October 28-29: Spiritually Dead, Eureka, Pentecost

Merton realizes he was spiritually dead . . . 

I was never particularly drawn to the Varsity show: but they had a piano in their room, and the room was almost always empty, so I used to go in there and play furious jazz, after the manner I had taught myself—a manner which offended every ear but my own. It was a way of letting off steam—a form of athletics if you like. I have ruined more than one piano by this method.

The place where I was busiest was the Jester office. Nobody really worked there, they just congregated about noontime and beat violently with the palms of their hands on the big empty filing cabinets, making a thunderous sound that echoed up and down the corridor, and was sometimes answered from the Review office across the hall. There I usually came and drew forth from the bulging leather bag of books that I carried, copy and drawings which I put into the editor’s hand. The editor that year was Herb Jacobson, and he printed all my worst cartoons very large in the most prominent parts of the magazine. 

I thought I had something to be proud of when I became art-editor of Jester at the end of that year. Robert Lax was to be editor and Ralph Toledano managing editor, and we got along well together. The next year Jester was well put together because of Toledano and well written because of Lax and sometimes popular with the masses because of me. When it was really funny, it was not popular at all. The only really funny issues were mostly the work of Lax and Bob Gibney, the fruit of ideas that came to them at four o’clock in the morning in their room on the top floor of Furnald Hall. 

The chief advantage of Jester was that it paid most of our bills for tuition. We were happy about it all, and wandered around the campus with little golden crowns dangling on our watch chains. Indeed, that was the only reason why I had a watch chain. I did not have a watch. 

I have barely begun the list of all the things that occupied me in those days. For example, I gave my name to Miss Wegener at the appointments office. Miss Wegener was—and I hope she still is—a kind of a genius. She sat all day long behind her desk in that small, neat office in the Alumni house. No matter how many people she had talked to, she always looked unruffled and at peace. Every time you went to see her, one or two phone calls would come in, and she would make a note on a little pad of paper. In summer she never seemed to be worried by the hot weather. And she always smiled at you with a smile that was at the same time efficient and kind, pleasant and yet a little impersonal. She was another one who had a vocation and was living up to it! 

One of the best jobs she ever got for me was that of guide and interpreter on the observation roof of the R.C.A. building, Rockefeller Center. It was an easy job. So easy in fact that it was boring. You simply had to stand there and talk to the people who came pouring out of the elevator with all their questions. And for this you got twenty-seven and a half dollars a week, which was very good pay in 1936. I also worked in another office in Radio City, for some people who handled publicity for all the manufacturers of Paper Cups and Containers. For them I did cartoons that said you would surely get trench mouth if you ever drank out of an ordinary glass. For each cartoon I was paid six dollars. It made me feel like an executive, to go walking in and out of the doors of the R.C.A. building with my pockets full of money. Miss Wegener would also send me off on the subway with little slips of paper with the addresses of apartments where I would interview rich Jewish ladies about tutoring their children in Latin, which meant that I got two or two and a half dollars an hour for sitting with them and doing their homework. 

I also handed in my name for the Cross Country team. The fact that the coach was not sorry to get me is sufficient indication of one reason why we were the worst college Cross Country team in the East that year. And so, in my afternoons, I would run around and around South Field on the cinder path. And when winter came, I would go round and round the board track until I had blisters all over the soles of my feet and was so lame I could hardly walk. Occasionally I would go up to Van Cortlandt Park and run along the sandy and rocky paths through the woods. When we raced any other college, I was never absolutely the last one home—there were always two or three other Columbia men behind me. I was one of those who never came in until the crowd had lost interest and had begun to disperse. Perhaps I would have been more of a success as a long-distance runner if I had gone into training, and given up smoking and drinking, and kept regular hours. 

But no. Three or four nights a week my fraternity brothers and I would go flying down in the black and roaring subway to 52nd Street, where we would crawl around the tiny, noisy, and expensive nightclubs that had flowered on the sites of the old speakeasies in the cellars of those dirty brownstone houses. There we would sit, for hours, packed in those dark rooms, shoulder to shoulder with a lot of surly strangers and their girls, while the whole place rocked and surged with storms of jazz. There was no room to dance. We just huddled there between the blue walls, shoulder to shoulder and elbow to elbow, crouching and deafened and taciturn. If you moved your arm to get your drink you nearly knocked the next man off his stool. And the waiters fought their way back and forth through the sea of unfriendly heads, taking away the money of all the people.

It was not that we got drunk. No, it was this strange business of sitting in a room full of people and drinking without much speech, and letting yourself be deafened by the jazz that throbbed through the whole sea of bodies binding them all together in a kind of fluid medium. It was a strange, animal travesty of mysticism, sitting in those booming rooms, with the noise pouring through you, and the rhythm lumping and throbbing in the marrow of your bones. You couldn’t call any of that, per se, a mortal sin. We just sat there, that was all. If we got hangovers the next day, it was more because of the smoking and nervous exhaustion than anything else. 

How often, after a night of this, I missed all the trains home to Long Island and went and slept on a couch somewhere, at the Fraternity House, or in the apartment of somebody I knew around town. What was worst of all was going home on the subway, on the chance that one might catch a bus at Flushing! There is nothing so dismal as the Flushing bus station, in the grey, silent hour just before the coming of dawn. There were always at least one or two of those same characters whose prototypes I had seen dead in the morgue. And perhaps there would be a pair of drunken soldiers trying to get back to Fort Totten. Among all these I stood, weary and ready to fall, lighting the fortieth or fiftieth cigarette of the day—the one that took the last shreds of lining off my throat. 

The thing that depressed me most of all was the shame and despair that invaded my whole nature when the sun came up, and all the laborers were going to work: men healthy and awake and quiet, with their eyes clear, and some rational purpose before them. This humiliation and sense of my own misery and of the fruitlessness of what I had done was the nearest I could get to contrition. It was the reaction of nature. It proved nothing except that I was still, at least, morally alive: or rather that I had still some faint capacity for moral life in me. The term “morally alive” might obscure the fact that I was spiritually dead. I had been that long since!

I have taught so many young people like young Thomas Merton.  Full of energy and ideas.  Constantly on the move.  Sleep-deprived and, at times, alcohol-soaked.  I remember BEING a young person like this, searching for excitement and fulfillment . .  all . . . the . . . time.  I place those ellipses in that last sentence to indicate how never-ending that quest was.  And exhausting.

Of course, Thomas Merton's diagnosis of this condition is that he was morally alive, but spiritually dead.  It's the old adage that you learn in Sunday school:  everyone has a God-sized hole inside them.  We all try to fill that hole with possessions and activities and loves and relationships.  It doesn't work.  The hole is infinite, and it can only be filled by infinity.  That's where God comes in.

Now, whether you believe in God or not, there is truth in this description of the human psyche/soul.  I think we all have a certain emptiness inside that can only be filled by something that is timeless.  Some people find that timelessness by turning to God.  Some to science or poetry or history.  We all crave to feel like we're connected to something larger than ourselves.

God is in all things.  In church and poetry, science and plumbing.  Called different names by different people.  Inspiration.  Grace.  Oprah followers call it the "aha moment."  Archimedes supposedly jumped out of his bath and shouted "Eureka!" when he was touched by it.  Christians call it the Holy Spirit.  Buddhists call it divine enlightenment.  Yet, all of these terms describe the same thing:  being touched by the finger of God.

Now, my scientist friends will frown on that description.  For science, it's a moment when everything that we know, all the tumblers in our minds, suddenly clicks into place and unlocks a mystery, whether it be about the displacement of water or the relativity of time.  And we run through the streets naked, screaming our news.  Or something like that.

We understand the universe in one way before this moment, and we understand it differently after it.

As a poet, I know you can't force inspiration.  It just doesn't work that way.  For me, most inspiration is the result of hours and hours of hard labor.  Then it happens.  It's like a breath blowing through my body.  My vision clears, and I see the path I need to follow.  I am not discounting the possibility of immediate clarity (those poems that seem like they drop into my lap out of the sky like pieces of shattered rainbow).  I'm just saying that I agree with Thomas Edison:  "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration."

I have been severely lacking in inspiration recently.  I have been creatively busy--designing new programs for the library, contacting artists and writers, thinking up events that I just want to see.  A friend recently asked me what I'm actually doing at the library, and I told him, "I'm getting paid to dream and to make those dreams come true."  That is an amazing privilege.

Yet, I have lacked personal inspiration.  The Holy Breath of Poetry is what I'll call it.  I haven't written a new poem in a very long time.  So, today I took some steps to invite the Holy Breath into my life this evening.  I texted a good friend and asked her if she wanted to write with me tonight.  I created a Zoom meeting.  Now, I'm sitting in a virtual space with my friend, and we are playing.  That's how my friend refers to these nights.  I would replace the "l" in that word with an "r."  We are praying.  

Praying for presence and inspiration.  I love the story in the gospels of the first Pentecost, where the apostles are sitting in a room together after the murder of Christ, terrified of being caught and crucified themselves.  And then "[s]uddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.  They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.  All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them." (Acts 2. 2. 2-4).  

That is what my friend and I are doing tonight.  We are in a room together, waiting for that violent wind, those tongues of fire.  And I feel something that I haven't felt in a long while, as well:  trust.  I trust that I will be touched tonight by the Holy Breath of Poetry.  I simply have to let go and follow where my fountain pen leads me.

It's a fearful place to be.  Yes, it is.  Because hand-in-hand with trust comes surrender, the willingness to let yourself become vulnerable.  For me, it's in that place of vulnerability where God lives and divine breath blows.  Where the God-sized hole that resides inside me (and everybody else) opens up into fields and continents and oceans and worlds and galaxies.

A pentecost is upon me.

Saint Marty feels the Holy Breath moving through him this evening.  For that miracle, he shouts, "Hallelujah!"

October 23-24: Contemporary Civilization, Kindness of a Poet, Lever Long Enough

 Merton visits the morgue . . .

However, October is a fine and dangerous season in America. It is dry and cool and the land is wild with red and gold and crimson, and all the lassitudes of August have seeped out of your blood, and you are full of ambition. It is a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful. The names of the subjects all seem to lay open the way to a new world. Your arms are full of new, clean notebooks, waiting to be filled. You pass through the doors of the library, and the smell of thousands of well-kept books makes your head swim with a clean and subtle pleasure. You have a new hat, a new sweater perhaps, or a whole new suit. Even the nickels and the quarters in your pocket feel new, and the buildings shine in the glorious sun. 

In this season of resolutions and ambitions, in 1935, I signed up for courses in Spanish and German and Geology and Constitutional Law and French Renaissance Literature and I forget what else besides. And I started to work for The Spectator and the yearbook and The Review and I continued to work for Jester as I had already done the spring before. And I found myself pledging one of the fraternities. 

It was a big, gloomy house behind the new library. On the ground floor there was a pool-room as dark as a morgue, a dining room, and some stairs led up to a big dark wainscotted living room where they held dances and beer-parties. Above that were two floors of bedrooms where telephones were constantly ringing and all day long somebody or other was singing in the showerbath. And there was somewhere in the building a secret room which I must not reveal to you, reader, at any price, even at the cost of life itself. And there I was eventually initiated. The initiation with its various tortures lasted about a week, and I cheerfully accepted penances which, if they were imposed in a monastery, for a supernatural motive, and for some real reason, instead of for no reason at all, would cause such an uproar that all religious houses would be closed and the Catholic Church would probably have a hard time staying in the country. 

When that was over I had a gold and enamel pin on my shirt. My name was engraved on the back of it, and I was quite proud of it for about a year, and then it went to the laundry on a shirt and never came back. 

I suppose there were two reasons why I thought I ought to join a fraternity. One was the false one, that I thought it would help me to “make connections” as the saying goes, and get a marvelous job on leaving college. The other, truer one was that I imagined that I would thus find a multitude of occasions for parties and diversions, and that I would meet many very interesting young ladies at the dances that would be held in that mausoleum. Both these hopes turned out to be illusory. As a matter of fact, I think the only real explanation was that I was feeling the effects of October. 

Anyway, when John Paul went to Cornell the whole family, except me, drove up to Ithaca in the Buick and came back with words and concepts that filled the house with a kind of collegiate tension for a couple of weeks to come. Everybody was talking about football and courses and fraternities. 

As a matter of fact, John Paul’s first year at Cornell turned out to be sad in the same way as my first year at Cambridge—a thing that was not long in becoming apparent, when the bills he could not pay began to show up at home. But it was even more obvious to me when I saw him again. 

He was naturally a happy and optimistic sort of a person and he did not easily get depressed. And he had a clear, quick intelligence and a character as sensitive as it was well-balanced. Now his intelligence seemed a little fogged with some kind of an obscure, interior confusion, and his happiness was perverted by a sad, lost restlessness. Although he maintained all his interests and increased them, the increase was in extent, not in depth, and the result was a kind of scattering of powers, a dissipation of the mind and will in a variety of futile aims. 

He stood for some time, with great uncertainty, on the threshold of a fraternity house at Cornell, and even let them put a pledge pin on him, and then after a couple of weeks he took it off again and ran away. And with three friends he rented a house on one of those steep, shady Ithaca streets, and after that the year was a long and sordid riot, from which he derived no satisfaction. They called the place Grand Hotel, and had stationery printed with that title, on which desultory and fragmentary letters would come to Douglaston, and fill everyone with unquiet. When he came back from Cornell, John Paul looked tired and disgusted. 

I suppose it is true, at least theoretically, that brothers watch over one another and help one another along in the fraternity house. In my fraternity house at Columbia, I know that the wiser members used to get together and shake their heads a little when somebody was carrying his debauchery too far. And when there was any real trouble, the concern of the brothers was sincere and dramatic, but it was useless. And there is always trouble in a fraternity house. The trouble, which came in the year after I was initiated, was the disappearance of one of the brothers, whom we shall call Fred. 

Fred was a tall, stoop-shouldered, melancholy individual, with dark hair growing low on his brows. He never had much to say, and he liked to go apart and drink in mournful solitude. The only vivid thing I remember about him was that he stood over me, during one of the peculiar ceremonies of the initiation, when all the pledges had to stuff themselves with bread and milk for a special reason. And while I tried with despairing efforts to get the huge mouthfuls swallowed down, this Fred was standing over me with woeful cries of “eat, eat, eat!” It must have been sometime after Christmas that he disappeared. 

I came into the house one night, and they were sitting around in the leather chairs talking earnestly. “Where’s Fred?” was the burden of the discussion. He had not been seen anywhere for a couple of days. Would his family be upset if someone called up his home to see if he was there? Evidently, but it had to be done: he had not gone home either. One of the brothers had long since visited all his usual haunts. People tried to reconstruct the situation in which he had last been seen. With what dispositions had he last walked out of the front door. The usual ones, of course: silence, melancholy, the probable intention of getting drunk. A week passed and Fred was not found. The earnest concern of the brothers was fruitless. The subject of Fred was more or less dropped and, after a month, most of us had forgotten it. After two months, the whole thing was finally settled.

“They found Fred,” somebody told me.

 “Yes? Where?” 

“In Brooklyn.”

 “Is he all right?” 

“No, he’s dead. They found him in the Gowanus Canal.”

 “What did he do, jump in?” 

“Nobody knows what he did. He’d been there a long time.” 

“How long?” 

“I don’t know, a couple of months. They figured out who it was from the fillings in his teeth.” 

It was a picture that was not altogether vague to me. Our famous course in Contemporary Civilization had involved me, one winter afternoon, in a visit to the Bellevue Morgue, where I had seen rows and rows of iceboxes containing the blue, swollen corpses of drowned men along with all the other human refuse of the big, evil city: the dead that had been picked up in the streets, ruined by raw alcohol. The dead that had been found starved and frozen lying where they had tried to sleep in a pile of old newspapers. The pauper dead from Randalls Island. The dope-fiend dead. The murdered dead. The run-over. The suicides. The dead Negroes and Chinese. The dead of venereal disease. The dead from unknown causes. The dead killed by gangsters. They would all be shipped for burial up the East River in a barge to one of those islands where they also burned garbage. 

Contemporary Civilization! One of the last things we saw on the way out of the morgue was the hand of a man pickled in a jar, brown and vile. They were not sure whether he was a criminal or not, and they wanted to have some part of him, after they had sent the rest of him up to the ghats. In the autopsy room a man on the table with his trunk wide open pointed his sharp, dead nose at the ceiling. The doctors held his liver and kidneys in their hands and sprayed them over with a trickle of water from a little rubber hose. I have never forgotten the awful, clammy silence of the city morgue at Bellevue, where they collect the bodies of those who died of contemporary civilization, like Fred. 

An uplifting little passage, filled with fraternity hazing, a depressed brother, suicide, and a trip to the morgue.  And for an encore, I will stand on my head while reciting Hamlet by memory and juggling with my feet.  When I land my dismount, I expect perfect tens from all of the judges.

It has been a heck of a night, filled with drama.  Yet, I don't want to write about that.  I have had more than enough drama for one evening.  Now, I'm sitting at my laptop, trying to wash the drama out of my brain with a very tall glass of wine.

Instead, I want to talk about the kindness of a poet.  Last night, when I was dealing with more drama and feeling a little under-the-weather (not COVID under-the-weather, just a little depleted of energy after a long week), I received an IM from a poet named Dennis Hinrichsen.  We know each other through our roles a Poets Laureate--me of the Upper Peninsula, he of the Greater Lansing area.  We were published in an anthology together.

His message was a simple reaching out to offer kind words and the gift of a copy of his latest collection of poems, as a way to mitigate the stresses and woes of pandemic reality.  It was a kind and generous gesture from a poet whose work I greatly admire.  I accepted his offer, and we had a wonderful exchange of words and ideas.  It buoyed my spirits for the rest of the night.

There are kind people in the world, and grace finds you at the most difficult times of your life.  When that happens, it sort of restores your faith in the universe.  I know some young people who are struggling right now, who need the kind of healing I received last night.  No details are needed here, just the understanding that we are all broken people in a broken time.  This year has been cruel on many levels.

I want these young people to know that there is still light in the world.  Kindness and understanding.  Grace.  I am living proof of that this evening.  Sure, sometimes life seems like an unending fraternity hazing where you are forced to swallow massive quantities of a food you despise.  And then some miracle happens, and you realize that anger and hatred only lead to more anger and hatred.  All it takes is one kind word, one kind gesture.  Archimedes said, "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."

On this dark, cold night, I offer my story of moving the world with kindness.  I hope my young people find a long lever, and a fulcrum, so that their worlds can be moved toward grace.

For the miracle of kindness from a poet friend, Saint Marty gives thanks.