A
current exhibit at the Burchfield Penney is about two extraordinary
artistic and religious figures and lifelong soul mates on their roughly
parallel but largely divergent spiritual and artistic quests, Thomas
Merton and Robert Lax. They met as students at Columbia University in
New York City, but both had substantial Western New York connections,
specifically to Olean and St. Bonaventure University, where both taught
at times, and Lax grew up—off and on—in Olean.
Merton ultimately wound up a Trappist monk in a monastery in
Kentucky, while Lax lived the latter half of his life on Greek islands,
the final years on the island of Patmos, where St. John the author of
the Book of Revelation composed that strange mystical prophetic screed,
and before that for several years on Kalymnos (a name that means
“beautiful song”).
Two men so very much alike, and very different. Among the
differences, that Merton, though he wrote many poems, was essentially a
prose writer. While Lax, while he wrote copious prose—mostly in the form
of personal journal entries, and letters to a wide variety of
correspondents—cartons of this material now in archives at St.
Bonaventure, cartons more at Columbia—was essentially a poet.
Another key difference—it has been observed—that in their spiritual
and artistic quests, Merton was more concerned with answers, Lax more
with questions. (This difference possibly not unrelated to the prose
versus poetry difference.)
The exhibit covers both men, but is weighted slightly toward Lax, as
the less famous of the two—so the path less trodden, while Merton
studies became virtually an industry—but equally significant in their
personal relationship, and equally or more significant than Merton as an
artist. Lax tended to get less than his due attention in part because
of the obstinately avant-garde character of his poetry—minimalist spare,
lines of a word or two, or partial words, snaking down the page,
sometimes syllable by syllable, including long poems of very few
discrete words repeated like a mantra, and little syntax—but literary
critics who did attend to his work could be effusive. Columbia professor
and friend—but nonetheless judicious literary critic—Mark Van Doren
called one of his works “a grand poem…Homer would have liked it.”
British critic R. C. Kenedy, who wrote extensively and insightfully
about Lax, called one of his works “one of the greatest poems in the
English language,” and one of his books “in all probability, the finest
volume of poems published by an English-speaking poet of the generation
which comes in T. S. Eliot’s wake.”
Partly also Lax got less than his due attention because he lived on
remote islands. An apparent similarity between Merton and Lax that turns
out to be a difference relates to hermit predilection. Merton chose a
formally monastic lifestyle. Lax did not go that extreme, but lived on
Aegean islands among fisher communities. He has been described as a
hermit, but he rejected that description. A term he was more comfortable
with was “solitary.” He needed time to himself, for his writing, for
meditation, for prayer, but also needed regular interaction with
ordinary people around him, in tune with the world around them, with the
seasons, with the environment, in the islands case, the sea and its
perils. Previously—before the Aegean islands years—he lived with circus
troupes, accompanied them on their peregrinations, and wrote poetry
about them, the jugglers, the acrobats, their skills, their grace,
their perils.
The exhibit materials include framed literary items—mostly poems—and
photos, and vitrines containing some of their books and other published
works. The weighting in Lax’s favor occurs in that all the framed
literary items are original issues on brown paper of the broadsheet he
and graphic artist Emil Antonucci produced on Antonucci’s hand-operation
press for several years running in the late 1950s, early 1960s,
entitled
Pax, Latin for peace. The
Pax materials are
by various authors, including Merton and Lax (writing for his own
publication under the pen name Peter Lewis) and members of their
literary and social circle, the likes of Jack Kerouac, e.e. cummings,
and Mark Van Doren.
Pax graphics are by Antonucci and Ad
Reinhardt, another Lax lifelong friend—from their high school days—and
artistic exemplar. (Lax’s stark minimalist poetry seems somehow related
to Reinhardt’s black paintings.)
Though roughly equal numbers of their photos, which again are similar
but different. Wall copy talks about how Merton’s photos were “made as
Zen-based expressions to foster contemplation.” Nature subjects—granite
rocks and tufts of grasses pushing up among them—and architectural
vignettes—a window recess in a cheap construction industrial building,
colonized by a tangle of scrub arboreal flora. Lax’s photos at once more
simple and more complex. About black and white and shadow. Including
the shadow of the photographer taking the photo. The artist behind the
art. In passageways amid whitewashed stone walls on Greek islands. Stone
passageways and stone steps. Metaphors of spiritual ascesis. And one
photo of a shadow of a hand on a wall. Reminiscent of cave paintings
hand images. The earliest ever assertion of the artist behind the art.
This exhibit curated by Tony Bannon, Burchfield Penney director
emeritus, and Paul Spaeth, St. Bonaventure University librarian and
curator of the Thomas Merton archives, and founder and curator of the
Robert Lax archives. The exhibit continues through August 26.
http://www.dailypublic.com/articles/04302018/image-and-word-thomas-merton-and-robert-lax
