Brother Jesse's Lamentations

[dave]

If anyone is interested, I thought I'd excerpt some pertinent parts of Monk In The Cellar and place them here in a thread called Brother Jesse's Lamentations. They are from a public reading I did in Woodstock on the major themes of Monk In The Cellar.

One is the Roof that Jesse frequently finds himself going out on and wondering if he should jump. The other is Women. There are three major women characters in the story. One is a stained glass portrait of St. Lucy, and how Jesse comes to build a chapel to her in a room that was once used as a sh*thouse. The other is Immy, his old girlfriend. And the third is a woman named Sally, who Jesse is convinced is his guardian angel, landed upon earth for reasons unknown to him.

I'll excerpt from various posts, so the product may seem a little choppy. I'd like to do it, because it will give me a chance to harvest these pieces from the Blog and possibly use them in another version of the novel. But what you see here will be the raw excerpts.

Maybe CB would want to provide the music! He could use stuff that was used on the Blog, which is still on line, or upgrade it with his choices.

[clarencebunsen]

I'm busy tomorrow with a baptism but if something strikes a chord I'll see what I can find.

[dave]

OK, I'll post the Youtube music that was in the original blog and you can add to if you want.

[dave]

There a number of major themes in Monk In The Cellar, the story of a band of eleven monks trying to save their monastery. The story was originally published on the Internet as blog of 171 posts. You can go read it here:

monkinthecellar.blogspot.com

The story is now in book form, both hardcopy and Kindle.

In the blog I include a music video from You Tube for most posts. The eleven monks live on the side of the mountain in West Saugerties, NY in a run down decrepit old summer resort they call a monastery. Their superiors, the Ardent Brothers, based in Ireland in Fermoy, County Cork are trying to kick our team out of their home and sell the place so that the Order’s mounting debts can be paid off. The brothers already live on a starvation diet of only lima beans and rice. Any new owner will probably want to give the place a good airing out.

I won't re-tell the entire story here, but I've excerpted a number of posts to illustrate some of the major themes contained in the story. They are:

1. The Roof

2. The Night Chapel and St. Lucy

3. Immy, Jesse's childhood girlfriend

4. Sally, woman he met in the woods, who he believes to be his guardian angel, and who becomes his real estate broker. I know ... it's confusing.

5. Fathers


You'll notice that three of the themes are about women. Why should that surprise you? Men are men.

We'll take the themes one at a time.

[dave]

Up On The Roof


The Roof of the monastery in Monk In The Cellar symbolizes Jesse's fear as well as his salvation. First is its obvious potential for Jesse to kill himself. Jesse thinks of doing so and he tempts himself by crawling out on the peak from time to time. He reasons that at age 68 he has had the best of life and that it can only get worse at this point. So why prolong it. Why not take the quick route to eternity. He doesn't believe God will be disappointed too much. In any event, God will get over it, he tells himself.

The roof is also where Jesse can be totally alone to look down the mountain side and across the fertile valley. He senses power there and enjoys his love of the geography. When he hangs out over the eave, his adrenaline rushes throughout his body and makes him feel fearful and powerful at the same time. He has the power to control his destiny then, which is a very future if he falls over the edge. He feels like he is flying with mostly the ground below him and the other side of the valley in sight. He is certain that at times a spirit calls to him that he's sure is feminine and that he hopes is heaven.

Here are the key posts that deal with the Roof. Starting in the cellar, of course.

[dave]

Here In The Cellar

If you fly south from Albany down the Hudson River toward New York City, the Catskill Mountains will be seen off to your right, their green stretches of forest coming all the way from the western horizon. Closer to you, less than ten miles away, the rippling blanket of pine and hemlock drops precipitously down an escarpment to a flat plain of mixed hardwood forest and open fields that run to the waterway gliding by beneath you. Tise river is the Hudson, a stretch of water edged with towns named Red Hook, Saugerties, Kingston, Poughkeepsie and Port Ewen.




Push the stick forward a tiny bit and move your feet to adjust the ailerons and your plane will swoop around and point west toward the mountains. Follow a glide path gradually sloping down to just below the top of the mountain wall ahead of you. Aim right at it, losing altitude as the mountain grows larger and details begin to show. Between the trees you’ll see a house here and there. Look for an old summer resort that is long past its prime, a cluster of buildings with a dilapidated tennis court. There! Among the trees. Atop the highest roof of the resort sits a man in a monk’s robe. You wonder why. Well, because I’m a monk. And you’d better pull up now because I don’t like airplane crashes. I’ve been in one.

I don't spend much time up here on the roof. Most of the time I can get a wifi signal down in the cellar. The abbot here at Our Lady’s Monastery at West Saugerties has told me on more than one occasion to stay below decks. So I spend most of my day in the cellar. In the monasteries of olden times I might have been the cellarer … the monk who kept track of the wine. Given the predilections one might expect to find among a bunch of old celibate guys, any wine we use today comes from the liquor store in town and is held under close guard by the Abbot. We don’t need to have that kind of spirit sitting around beckoning to us.

[clarencebunsen]

One of my disagreements with Dave. James Taylor is good, a singer who has spoken to my generation forever. However, the song I hear in my head no matter who is singing is the Drifters. It may be because it came out when I was 15, in love and convinced that I knew more than any adult with the possible exception of my father.

[dave]

Yeah, but Carol King wrote the song (with her then husband, Gerry Goffin). Here's an interesting article about Taylor and King, "James Taylor and Carole King: They've got a friend," in a newspaper from your old neck of the woods. BTW, what year did the Drifters make Up On The Roof popular? I can't remember.

www.startribune.com/entertainment/music/94501799.html?refer=y

[dave]

This old print shop is where I live out my days of self-imposed retirement. By that I mean I just stopped working, unlike most monks. I gave up my calling, but not my vocation, so I'm still on the payroll of rice and beans just like the other guys. Abbot Agnes says he thinks I am going through a depression of old age. But I’m not depressed, just sad sometimes.

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The building creaking and groaning above me began life in the 1800's as a Catskills resort for the middle-middle class and when later gifted to our order it became a small monastery without all the bother of a working farm (we have only 14 acres, much of it vertical, sitting on the mountain side.) Some time before I got here, when the endowments ran out and we needed an income, I’m told that we ran a school. It wasn’t exactly a “Minor Seminary,” but rather served as a port in the storm for head strong teenage boys. We took only few at a time, but even the small income supplemented what little money was coming in. Alas, after a few years the state education department closed us down, saying our building was unsafe. However, we’ve all survived here. We could have been helping some troubled teenagers for the past 40 years.

[dave]

Up On The Roof

I’ll tell you a little secret. But before I do, I have to say I’m well aware I write things that could be potentially embarrassing. And some of you, dear readers, have mentioned in your emails that you are worried for me. And I’m troubled about my Great Sin of Having A Blog and Not Confessing It. But writing to real people, even those I’ll never meet, seems so much more vital than recording my thoughts in a diary. Writing in a diary is like sitting in a corner talking to the wall. When I write on the Blog, at least someone is listening. It makes all the difference in the world when someone is listening.

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Here’s something else I try to keep from my Brothers. I go out on the roof of the monastery to look out over the valley on days when the weather is fine. The highest roof on our clump of buildings is atop the Chapter House. It has a trap door up near the peak of a steeply inclined roof. I remove my robe first, so that I’m in boots and jeans and usually just a T-shirt. There’s a ladder in the high attic that leads up to the trap door. When I get to the top, I swing open the tar covered door, stand on the top rung of the ladder, step up and put my foot on the framing around the hole and throw my other leg over the peak of the roof. Then I throw my weight forward and, if I do it just right and my hands don't slip, my legs slide over the peak of the roof just like I’m slinging myself up on to the back of a horse. If I don’t do right, I bounce back and my foot has to find the framing or I’ll go crashing down through the hole to the attic floor. I’ve never missed, however. And I can’t launch myself too far forward and go flipping over the peak and down to the ground on the other side. I’m too heavy to throw myself that far.

Once I’m comfortably straddling the peak, I slide myself inch by inch along to very edge of the roof, my jeans rasping across the shingles. What a feeling to sit there at such a dizzying height! Vertigo grips me and I lean back a bit and slide my fingertips beneath the slightly wet roof shingles behind me. Brother Jessica The Lightning Rod! Don't try this while thunderstorms are in the area! Were I to lean even a tiny bit forward at this moment, I might tumble down into the circular driveway at the front door of the Chapter House.

On days with fine weather, I can see the entire valley spread out before me as if it were a calm green sea. There’s the Hudson River. Closer is the back side of Mount Marion and just a bit to the left is Churchland.

(Here's another cover for CB.)

[dave]

After Compline

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It’s late, after Compline. I’ve come down here from the chapel to the cellar to sit at the typebench and to listen to the sounds. There’s nothing as quiet as a group of monks who are keeping monastic silence. It can be oppressive after these many years. And so I come down to cellar among the great slabs of bluestone that form Our Lady’s foundation to hear the sounds of the house: the furnace going on once in a while, the water gurgling through the pipes, the mice skittering across the floor above me. The peaceful sounds of life to which we seldom listen. But then the far off screaming siren of a fire truck come to me, or an ambulance responding to a fire or a car accident. Lord be with them, victims and rescuers.

I guess my email address is being passed around Saugerties. Even though I turned off my profile this morning, I’m still getting messages from local residents. That’s terrific, actually, because I am hearing from wonderful people. I hope Abbot Agnes doesn’t discover me here at the PC, tapped into the world wide web. Worse, he would be upset over my blog. After all, I shouldn't be speaking with anyone outside, except when we're in the village on errands.

But what the heck … you can send email to me: [e-mail]

So. Yes to the woman from Quarryville who asked if we have enough food for the coming winter. We have 48 sacks of rice and four and one half barrels of dried lima beans. If we can beg some flour for making bread, we will do fine through the winter. Last Christmas, some nice folks from Woodstock gave us 50 pounds of coffee! Life doesn’t get any better. Well, of course it does ... at a pig roast!

[clarencebunsen]

Oct 15, 2012 8:49:08 GMT -5 dave said:

Yeah, but Carol King wrote the song (with her then husband, Gerry Goffin). Here's an interesting article about Taylor and King, "James Taylor and Carole King: They've got a friend," in a newspaper from your old neck of the woods. BTW, what year did the Drifters make Up On The Roof popular? I can't remember.

www.startribune.com/entertainment/music/94501799.html?refer=y

That triggered a morning's worth of stuff. The Drifters version was popular in 1962. (The path I got to that factoid: I remember the girl who was my lab partner in Biology singing it while I was doing the dissection of a worm. We had worked out a division of labor with each of us going with our strengths. Now if only I could remember her name.)

More than 40 years after its release Tapestry remains one of my favorite albums. The entire album is available on Youtube:


One more thing, until the article link reminded me, I'd forgotten that the Beatles & Taylor shared a bit of a lyric.

[dave]

"One more thing, until the article link reminded me, I'd forgotten that the Beatles & Taylor shared a bit of a lyric."

Yup, Taylor was the first Non-Brit to record an album for Apple Records. Taylor spent some months over there at their studio. McCartney and at least one other Beatle played on the album, "James Taylor." That was before his best selling album back here that featured "Fire and Rain."

[dave]

When I sit on the roof and look out across the valley, I feel like I’m flying, as free as a bird. There’s something very Jungian about that, of course. When we dream of flying it means our shadow wants to fly, to be free. Or maybe to flee. But why would I want to flee? I’m very happy here. Truthfully, I haven't known much else for decades. Like the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and his beloved hills of central Kentucky (“knobs” he called them) I’ve come to love every nook and cranny on the face of this mountain that looms behind me. And I can recognize and name each winding creek carved on the landscape rolled out here before me.

Often I feel like Christ in the wilderness. But in my case it's not Satan tempting me to jump from the pinnacle of the temple. It's me. Sometimes I’ve had enough of life. I’m almost seventy, after all, and I have a great temptation to end it all before the journey gets worse. I could just slip off the edge of the roof into the waiting arms of eternity. And here’s a strange thing … I don’t know why, but I have a sense that eternity is feminine.


www.windsweptpress.com/TEMP/roof valley.jpg[/img]

So, up here on the peak of the roof I hover in place, held back by something I can't understand. I want to go forward and embrace whoever is on the horizon, as if she has been waiting for me since I embraced my manhood, but something holds me back. Is it my guardian angel? Don't we each have one? I guess I do, because I've never fallen off the roof. Maybe she specializes in roof top safety. She? Yes, she. I wouldn't want a male guardian angel. I want one to love me like I always wanted a woman to love me. Unconditionally.

I'll bet my guardian angel is a fine looking lass….cute, capable, soft and warm. Sure of herself and saucy. I’ll bet her name is not Mary or Theresa or Kundegunda of Sandeck.* I’ll bet she has a snappy name like Sally.

As the sun continues to rise and warm the roof, the bell rings for Terce and it's time to leave my aerie for mid morning chapel. I back down the peak to the trap door. Then I back into the roof hole, close the hatch and back down the ladder. I back down all the way. I'm always backing down.

* Kundegunda of Sandeck is a Polish saint. She was a member of the Polish Royal Family of her time. For all I know she is the patron saint of land taxes and public executions.

[dave]

Just some background ...


Dramatis Personae




Carmelita of The Bronx writes asking about the Brothers at Our Lady's Monastery at West Saugerties. Here they are, the entire crew.

There are eleven of us.

Agnes (Abbot and Brother Saint Agnes of Cornwall.) Sent from Ireland by our superiors, The Committee on Personnel for The Ardent Brothers, the old men back on the Ould Sod who we refer to as the Gang of McFour. Agnes is fifty-ish.



Terd (Brother Saint Theresa Kim Im-I of Seoul,) a Brother and the only real scholar among us, an expert on the writings of Athanasius. Late forties.



Jesse (Brother Saint Jessica of Galilee) yours truly, former college rock band star of at least two counties. Someone should have attached a monkey on a leash to my belt and after some indecision handed one of us the tin cup. 67 years old.

www.windsweptpress.com/TEMP/jesse habit.jpg[/img]

Harpo (Brother and Father Saint Gertrude of Rodalsdorf.) The oldest among us, doesn’t do much but kibitz. Less than me, if you can believe it. Of Jewish descent, stolen by Gypsies in Budapest as a baby, sold as a youngster to another Circus that gave him to a group of passing nuns on their way to the New York City. Shipwrecked off the Outer Banks, survived and brought up by a wealthy family in Columbia, South Carolina. A real southern gentleman. Past eighty. He is the only priest among us and is able to furnish us Mass and the Sacraments.

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Bouncer (Brother Saint Bilhild of Thuringia). I call him my boss, because he does most of the plumbing and is constantly sending me down to the hardware store for parts. Won’t go himself because he says he slept with half the women in Saugerties and most of the young people he might meet on the street are his children. Told Agnes that with a straight face. In matters of no account, Bouncer is believed less than myself. Early fifties.



Kickstart (Brother Saint Winifred of Gwytherin in Denbigshire), probably the youngest among us. Raced motorcycles after college. Accused (by Bouncer) of being a former Hell’s Angel and amphetamine distributor. Probably not true, but under direct questioning only laughs. 31 years old.



Raiser (Brother Saint Helen of Skovde.) Once studied to be an actor at a famous school in New York City. Received the call to his vocation on the E Train during morning rush hour just as the train went underground while he commuted in from Jamaica. Happened twice. Late thirties.



Izzy (Brother Saint Isidora the Simple.) Anything but simple, Izzy was a croupier in Las Vegas before coming to our order (after a period of time with the Capuchin Franciscans.) Does most of our cooking, which consists of keeping a fire going under two large pots, one of rice and the other of lima beans. Has memorized the entire New Testament. Some of us doubt the probability of that , but to my knowledge he’s never misquoted a verse when someone shouts out, for example, “second Corinthians, chapter 7, verse 13.” Some of us want to take him to a casino some night to improve our fortune, but chips probably don’t come in really small denominations. Maybe mid forties.



Cat (Brother Saint Catherine of Alexandria.) Before coming to the Order, taught auto mechanics in a trade school after graduating with a degree in Antiquities. Mother was a NASCAR driver and mechanic. Mother showed up unannounced at Our Lady’s two years ago. Still quite a looker in brief shorts and tank top. One guesses she was a teen Mom. Cat keeps our jalopies running. Gets his own parts at NAPA. Early forties.



Headless (Brother Saint Leocrita of Cordoba.) Of Pacific Islands descent, his father was the King of Saphlaticiotarapherictu (a.k.a. Gardner Island,) a very small rock off the coast of the much larger Nikumaroro Island. Claims his royal family ate Amelia Earhart. Hard to tell, but probably around fifty years old.



Beep Beep (Brother Saint Wilgefortis of Wambierzyce.) Should have come to the Order with his own leash and saved us a few bucks. DSM code is 293.81. “Where’s Beep?” sends everyone running down the driveway. Beep is 57 years old, but could run a marathon if he would do it with clothes on.



Yes, everyone in the Ardent Brothers has the name of a female saint. No one remembers why our founders ordained the practice. Maybe they hoped to dilute our testerone. No comment.



I almost forgot. One somewhat evil dog named Tapioca. She has no patron, but were he in good standing, Lucifer would be appropriate. I can’t think of anyone else I know who would stand up to God, not back down and (maybe because she’s a redhead) do as she damn well pleased.

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