Merton speaks more about Mark Van Doren . . .
Mark would come into the room and, without any fuss, would start talking about whatever was to be talked about. Most of the time he asked questions. His questions were very good, and if you tried to answer them intelligently, you found yourself saying excellent things that you did not know you knew, and that you had not, in fact, known before. He had “educed” them from you by his question. His classes were literally “education”—they brought things out of you, they made your mind produce its own explicit ideas. Do not think that Mark was simply priming his students with thoughts of his own, and then making the thought stick to their minds by getting them to give it back to him as their own. Far from it. What he did have was the gift of communicating to them something of his own vital interest in things, something of his manner of approach: but the results were sometimes quite unexpected—and by that I mean good in a way that he had not anticipated, casting lights that he had not himself foreseen.
Now a man who can go for year after year—although Mark was young then and is young now—without having any time to waste in flattering and cajoling his students with any kind of a fancy act, or with jokes, or with storms of temperament, or periodic tirades—whole classes spent in threats and imprecations, to disguise the fact that the professor himself has come in unprepared—one who can do without all these non-essentials both honors his vocation and makes it fruitful. Not only that, but his vocation, in return, perfects and ennobles him. And that is the way it should be, even in the natural order: how much more so in the order of grace!
Mark, I know, is no stranger to the order of grace: but considering his work as teacher merely as a mission on the natural level—I can see that Providence was using him as an instrument more directly than he realized. As far as I can see, the influence of Mark’s sober and sincere intellect, and his manner of dealing with his subject with perfect honesty and objectivity and without evasions, was remotely preparing my mind to receive the good seed of scholastic philosophy. And there is nothing strange in this, for Mark himself was familiar at least with some of the modern scholastics, like Maritain and Gilson, and he was a friend of the American neo-Thomists, Mortimer Adler and Richard McKeon, who had started out at Columbia but had had to move to Chicago, because Columbia was not ripe enough to know what to make of them.
The truth is that Mark’s temper was profoundly scholastic in the sense that his clear mind looked directly for the quiddities of things, and sought being and substance under the covering of accident and appearances. And for him poetry was, indeed, a virtue of the practical intellect, and not simply a vague spilling of the emotions, wasting the soul and perfecting none of our essential powers.
It was because of this virtual scholasticism of Mark’s that he would never permit himself to fall into the naive errors of those who try to read some favorite private doctrine into every poet they like of every nation or every age. And Mark abhorred the smug assurance with which second-rate leftwing critics find adumbrations of dialectical materialism in everyone who ever wrote from Homer and Shakespeare to whomever they happen to like in recent times. If the poet is to their fancy, then he is clearly seen to be preaching the class struggle. If they do not like him, then they are able to show that he was really a forefather of fascism. And all their literary heroes are revolutionary leaders, and all their favorite villains are capitalists and Nazis.
It was a very good thing for me that I ran into someone like Mark Van Doren at that particular time, because in my new reverence for Communism, I was in danger of docilely accepting any kind of stupidity, provided I thought it was something that paved the way to the Elysian fields of classless society.
Merton seems to agree with Mark Van Doren's understanding of poetry as a "virtue of the practical intellect." Poetry is something that perfects the human condition, or expresses aspects of the human condition practically, without the messiness of human ideologies that seek to define the universe in terms of economic or class distinctions. Of course, Merton is a Trappist monk. Therefore, his understanding of the universe is seen through the lens of Catholic monasticism. Poet Kathleen Norris writes of Merton, "Merton has a mystic's sense of unity, and in his poems, he wants to bring as much together as he can. Sometimes he does it with monastic simplicity . . . but Merton can also insist on plenitude, and a wild extravagance flowers in much of his work."Simplicity and wild extravagance. I don't think there is a better description of poetry than this. Poetry, through its razor-sharp language, pares truth down to its elements. But poetry embraces all the beauty and ugliness of life, as well--joy, grief, ecstasy, despondency. It's all there. That's why, in the lowest times of my life, I've turned to poetry for solace, and, in the highest times, I've sought out poetry to give voice to my abounding happiness.
Today has been good. And by good, I mean that nothing terrible has happened, and a lot of small blessings have filled my hours. I worked, picked up Thai food for dinner, listened to a poetry reading by new Nobel Laureate Louise Glück on my way home. My son went to school (which may not sound like a huge accomplishment, but it was). My daughter's Covid test came back negative (after a week of symptoms). In the evening, I cleaned a church with my wife, and we listened to a good channel of 1980s music as we disinfected and sanitized. When I got back to our house, I took a shower and then napped.
All these little blessings added up to a day of grace. I think a lot of people look for happiness in huge things. Like winning the lottery or the Nobel Prize in Literature. Don't get me wrong. Those things are wonderful, and I wouldn't turn either of them down. However, real happiness has nothing to do with these externals. I saw a short video of Louise Glück leaving her house on the afternoon she won the Nobel, after a day that I'm sure was filled with non-stop phone calls and e-mails and whatnot. She looked absolutely frazzled as she faced the hoard of reporters and photographers outside her home, and she wasn't very gracious in answering their shouted questions. She just wanted to get into the waiting SUV and escape. She didn't look like she was enjoying herself very much.
Now, part of me thinks, "Suck it up. You've just been given the most prestigious literary prize in the world, and over a million dollars to boot." But the other part of me (the nicer part) thinks, "Yeah, I get it. You had a comfortable, ordered life, and it's never going to be the same again. No more anonymous trips to Starbucks or McDonalds. I'm sorry." Louise Glück, from here on out, is Nobel Laurate Louise Glück, with all the accompanying trappings wherever she goes.
Me? I have been granted 18 or so hours of small goodnesses, leading up to me writing this post. It wasn't a perfect 18 or so hours. I didn't get a phone call from the Swedish Academy in the early morning. Wasn't hounded by phone calls and reporters all day. All of my current problems are still problems. But I didn't let all of these small annoyances avalanche into a Sisyphean boulder.
Because happiness really is a matter of choice,
And today, Saint Marty chose happiness, in all its poetic simplicity and wild extravagance.
And a poem of feathered happiness . . .
After Judith Minty
by: Martin Achatz
for Helen and Gala
Two people. Two poets. Two friends. Surrounded by the long sunlight of coming dusk. By a lake. Wind. Water rucked like a slept-on bed. Green everywhere. Clover. Birch leaves with palms waving. And green sounds. Happy kid screams. The squeal of swing chains.
I watch these two people, two poets, two friends bent over notebooks, pens moving, creating something out of nothing on the winter of their paper. Great looping somethings. Smaller, lined somethings. This July night, in this place, with these two, somethings that haven't drawn breath before will take form--skeleton, muscle, organ, skin, thought, emotion.
It will be something feathered, like Emily said. Something purple, like Judith said. It didn't exist yesterday, might not exist tomorrow. But tonight, it sits in the branches of my ribs, beats against my lungs with its wings.
I will name it, even though I rarely allow myself that luxury. I will open my mouth, and let it fly from between my lips. To my friends, my poets, my people. I will let it flit between us with its lilac-ness, violet-ness, grape-ness.
Listen. Hear it. It's there.
Hope.
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