in the chapel, unless I call home. My thin voice sounds odd, insubstantial. My husband carefully recites all the messages from my office answering machine. I ask if he’s OK. He is. You OK? I tell him I am. I love you. Me too—I love you. Touching base. The telephone receiver clicks back into its cradle, and the mirage of news and endearments melts. It doesn’t disappear exactly—I leave the telephone room, a little booth by the monastery bookstore, smiling, his voice still in my ear. It’s just that conversation has become a bare tissue of meaning, a funny human foible, but not something to take seriously for once. The mid-day bell is ringing, and there is something I’m trying to remember.

That’s wrong. I am not trying “to remember” something. I want to get this right, this odd experience of praying all day. More like this: I am being remembered. Being remembered into a memory—beyond historic to the inchoate, still intense trace of feeling that first laid down this pattern. It is a memory which puts all personal memory in the shade, and with it, all other language. In my experience, it is unique, this sensation of being drawn out of language by language which the Divine Office occasions. Praying, chanting the Psalms, draws me out of whatever I might be thinking or remembering (for so much thinking is remembering, revisiting, rehearsing). I am launched by the Psalms into a memory to which I belong but which is not mine. I don’t possess it; it possesses me. Possession understood not as ownership, but as embrace. The embrace of habitation. Hermitage of the word.

In recent years, I have gone on several Vipassana Buddhist retreats, also silent, where the practice has been sitting and walking meditation. I will do that again because it was what it promised: cleansing, insightful. It felt like the rarest air it is possible to breathe. And its substance was exactly that: breath and its entrance, its exit. Though it was difficult, it was gentle. More: it was a relief. Perhaps especially so for a contemporary Western mind, wracked with busyness. It was not a hive, the cells humming.

But here in this Benedictine monastery, even though the day is silent (conversation has been abducted somewhere), the hours murmur. The first morning bell rings at 5:30. I walk up to the chapel in the dead-night dark for Vigils, the first round of daily prayers. The chapel is stark, perhaps to some eyes severe. Not to me: the calm of the place is an invitation. I bow, as each of the monks does when he enters, toward the dark sanctuary. A candle burns there. The honey-colored wood chairs and benches, ranked on two sides, face each other. They form two barely curved lines, two choirs deftly passing the ball of chant back and forth across the arched room as, somewhere beyond us, the sun rises and the world begins to exist again.

It is important that this not sound ecstatic. I must leech the exaltation out of the description. Here is what happens in the chapel: old news is revisited, peeves and praise ritualized (the Psalms don’t just exult; they grunt and groan). The call to the elusive One, polished with plain-chant, is handed back and forth across the ranks of the honey-colored chairs like an imaginary globe of blown glass passed by men wearing cream-colored habits over their jeans and work shirts, scuffed Reeboks visible below their chapel-robe hems. It sometimes seems improbable, ridiculous.

And my mind wanders. There are the monks, looking very much alike in their cream-colored robes, and yet I manage to wonder—is that one gay? The one with the clipped accent—from Boston maybe? The one on the left looks like a banker, could have been a CEO, why not? The guy over here looks like a truckdriver. On and on it goes, my skittery mind. Meanwhile, the Psalms keep rolling. A line snags—More than the watchman for daybreak, my whole being hopes in the Lord—and I am pulled along.

It can also be boring. What happens in the chapel partakes of tedium. It must. The patterns repeat and return. Every four weeks the entire Book of Psalms, all 150 poems, is chanted. And then begun again, and again, and again. Sing to the Lord a new song, we have been saying since David was king. This new song rolls from the rise of monotheism, unbroken, across the first millennium, through the second, soon to enter the third, the lapidary waves of chant polishing the shore of history. There are men here—there are men and women in monasteries all over the world—repeating this pattern faithfully in antiphonal choirs, softly lobbing this same language back and forth to each other. What is this invisible globe they are passing across the space?

Worship, of course. But what is worship? It is the practice of the fiercest possible attention. And here, at the end of the millennium, the ancient globe of polished words, rubbed by a million anxious hands down the centuries, is also the filmy glass of memory. We touch it. But this is memory understood not as individual story, not as private fragment clutched to the heart, trusted only to the secret page. Even in the midst of high emotion, the rants and effusions that characterize the psalmist’s wild compass, there is a curious non-psychological quality to the voice. This is the voice of the intense anonymous self. It has no mother, no father. Or it borrows, finally, the human family as its one true relation. This is the memory of the world’s longing. Desire so elemental that its shape can only be glimpsed in the incorruptible storehouse of poetic image—he sends ice crystals like bread crumbs, and who can withstand that cold? Our days pass by like grass, our prime like a flower in bloom. A wind comes, the power goes....

Paging through a picture book of Christian and Buddhist monasteries in the bookstore, stopped by this cutline accompanying a photograph of a beautiful Buddhist monastery, a remark by a dogen: “The only truth is we are here now.” The humility of living in the present moment. The physical beauty of the place is eloquent, revealing the formal attentiveness of a supreme aesthetic: mindfulness. The human at its best. And the food is famous there. They are living their profound injunction, honoring the fleet moment, and the smallest life: Buddhist retreatants are asked not to kill the black flies that torment them. Here, when I told the monk at the bookstore that ants were streaming all over the kitchen counter of Logos, he handed me an aerosol canister, and I was glad. I sprayed, mopped, discarded the little poppyseeds of ant carcasses. I sat back satisfied, turning again to Augustine and the mind of the West, figuring, figuring. The sweetish spume of bug spray hung in the air for a day.

Lord, do we need the East. The bug spray has to stop, we know that. Contemplative nuns have told me that without the introduction of Buddhist meditation practice, they wouldn’t be in the monastery anymore. “It’s thanks to Buddhism that I’m a Catholic,” one of them said. I have never been to an American Christian monastery that did not have Buddhist meditation mats and pillows somewhere in the chapel. The gentle missionary work of the East, its light, blessedly unecclesiastical heart, the absence of cultural imperialism, the poetry of its gestures: the bell is never “struck,” never “hit.” In the Buddhist monastery, it is invited to sound.

But still this handing down of words, still this Western practice I cannot abandon, would not wish myself out of. The only truth is we are here now. I don’t believe we are only here. How could I, transfixed by memory as I am, believing in the surge of these particular words down the channel of the centuries? We are here—for now. My conception of this is not of a heaven (and hell) in the future, but rather of an understanding of existence which encompasses history as well as being.

I will ponder the story of your wonders. Imagine that. Imagine living one’s life entirely around, within, through, over and under the chanting of poetry. Maybe it is another way, the West’s way, of saying we are here now. Out of this recitation of the ancient words to reach the stillness of the present moment. The Psalms are an intricate web of human experience, reminding us that we live in history, and that history is the story of longing. Its pulse races.

We enter the dark sanctuary, bow to the flame, assemble in the honey-colored chairs again, two halves of the human choir. Some mornings at Vigils, before first light, it feels strangely as if our little band—fifteen monks, a handful of retreatants—are legion. The two facing choir lines curve slightly, two horizon lines, an embryonic globe forming anew.

We are greeting first light, we are entering dark night. It is all very old, a memory of a memory. And it is new as only the day can be new, over and over. The day is a paradox, and we enter it possessed by time’s tricksy spirit, history and the present instant sublimely transposed.

We are here now, the East is chanting from its side of the monastery.

Oh yes, the West chants in response, the antiphon rising as it has all these short centuries, out of the endless memory we inhabit together, Sing a new song, sing a new song to the Lord.

Patricia Hampl is the author of two memoirs, A Romantic Education and Virgin Time, as well as two collections of poetry and a prose meditation, Spillville (about Antonin Dvorak’s 1893 summer in Iowa). Her new book of essays on memory and imagination, I Could Tell You Stories, was published in 1999. She is Regents’ Professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where she teaches creative writing.

Visit Patricia Hampl as Image Artist of the Month for December '99

Issue #19 • Spring 1998