Brian H. Appleton
11-14-2007, 05:55 AM
Dear Readers,
When I was about 15 years old in 1965, I decided that I wanted to spend two weeks in a monastery and live the life of a contemplative...you know the idealism and craziness of youth...we had met an American Carthusian monk from Iowa who had somehow gotten it into his head that he could best serve humanity by joining one of the stricktest orders of Catholic monks in existance when what he really needed to do was join the Peace Corps or Americorp or something...the Carthusians take the vow of silence except when they sing hymns in the chapel at God forsaken hours. They also wore cream coloured full length robes and shaved their heads except for a little 1/2" thick fringe which circumnavigated their head in a complete circle. Oh and they also wore hair shirts...I guess the idea was to make oneself unattractive to women and to mortify your own flesh to abandone desires of the flesh...God save us from the zealots...I noticed that their wooden pews in the side chapels in the monastery had little faces carved in the middle of their backs so that it you slouched instead of sitting up straight they would poke you right in the small of your back but at the same time there were little drawers you could pull out at the base of the pew where you could spit your chewing tobacco into the saw dust they contained, so apparently that was one vice that had been allowed...
You might ask yourself how on earth had I managed to become friends with someone who was cloistered at the Certosa Di Calci up in the foot hills near Pisa and had taken the vow of silence?
Well this French order of medievil origin was a working order and believed in economic self sufficiency so they produced a lot of agricultural produce and sold it at a nearby farmers market to raise money for the monastery. One of the products they made was honey, which Fr. Anthony had sort of been given charge of from the bee keeping to the packaging and the stall in the market place and that is where we met him one Saturday selling honey in little jars. So while he was out of the monestary selling their farm products at the market he was allowed to speak...oh and everybody got their stint scrubbing the floors of the refectory on their hands and knees...
After frequenting his stall on several Saturdays, we had gotten to know him a little better and I shared with him my ambition of spending some time at the monastery living the life of a contemplative. He petitioned his Father Superior, Father Poisson and got me permission. In fact my older brother also decided to join me for this experience.
They put us up in some kind of a farmhouse just on the edge of the monastery in the middle of a vinyard on the side of the hill with a commanding view of olive orchards and the little town of Calci down below. I remember how the sound of rain drops pattering on the roof put me off to sleep under a jet black night sky yet thick with the milky way like a shimmering belt across its middle.
At dawn I recall being awakened by the sound of a housefly buzzing where it was caught in a spiderweb in the window where the first rays of the sun cut in across the floor of the bedroom.That buzzing was the only sound. It was so silent there and the buzzing only emphasized it. There was not a sound of traffic or motors of any kind nor people.
I also remember there was a fountain in the middle of the cloister where a constant stream of honey bees alighted on the edge of the upper basin of the fountain where the water overflowed it in thin sheets and drank long and hard from the cold water.
Another thing I remember was that at one end of the cloister it dead ended in a wall which was so cleverly painted with a fresco trompe l'oie in perfect perspective as to look like the cloister continued on. I asked Fr. Anthony why there was a smudge in the middle of the wall at knee height and apparently a dog had run right into the wall with his nose there...
Anyway immediately without words we were put hard to work. I was working with Father Bartolomeo,the monk who was the cook helping him harvest his egg plants in his garden of which he was very proud. He was a very kind man and he beemed with gratitude when my mother had left him a grocery bag full of boxes of chocolate angelfood cake mix, corn flakes and other 1950s style Americana processed food stuff from the US Army commissary at Camp Darby. The cook actually produced several perfect angel food cakes complete with chocolate frosting from those card board Betty Crocker cans later in our stay so he must have snuck in some American TV to know how to do this at some point in his life.
Another interesting monk was an ethnic Chinese Australian, father David Sing, who was allowed to have the avocation of oil painting of which he only painted still lifes of vases of cut flowers, zinnias, violets, daffodils, roses...they were quite good and of course my mother being a soft touch must have bought at least 30 of them from him over the years...
There were several events which stick out in my mind during my stay at the Certosa di Calci as vividly now as the many decades ago that they took place. One is a mental picture, actually mental video film clip of my brother slowly, carefully lowering a wheel barrel down the steps to the basement which was filled by a 300 pound ceramic crock of honey. Somehow as careful as he was being, the crock managed to slip out of the wheel barrel and flip over and I watched in utter amazement as a tidal wave of thick golden brown honey rose in slow motion, crested and silently crashed on the steps...all in slow motion, like stop action film and then what seemed like an eternity later leveled itself evenly across the basement floor in a layer about 3 or 4 inches thick. It was truely amazing to behold and I had never witnessed anything of the kind. My brother of course who was always an incredible "goody two shoes" as a boy, was mortified. The monks undaunted immediately started scooping the honey off the floor into the jars and capped them off making them ready for market like nothing had happened at all.
The second event that comes to mind is that I had remembered seeing in movies how if you rang a big church bell with a rope and got it going well enough that after awhile it could lift you off the ground. It was time for matens one morning and I asked Fr. Anthony if I could ring the bell to call the monks to mass. He and I set about ringing the bell and with each tug and resulting ring, the rope hauled us both a little further off the ground until suddenly we shot right up into the tower and were a good six feet or more off the ground up in the dark belfry with the bats no doubt,then a momentary pause at the peak of the cycle and back down again into the light. The clamour was huge as you can imagine.
We were having so much fun that we had gotten a little carried away and apparently he was later reprimanded as we had rung the bell longer than they were accustomed to ringing it even on Christmas morning...poor Father Anthony.
Last but not least, by the time the next Saturday evening rolled around, Father Bartolomeo, the cook, who had become my friend took pity on me and whispered to me that I deserved the evening off and I could borrow his bicycle and ride down the hill into the village.
As I was saddling up on his bicycle, he kept shoving little bottles of a very powerful green liquer called Chartreuse, which was another product of the monastery into my pockets. He said that I would need them for the ride and there was precious little to do in the village anyway. My pockets were buldging. I think there were ten of them in all. As I drove down the hill I popped off the little cork of the first bottle and polished it off and tossed in into the bushes along the side of the road. It was quite tastey so I went on to down the second one. Needless to say by the time I got to town I had none left and I was careening and bouncing the bicycle off the parked cars on one side of the road to the parked cars on the other, all the way to the bottom of the hill. I can't much remember what I did after that although I have a vague recollection of spending time on a patio with two Italian boys my age whose father worked in some capacity for the monastery and they were asking me how I liked Italy...I told them "what's not to like..." I have no recollection at all of how I got back up the hill to the monastery with the bicycle that night but I imagine I walked the bicycle back up...anyway it was an amazing two weeks but at the end of it I decided the life of a mendicant, vows of silence, vows of poverty, vows of celebacy was not right for me afterall....
Buona notte,
Brian H. Appleton
When I was about 15 years old in 1965, I decided that I wanted to spend two weeks in a monastery and live the life of a contemplative...you know the idealism and craziness of youth...we had met an American Carthusian monk from Iowa who had somehow gotten it into his head that he could best serve humanity by joining one of the stricktest orders of Catholic monks in existance when what he really needed to do was join the Peace Corps or Americorp or something...the Carthusians take the vow of silence except when they sing hymns in the chapel at God forsaken hours. They also wore cream coloured full length robes and shaved their heads except for a little 1/2" thick fringe which circumnavigated their head in a complete circle. Oh and they also wore hair shirts...I guess the idea was to make oneself unattractive to women and to mortify your own flesh to abandone desires of the flesh...God save us from the zealots...I noticed that their wooden pews in the side chapels in the monastery had little faces carved in the middle of their backs so that it you slouched instead of sitting up straight they would poke you right in the small of your back but at the same time there were little drawers you could pull out at the base of the pew where you could spit your chewing tobacco into the saw dust they contained, so apparently that was one vice that had been allowed...
You might ask yourself how on earth had I managed to become friends with someone who was cloistered at the Certosa Di Calci up in the foot hills near Pisa and had taken the vow of silence?
Well this French order of medievil origin was a working order and believed in economic self sufficiency so they produced a lot of agricultural produce and sold it at a nearby farmers market to raise money for the monastery. One of the products they made was honey, which Fr. Anthony had sort of been given charge of from the bee keeping to the packaging and the stall in the market place and that is where we met him one Saturday selling honey in little jars. So while he was out of the monestary selling their farm products at the market he was allowed to speak...oh and everybody got their stint scrubbing the floors of the refectory on their hands and knees...
After frequenting his stall on several Saturdays, we had gotten to know him a little better and I shared with him my ambition of spending some time at the monastery living the life of a contemplative. He petitioned his Father Superior, Father Poisson and got me permission. In fact my older brother also decided to join me for this experience.
They put us up in some kind of a farmhouse just on the edge of the monastery in the middle of a vinyard on the side of the hill with a commanding view of olive orchards and the little town of Calci down below. I remember how the sound of rain drops pattering on the roof put me off to sleep under a jet black night sky yet thick with the milky way like a shimmering belt across its middle.
At dawn I recall being awakened by the sound of a housefly buzzing where it was caught in a spiderweb in the window where the first rays of the sun cut in across the floor of the bedroom.That buzzing was the only sound. It was so silent there and the buzzing only emphasized it. There was not a sound of traffic or motors of any kind nor people.
I also remember there was a fountain in the middle of the cloister where a constant stream of honey bees alighted on the edge of the upper basin of the fountain where the water overflowed it in thin sheets and drank long and hard from the cold water.
Another thing I remember was that at one end of the cloister it dead ended in a wall which was so cleverly painted with a fresco trompe l'oie in perfect perspective as to look like the cloister continued on. I asked Fr. Anthony why there was a smudge in the middle of the wall at knee height and apparently a dog had run right into the wall with his nose there...
Anyway immediately without words we were put hard to work. I was working with Father Bartolomeo,the monk who was the cook helping him harvest his egg plants in his garden of which he was very proud. He was a very kind man and he beemed with gratitude when my mother had left him a grocery bag full of boxes of chocolate angelfood cake mix, corn flakes and other 1950s style Americana processed food stuff from the US Army commissary at Camp Darby. The cook actually produced several perfect angel food cakes complete with chocolate frosting from those card board Betty Crocker cans later in our stay so he must have snuck in some American TV to know how to do this at some point in his life.
Another interesting monk was an ethnic Chinese Australian, father David Sing, who was allowed to have the avocation of oil painting of which he only painted still lifes of vases of cut flowers, zinnias, violets, daffodils, roses...they were quite good and of course my mother being a soft touch must have bought at least 30 of them from him over the years...
There were several events which stick out in my mind during my stay at the Certosa di Calci as vividly now as the many decades ago that they took place. One is a mental picture, actually mental video film clip of my brother slowly, carefully lowering a wheel barrel down the steps to the basement which was filled by a 300 pound ceramic crock of honey. Somehow as careful as he was being, the crock managed to slip out of the wheel barrel and flip over and I watched in utter amazement as a tidal wave of thick golden brown honey rose in slow motion, crested and silently crashed on the steps...all in slow motion, like stop action film and then what seemed like an eternity later leveled itself evenly across the basement floor in a layer about 3 or 4 inches thick. It was truely amazing to behold and I had never witnessed anything of the kind. My brother of course who was always an incredible "goody two shoes" as a boy, was mortified. The monks undaunted immediately started scooping the honey off the floor into the jars and capped them off making them ready for market like nothing had happened at all.
The second event that comes to mind is that I had remembered seeing in movies how if you rang a big church bell with a rope and got it going well enough that after awhile it could lift you off the ground. It was time for matens one morning and I asked Fr. Anthony if I could ring the bell to call the monks to mass. He and I set about ringing the bell and with each tug and resulting ring, the rope hauled us both a little further off the ground until suddenly we shot right up into the tower and were a good six feet or more off the ground up in the dark belfry with the bats no doubt,then a momentary pause at the peak of the cycle and back down again into the light. The clamour was huge as you can imagine.
We were having so much fun that we had gotten a little carried away and apparently he was later reprimanded as we had rung the bell longer than they were accustomed to ringing it even on Christmas morning...poor Father Anthony.
Last but not least, by the time the next Saturday evening rolled around, Father Bartolomeo, the cook, who had become my friend took pity on me and whispered to me that I deserved the evening off and I could borrow his bicycle and ride down the hill into the village.
As I was saddling up on his bicycle, he kept shoving little bottles of a very powerful green liquer called Chartreuse, which was another product of the monastery into my pockets. He said that I would need them for the ride and there was precious little to do in the village anyway. My pockets were buldging. I think there were ten of them in all. As I drove down the hill I popped off the little cork of the first bottle and polished it off and tossed in into the bushes along the side of the road. It was quite tastey so I went on to down the second one. Needless to say by the time I got to town I had none left and I was careening and bouncing the bicycle off the parked cars on one side of the road to the parked cars on the other, all the way to the bottom of the hill. I can't much remember what I did after that although I have a vague recollection of spending time on a patio with two Italian boys my age whose father worked in some capacity for the monastery and they were asking me how I liked Italy...I told them "what's not to like..." I have no recollection at all of how I got back up the hill to the monastery with the bicycle that night but I imagine I walked the bicycle back up...anyway it was an amazing two weeks but at the end of it I decided the life of a mendicant, vows of silence, vows of poverty, vows of celebacy was not right for me afterall....
Buona notte,
Brian H. Appleton