Every man got one poem, and when he stumbles on it he got to make it smaller and smaller and blacker and blacker and then it will finally convince.

Ad Reinhardt, hanging black canvasses. 

"Yet evidence suggests that Lax’s colour poems were not entirely uninfluenced by current events. On 15 September 1963, four young black girls were killed in a racist bomb attack while attending church in Birmingham, Alabama. In early October, Merton wrote Lax that he was “tired of belonging to the humiliating white race.” 

Reinhardt was a prominent subject of exchanges between Lax and Merton at this time. They discussed his participation in Civil Rights Marches, and writing from Greece, Lax declared himself present at the marches in spirit. Both were full of praise for their artist friend, and not just for his political activities. By this time Reinhardt had begun to paint his five-foot square black paintings exclusively. “Old Reinhardt is a splendid fellow and all but the king of the birds,” wrote Lax. “His paintings is magnificent and works like dynamite when set down in any particular locale. They are all black paintings (get it?) black, black, black & can hardly help doing some good in the whole situation.”  

In the midst of this conversation, Lax gave Merton some poetic advice:  “as reinhardt makes now all the time the same black painting, make you also all the time the same dark poem; all the time, just that one poem: here a word, there a word, maybe a little different; only when you think it should be, until it gets to be tight as a sonnet: the music, the music always the same, here a word, there a word just a little different.”  

“You got the right answers,” returned Merton, “I think this poem should get blacker and blacker and blacker like Reinhardt’s paintings, then everyone will see the light, they will have to. Every man got one poem, and when he stumbles on it he got to make it smaller and smaller and blacker and blacker and then it will finally convince.”  

Lax replied that he had “of recent months become so generally small & black myself that it is useless for me to apply for abrogation from the whites. How come you want to get out of the race (they would snigger) you was never in it.”" 

[This exchange took place between 5 October and 2 November 1963. See When Prophecy Still  Had a Voice, pp. 251-259.]

-from Karen Alexander's "The Abstract Minimalist Poetry of Robert Lax" http://www.cipa.ulg.ac.be/pdf/alexander.pdf

The Mad Farmer Liberation Front (Practice Resurrection)

Wendell Berry, Fall 1967, at a picnic with Merton, Gethsemani
Photograph by Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

--by Wendell Berry from his collection The Mad Farmer Poems

(I found this photo of Merton's hermitage on the web. No photographer was noted, but I suspect it might be Gordon Oyer)

"I love the woods, particularly around the hermitage. Know every tree, every animal, every bird. Sense of relatedness to my environment -- a luxury I refuse to renounce. Aristocrat, conservative: I don't give a damn." 

March 23, 1967

"In eight weeks I am to leave here. Who knows, I may not come back. Not that I expect anything to go wrong -- though it might -- but I might conceivably settle in California to start the hermit thing Father Flavian spoke of: it depends … Really I don't care one way or another if I never come back. 

July 29, 1968

"I really expect little or nothing from the future. Certainly not great "experiences" or a lot of interesting new things. Maybe, but so what? What really intrigues me is the idea of starting out into something unknown, demanding and expecting nothing very special, hoping only to do what God asks of me, whatever it may be."

July 29, 1968

Ruby Bridges

)

Extraordinary video and a truly holy little girl.

Back to that book about the spiritual roots of protest. Merton says that the contemplative roots of protest had to be motivated "not only by outrage but by compassion for those who, driven by fear or a warped patriotism, experience themselves as objects of protest” (from the Foreword by Jim Forest).

That sounds very much like what Ruby Bridges was doing to me.

Tom was grateful that we weren't pious … Gene photographed.

Photograph of Thomas Merton by Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Early winter 1967, reading from Notes for Cables to the Ace, then called "Edifying Cables"

"Ralph Eugene Meatyard met Thomas Merton on January 17, 1967, at the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky. The day was bright and cold. The next day Merton wrote his friend Bob Lax that he had been visited by "three kings from Lexington," as Michael Mott records in his biography. Tom's letters to Lax were always madcap and full of private jokes, so that why we were cast as the Magi must remain a mystery. We brought no gifts, we came in Gene's car, but we were decidedly remote in religion: Gene, I think, was a lapsed Methodist; Jonathan Williams, a very lapsed Episcopalian; and I, a Baptist who would figure in Tom's judgment as the only real pagan he had ever met. 

Tom was grateful that we weren't pious. His life was bedeviled by people who had read a third of The Seven Story Mountain and wanted to say they had met him. … 

… Tom served us goat cheese made at the abbey, packets of salted peanuts, and jiggers of bourbon. Jonathan asked at this Epicurean meal what Tom was writing. He was writing what came to be Section 35 of Cables to the Ace. Would we like to hear some of it? ... 

… My notes say: Gene photographed as we talked. For the rest of their friendship, up until Tom's departure for the East, Gene photographed."

- from "Tom and Gene", by Guy Davenport, Father Louie, Photographs of Thomas Merton by Ralph Eugene Meatyard.

monasticism

"Monasticism. I see more and more the danger of identifying the monastic vocation and spirit with a particular kind of monastic consciousness -- a particular tradition, however "authentic." … Maybe monasticism needs to be stated all over again in a new way. I have no way of knowing how to tackle this idea. It is just beginning to dawn on me."

- Thomas Merton, February 6, 1967

Pursuing the Spiritual Roots of Protest

For three days in November of 1964 fourteen of America’s best known Christian peacemakers gathered, by invitation of their host Thomas Merton, at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky for an informal retreat to discuss “The Spiritual Roots of Protest.” Gordon Oyer, with an insatiable “curiosity and relentless digging,” has reconstructed for our generation the story and discussions from those three days at a monastery in the damp, chilly, rural Kentucky hills.

Jim Forest, one of the fourteen participants, recalls the persistent question during those three days—”By what right do we protest?” He writes, “Merton and others at the retreat made me more aware that acts of protest are not ends in themselves but ultimately must be regarded as efforts to bring about a transformation of heart of one’s adversaries and even one’s self. . . Merton put great stress on protest that had contemplative roots, protest motivated not only by outrage but by compassion for those who, driven by fear or a warped patriotism, experience themselves as objects of protest” (from the Foreword).

Order the book HERE.