Author: Michael N. McGregor

“Image and Word,” A Merton-Lax Exhibit in Buffalo

The Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State is hosting an exhibit dedicated to the creative works of Thomas Merton and Robert Lax.  According to The Public, an alternative publication covering Western New York, “The exhibit materials include framed literary items—mostly poems—and photos, and vitrines containing some of their books and other published works.”  You can read more of The Public‘s write-up about the show here.

The exhibit, titled “Merton & Lax: Image and Word,” is an expanded remounting of the Lax exhibit displayed at the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts at St. Bonaventure University last year.  Among its highlights are rarely-seen issues of Pax, the limited-circulation broadsheet Lax produced in the 1950s and 1960s with poems by friends such as Merton, Jack Kerouac, Mark Van Doren, and E.E. Cummings, and illustrations by painter Ad Reinhardt and graphic artist and publisher Emil Antonucci.

The exhibit, which runs through August 26, is curated by Anthony Bannon, two-time director of the Burchfield Penny Art Center, and Paul Spaeth, Rare Books and Special Collections Librarian at St. Bonaventure University, who is also the curator of the Thomas Merton and Robert Lax Archives at St. Bonaventure.  For more information, see the exhibit posting on the Burchfield Penney website.

Video: Lax’s Friends, the Cristiani Circus Acrobats, in Action

“I knew right away that a big thing had happened.  I’ve never gotten over it.”

–Robert Lax on first meeting the Cristiani family of circus acrobats, who became his friends and inspired his thinking about life as pure act.  He later traveled with them through Western Canada, performing sometimes as a clown called Chesko.

 

Note from M. McGregor: Last week I stopped at the Ringling Brothers circus museum in Sarasota, Florida, where the Cristianis used to winter, and found this video of the Cristiani brothers performing back when Lax knew them in the 1940s:

 

the child’s only duty is to live and grow

“what a writer writes should have some relation (though not necessar-

ily a discoverable relation) to the meaning of his life.

and the meaning of our lives should have some relation (to the

meaning of the life of the world)

but the meaning of our lives, and what we write, and what we do, is

somehow in us from the beginning: in this sense, the child’s only duty

is to live and grow”

–Robert Lax, p. 304, Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax

 

Victor Hugo on the Patmos Within Us

Dan Siegel, who, with his wife Jenny Yancey, runs a wonderful summer writing program on Patmos called GoodWorld Journeys, sent me the following quote from Victor Hugo yesterday.  It is worth contemplating, not only for what is says about how we live or might live but also for how well it reflects the life Robert Lax lived on the actual island of Patmos.

“Every man has within him his Patmos. He is free to go, or not to go, out upon that frightful promontory of thought from which one perceives the shadow. If he does not, he remains in the common life, with the common conscience, with the common virtue, with the common faith, or with a common doubt; and it is well. For inward peace it is evidently the best. If he goes out upon those heights, he is taken captive. The profound waves of the marvelous have appeared to him. No one views with impunity that ocean, henceforth he will be the thinker, dilated, enlarged, but floating; that is to say, the dreamer. He will partake of the poet and of the prophet. Henceforth a certain portion of him belongs to the shadow. An element of the boundless enters into his life, into his conscience, into his virtue, into his philosophy. Having a different measure from other men, he becomes extraordinary in their eyes. He has duties which they have not. He lives in a sort of diffused prayer, and, strange indeed, attaches himself to an indeterminate certainty which he calls God. He distinguishes in that twilight enough of the anterior life and enough of the ulterior life to seize these two ends of the dark thread, and with them to bind his soul to life. Who has drunk will drink, who has dreamed will dream. He will not give up that alluring abyss, that sounding of the fathomless, that indifference for the world and for this life, that entrance into the forbidden, that effort to handle the impalpable and to see the invisible; he returns to it, he leans and bends over it, he takes one step forward, then two; and thus it is that one penetrates into the impenetrable, and thus it is one finds the boundless release of infinite meditation.”

 

By the way, the teachers for Dan and Jenny’s program on Patmos July 9-19, 2018 will be Mary Karr and George Saunders.  You’ll find full details here.

 

New Book by Robert J. Wicks Features Lax as Mentor

[*Note: After making this post this morning, I received a message from Robert J. Wicks offering readers of this blog 30% off on his new book.  To receive the discount, go to the Oxford University Press page for Night Call and use the promo code ASPROMP8.]

 

The popular writer and psychologist Robert J. Wicks, author of 50 books, has included a section on Robert Lax as a mentor in his new book Night Call: Embracing Compassion and Hope in a Troubled World.  The book just arrived in my mailbox yesterday so I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it looks like an important book for these unsettled days.

Wicks features Lax in a chapter called “Profile of a Future Mentor.”  He quotes several passages from my book Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax, first to illustrate that Lax felt mentored himself by the Indian guru he met in college, Brahmachari, and then to show how Lax, in turn, mentored others.  In addition to discussing my relationship with Lax, Wicks talks about Lax’s mentoring of Steve Georgiou, quoting from the book Georgiou wrote about their relationship, The Way of the Dreamcatcher.

Wicks concludes his section on Lax as a mentor with these words:

“Both Georgiou and McGregor were bringing their life experiences to Lax, in this case, in the hopes of making greater sense of their stories than they could on their own.  The were seeking a form of wisdom that would allow them, in turn, to continue to share with others in need–possibly on a deeper level–what they had and would learn.”

Later in the book, Wicks returns to Lax briefly, mostly to quote (again from Pure Act) a brief Lax poem that suggests the goal of self-evaluation and renewal:

not

so

much

finding

a

path

in

the

woods

as

find

ing

a

rhythm

to

walk

in

 

 

 

A Lax Poem and a Children’s Book About Thomas Merton

In April 2016 I wrote about the luminous paintings based on Lax’s poetry done by a talented young painter named Abbey Ryan.  Lately, I’ve been corresponding with Abbey’s father Greg Ryan, who knew Robert Lax for many years.  Greg sent me this image of the kind of thing Lax often included with his letters:

Greg and his wife Elizabeth Ryan are the author and illustrator of a lovely new children’s book about Thomas Merton called The ABCs of Thomas Merton: A Monk at the Heart of the World.  It is a well-pitched and pleasingly illustrated introduction to Merton and his world for children age 6-10.  You can find it on Amazon.  Here’s the cover:

By the way, the featured image for this entry is a note Lax sent to Greg and Elizabeth when they were expecting Abbey, the “bright newcomer from the sky.”

7 p.m. this Friday, June 16: Thomas Merton Society Keynote Address on the Merton-Lax Friendship to be Live-Streamed

I just learned that my keynote address at the International Thomas Merton Society conference at 7 p.m. (Eastern time) this Friday, June 16, will be live-streamed.  The talk is titled “Harpo and the Clown of God: The Seven-Storied Friendship of Thomas Merton and Robert Lax.”

The other keynotes–by Scott Russell Sanders, M. Shawn Copeland, and Luke Timothy Johnson–will be live-streamed too.

To tune in, go to http://merton.org/2017/default.aspx#stream when it’s time for the talk and look for the blue box (where you’ll find the schedule too):