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Chapter One

October 18, 1967
There was an eclipse of the moon about 4 to 5 this morning. The clouds cleared a little and I was able to see it begin. Then after I said Mass I went out and the eclipse was closer to full, the clouds had almost completely gone. The moon was beautiful, dimly red, like a globe of almost transparent amber, with a shapeless foetus of darkness curled in the midst of it. It hung there between two tall pines, silent, unexplained, small, with a modest suggestion of bloodiness, an omen without fierceness and without comment, pure.

There was a great deal of rain yesterday, and I talked with J [ohn] Ford, a Louisville attorney, about the estate, the Trust, etc. I hope finally something will get done. We have been at it for three years and nothing has happened. This is a new one -- I hope he will act. I should have got a Kentucky lawyer long ago, I guess.

Last evening at supper (wild rice, barbecued beans, knocked out my stomach) I read some of Leonard Woolf's Autobiography-the 4th volume (Downhill All the Way). What a job they did with that Hogarth Press! And what their list brings back to me -- the days when I bought second-hand novels and poetry in London Bookshops -- Eliot, Graves, Lawrence -- and Roger Fry whom they published also. Bloomsbury and their friends -- and the Royal Hotel which L.W sued. All this was a world where I was once a citizen.

Curious contest with the record of Janis Ian sent by a nun at Regina Laudis [monastery, Bethlehem, Connecticut]. Articulate, sensitive, vulnerable, disconcerting: a 15-year-old girl.

October 23,1967
Blazing bright days, cool nights, my face still hot from burn as we sat yesterday at top of the long new farm cornfield -- Gene Meatyard, Jonathan Williams, Guy Davenport, Bonnie and I -- in noon sun and drank some beer. Hills glimmering with heat and color. Sky deep blue. All distances sharp. White dead corn leaves blowing about in the hot dust of the field, fully ravaged, fully harvested.

Gene brought some of his photos -- including ones taken around the beatup house down the road in June (the house now repaired and occupied, with a pickup standing outside under the locust tree).

Jonathan had an exciting and beautiful new book of concrete poetry.

Guy picked up the avocado seed Bob Shepherd [from Lexington] threw away there the other day when it was much colder.

Telegram from Doris Dana sent October 20, reached me (the note of the phone message) yesterday, 22nd. Not bad for here! The other day Rosemary Haughton came out (between lectures in Minneapolis and Chicago). It was curious to meet a theologian who is six months pregnant. In a long black cloak with hair blowing in the wind she sat on the concrete dam of Dom Frederic's Lake. I hope my picture of that is good. She is quiet, intelligent, not the obstreperous kind of activist progressive, concerned about a real contemplative life continuing, etc.

Saturday, with some satisfaction, finished "The Sacred City" essay (or rather Sunday morning when I added a final half page) on Monte Alban. I enjoyed writing this and it came easy.

J. W. Hackett has sent a volume of his English Haiku. I am not convinced Haiku can or should be written in English. His are, it seems to me, somewhat weakened by too many present participles and adverbs. I don't see how you can make a Haiku out of "-ing" and "-ly." Dismantle and rewrite as concrete poetry! Then he might have something!

Last evening after supper -- an intruder barged in here, frankly boasting that he had easily figured out the combination of the padlock on the highway gate. Car full of suits on hangers strung across the back seat left halfway up the hill. Had no real reason for being here except curiosity, wanted to get his nose into everything. Why this? Why that? Why do you live in such a place? Young, boasted about his exploits as a "private investigator" -- trailing women to Holiday Inns. Maybe he was investigating me. I thought about it, pacing up and down in the dark, after I had got rid of him. Certainly he has now cased the place, knows how to get in and steal things if he wants to. I don't think he was malicious or systematic, just nosey and disorganized -- a budding operator. He gave his name as Ken Hill and said he came from Chicago. Maybe! I asked where he was going. Vague. Could be Memphis, perhaps. A red car: I'm too dumb to know what kind and I forgot to take a look at the plates.

October 25, 1967
I do not have much news of what happened in Washington Saturday -- an enormous peace mobilization at which there was evidently some violence. An ex-novice whom I happened to meet outside the gate Saturday said that troops had been called to "protect the Pentagon" and in his opinion this made sense "because of all those juvenile delinquents"! Roger Barnard -- who has good judgment -- surmises in Peace News that Johnson will sooner or later stop bombing Vietnam and call a Peace Conference knowing that North Vietnam wants something more than that. Then, having "failed" in his "honest" efforts for peace he will flatten North Vietnam. Or try to. An invasion, etc. The stupidity and blindness of American power, which, in its own terms is perfectly "logical" -- and yet its terms are fantastically arbitrary and respond only to the "reality" of a thinking that goes on within an artificial and closed system. To defend your own reality and then impose it forcefully fully on the outside world is paranoia.