Hotel Retreat Day 1

This is a photo of my rental car.  At Dollar, they don't assign a car to you.  All the cars in your price category are parked together and you pick out whichever one you want.  I grabbed this bright yellow Chevy so I could find the car easily in a parking lot.  Gray rental cars take so much effort, you have to pay all that attention to keep track of them.  My yellow car is a bright slash in a sea of gray and white cars.  You glance in its direction and it grabs you.

It's quarter to 11 on my first day of my 10 day hotel stay in Culver City.  I'm still unpacking and unearthly tired, having gotten only 4 hours of sleep last night.  I'm listening to "Miles Davis Radio" on Pandora.  They're currently playing Lester Young's "Prisoner of Love."  This is so fitting as I've been reading about Thomas Merton's late-in-life romance with a student nurse half his age.  Volume 6 of Merton's edited journal, which chronicles that period of his life, is called Learning to Love.  It's fascinating and unbearable to hear him go on and on and on and on about the depth of his love for Margie, alternately rationalizing it and guilt tripping over it. He kept his Trappist vows of chastity in that he and Margie never had sex-sex, but it sounds like they fooled around.  Merton's excesses remind me of my own excesses, remind me of the excesses of anybody who falls passionately in love, as if being in love were a form of possession, or a disease with predictable and inevitable stages—even though when you're in that state, you're sure what you're going through is unique to you and your muse.  Here's Alica Keys singing "Love is My Disease":



 I thought love would be my cure/ but now it's my disease

When the affair is found out and Merton is forbidden to see her (he does continue to see her a bit, even after forbidden not to), this fuels a new wave of love for now that the physical temptation is removed, Margie and his love for her can be idealized, and he can hold her image with him day and night, possess it.  Woman as divine muse.  I'm also reading John Howard Griffin's Follow the Ecstasy:  The Hermitage Years of Thomas Merton.  The trauma of Merton's passion causes him to glide over a lot of details.  It's hard to tell what Margie's like and what actually transpired between them in some of these furtive meeings.  Griffin's book fills in gaps.  The sex life of repressed spiritual types continues to fascinate.   People in love always seem foolish, and the more dignified the persona, the more foolish they seem.  I look at Merton and I look at my blatherings about the buddhist, and I look at a dozen other books dealing with spiritual life I've read this past year and I wonder:  do any of us really know anything?  Would life be interesting without flaws?  According to Griffin, Merton didn't feel comfortable with the idealized version of himself that the world held, and he undercut it when he could.  I'm so tired I feel dull and rather animal, like I just want to roll around on the floor, stretch and scratch my back on the hotel carpet, which is dark blue with small, irregular beige dots.  Now Pandora is playing "All the Things You Are" by Charlie Parker, which, besides being great exit music, brings me back to the beloved enumerations in Merton's journal.  Margie you are all things Margie you cannot be all things I am a man of God I am a man of passion this human love is good this human love is bad they can take you away from me but they'll never touch my love this love I have for you is huge as the nature that surrounds me I look up at the moon and your love is there in the moon and the solitude of this dark night.