Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,10

what I wrote in my previous letter: No one has been able to stop me, not even God. What I mean is that not even God has been able to save me from myself. This is one thing I despair of. I plunge myself into something, seeing and hearing only my will, and I have to crash into something else to stop—Maria, the monastery, the Catholic Worker. So I don’t know if I can say that I have ever heard God’s voice. I wonder if it was only my own will, speaking loudly, that led me to the monastery, the Catholic Worker, even conversion. I wonder if you think we can ever hear God’s voice. I suspect you would call me naive for imagining such a thing is possible.

It’s good to have people around me to put their hands on my shoulders and get me moving forward again. Maria may have been trying to but I could not hear her. But I can frequently hear Ted. Ted came to visit me at the Catholic Worker. We were sitting in the kitchen having coffee while people made dinner, and a fight broke out over how much meat to use in the soup, and he said: “I think the people here have problems. And by people, I mean you.” I didn’t, and don’t, think Ted’s entirely right, because he comes from a family whose coal companies bust unions, but this was right after the girl scolded me, so what he said—about me—seemed right.

Your story reminded me that I, too, love John best. There is a verse of his that presses on me: This then is the message which we have heard of him and declare unto you; that God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all. I can grow dark. I grow black. It is not, I think, what defines me, this blackness, but it is something that runs through me and can overtake me. The blackness is a hand that passes over my face to draw me a bath of heavy, ache-riven sleep, and if I want to come out of it I have to make a constant effort to see what is going on around me and then decide if I want to care about where to put my feet and hands. Impatient only for something to drag me off into unconsciousness. No desire even to write. I look at typewritten drafts, and the sentences slide off the paper and trail off into the distance; the sentences break up into letters, hovering like a cloud of gnats over my typewriter. This hand can also draw me a bath of drink, or send me crashing into people. I have stood on street corners fantasizing about being hit by a car—about being taken out instantly. Stood asleep on street corners summoning dreams of traffic accidents. I was once fantasizing about this on a corner somewhere in Cambridge and at that same moment, one traffic light down, two cars crashed into each other, and I fainted from the shock of hearing sounds I’d been practicing summoned—but not summoned close enough. And then came to in an emergency room hammering down rudeness on the nurses because I was still alive.

I wonder if I should have even described this to you, if I have scared you. But I imagine knowing you for a long, long time, and I have felt this blackness for a long, long time, and I don’t want to hide any part of my self from you.

Yours,

Bernard

March 13, 1958

Bernard—

You don’t scare me. I have not experienced feelings like that myself, but I think my mother suffered from them. I don’t think I can tell you anything that can lift you out of this blackness—here is where I may have a little blackness myself, in refusing to believe that humans can bulldoze each other out of despondency by applying the force of uplifting sentiment—but please don’t be afraid to write to me about it.

You’re right. I probably would have given you that look had we been classmates—and yes, I was giving all of you that look at the colony, but not really you specifically, although there was that one night I saw you fingering Lorraine’s necklace while you were all making plans to drive out, and I have to tell you I always thought you were too nice to Lorraine. I assumed it was because she was the only pretty thing there, and you couldn’t help yourself around pretty