So "The Man Who Loved Birds" began literally
when I was 17 years old.
I was about to go on the great adventure of my life.
I had gotten a scholarship from Seagram's, the employer
of my father.
A bourbon scholarship that paid everything anywhere
that I got into school.
And of course, I had seen there had been a Life
magazine with a spread of the Santa Clara high school swim
team.
And all these guys in speedos.
And I thought that's where I want to go to college.
And so I went out to California.
And just before I left, literally a few days before
I left, two things happened.
There was a local renegade storyteller
named Charlie Styles.
I like to bring him in this room.
And the police couldn't get a conviction of him
because he was--
he liked to make fun of the police.
And he was related to everybody.
Nobody would to-- the juries would never convict him.
They always let him free.
So about four days before I left for California,
the state police kidnapped him, took him to a cornfield,
and shot him, murdered him.
And we all, I learned later, probably tortured him.
And the community's collective silence around that
was something that really struck me, because we all
knew what had happened.
There was no question about what had happened.
And yet no one said anything.
And at the same time my town which
had not had a doctor for something
like 10 years acquired a Muslim woman doctor under a program
that I think still exists.
A Muslim who came-- a woman who came to this solidly Catholic
town in the hills of Kentucky.
And I thought how extraordinary it
would be to be a Muslim woman doctor setting up practice
in this rural Kentucky town.
I lived with that book for 40 years.
I threw in a Trappist monk and that's
"The Man Who Loved Birds."
Looking back on it, it was really fun to write.
And it gives me an excuse to bring Charles Styles back
to life.
I was going to read a different part.
I was going to read from the Bengali woman
doctor who I made her Bengali for reasons that you can ask me
later on.
I spent six weeks in Kolkata researching her.
That was an extraordinary experience.
But instead inspired by Ander, I'm going to read about sex.
A writer known to us all, a Protestant writer,
quite famous writer, is not particularly fond of this book.
It's too Catholic for him.
But he did write me a note and said, you write really
well about sex.
So I'll let you be the judge of that.
In this scene, there are two, and I also
wanted to write a book in which people fell in love very slowly
over the course of the book.
There's a Trappist monk named Brother Flavian.
And the renegade whose name is Johnny Faye.
And Johnny Faye's growing pot.
You have to believe that I also wanted
to write a book it's totally incredible
and yet write it in a way that made it entirely credible.
Johnny Faye is growing pot.
The monk is teaching him how to read.
He's functionally illiterate.
And you have to believe that this
is credible in the course of the book.
The pot growers in my part of the world
grew their pot on the Abbey of Gethsemani property.
So that when if it was found, they wouldn't have their land
confiscated.
That's all set up in the book.
So this is where--
what's happened is so the crop is, it's
September the crop is right.
It's almost ready.
Johnny Faye sets out to cut down ditch weed which
grows everywhere because they grew pot everywhere
in Kentucky.
And it was a cash crop for many years, hemp.
You've got to chop it out of the way
because if the pollen gets to the real thing
it impregnates the female buds and you
don't want that to happen.
So they're setting out down the creek
to chop out the ditch weed, to kill the ditch
weed so it won't be there.
And that's what happens in the scene.
That's a setup for the scene.
"They rolled up their pants legs and made their ways
down the creek.
All the dense growth on the banks
looked the same to Brother Flavian, one big wall of green.
But in one or two places Johnny Faye waded into the green
and swung the sickle.
And Flavian feeling useless and dumb followed his example.
Then the creek narrowed and grew deeper.
And they came to a water maple that had fallen
across the water bank to bank.
Johnny Faye climbed to the bank and pulled off
his jeans and underwear.
"No way to get around this tree except climb
up and over the bank", he said, "and I could do that early
in the season but I tried it last week
and got a butt full of smart weed.
The creek gets deep on the other side.
So you've got to get your pants wet or take them off
and swim across.
Best thing to do is just strip and duck under."
Flavian hesitated a moment but what was the difference
between stripping to swim in the lake."
They've been swimming in the monastery lake this summer.
"Or stripping to swim in the creek.
By the time he pulled off his clothes
and placed them on the back and ducked under the tree,
Johnny Faye was far downstream.
Only the whites of his untamed buttocks
showed through the overhanging branches.
And Flavian followed after flailing his sickle
at random weeds that were probably
just innocent bystanders.
After all, the sharp eyed Johnny Faye had already
passed by but doing something, anything made
him feel this stupid, a naked middle aged
monk wading in knee deep water, and swinging a sickle.
They thrashed their ways down the creek."
The hornets by the way are borrowed from Dante.
"They thrash their way down the creek.
To Flavian every branch seemed adorned with poison ivy.
Every rock concealed a cottonmouth.
So and so he anticipated the attack,
maybe in some pheromonal way brought it on.
All he knew was that in a single moment he went from a place
where he was thrashing along in a fog of foolishness to a place
where Johnny Faye was splashing past him yelling "run, run".
And Flavian ignorant but aware of something gone wrong
went splashing after him scraping and cutting
his bare feet on gravel and the razor sharp shells
of freshwater mussels.
Spider webs filled his mouth and he had some dim worry of ticks
amid the adrenaline rush.
But Johnny Faye was crying, "to the hole, to the hole"
and Flavian realized he meant the deep pool where they first
ducked under the fallen water maple.
And then he felt a hot white brand of fire on one arm
and he got the picture.
He went double time the last 20 yards
and dove into the pool of water even
before Johnny Faye got there.
Though later it occurred to him that Johnny Faye hung back
so as to present a diversionary target.
Unbelievably the hornets followed them in the water.
Flavian would stop thrashing to catch his breath
and there they'd be dive bombing his head.
"Duck, and swim under.
And head for the shade, they don't much like the shade."
And Flavian ducked into the cool green wet
and did not emerge until he found a place
under the trunk of the fallen water maple that was sheltered
from the sun and with an underwater limestone
ledge at the right height for him to sit,
leaving only his face exposed from the lips up.
After a moment, Johnny Faye's wet stringy head
bobbed up beside him and last but not JC.
The dog climbed up the maple's trunk
and shook sending a little shower over their heads
that could only help, or so Flavian
hoped, drive away the hornets.
So they sat there for a while.
"You think they'd gotten off for today? " Johnny Faye said.
"You mean the hornets?"
"No, Sherlock, I mean the flying cows."
"Well, I don't see any more of them."
"Did they get you?"
"Only once.
How about you?"
"One on my arm, another on my back."
"Let me see."
They compared war wounds.
Flavian had one, Johnny Faye had two bright little nips of flesh
surrounded by scarlet aureoles.
"Damn, sorry.
Must have swung into a nest."
Johnny Faye took Flavian's arm and raised the wound
to his mouth.
"Hold steady, the spit does it good, neutralizes the poison."
"It's OK, I'll live," Flavian said.
"OK, your turn," and Johnny Faye held up his arm.
And Flavian wrapped his lip around the meaty hunk
of Johnny Faye's biceps.
And he was very, very grateful that the water
hid that part of his body with a mind of its own.
"Sit still.
They come after anything that moves.
We'd better hang out here for a little bit."
Oh sure, yes," Flavian said, "let's stay in the water.
Absolutely".
The canopy of green arched overhead,
enlivened by the grating of cicadas and the panting of JC,
now sprawled on a wet ledge above the bank.
"So what made you become a monk, anyway?
I mean there must have been something besides the war."
"Well, you're right," Flavian said,
"not at first, at first I was just hiding out."
He was a draft dodger.
"But then I spent more time at the monastery
and I came to like the place, you know.
It just made so much sense.
I don't have to tell you that.
Living with the brothers and trying to make something
in a community as a community rather than this idiot notion
that somehow magically a good world
can come out of everybody being selfish.
You drive along the highway and you
can tell the second you come on to monastery land.
There's something sacred about the place.
It's like the land belongs to God, which
is who it belongs to anyway.
And our job is to take care of it for him, her, it.
All that God stuff, it comes out of people
wanting not to be so alone."
"I can see that," Johnny Faye said.
"When we're not really alone in the first place," Flavian said.
"I can see that too," Johnny Faye said,
"that's what people are looking for and ain't finding in sex."
"I wouldn't know about that, Flavian said,
"all I know is that people want to be one with the one, one
with the whole."
"You don't say," Johnny Faye said,
I have always said that sex was about being one with the hole.
Flavian leaned over to cuff him on the ear.
"Sorry, I got a smart mouth.
In the army they tried beating it out of me
but might as well try to beat the kick out of a mule."
"It's OK.
Maybe it's the same whole, for you anyway."
"Wow," Johnny Faye said, "all those years
I thought what I was doing was fucking when it turns out
I was communing with God."
Flavian sighed.
"It's not like that's the only kind of desire.
There are lots of kinds of desire."
"Such as?
I'm listening."
Well, you know desire."
Johnny Faye made a little circle with his thumb and forefinger
then poked his other finger in and out.
Color rose to Flavian's cheeks.
"Well, I don't mean that kind of desire.
Or at least not only that kind."
"Oh?", Johnny Faye asked, "what other kind is there?
There's only one kind of I ever known and it drives me crazy
and makes me alive at the same time.
Can't do with it, that's for sure,
but can't do without it, neither.
Sex is this funny thing.
You've got to have it, you can't think of anything but it.
It makes you toss and turn.
It's like knowing the next morning
you're going to start on a long trip
to someplace you never seen.
You think about it all the time.
And then finally you get it and you
go to that place for a few minutes.
Maybe it's the place the animals live in all the time.
I thought about that, a place where
the only thing that matters in the world
is what you're doing right here, right now."
"A monk would call that perfect prayer," Flavian said.
Johnny Faye gave Brother Flavian a funny look.
"Is that a fact?
You don't start out that way of course.
Most people have to be warmed into it a little,
even most guys.
Even though they won't admit it.
And then you get hot.
And then it takes you over and you belong to it
for a few minutes.
And you're alive, nothing dead about you.
Everything says go, go, go, live, live, live.
And then it's over and done with and all you want to do
is smoke a joint.
You're a stranger to yourself.
You have to lie there a few minutes
to find your way back to the person you left
behind a few minutes before.
And the other person, the person you're with,
you want to be tangled up with them and away from them
at the same time.
At least that's how it is with me.
I heard a guy say once that people
used to think that a man could only do it
so many times in his life, could only--"
He stopped here to search for word in the search
and grew too long.
"Come," Brother Flavian said.
"Yeah."
He stretch his neck a little and dropped his shoulders.
"Like you say.
And when I first heard that, I thought no that can't be true.
And then another part of me, the smart part
said but you know I can see how you think that way,
if you didn't know no better.
Because it takes something out of you, it surely does.
Religion ought to be all about it, you know.
It's like the place I go to in church
but where it's not the place.
It's not like the place I get to in church
but it's where I'd like to go."
"You go to church?"
Flavian asked.
Johnny Faye's eyes narrowed and he gave a little laugh that
came from some secret place.
"You act like you're surprised."
"Well, I am surprised."
"I always like it when people trip themselves up.
They think they got somebody pegged
and they ain't got a clue.
I'd never darken the door of that church in town, no way.
Father Poppelreiter would have a cow, for one.
Besides, I don't want to go giving people
the wrong impression.
"And what impression might that be?"
Flavian asked.
"Oh, you know, like I was getting their kind of religion,
all that kissy-padres-ring-assed stuff.
No, I go to mass at Calvary when the mood strikes.
Good friends with the priests there.
He's happy to see me, if you get my drift."
Johnny Faye pinched his forefinger and thumb together
and put them to his lips and made a subtle noise.
"Don't ask much where I've been.
Pretty little church and that priest, he's been around.
He served in Nam.
He don't ask questions.
Most of these priests, they don't know jack.
The church is just like the army.
The more ignorant they are, the higher up they rise.
Hell, if you're dumb enough and willing enough
to stab enough backs, you just might
make general, or Pope, same thing more or less.
You take a guy at 20 years old, stick him
in a room with a bunch of other guys for four or six years,
tell him he can't even put his hands on his own dick,
then you send him out in the world all of a sudden,
everybody's calling him Father and kissing his ass
and buying him supper at nice restaurants.
And he don't know a thing about sex and life, except how
to feel bad about having it.
Now how in the hell can he help people
be better than they are when most of the time
their problem is sex, or something coming out of it.
You tell me that."
"Because when I'm alone and in silence,
some things reveal themselves to me
that otherwise I can't see or understand," Flavian said.
"Is that a fact?"
"Like the birds," Flavian said, "you can't order--
you can't order the Spirit to show up when you want to.
Instead you have to sit in patience and in silence
and look around.
You walk through the fields in the woods
making noise, talking with somebody,
or just shuffling through the leaves the way
we do when we're with somebody else,
and you think the birds are all flown to Mexico.
But then you go someplace and sit long and in silence,
and after a while they were all around you."
"Well, you got that right," Johnny Faye said,
"let me think about that one."
"Yeah, well, I'll think about it too," Flavian said.
"I never thought of being a monk like that before now."
For a while they said stand still
until Flavian relaxed a little.
And his tongue got the better of him.
"So why did you go for a soldier?"
"Because I wanted to be a monk," Johnny Faye said,
"but I can't stand the religion."
"Oh, come on."
"I mean it.
I wasn't so dumb as to believe all that shit
about how we had to go save the world for democracy.
I mean, follow the money as some wise guy said
and any idiot could see who stood
to make money on this business.
And it was definitely not the guys in my platoon.
But I wanted to join up with a brotherhood of men,
like you say.
And they promised me they would teach me how to read and write.
And then I could find a good job when I came back.
So I made my mark because I thought
if anybody could teach me how to read, it was-- read and write,
it was a United States Army.
And that was pretty much the last time it got mentioned."
"I'm sorry you had to go through that,
Flavian said, "I guess it's one reason to believe in paradise.
Surely, all those guys who died got more out of life
than just those 20 years."
Johnny Faye spread his hands flat on the creek's mirror.
"I don't believe in death."
"What do you mean?", Flavian said,
"you don't believe in death."
Johnny Faye grabbed Flavian head and ducked him under.
He came up sputtering.
"Don't you get it?", Johnny Faye cried.
"Ain't you been paying attention to nothing?
Dying is just a dream the devil cooked up
to make us scared so that then he could have his way.
Get with the program, man.
You're a monk, act like one."
Johnny Faye pointed around the creek bank.
"You show me where there's death.
You could climb all over the banks
to find a dead bird or a turtle but you'd
be a long time looking.
Ever think about that?
All that dying going on, at least
if you see things your way.
But we don't see a single dead thing.
I look around and all I see is life.
Life turning into life."
He slapped the surface of the water.
"And this is my paradise, right here, right now.
And hell is all those people who don't know theirselves.
Where are the damn wild places anymore is what I wonder.
A place a misfit like me can go home."
Flavian touched his heart.
"Maybe it's in here."
They sat for a moment in silence.
"I'll be damned," Johnny Faye said, "something else
to think about."
"For you and me both."
A long burr from a cicada stationed in the water maple
over their heads.
Johnny looked up.
"I think the hornets are gone."
"I think you're right."
They ducked under the water maple
and retrieved their clothes from the bank
and waded wordlessly up the creek.
JC trotted after, tongue lolling.
When they reached the oxbow bend they waded out of the creek.
Their hands brushed.
Flavian stiffened like a flagpole
and turned away and worked his way up the bank
in an awkward crabwise step trying to conceal his privates.
He pulled on a shirt and grabbed his jeans
and tried to get one leg into them.
But in this haste he caught his foot in his pants leg
and fell down, his cock pointing at the sky.
And then Johnny Faye had his mouth around the thing.
That is what happened.
Flavian opened his eyes wide and took it all in and for a second
he tried to think of something to say.
But then another part of him took hold and spoke
and a deep calm voice.
"Suffer the consequences."
Then Johnny Faye stood and took his hand.
"Come on, come here.
I ain't lived 40 years for nothing.
If you're going to do a thing, you might as well do it right
and it ain't going to be paradise
lying here in the mud."
He took Flavian's hand and led him to the great sycamore
and climbed up first and pulled Flavian up after.
And all the while Flavian's mind saying no, no, no.
And every other cell in his body saying yes, yes, yes.
Until Johnny Faye sat him down on sycamore throne and knelt
in front of him.
He tucked his hand behind Flavian's neck
to pull him forward, so that he could
shrug the shirt off his long shoulders and arms.
And then Johnny Faye took the shirt
and fold it tenderly and used it to cover the tree scaly trunk.
He placed one hand in the small of Flavian's back
and the other in the center of his chest,
and leaned him back until he was resting
against the sycamores cloth covered arm.
He tucked a hand under each of Flavian's knees
and lifted them and propped his feet on the tree's other arms.
Then he took Flavian's hands, one in each of his,
and raised and locked them over his head.
He buried his mouth in Flavian's open armpit.
Then he covered Flavian's mouth with his mouth.
And for the first time in his life,
Flavian tasted that most familiar of smells,
the smell of his own sweat.
Then Johnny Faye took Flavian's root in his hands
like it was some kind of scepter.
A timeless while of this and then Johnny Faye
took his mouth to the sweet and other places.
And the next thing Flavian could remember
was a loud cry, "Jesus," that echoed
in the pantheon of green.
He would never believed any human
being capable of making such a sound except that when
he finally opened his eyes, he kept
them closed very long because as long as they were closed
he was in some other timeless universe, where actions
had no consequences.
Maybe that's what they meant by paradise, a place
where actions have no consequences.
And when he opened them he would be back
in this ordinary world of telephones, and mail orders,
and benediction.
What about benediction, my God.
And then he opened his eyes to see
Johnny Faye grinning his crazy, chipped tooth grinning
from ear to ear.
And he had been waiting, Flavian could read it in his eyes,
for Flavian to open his eyes so that the first thing he saw
was Johnny Faye lifting his arm and wiping
his hand across his mouth, like the lanky stringy haired
tempter that he was.
And Flavian understood that he, Brother Flavian
of the order of Cistercian of the Strict Observance,
which familiarly known as Trappist,
had been the one to shout at the top of his lungs
and on the sycamore throne, the name of the Lord.
"Shh," Johnny Faye pointed out a kingfisher.
But Flavian's glasses were cockeyed
and when he lifted his hand to straighten them
the bird took off into the September sky.
"Now ain't that something, Johnny Faye said.
"He sits there through all that racket
but then flaps away when you so much as make a move.
Whatever.
Now it's your turn.
You don't have to swallow.
That ain't in the rules but you got to at least give it a try
and see how you like it.
That is in the rules."
Johnny Faye stood in the tree's crotch and Flavian knelt
before him and closed his eyes against slipping
sliding late summer light, and felt
Johnny Faye place his hands tender as the setting
sun on Flavian's head so that they guided him
in an act for which he was amazed
to find he needed no guidance.
Because he loved this man, every part of him he loved.
And when Johnny Faye said in a low humble voice, "Excuse me,
Brother Tom, but I'm about to come."
Flavian raised his hands and guided Johnny Faye's hands back
to his temples, and kept his hands over Johnny Faye's hands
until he heard a guttural moan.
And his mouth was filled with something like life.
And Flavian was seriously present to the cause.
He had never once in his life been
so present to his own reality, perfect prayer.
Then Johnny Faye gently tipped up Flavian's head and pressed
his thick lipped mouth over Flavian's.
For a very long while they stay that way.
Flavian kneeling in the sycamore throne,
Johnny Faye bending to his mouth,
and gradually the twittering of the evening birds
and the grinding of the cicadas coming back to consciousness
until Johnny Faye stretched his hands to the sky
and leaned back against the sycamore's branch.
And in that moment, all of history, all the past
and future, all the memory, and responsibility
and his vows to his brothers and to God came rushing back.
And Flavian opened his mouth to say, "I'm sorry, I am so sorry.
When Johnny Faye took his head in his hands
and looked him in his eyes and did not let him
turn his head to one side, or look down.
And his eyes were deep brown and full of love.
"Ain't it glorious?", he said.
A $3 word he would have learned in church.
And Flavian held his tongue and looked up
through the dense canopy of leaves,
the sycamore leaves so broad and shapely,
all of a piece, whole unto itself.
And for the first time the thought
occurred to him that he too might become all of a piece,
whole unto himself.
"Ain't it glorious?", Johnny Faye said a second time.
Now that is what I call--
"Now that is what I call a conversation with God.
Or beauty, if you've got to be so high falutin about it
and you do, I know that.
It's part of what I like about you.
You know why I got brown eyes?"
"No."
Johnny Faye held a hand flat at his forehead.
"Because I'm full of shit up to here.
And you, you with your barely blue eyes,
you're a quart short.
Which is why you take everything so serious
and why you ever been, are now, and ever will be a monk."
And after he said this first, for a space of a few seconds,
Flavian forgot everything he had promised, all the vows he made,
his place in the world, everything but right here,
right now, and the thought I will follow this man wherever
he goes.
Only say the word and I shall be healed.
Johnny Faye worked his way around Flavian
and slid down the sycamore trunk to JC who'd
been biding his doggy time.
He picked up Flavian's shirt from where
it had fallen from the tree.
"I'm a liberal minded man but I have
to say that, when it comes right down to it,
I'm better at hard and sharp than I am at soft and round."
Something in Johnny Faye's voice and what he said
lodged the little dagger in Flavian's side,
somewhere just below his heart.
Maybe it lodged in his heart.
He didn't want to put a name to the feeling.
He'd never thought of before and he would have been hard pressed
to name it.
But it was there all right, not a sharp quick pain
like a pinprick but more like a splinter, barely noticeable.
The kind of injury that he was innocent enough to think
would go away on its own instead of suppurating into poison.
Johnny Faye held up Flavian's shirt and jeans.
Flavian jumped down from the tree and grabbed at them
but Johnny Faye stepped out of reach.
"Maybe I'll just disappear with these," he said,
"explain that to the abbot."
But then he held up Flavian's shirt with the arms
out while Flavian slipped it on.
Flavian pulled on his pants in silence.
With every moment the weight of what he had done
grew until he was nearly choking with remorse.
"See you next week," Johnny Faye said, "same time, same place."
I won't-- I can't promise--
I can't promise that."
"I ain't asking for promises."
"I ain't much on promises, you know that.
Just letting you know where I'm planning on being.
Now let's get out of here before they send out that dumb ass
cop in a search party."
And then they were out of the creek bed,
and through the parted cedars, and into the field,
and onto bittersweet, whom Johnny Faye sent
cantering through the early September evening light, no sun
by now.
The sun had said set, the world was still filled
with light, fading every moment but everywhere at once.
The light of love.
The light of God."
Thank you.
[CLAPPING]