the unreality of the imaginary self

 Sketch by Thomas Merton

“In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart. As soon as you compare that shadow with the shadows of other people, you lose all joy, because you have begun to trade in unrealities and there is no joy in things that do not exist.”

~Thomas Merton

Image and Word: Thomas Merton and Robert Lax

Robert Lax (1915-2000), Untitled, 1970s; black and white photograph, 11 x 17 inches; Robert Lax Archives. St. Bonaventure University.

By Jack Foran

/ May. 2, 2018 7am EST

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

a meditation on Jesus Christ by Daniel Berrigan

1. The gospel of Jesus is spoken in a world
intoxicated with death
mesmerized by death
convinced of the necessary rule of death
technologizing death
acceding to the omnipresence of death
2. And Jesus says No
to this omnivorous power.
So his word makes the slight
all but imperceptible difference
(which is finally the only difference).
A good man, himself powerless,
stands at the side of powerless men
and says to death No
for them for himself.
3. Can any of you
place before you a single child, smiling
squirming in your arms; and say
The death of this child is a fact of modern war; I accede
to that death. I regret it of course
but what can one do? We have to destroy
in order to save; villages, women, children,
The system traps us all...
4. The system; horrible word! Can the system
trap the conscience of a free man?
Traps are for animals; freedom is for men.
I cannot speak for you
but I will not wait upon Caesar
to instruct me in God's word.
I am a man. I can read:
If a man will save his life, let him lose it.
I say to you love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.
Whatever you do to the least of these my brothers, you do to me.
Blessed are you who suffer persecution for justice's sake.
5. Jesus had nothing to say to "systems",
except to deny their power over him.
He said in effect, violence stops here (pointing to his body)
He said in effect, it is better to die for others
than to live (live?) in a trap.
6. Be concrete, be immediate!
Imagine the world!
If you embrace a child, can you consent
to the death of a child? each human face
leads you (follow!) to every human face.
7. I can only tell you what I believe.
I believe I cannot be saved by foreign policies.
I cannot be saved by sexual revolutions.
I cannot be saved by the gross national product.
I cannot be save by nuclear deterrents.
I cannot be saved by aldermen, priests, artists,
plumbers, city planners, social engineers,
nor by the Vatican,
nor by the World Buddhist Association
nor by Hitler nor by Joan of Arc
nor by angels and archangels,
nor by powers and dominations
8. I can be saved only by Jesus Christ.
9. Take this book with you, please
into the midst of children old men and women
the poor, the defeated, the innocent.
Carry it about with you, let it speak
wherever men struggle, suffer, abandon hope,
Let the book happen to you.
It has no other reason for being,
A man
very like yourself
first spoke the words of these pages,
"a man
acquainted with grief,
like us in everything, save sin alone."
He is as near to you/ as your next drawn breath.
10. I do not know
where my life leads.
Do you know where your life leads?
The next note is not struck.
The hands (foul, cleansed) hover
over the instrument.
My friends ask me: After jail, what?
You too (my friends) start awake at midnight,
question the silent lover beside,
the dream-wrapped child;
where? what next?
11. Lover, child, in the immense dignity
of birth or death refuse an answer.
There is no answer.
The genius of the gospel is in the name of man
to refuse an answer.
We had best go forward/ as those in love go
Exulting
in the breadth of the swath love opens
the sound of a scythe at harvest
the soundlessness of children sleeping
a universe
of unanswerable grandeur!
12. If we have awakened to the world
it is probable that our salvation is near.
If we abide in love
we shall be greatly loved.
13. I believe that twelve just men, believing
against all evidence,
may stir the soil or sea
with toilers' hands, bring up intact
something flowerlike, something -
Jesus,
that direct and life-giving man
waits on you.
The world waits on you.
The two statements
are quite simply verified.
Close then open your eyes.

- first published as the foreword to Quotations from Chairman Jesus, compiled by David Kik and published by Templegate for $1.95 in 1969. The book was subsequently reissued by Bantam.

Jerusalem

And, as Christ said over Jerusalem, we do not know the things that are for our peace.

-Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 66

the question that nobody knows how to answer

Thomas Merton

Drawing of a Cross

Pen and pencil, ca. 1949-1953

(from an exhibit at Columbia University in 2015, photo by Jim Forest)

God, my God, God Whom I meet in darkness,
with You it is always the same thing!
Always the same question that nobody knows how to answer!

- Thomas Merton, "Fire Watch", The Sign of  Jonas

Your Darkness (no-man's land)

King Minos, Thomas Merton art

But oh!
How far I have to go to find You in Whom I have already arrived!
For now, oh my God, it is to You alone that I can talk,
because nobody else will understand.
I cannot bring any other on this earth
into the cloud where I dwell in Your light,
that is,
Your Darkness,
where I am lost and abashed.

I cannot explain to any other
the anguish which is Your joy
nor the loss which is the possession of You,
nor the distance from all things
which is the arrival in You.
nor the death which is the birth in You
because I do not know anything about it myself
and all I know
is that I wish it were over
-- I wish it were begun.

You have contradicted everything.
You have left me in no man's land.

- Thomas Merton
Dancing in the Water of Life, page 175, excerpted

Zen Catholicism

calligraphy by Thomas Merton

In some notes that Merton prepared for an exhibition of his calligraphic drawings, he writes:

“Neither rustic nor urbane, Eastern nor Western, perhaps can be called expressions of Zen Catholicism”. (from a notebook in the TMC collection)

we carry the memory of the earth

 Calligraphy by Thomas Merton

Fashioned from clay, we carry the memory of the earth. Ancient, forgotten things stir within our hearts, memories from the time before the mind was born. Within us are depths that keep watch. These are depths that no words can trawl or light unriddle. Our neon times have neglected and evaded the depth-kingdoms of interiority in favor of the ghost realms of cyberspace. We have unlearned the patience and attention of lingering at the thresholds where the unknown awaits us. We have become haunted pilgrims addicted to distraction and driven by the speed and color of images.

—	John O'Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, from Whiskey River.

the empty boat (wu wei)

“Who can free himself from achievement

And from fame, descend and be lost

Amid the masses of men?

He will flow like Tao, unseen,

He will go about like Life itself

With no name and no home.

Simple is he, without distinction.

To all appearances he is a fool.

His steps leave no trace. He has no power.

He achieves nothing, has no reputation.

Since he judges no one

No one judges him.

Such is the perfect man:

His boat is empty.” 

― Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Merton. 

Many people are recognizing and writing about Merton now. I have certainly had plenty to say these last few years in my explorations of Merton’s art and writing.

Here are some things that I found this past week that I hadn’t seen before. Painting of Prades, France by Owen Merton, Thomas Merton's artist father:

Photo of Merton's father and mother, Owen and Ruth, in Prades -- at least the full photograph. I have seen this shot of Owen "lifted" from the photo.:

And a photo of Merton's draft of the beginning of Seven Story Mountain:

Poetry and Contemplative Life

Photo of Thomas Merton by Eugene Meatyard

An article by Thomas Merton appeared in the July 4, 1947 issue of Commonweal Magazine and was recently republished. The topic: Poetry and Contemplation. This was something that Merton, poet & monk, supposedly knew something about. In fact, Merton struggled with articulating the relationship between art and religion ("... there is an abyss between them ..."). He seems (to me) to slide from one side to the other, never quite recognizing the authentic synthesis of monk & artist that he, himself, embodied so well. As did his friends Robert Lax and Ad Reinhart (see louie post: "Art is Art, Everthing Else is Everything Else") 

Below are some excerpts from the 1947 Commonweal article. It is good, but it is still early Merton. He will continue to develop this theme for the rest of his life, both in his writing and his living. Read the whole article  HERE.

"The term “contemplative life" is one that is much mistreated. It is more often used than defined, and that is why arguments about the respective merits of "active" and ''contemplative" orders generally end nowhere. In the present article, I am not talking about the contemplative orders, but about the contemplative life. It is a life that can be led and, in fact, must eventually be led by every good Christian. It is the life for which we were created, and which will eventually be our everlasting joy in heaven. By the grace of Christ we can begin to lead that life even on earth, and many in fact do so begin. Some of them are in cloisters, because the vows and rules of religious orders and congregations make the necessary work of preparation easy and, as it were, almost a matter of course. But many more "contemplatives" are out in the world. A lot of them may be found in places like Harlem and wherever people suffer, and perhaps many of these have never even heard the word "contemplative." And yet, on the other hand, not all of those who are in contemplative orders are contemplatives. Through their own fault they miss the end of their vocation. 

"The contemplative life is a life entirely occupied with God—with love and knowledge of God.
... 

"We have said that the poetic sense may be a remote disposition for mystical prayer. This needs explanation. And the first thing that needs to be stressed is the essential dignity of esthetic experience. It is, in itself, a very high gift, though only in the natural order. It is a gift which very many people have never received, and which others, having received it, have allowed to spoil or become atrophied within them through neglect and misuse. 

"To many people, the enjoyment of art is nothing more than a sensible and emotional thrill. They look at a picture, and if it stimulates one or another of their sense-appetites they are pleased. On a hot day they like to look at a picture of mountains or the sea because it makes them feel cool. They like paintings of dogs that you could almost pat. But naturally they soon tire of art, under those circumstances. They turn aside to pat a real dog, or they go down the street to an air-conditioned movie, to give their senses another series of jolts. Obviously for such people art is not even a remote preparation for even the lowest degree of contemplation. 

"But a genuine esthetic experience is something which transcends not only the sensible order (in which, however, it has its beginning) but also that of reason itself. It is a supra-rational intuition of the latent perfection of things. Its immediacy outruns the speed of reasoning and leaves all analysis far behind. In the natural order, as Jacques Maritain has often insisted, it is an analogue of the mystical experience which it resembles and imitates from afar. Its mode of apprehension is that of "connaturality"—it reaches out to grasp the inner reality, the vital substance of its object, by a kind of affective identification of itself with it. It rests in the perfection of things by a kind of union which somewhat resembles the rest of the soul in its immediate, affective contact with God in the obscurity of mystical prayer. A true artist can contemplate a picture for hours, and it is a real contemplation, too. So close is the resemblance between these two experiences that a poet like Blake could almost confuse the two and make them merge into one another as if they belonged to the same order of things. And yet there is an abyss between them."

HT: Claire - A Seat At The Table

ash wednesday

"Ash Wednesday is for people who know that it means for their soul to be logged with these icy waters: all of us are such people, if only we can realize it.

"There is confidence everywhere in Ash Wednesday, yet that does not mean unmixed and untroubled security. The confidence of the Christian is always a confidence in spite of darkness and risk, in the presence of peril, with every evidence of possible disaster...

"Once again, Lent is not just a time for squaring conscious accounts: but for realizing what we had perhaps not seen before. The light of Lent is given us to help us with this realization.

"Nevertheless, the liturgy of Ash Wednesday is not focussed on the sinfulness of the penitent but on the mercy of God. The question of sinfulness is raised precisely because this is a day of mercy, and the just do not need a savior."

-Thomas Merton, Seasons of Celebration (FSG 1965), 113-124

Christ in the Desert

Earlier this month I visited this monastery in Abiquiu, New Mexico.

"The place was chosen with careful deliberation, and it is admirable. Thirteen miles by dirt road from the nearest highway, the monastery rises at the point where the canyon narrows and road vanishes into rock and brush. Still surrounded by visible traces of an ancient Pueblo culture, it is at the frontier on which the Pueblos had to protect their country against marauding Apaches. 

"The rocky land is even more lonely and desolate today than it was then (for the Indian villages have disappeared). The monastic Church, designed by the Japanese architect George Nakashima, fits perfectly into its setting. Stark, lonely, stately in its simplicity, it gazes out over the sparse irrigated fields into the widening valley. The tower is like a watchman looking for something or someone of whom it does not speak. This architectural masterpiece is a perfect expression, in adobe brick and plaster, of the monastic spirit. 

"Monastic hospitality does not conflict with the "desert spirit" -- on the contrary, it is an essential element in the desert tradition, for the first monks had to be concerned for the welfare of those who got lost in the desert, or came to them in spiritual crisis."

- Thomas Merton, who visited this monastery in 1968

Here are some more photos of the monastery:

 I had always assumed that this was a Trappist monastery, since Merton made special effort to visit here before his trip to Asia in 1968.  However after seeing how different these monks looked (and acted), dressed all in black rather than the black and white habit of the Trappist, I found out that they were a Benedictine order of monks.

I've come to the conclusion that Merton made the visit more from an artistic than religious interest (as if the two can be separated in him).  The monastery was built in 1964, the church designed by George Nakashima, a Japanese American woodworker and architect.

Merton also hoped to visit with Georgia O'Keeffe while he was in Abiquiu, but that didn't work out.

The monastery is 13 miles off the main road, deep in the quiet wildness of the northern New Mexico desert.  Not an easy place to get to.

Website of George Nakashima

more on the Merton movie ...

[from the Orange County Register by Cathleen Falsani]

Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother
She's sleeping here right by my side
And in her right hand a silver dagger,
She says that I can't be your bride.
— from “Silver Dagger” by Joan Baez

It was their song — the young, winsome brunette and her silver-pated lover with the sparkly eyes.

“All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s ‘Silver Dagger,’” the man wrote to his lady love in 1966. “I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.”

He yearned for her. He was heartbroken. And he was Thomas Merton — the Trappist monk, celebrated author, and perhaps most influential American Catholic of the 20th century.

It’s a chapter of the thoroughly modern mystic’s life that is no secret to his legions of fans, detractors, and scholars of his prolific work, including the best-selling autobiography (written when he was just 31), “The Seven-Storey Mountain.”

Now Merton’s complex love life (divine or otherwise) is also the subject of a forthcoming feature film, “The Divine Comedy of Thomas Merton.”

Not long before his death in1968 at the age of 53 — he reportedly was electrocuted when he stepped out of a hotel shower and touched an electric fan during a monastic convention in Bangkok — the thoroughly modern mystic (known to fellow monks at the Abbey of Gethsemani in rural Kentucky as “Brother Louis”) fell in love with a nursing student half his age. She is referred to, simply, as “M” in his memoir and letters collected in the volume “A Midsummer Diary for M,” published posthumously in 1997.

“I will never really understand on earth what relation this love has to my solitude,” Merton wrote to M in a letter dated June 21, 1966. “I cannot help placing it at the very heart of my aloneness, and not just on the periphery somewhere.”

I recently had the pleasure of reading the screenplay for “The Divine Comedy of Thomas Merton,” written by Ben Eisner and Kevin Miller, the filmmakers behind last year’s feature-length Canadian documentary “Hellbound?.” That film explored popular notions of hell and what those ideas say about our collective understanding of God.

The duo’s Merton film, while factually-based (carefully so, they emphasize), is not a documentary. Rather it is an epic tale of spiritual, emotional, and cultural transformation in the 1960s. And, yes, it is a love story.

“I chose to build this film around Merton's love affair in 1966 for every reason other than the fact that sex sells,” Eisner told me earlier this week.
“A lot of Merton fans are revolting against what I am doing because they want to hold on to him and sanitize him. Merton doesn't fit into any mold, and that's why I love the man.”

Merton was “a fully spiritual person and fully human person who openly shared his deepest fears and failures with anyone who cared to listen,” Eisner added.

“He tosses formulas out the window. We all want something spelled out for us to follow so we know we are safe, secure, and on the right path. But Merton doesn't let us off the hook that easy.”

The middle-age monk’s love for M was an “agonizing, and at other times liberating, crucible he has been forged in,” that “crystallized his vocational vision and cemented him more firmly in his message for the world. And oh how relevant that message is for us today amid the clamor of social media and the 'me, me, me' mentality we pretend doesn't exist,” Eisner said.

I first read Merton as a graduate seminarian 20 years ago and fell head-over-heels in love with him, too. His voice was, to me at the time, unique in the way he lived in the awkward no-man’s-land between holiness and humanity (where, frankly, each of us dwells.) It is a delicious dichotomy, one he navigated with grace and brutal honesty.

Merton was a man’s man, handsome and strapping, like a rugged Spencer Tracy with a tonsure and cassock. “Tom” had been around the block a few times, both before he moved behind Gethsemani’s cloistered walls and after. That made him, to me and many others, more accessible and authentic than many other giants of the faith.

Merton was saintly and serious. He also was sexy and a little bit dangerous. It’s a combination that tends to make people nervous, not unlike C.S. Lewis’ Aslan. Not safe, but good.

“He is so human, real, and relatable to me,” Eisner said. “I am convinced that what he so eloquently and vulnerably wrote about is perhaps more relevant today than it was in his own day... I just can't wait to introduce this beautiful person to a whole new mass of people who have yet to be smitten by his wit and wisdom.”

The way Eisner and Miller have written the romance between Merton and his M is lovely. It’s not tawdry or voyeuristic, and it leaves to the audience the (highly debated) question of whether their relationship was ever fully consummated physically. I was grateful for that as the details of what happened between the sheets are the least compelling part of their unlikely coupling.

“Dear, I have a terrible desire for fidelity to what has been far greater than either of us,” Merton wrote to M in the “Midsummer” collection. “And not a choice of fidelities to this or that, love or vows. But a fidelity beyond and above that to both of them in one, to God; to the Christ who is absolutely alone and not apart from us, but is the dreadful deep hole in the midst of us, waiting for no explanation.”

Eisner and Miller are in the midst of development and fundraising, with principal shooting set to begin next March and a (hopeful) 2015 release date to coincide with what would have been Merton’s 100th birthday.

Of course, the million-dollar question remains: Who will portray Merton on the big screen?

When I posed the question online via Twitter and Facebook, people responded with definite (and passionate) ideas including Patrick Stewart (probably a little too old, though), Sir Anthony Hopkins (ditto), Paul Giamatti (hmm...), Daniel Day-Lewis (too skinny), Campbell Scott (the eyes are close and he’s 52), and Philip Seymour Hoffman (well, everything he does is art.)

I’d like to see Jeremy Sisto — whose middle name is Merton and whose jazz musician father knew Brother Louis (a longtime jazz fan) personally — cast in the film.

Sisto already has played Jesus in a film and he’s got a glimmer in his eyes and brooding energy that reminds me of Merton. If not the protagonist himself, Sisto, perhaps best known for his recurring role on "Six Feet Under," might do well as Merton’s final abbot, Flavian Burns, or his friend, the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra.

But if Eisner has his way, he knows exactly who the lead roles will go to: “I wrote the script with Stanley Tucci and Zooey Deschanel in mind.”
Sounds like a match made in heaven to me.

Learn more about “The Divine Comedy of Thomas Merton” at mertonmovie.com.

image of Christ crucified

 brush drawing by Thomas Merton

(image size 6 1/2" h x 4 1/4" w)

Notes from Roger Lipsey
“This perfectly grand image of the Crucifixion was found in a booklet, a kind of diary of drawings, as just one among ten or so brush drawings, the others of no special interest. Though monumental in “feel” and impact, it is factually a small print produced by inking and printing with the edge of an envelope or something of the kind. The method could hardly be simpler; the result could hardly be more majestic. This image recalls medieval carvings of the Crucifixion to which Merton was exposed as a boy in France, especially of the Romanesque period before the elaborations of Gothic art.
… this image of Christ Crucified draws together, remarkably, the values he most cared for as a contemporary artist and the values he most cared for as a monk …”

(Angelic Mistakes, The Art of Thomas Merton, by Roger Lipsey, p. 53)

from the darkness comes light

 brush drawing by Thomas Merton

(image size: 8 1/2" h x 5" w, on gray card)

The monk who is truly a man of prayer and who seriously faces the challenge of his vocation in all its depth is by that very fact exposed to existential dread. He experiences in himself the emptiness, the lack of authenticity, the quest for fidelity, the “lostness” of modern man. … The monk confronts his own humanity and that of his world at the deepest and most central point where the void seems to open out into black despair. The monk confronts this serious possibility, and rejects it … The option of absolute despair is turned into perfect hope by the pure and humble supplication of monastic prayer. The monk faces the worst, and discovers in it the hope of the best. From the darkness comes light. From death, life. From the abyss there comes, unaccountably, the mysterious gift of the Spirit sent by God to make all things new, to transform the created and redeemed world, and to re-establish all things in Christ. (The Climate of Monastic Prayer, p. 25)

Notes from Roger Lipsey:
“ … the Celtic cross reflects what Merton once called Zen Catholicism – a phrase borrowed from Dom Ailred Graham, a Benedictine abbot and author whom Merton admired. This is a magnificent rendering, uncanny but still comfortable and settled in its fusion of freely brushed Zen calligraphy with the unique design of the Irish medieval cross. Here is the Zen brush-drawn circle yet again, at home in an unexpected place. …”(Angelic Mistakes, The Art of Thomas Merton, by Roger Lipsey, pp. 48-49)

Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967) - "Art is art. Everything else is everything else."

 

Photo by Robert Lax

"Art is art. Everything else is everything else." - Ad Reinhardt

In other words, art does not represent something else.  Art stands on its own, a living entity, in and of itself. 

Reinhardt was a pioneer of conceptual and minimal art.  He was a critic of abstract expressionism.   Reinhardt’s earliest exhibited paintings avoided representation, and show a steady progression away from objects and external reference.  He is best known for his Black paintings of the 1960s.

Ad Reinhardt, Merton and Lax were friends.  They met while they were students at Columbia University in New York City.  (Actually, Reinhart and Lax attended the same high school, but that's another story) Ad was studying art history at Columbia and frequently contributed cartoons to the school newspaper, Jester, where Merton and Lax were staffers.   

The three were bonded by a common vision.  A similar calling that centered around simplicity and emptiness.  Though they each went their own way in the world, they never lost sight of each other.

"... I think Ad Reinhardt is possibly the best artist in America ... Reinhardt's abstract art is pure and religious.  It flies away from all naturalism, from all representation ... " - Merton, 1940, "Run to the Mountain, page 128

Merton, Lax, and Reinhardt form a potent troika, forging into new territory.  Continuing the "Beat" style of their youth, they are unusual, contrary to what is considered traditional or accepted, off the beaten track, outside the norm.  Reinhardt's paintings remain controversial decades after they were composed.  Lax's poetry is shocking in its simplicity and is still relatively unknown in America.  Merton's writings are popular, but he was rejected for inclusion in the Catholic Catechism.

In the spring of 1959 Lax and Reinhardt visited Merton at Gethsemane.  In his thank you note, Reinhardt says to Merton:

"... let's argue about art and religion some more.  If you're doing a book on it, and you have a world-wide audience, can I help you say what's right, instead of saying things people want to hear and agree with?  You just make people happy if you don't say what's right, true (beautiful?) ... thanks for the weekend."

In fact, in 1962 Merton was taken with the art of William Congdon, an American painter, abstract expressionist and devout Catholic who focused on religious themes.  Merton wrote a few paragraphs praising Congdon's work, and threw in a line condemning abstraction:

"... here the dynamism of abstraction has been set free from its compulsive, Donysian and potentially orgiastic self-frustraion and raised to the level of spirituality." - Thomas Merton, jacket copy for William Congdon, In My Disc of Gold: Itinerary to Christ of William Congdon, 1962

Well, Reinhardt soon caught wind of this and fired off to Merton a blistering letter, taking him to task for his poor judgement.

" ... I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw ... Why shouldn't you be human after all ... have you given up on hope?  Have you no respect for sacredness and art? ... Are you throwing in the trowel at long last?  Can't you tell your impasto from a holy ground? ... We'll send help, hold on, old man." - Ad Reinhardt letter to Merton, 1962

Merton had the good sense to listen to Reinhardt's criticism.  His reply, though superficially humerous, shows that Merton and Reinhardt were looking at each other, eye to eye, and this was a time of reckoning.

"Dear Ad,
"Once, twice, often, repeatedly, I have reached out for your letter and for the typewriter.  Choked with sobs, or rather more often carried away by the futilities of life, I have desisted ...

"Truly immersed in the five skandhas and plunged in avidya, I have taken the shell for the nut and the nut for the nugget and the nugget for the essence and the essence for the such-ness ... I have embraced a bucket of schmaltz.  I have accepted the mish mash of kitsch.  I have been made public with a mitre of marshmallows upon my dumkopf.  This is the price of folly and the wages of middle-aged perversity.  I thought my friends would never know ... I am up to my neck.  I am in the wash.  I am under the mangle.  I am publicly identified with all the idols.  I am the byword of critics and galleries.  I am eaten alive by the art racket.  I am threatened with publication of a great book of horrors which I have despised and do recant." - Merton letter to Ad Reinhardt, 1962

Merton decisively moved to Reinhardt's camp and the world of contemporary art.  As an artist, he would not go back to his drawings of Our Lady.   As an author, he would not turn medieval concepts to a task for which they were not suited.

Like Lax and Reinhardt, Merton headed into the Unknown.

Ad Reinhardt died on August 30, 1967, of heart problems.  He was 53 years old.

[photo by Merton, cover of Monk's Pond 1st edition, spring 1968]

As a memorial to Reinhardt, Merton published in the first issue of his literary magazine, Monk's Pond, a chantlike text by Reinhardt, dating to 1962.  Here is one verse of that text:

"The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive - non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective.  the only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not." - Ad Reinhardt, Monk's Pond 1, Spring 1968, p. 6 first published in Art International, December 1962

Sounds like God, doesn't it?

See also - does art have anything to do with life? (Robert Lax on Ad Reinhardt)

song for our lady of cobre

In April of 1940 (70 years ago), Merton took a vacation/pilgrimage to Cuba.  At the time he was teaching English at St. Bonaventure's College in Olean and had applied to join the Franciscans (and was soon to be rejected).  Merton was enchanted with the Cuban people, their friendliness, their dance and song.

He visited several monasteries and churches:

"... as for the churches around Cuba, I must say that I have never seen such churches or such things when I was in a church.  There is a church here called La Soledad which has in it a miraculous image, and when I walked into the place I was picked up by my feet off the floor and seen not a ring of pure and endless light but rather a great ring of nothing which was absolutely real, indescribable and also a little frightening.  It was clearer than if I had seen it which my eyes, but it was simply nothing, and there was no sensible note included in it anywhere, and anyway I was on the edge of it like on the edge of an abyss ... " - from a letter to Lax dated April 1940

 Iglesia de Nuestra Senora de la Soledad in Camabuey

Merton also visited the church of Our Lady of Charity of Cobre (La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre), patroness of Cuba.  A woman of mixed race, she also represents, Ochun, the African goddess of love, femininity and the river.   She is the symbol of feminine sensuality.

This is probably the finest of Merton's early poems.  Merton later made some changes to it, but I like it in its original form.  He seems to be influenced by the beat of calypso music.

Song for Our Lady of Cobre

The white girls stir their heads like trees,
The black girls go
Reflected like flamingoes in the street.

The white girls sing as shrill as water,
The black girls speak
As loud as clay.
[The published version reads: The black girls talk/As quiet as day."]

The white girls open their arms like clouds,
The black girls close their eyes like wings;
Angels bow down like bells,
Angels look up like toys,

Because the heavenly stars
Stand in a ring,
And all the pieces of the mosaic, earth,
Get up and fly away like birds.

-Thomas Merton

[drawings by Thomas Merton]

The prayer life of a flexible instrument

There are these “drawings” that Merton left behind. Not “drawings of” anything. They remind me of the images that come back to us from the Hubble telescope. Outer space. Are these inner space?

Roger Lipsey says that Merton inked grass and then pulled the prints directly from the grass. On this one he probably layered brushwork with a dense lattice of inked grass stems, which functioned as a kind of stencil. Merton must have been pleased “to create such fragile, temporary patterns of grass. That nearly empty, luminous drifts of energy or matter appeared in prints derived from these fragile setups must have been a shock”.
(“Angelic Mistakes, The Art of Thomas Merton”, by Roger Lipsey, p. 53)

April 3, 1965. “ To be a flexible instrument in the hand of God is a great and sometimes terrible vocation ... We are all in some way instruments. And we all have to be virtuosos at taking a back seat when necessary. Way back. The prayer life of a flexible instrument cannot be well ordered. It has to be terribly free. And utterly responsive to a darkly, dimly understood command.”
("The School of Charity" p. 271)

October, 1968. “You have to see your will and God’s will dualistically for a long time. You have to experience duality for a long time until you see it’s not there. In this respect I am a Hindu. Ramakrishna has the solution. Don’t consider dualistic prayer on a lower level. The lower is higher. There are no levels. Any moment you can break through to the underlying unity which is God’s gift in Christ. In the end, Praise praises. Thanksgiving gives thanks. Jesus prays. Openness is all.”
(David Steindl-Rast, citing Merton in conversation, in "Thomas Merton, Monk: A Monastic Tribute", p. 89)

an act for which there can be found no word

image by Thomas Merton. Untitled.

image size: 7 1/4" h x 10" w

April 10, 1965. The religion of our time, to be authentic, needs to be the kind that escapes practically all religious definition. Because there has been endless definition, endless verbalizing, and words have become gods. There are so many words that one cannot get to God as long as [God] is thought to be on the other side of words. But when [God] is placed firmly beyond the other side of words, the words multiply like flies and there is a great buzzing religion, very profitable, very holy, very spurious. One tries to escape it by acts of truth that fail. One’s whole being must be an act for which there can be found no word. This is the primary meaning of faith. On this basis, other dimensions of belief can be made credible. Otherwise not. My whole being must be a yes and an amen and an exclamation that is not heard. Only after that is there any point in exclamations and even after there is no point in exclamations. One’s acts must be part of the same silent exclamation … If only [we] could realize that nothing HAS TO BE uttered. Utterance makes sense only when it is spontaneous and free.” (The Courage for Truth, p. 25)

Notes from Roger Lipsey (Angelic Mistakes, p. 52-53):

“[this image]… can be understood as glimpses of another world, another quality of energy and organization, not maps but something more like visions from the margin of experience, where matter and energy become interchangeable.. appears to have been done completely without the brush; he seems to have inked grass stems and pulled prints directly from them … chance and providence meet …

When first encountered, these works may seem slight and odd. What a great distance has been traveled from the majestic Zen brushworks. Is it distance gained? The notion of gain or loss is misleading at this point in Merton’s development as an artist; there is simply change in a search that no longer measured itself and perhaps never measured itself along a line of progression. But I can report from my own experience that these images of little visible substance, hovering at some “incomparable point” in space, once seemed to me slight but now strike me as remarkable. This is not a crucial claim or perspective. It simply asks us to keep looking.”

everybody will come to their senses

image by Thomas Merton, “Untitiled”
image size 6”h x 7 ½” w

December 20, 1962. They cannot silence either Chuang Tzu or this Child, in China or anywhere. They will be heard in the middle of the night saying nothing and everybody will come to their senses.

(The Hidden Ground of Love, p. 624)