Merton and Bob Lax and a dog named "Bunky" . . .
All that year we were, in fact, talking about the deepest springs of human desire and hope and fear; we were considering all the most important realities, not indeed in terms of something alien to Shakespeare and to poetry, but precisely in his own terms, with occasional intuitions of another order. And, as I have said, Mark’s balanced and sensitive and clear way of seeing things, at once simple and yet capable of subtlety, being fundamentally scholastic, though not necessarily and explicitly Christian, presented these things in ways that made them live within us, and with a life that was healthy and permanent and productive. This class was one of the few things that could persuade me to get on the train and go to Columbia at all. It was, that year, my only health, until I came across and read the Gilson book.
It was this year, too, that I began to discover who Bob Lax was, and that in him was a combination of Mark’s clarity and my confusion and misery— and a lot more besides that was his own.
To name Robert Lax in another way, he was a kind of combination of Hamlet and Elias. A potential prophet, but without rage. A king, but a Jew too. A mind full of tremendous and subtle intuitions, and every day he found less and less to say about them, and resigned himself to being inarticulate. In his hesitations, though without embarrassment or nervousness at all, he would often curl his long legs all around a chair, in seven different ways, while he was trying to find a word with which to begin. He talked best sitting on the floor.
And the secret of his constant solidity I think has always been a kind of natural, instinctive spirituality, a kind of inborn direction to the living God. Lax has always been afraid he was in a blind alley, and half aware that, after all, it might not be a blind alley, but God, infinity.
He had a mind naturally disposed, from the very cradle, to a kind of affinity for Job and St. John of the Cross. And I now know that he was born so much of a contemplative that he will probably never be able to find out how much.
To sum it up, even the people who have always thought he was “too impractical” have always tended to venerate him—in the way people who value material security unconsciously venerate people who do not fear insecurity.
In those days one of the things we had most in common, although perhaps we did not talk about it so much, was the abyss that walked around in front of our feet everywhere we went, and kept making us dizzy and afraid of trains and high buildings. For some reason, Lax developed an implicit trust in all my notions about what was good and bad for mental and physical health, perhaps because I was always very definite in my likes and dislikes. I am afraid it did not do him too much good, though. For even though I had my imaginary abyss, which broadened immeasurably and became ten times dizzier when I had a hangover, my ideas often tended to some particular place where we would hear this particular band and drink this special drink until the place folded up at four o’clock in the morning.
The months passed by, and most of the time I sat in Douglaston, drawing cartoons for the paper-cup business, and trying to do all the other things I was supposed to do. In the summer, Lax went to Europe, and I continued to sit in Douglaston, writing a long, stupid novel about a college football player who got mixed up in a lot of strikes in a textile mill.
I did not graduate that June, although I nominally belonged to that year’s class: I had still one or two courses to take, on account of having entered Columbia in February. In the fall of 1937 I went back to school, then, with my mind a lot freer, since I was not burdened with any more of those ugly and useless jobs on the fourth floor. I could write and do the drawings I felt like doing for Jester.
I began to talk more to Lax and to Ed Rice who was now drawing better and funnier pictures than anybody else for the magazine. For the first time I saw Sy Freedgood, who was full of a fierce and complex intellectuality which he sometimes liked to present in the guise of a rather suspicious suavity. He was in love with a far more technical vocabulary than any of the rest of us possessed, and was working at something in the philosophy graduate school. Seymour used consciously to affect a whole set of different kinds of duplicity, of which he was proud, and he had carried the mendacium jocosum or “humorous lie” to its utmost extension and frequency. You could sometimes gauge the falsity of his answers by their promptitude: the quicker the falser. The reason for this was, probably, that he was thinking of something else, something very abstruse and far from the sphere of your question, and he could not be bothered to bring his mind all that way back, to think up the real answer.
For Lax and myself and Gibney there was no inconvenience about this, for two reasons. Since Seymour generally gave his false answers only to practical questions of fact, their falsity did not matter: we were all too impractical. Besides his false answers were generally more interesting than the truth. Finally, since we knew they were false anyway, we had the habit of seeing all his statements, in the common factual order by a kind of double standard, instituting a comparison between what he had said and the probable truth, and this cast many interesting and ironical lights upon life as a whole.
In his house at Long Beach, where his whole family lived in a state of turmoil and confusion, there was a large, stupid police dog that got in everybody’s way with his bowed head and slapped-down ears and amiable, guilty look. The first time I saw the dog, I asked: “What’s his name?”
“Prince,” said Seymour, out of the corner of his mouth.
It was a name to which the beast responded gladly. I guess he responded to any name, didn’t care what you called him, so flattered was he to be called at all, being as he knew an extremely stupid dog.
So I was out on the boardwalk with the dog, shouting: “Hey, Prince; hey, Prince!”
Seymour’s wife, Helen, came along and heard me shouting all this and said nothing, imagining, no doubt, that it was some way I had of making fun of the brute. Later, Seymour or someone told me that “Prince” wasn’t the dog’s name, but they told me in such a way that I got the idea that his name was really “Rex.” So for some time after that I called him: “Hey, Rex; hey, Rex!” Several months later, after many visits to the house, I finally learned that the dog was called nothing like Prince nor Rex, but “Bunky.”
Merton is finally finding his crowd. People who are leading him in the direction of his calling. Robert (Bob) Lax was a poet who, as Merton hints at here, drifted through life, eventually settling on Patmos. While I'm not at all familiar with Lax's work, I sort of imagine him as a latter-day John, living on that island and writing apocalyptically. That Merton was drawn to him is not surprising. In fact, all of the people mentioned here (Lax, Freedgood, Rice) were instrumental in Merton's conversion. Ed Rice was the godfather to both Merton and Lax when they converted.
When I was in college, it took me quite a while to find my crowd, as well. For most of my undergraduate years, I hung with computer scientists and mathematicians. Took classes in Pascal programming and abstract algebra. Spent a good deal of my time in rooms with monstrously large desktop computers, figuring life out through flow charts and lines of code. However, somewhere deep down, I knew I didn't really fit in. I couldn't get as excited as my friends about pixels and artificial intelligence. And, to a person, money was their motivating factor. They were all looking to get rich.
It was only when I started taking upper-division creative writing classes that I found my people. While I did well in my computer and math classes, by the time I hit my last semesters as an undergraduate, I knew I wasn't going to spend my life debugging programs or teaching students the differences between differential and integral calculus. I was going to be a writer and surround myself with writers.
For the most part, that is what I have done. Yes, I worked in the healthcare industry for over 25 years, but, at the same time, I was contingent teaching for the local university's English Department. And, every once in a while, I would publish a story here, a poem there. I have not made the kind of money I would have made had I pursued a career in computers. But I knew I stood a better chance of being the next Galway Kinnell than the next Steve Jobs.
Because it all boils down to passion. I am passionate about words and literature and beauty. I am NOT passionate about algorithms and Booleans. And, as Frost said, that has made all the difference. Poetry and my poet friends have sustained me throughout all of my life struggles.
Comparatively speaking, I haven't had nearly as hard a life as some poets. I have never personally struggled with alcoholism or drug addiction. Nor have I suffered from any kind of long-term mental illness. I am not Dylan Thomas or Sylvia Plath. In fact, I'm like vanilla pudding when it comes to the typical problems that plague most major poets. Yet I've had my share of setbacks.
Most poems come from a place of pain. Rumi said, "The wound is the place where the light enters you." I would amend that statement a little: "The wound is the place where poetry enters you." Poets grapple with pain. Try to understand it. Make friends with it. Transform it.
Most people feel uncomfortable in the presence of real hurt. They try to make things better, through word or action. There's nothing wrong with that. It's a natural human instinct. However, poets, I think, recognize that all truly beautiful things arise from a place of woundedness. Think about it. Would the narrative of Jesus Christ be as moving without the crucifixion? Little Women work without the death of Beth? Scrooge be redeemed without the specter of Tiny Tim's absence?
Poets get that. The fissures and cracks and wounds of life allow light to break through. Grief gives way to healing. Loneliness to love. Night to day. That's why I'm a poet and not a computer programmer. Why I've turned to Seamus Heaney and Natasha Trethewey to understand the events of 2020. Why my best friends are poets and poetry lovers.
Because Saint Marty learned that the greatest miracles are the ones that require you to travel through mountain and desert, on blistered feet, hungry and cold, following a distant star toward the promise of joy.
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