December 1: Blind and Crude and Unspiritual, Most Human Person, Louisa May Alcott

 Merton delves into Eastern mysticism . . . 

The point of his title was this: we cannot use evil means to attain a good end. Huxley’s chief argument was that we were using the means that precisely made good ends impossible to attain: war, violence, reprisals, rapacity. And he traced our impossibility to use the proper means to the fact that men were immersed in the material and animal urges of an element in their nature which was blind and crude and unspiritual. 

The main problem is to fight our way free from subjection to this more or less inferior element, and to reassert the dominance of our mind and will: to vindicate for these faculties, for the spirit as a whole, the freedom of action which it must necessarily have if we are to live like anything but wild beasts, tearing each other to pieces. And the big-conclusion from all this was: we must practice prayer and asceticism. 

Asceticism! The very thought of such a thing was a complete revolution in my mind. The word had so far stood for a kind of weird and ugly perversion of nature, the masochism of men who had gone crazy in a warped and unjust society. What an idea! To deny the desires of one’s flesh, and even to practice certain disciplines that punished and mortified those desires: until this day, these things had never succeeded in giving me anything but gooseflesh. But of course Huxley did not stress the physical angle of mortification and asceticism—and that was right, in so far as he was more interested in striking to the very heart of the matter, and showing the ultimate positive principle underlying the need for detachment. 

He showed that this negation was not something absolute, sought for its own sake: but that it was a freeing, a vindication of our real selves, a liberation of the spirit from limits and bonds that were intolerable, suicidal —from a servitude to flesh that must ultimately destroy our whole nature and society and the world as well. 

Not only that, once the spirit was freed, and returned to its own element, it was not alone there: it could find the absolute and perfect Spirit, God. It could enter into union with Him: and what is more, this union was not something vague and metaphorical, but it was a matter of real experience. What that experience amounted to, according to Huxley, might or might not have been the nirvana of the Buddhists, which is the ultimate negation of all experience and all reality whatever: but anyway, somewhere along the line, he quoted proofs that it was and could be a real and positive experience. 

The speculative side of the book—its strongest—was full, no doubt, of strange doctrines by reason of its very eclecticism. And the practical element, which was weak, inspired no confidence, especially when he tried to talk about a concrete social program. Huxley seemed not to be at home with the Christian term “Love” which sounded extraordinarily vague in his contexts—and which must nevertheless be the heart and life of all true mysticism. But out of it all I took these two big concepts of a supernatural, spiritual order, and the possibility of real, experimental contact with God. 

Huxley was thought, by some people, to be on the point of entering the Church, but Ends and Means was written by a man who was not at ease with Catholicism. He quoted St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila indiscriminately with less orthodox Christian writers like Meister Eckhart: and on the whole he preferred the Orient. It seems to me that in discarding his family’s tradition of materialism he had followed the old Protestant groove back into the heresies that make the material creation evil of itself, although I do not remember enough about him to accuse him of formally holding such a thing. Nevertheless, that would account for his sympathy for Buddhism, and for the nihilistic character which he preferred to give to his mysticism and even to his ethics. This also made him suspicious, as the Albigensians had been, and for the same reason, of the Sacraments and Liturgical life of the Church, and also of doctrines like the Incarnation. 

With all that I was not concerned. My hatred of war and my own personal misery in my particular situation and the general crisis of the world made me accept with my whole heart this revelation of the need for a spiritual life, an interior life, including some kind of mortification. I was content to accept the latter truth purely as a matter of theory: or at least, to apply it most vociferously to one passion which was not strong in myself, and did not need to be mortified: that of anger, hatred, while neglecting the ones that really needed to be checked, like gluttony and lust. 

But the most important effect of the book on me was to make me start ransacking the university library for books on Oriental mysticism. 

I remember those winter days, at the end of 1937 and the beginning of 1938, peaceful days when I sat in the big living room at Douglaston, with the pale sun coming in the window by the piano, where one of my father’s water-colors of Bermuda hung on the wall. 

The house was very quiet, with Pop and Bonnemaman gone from it, and John Paul away trying to pass his courses at Cornell. I sat for hours, with the big quarto volumes of the Jesuit Father Wieger’s French translations of hundreds of strange Oriental texts. 

I have forgotten the titles, even the authors, and I never understood a word of what they said in the first place. I had the habit of reading fast, without stopping, or stopping only rarely to take a note, and all these mysteries would require a great deal of thought, even were a man who knew something about them to puzzle them out. And I was completely unfamiliar with anything of the kind. Consequently, the strange great jumble of myths and theories and moral aphorisms and elaborate parables made little or no real impression on my mind, except that I put the books down with the impression that mysticism was something very esoteric and complicated, and that we were all inside some huge Being in whom we were involved and out of whom we evolved, and the thing to do was to involve ourselves back in to him again by a system of elaborate disciplines subject more or less to the control of our own will. The Absolute Being was an infinite, timeless, peaceful, impersonal Nothing. 

The only practical thing I got out of it was a system for going to sleep, at night, when you couldn’t sleep. You lay flat in bed, without a pillow, your arms at your sides and your legs straight out, and relaxed all your muscles, and you said to yourself: 

“Now I have no feet, now I have no feet ... no feet... no legs ... no knees.” 

Sometimes it really worked: you did manage to make it feel as if your feet and legs and the rest of your body had changed into air and vanished away. The only section with which it almost never worked was my head: and if I had not fallen asleep before I got that far, when I tried to wipe out my head, instantly chest and stomach and legs and feet all came back to life with a most exasperating reality and I did not get to sleep for hours. Usually, however, I managed to get to sleep quite quickly by this trick. I suppose it was a variety of auto-suggestion, a kind of hypnotism, or else simply muscular relaxation, with the help of a little work on the part of an active fancy. 

Near the end of his life, Merton got himself into a lot of trouble because of his interest in Eastern religions.  In fact, he died in Thailand while attending a conference on monasticism and ecumenism.  While he seems more than a little skeptical here--seems even to be mocking the practice of meditation--Merton later embraced worldwide unity and universality.  

I sometimes struggle with these passages in Merton that seem so lofty and removed from anything human and real.  But, of course, that's how most saints and holy people come to God--through their own weaknesses and failings.  Because that's really the only way light enters into dark places--through the cracks and fissures and seams.

I am probably the most human person on this planet.  Every day, I fail at something important.  Working.  Fathering.  Husbanding.  Friending.  Poeting.  Christianing.  Tonight, I am exhausted after a day of trying to be the person everyone expects me to be.  Doing the things everyone expects me to do.  Expectations are exhausting.

I should be in bed right now.  Asleep.  I have another long day of work and grading and forcing my son to do his schoolwork tomorrow.  Instead, I'm sitting on my couch, watching Greta Gerwig's adaptation of Little Women.  It's the fourth time I've watched it since Saturday.  I guess you could call it my latest obsession.  

I find something very comforting in the story of Jo March.  Her messy life makes me somehow feel not quite so . . . alien.  Of course, it's fiction, written over 150 years ago.  A different time.  A different place.  The country recovering from the Civil War.  Women, slave to social customs and mores.  Men, expected to hold down jobs, support their families, be upstanding citizens.  Expectations again.

Louisa May Alcott, and her main character, didn't really care what other people thought about them.  Alcott wanted to be a successful, serious writer, and she succeeded in that ambition.  Wildly succeeded.  In her lifetime, she was one of the most famous writers in the United States (and the world, for that matter).

I have a lot of things I need to get done in the next week, before I can get on with the real enjoyment of the holiday season.  Teaching and work stuff.  Obligations I really do need to meet.  I don't like disappointing anyone.  Never have.  In fact, I like surprising people.  Doing things that actually rise above everyone's expectations.

That's a lot of pressure.  And that's why I'm really tired at the moment.

Charles Dickens used to write all day long and then walk 10 or 20 miles every night.  Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in six weeks.  Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women in three months.  It takes me three or four hours just to pound out one, small blog post.

Dickens wasn't perfect.  Alcott wasn't.  I'm certainly not, either.  Of course, Dickens and Alcott were geniuses.  Me?  I'm a father, husband, friend, teacher, poet, musician, actor, director.  I make mistakes.  Often.  Every day.  But that's okay.  That's how the light gets in.  How God gets in.

Saint Marty gives thanks tonight for the miracle of his failings.

November 27-28: Job and St. John of the Cross, My People, Light Enters You

 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.