I kind of want to just stick with Arizona.
Let's see, I think I have it marked in here.
There was a Discalced Carmelite monastery outside Sedona,
Arizona, for some time, and I believe they've
moved on to rougher terrain.
They liked it wild, and it was getting less wild there.
But I visited them.
This was several years ago.
And actually what happened was, I
called them up because my girlfriend had dumped me.
They had a phone number and I rang them up
and said, what do you do?
How do you get in?
[LAUGHTER]
And they said, well, you come for a visit, three or four days.
And if it works out, you come back for 10 days.
And then you come back for three months.
And then you can take vows for two years, I think,
and then you can take vows for five years,
and it sounded good, so.
I went up and stayed.
I lasted about six days, I guess.
But I was surprised during that time.
I expected them to say, we don't come here just because we've
been dumped, you know.
We're serious here.
But they seemed to think that was a good beginning.
[LAUGHTER]
And they were happy to let me stay.
They said, you have a radical personality
and maybe you should think about making a radical commitment
to your face--
uh, faith.
Excuse me.
[LAUGHTER]
I remember the phrases very well.
But that was a very scary thing to have said to one, so--
and it caused me to leave right away.
Anyhow, while I was there, I guess
I imagined somebody who might be considering leaving,
having been there for many years.
And this is all fictional.
And the landscape is accurately rendered,
but I think the rest is entirely fiction.
It's called "The Monk's Insomnia."
"The monastery is quiet.
Seconal drifts down upon it from the moon.
I can see the lights of the city I came from, can remember
how a boy sets out, like something thrown
from the furnace of a star.
In the conflagration of memory, my people
sit on green benches in the park,
terrified, evil, broken by love.
To sit with them inside that invisible fire of hours
day after day, while the shadow of the milk billboard
crawled across the street, seemed impossible.
But how was it different from here,
where they have one day they play over and over as if they
think it is our favorite?
And we stay for our natural lives, a phrase that conjures up
the sun's dark ash adrift after 10 billion years
of uncontrollable burning.
Brother Thomas's schoolgirl obsession
with the cheap doings of TV starlets
breaks everybody's heart.
And the yellow sap of one particular race of cactus
grows tragic for the fascination in which it
imprisons Brother Toby.
I can't witness his slavering and relating
how it can be changed into some unprecedented kind of plastic.
And the monastery refuses to say where it is taking us.
At night, we hear the trainers from the base down there
and see them blotting out the stars.
And I stand on the hill and listen, bone-white with desire.
It was love that sent me on the journey,
love that called me home.
But it's the terror of being just one person, one chance,
one set of days, that keeps me absolutely still tonight
and makes me listen intently to those young men above us,
flying in their airplanes in the dark."
[APPLAUSE]