to live in God so thoroughly, so unselfconsciouly, that we become pure act

Cristiani Bros. Circus 1956

A caption that goes with this photo:

After the teeterboard act, left to right, Ortans (Cristiani) Canestrelli, Oscar Cristiani, Belmonte Cristiani, Mogador Cristiani and Lucio Cristiani. Behind Oscar, may have been Daviso Cristiani or Freddie Canestrelli.

(Lax's friend, Mogodor, is front and center)

During the 1950s Lax traveled to western Canada with the Cristiani circus family.  He saw in this family something similar to what he intuited as "pure act", not only when they performed but when they interacted with each other as well:

"Everything they did was both spontaneous and confident, flowing the way a river flows. This way of being in the world came from years of practicing their art but also from a deeper well of knowing. They had been acrobats for several generations and the way they moved, the way they were, seemed bred in the bone. He found himself wanting to be a poet in the same way they were acrobats, his poetry flowing from who he was by nature, without the artistic calculations that kept it from being pure.
...

That should be our goal as people of God as well, thought Lax, who had converted from Judaism to Catholicism several years before: to live in God so thoroughly, so unselfconsciously, that we become pure act, too. In his Circus cycle, in comparing creation to a traveling circus, he equated God’s people with acrobats. How do God’s people move on the earth? Here’s his description of Mogador Cristiani, the book’s central character and Lax’s good friend:

He walks the earth like a turning ball: knowing
and rejoicing in his sense of balance:
he delights in the fulcrums
and levers, teeter-boards, trampolines, high-wires,
swings, the nets, ropes and ring-curbs of the natural
universe.

Beneath his feet the world is buoyant,
thin and alive as a bounding rope.
He stands on it poised,
a gyroscope on the rim of a glass,
sustained by the whirling of an inner wheel.

He steps through the drum of light and air, his
hand held forth.
The moment is a sphere moving with Mogador.

- from "A Gyroscope on the Island of Love" by Michael McGregor, an article published in Image Magazine, Issue 70, available HERE.

 See also:
Lax on Pure Act
acrobat and pure prayer - Phillippe Petit

one stone

Photo of Lax taken by Dr. Paul Spaeth at St. Bonaventure University in 1990

The following is excerpted from a fascinating and excellent article about Lax by Michael McGregor.  It appears HERE in the online version of Image magazine, Issue #70.  I understand that the excerpts from this article are part of a new, upcoming, biography of Lax.  The first one really.  I can't wait.  Like McGregor, I believe that Lax was Merton's mentor.  Lax had an intuitive grasp of what Merton was - and we all are - seeking.  Merton called it a direct link to the living God.  But to get Lax, you have to go slow, be still.

 

Words—those wonders he wielded better than anyone else, requiring “remarkably few” to “weave awesome poems,” as critic Richard Kostelanetz put it.

Words—those specks of speech he parceled out like perfect pearls—one per line in later poems, or maybe just a syllable.

“Write as though sending a telegram in which every word costs a dollar,” he said more than once, paraphrasing Joyce, his literary hero. “Never use a single word more than necessary.”

His breakthrough as a writer—his transformation from mainstream poet into experimental minimalist—had come from a single word. A single object. A single act. In New York City in 1961, twenty-four years before I met him, he’d seen a stone on a sidewalk and picked it up. A few years before that, he had lingered in Europe for the first time, living on little money among immigrants and drifters near the Marseilles harbor, then in a seminary high in the French Alps. He’d returned to New York for work because he’d run out of cash, but after living so simply, so relatively quietly, the words that whirled round him there—the words he and others used so blithely both in poetry and conversation—bothered him. He wondered how many he or anyone understood.

Then that day he saw the stone. That undeniably physical and natural object in an uncomfortably abstract, unnatural world. As he picked it up, he thought only: stone. Stone, he realized, was one word he felt sure about. One word he could write down and feel confident a reader would understand. Standing there, he started a poem that began:

one stone
one stone
one stone

i lift
one stone
one stone

i lift
one stone
and I am
thinking

i am
thinking
as I lift
one stone

one stone
one stone
one stone

Although he’d written unusually vertical poetry before, publishing some in the New Yorker, this was his first poem in what critics would come to call his minimalist or concrete style. He wrote more—dozens in the days ahead—feeling freer every time he set one down. A year later, Emil Antonucci, an artist who had collaborated with him before, published a book of them called simply New Poems.

And further down the page, there is this:

These compositions have the force to imply that everything is capable of being transformed into symbolic meaning by coming into contact with a passionate human being. Nothing is too small and nothing is too great to be comprehended—or to transmit the meaning which is beyond meanings and which defines itself by remaining incomprehensible. Lax has chosen to write about the common experience in order to avoid seeming to be an elected person. Sanctity is meaningful to him only if it belongs to everything; to sea, sky, minnow and god.

You really have to read the whole essay.  McGregor gets Lax and is able to talk about him within the context of his own creative writing without in any way distorting what Lax was about:

Living among poor Greek fishermen and sponge divers had freed him from the American obsession with money, the expectations of editors and writer friends, and the need to maintain anything anyone might call a career. It had allowed him to write as he wanted to write and live as he wanted to live—a life of what he called pure act among people he saw living that way naturally.

Unless one become empty and alone ... (solitude)

Photo by Thomas Merton

"What then is the conclusion? That this solitude of which we have been speaking, the solitude of the true monachos, of the lone one, is not and cannot be selfish.  It is the opposite of selfish.  It is the death and the forgetfulness of self.  But what is self?  The self that vanishes from the emptiness is the superficial, false social self, the image made up of the prejudices, the whimsey, the posturing, the pharisaic self-concern and the pseudo dedication which are the heritage of the individual in a limited and imperfect group.

"There is another self, a true self, who comes to full maturity in emptiness and solitude -- and who can of course, begin to appear and grow in the valid, sacrificial and creative self-dedication that belong to a genuine social existence.  But note that even this social maturing of love implies at the same time the growth of a certain inner solitude.

"Without solitude of some sort there is and can be no maturity.  Unless one becomes empty and alone, he cannot give himself in love because he does not possess the deep self which is the only gift worthy of love.  And this deep self, we immediately add, cannot be possessed.  My deep self is not "something" which I acquire, or to which I "attain" after a long struggle.  It is not mine, and cannot become mine.  It is no "thing" - no object.  It is "I".

The shallow "I" of individualism can be possessed, developed, cultivated, pandered to, satisfied: it is the center of all our strivings for gain and for satisfaction, whether material or spiritual.  But the deep "I" of the spirit, of solitude and of love, cannot be "had," possessed, developed, perfected.  It can only be, and act according to deep inner laws which are not of man's contriving, but which come from God.  They are the Laws of the Spirit, who, like the wind, glows where He wills.  This inner "I," who is always alone, is always universal: for in this inmost "I" my own solitude meets the solitude of every other man and the solitude of God.  Hence it is beyond division, beyond limitation, beyond selfish affirmation.  It is only this inmost and  solitary "I" that truly loves with the love and the spirit of Christ.  This "I" is Christ Himself, living in us: and we, in Him, living in the Father."

-- Thomas Merton, Notes for a Philosophy of Solitude, in the book Disputed Questions (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1960) pp. 206-207

[Note, this is the last entry in the series of postings on solitude.  A blessed rest of Lent, Holy Week and Easter to all.]

real hermits don't have answers (solitude)

Photo by Thomas Merton

"We must remember that Robinson Crusoe was one of the great myths of the middle class, commercial civilization of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries:  the myth not of eremitical solitude but of pragmatic individualism.  Crusoe is a symbolical figure in an era when every man's house was his castle in the trees, but only because every man was a very prudent and resourceful citizen who knew how to make the best out of the least and could drive a hard bargain with any competitor, even life itself.  Carefree Crusoe was happy because he had an answer to everything.  The real hermit is not so sure he has an answer."

-- Thomas Merton, Notes for a Philosophy of Solitude, in the book Disputed Questions (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1960) pp. 201-201

a life of direct dependence on God (solitude)

"One of the most telling criticisms of the solitary may well be that even in his life of prayer he is less "productive".  You would think that in his solitude he would quickly reach the level of visions, of mystical marriage, something dramatic at any rate.  Yet he may well be poorer than the cenobite, even in his life of prayer.  His is a weak and precarious existence, he has more cares, he is more insecure, he has to struggle to preserve himself from all kinds of petty annoyances, and often he fails to do so.  His poverty is spiritual.  It invades his whole soul as well as his body, and in the end his whole patrimony is one of insecurity.  He enjoys the sorrow, the spiritual and intellectual indigence of the really poor.  Obviously such a vocation has in it a grain of folly.  Otherwise it is not what it is meant to be, a life of direct dependence on God, in darkness, insecurity and pure faith.  The life of the hermit is a life of material and physical poverty without visible support."

-- Thomas Merton, Notes for a Philosophy of Solitude, in the book Disputed Questions (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1960) p. 201

the hermit is nothing but a failure (solitude)

"The true solitary is not called to an illusion, to the contemplation of himself as solitary.  He is called to the nakedness and hunger of a more primitive and honest condition.  The condition of a stranger (xeniteia) and a wanderer on the face of the earth, who has been called out of what was familiar to him in order to seek strangely and painfully after he knows not what ...

"In the eyes of our conformist society, the hermit is nothing but a failure.  He has to be a failure - we have absolutely no use for him, no place for him.  He is outside all our projects, plans, assemblies, movements.  We can countenance him as long as he remains only a fiction, or a dream.  As soon as he become real, we are revolted by his insignificance, his poverty, his shabbiness, his total lack of status.  Even those who consider themselves contemplatives, often cherish a secret contempt for the solitary.  For in the contemplative life of the hermit there is none of that noble security, that intelligent depth, that artistic finesse which the more academic contemplative seeks in his sedate respectability."

-- Thomas Merton, Notes for a Philosophy of Solitude, in the book Disputed Questions (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1960) pp. 198-199

the desert can be found in the midst of men (solitude)

Photo by Thomas Merton

"There have always been, and always will be, men who are alone in the midst of society without realizing why.  They are condemned to their strange isolation by temperament or circumstance, and they get used to it.  It is not of these that I am speaking, but of those who having led active and articulate lives in the world of men, leave their old life behind and go into the desert.  The desert does not necessarily have to be physical -- it can be found even in the midst of men.  But it is not found by human aspirations or idealism.  It is mysteriously designed by the finger of God."

-- Thomas Merton, Notes for a Philosophy of Solitude, in the book Disputed Questions (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1960) p. 195