Category: Lax writings and quotes

Robert Lax on Art as a Mirror and Guide to Understanding

Lax writings and photographs inside a reflection of his silhouette. © Michael N. McGregor

In my conversations with Robert Lax back in the 1980s and 1990s, when I was spending time with him every year, we talked about art many times. He saw art as a guide for people but also a mirror, in which they could see our own responses to the world more clearly and understand them better. Here’s a slightly edited portion of one of those conversation:
 
MNM: What is the purpose of art?
 
RL: Well, I’ll talk figuratively for a second. Just as Virgil could lead Dante into hell and up as far as he could and Beatrice could lead Dante the rest of the way up to heaven, art is a guide. Art is a bridge or a guide or a tour guide that leads you along to upper levels. It doesn’t drag you along by any means. At most it coaxes you or invites you. More like that: it invites you along.
 
…You might think, if you’d never seen any art or read any poetry, that your dreams and things that go beyond the ordinary in your solitary moments were yours alone and you might consider them a problem. Or you might consider your reactions to what someone said, which seemed so elaborate and beyond what in the ordinary course of things you’d expect them to be, to be troubling. But fortunately somebody learned to write about them, somebody learned to put them on stage, and that helps the whole community know how to understand—not just deal with, but understand—and even appreciate those moments.
 
MNM: I’m thinking about the phrase from Blake: “the doors of perception.” Is that akin to what you’re saying about art?
 
RL: Yes. I think that’s exactly it. For example, people analyze dreams—since Freud, at least—to find out what dreams tell them about their problems, but dreams serve so much more of a function for us than just letting us know what our problems are. It’s a whole world and in a sense you might think that art serves the same function in a community that a dream serves in the psyche of an individual.


When I asked Lax how this related to his latest books, which, at that time, contained mostly journal entries, he mentioned his small book 27th & 4th, composed of descriptions of people he saw passing that corner in New York from his office at Jubilee magazine in the 1950s. Here’s what he said about writing it:
 
RL: I had a friend, Jacques Lowe, a photographer, who used to practice photography by snapping people as they walked quickly past a low narrow door, and I thought I could do the same thing with writing. So I would just describe, quickly describe, everyone who went down the block as though I was a camera or something like that. I described them as I saw them and as I would talk to myself about them. So there would be jokes about them. I wasn’t trying to be objective or something like that. I was seeing them just as I saw them, talking about them just in my own language.
 
What I’m trying to do, in a sense, is bear witness—not false witness—to life as I see it and as I like it—as I love it—whatever it is, if it attracts me, and most of it does.
 
Lax is saying many things here, but I want to focus on three in particular:

1. Artists need to begin by paying attention: seeing what is really there, but also noting their responses to it.
 
2. Artists need to risk taking their interior life into the outside world, not merely to express it but in hopes that others will see their reflection in it and understand their own thoughts and responses better.
 
3. The patient seeking of one’s own understanding about even the most common of life’s moments can lead a community to a better place.
 
While Lax was talking primarily about his own approach to writing and making art, he was also showing all of us how to foster understanding in a community and help that community rise to a higher level, whether it’s only group of friends or an entire nation. We all need to seek to see more clearly and express our reactions to what we see more honestly, bearing witness—not false witness—to life as it truly is, with understanding as our goal.

A selection from 27th & 4th

(Note: This post originally appeared in the November 2021 issue of the Lax Newsletter. To subscribe, click here and look for the “subscribe” button on the left-hand side of the page as you scroll down.)

Today, November 30, is Robert Lax’s Birthday

© Michael N. McGregor

Robert Lax was born in Olean, New York, on this day in 1915, to Sigmund and Rebecca Lax, both Jewish immigrants.

To honor his birthday, here’s a brief selection from his poetry (and his soul):

Who can speak for the soul's delight in a beautiful
  day?
Who can tell the wonder that enters through the eyes
  & into the heart?
Who knows the soul's rejoicing?
The whisper it would make to its Maker,
the whisper of love, the song of glory?
Who knows the soul's delight in beauty?

The light
  is on the mountains
    in the brush country,
      & I am tortured
        by the beauty
          of the light
            upon the mountains
              in the brush country.

(a selection from a longer poem set down on November 12, 1947, in Hollywood, CA)

--p. 68, journal E/tagebuch E: hollywood journal, published by pendo-verlag, 1996

Two More Videos Based on Robert Lax Poems

Video artist Susanne Weigner has produced several short, award-winning videos from Robert Lax poems. One of her latest ones, called “moments,” was recently part of a show in Taipei, Taiwan, curated by a group based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Lax’s words are getting around!

Another Weigner-Lax videopoem, called “contemplation is watching” took first prize in the 2019 Atticus Review Videopoem Contest. You can watch it below:

There Is No Right Way of Singing…or Dancing…or Living

(Image from 123freevectors.com)

In these fractious times, when competing visions of who we are (or should be) seem to separate us more and more, let me offer this short excerpt from Pure Act about a realization Lax came to in the fall of 1973, one of the most significant of his life (Lipsi is a small island near where he lived his later years on Patmos):

As he lingered on Lipsi that fall, he began to see that his vision hadn’t been capacious enough. He had been looking at parts rather than the whole, searching for models rather than an understanding of the greater scheme of things. The oneness of humanity–of all of life–wasn’t something to be sought, he realized, but something to be recognized and embraced. The life flowing in his veins had been flowing in veins since the beginning of time or longer. The enduring nature of life was the important thing to understand:

the continuity of life is
its meaning: it begins from
eternity & flows to eternity

there is no right way of
singing a given song: but
all ways are more or less
right

the variations of tone we
bring to our roles give life
its color: whether we will (to)
or not, we add variations

there is no one character in
whom the Lord would dwell &
not in others

he who dances in the middle
of the room, dances for me;
he who sits in the corner
watching, watches for me

…it is not that our lives
should so radically change,
but rather our understanding
of them

–pp. 320-321, Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax


“A Reaching Beyond”: Robert Lax Explains His Color Poems

(image from artistsbooksandmultiples.blogspot.com)
the red blue color
poems in colored
crayon

(do a lot of
things at
once)

they're poems
but look like
paintings

yet (being
neither poems
nor paintings)

are something
beyond both

---

and are meant to
be
(that) thing
beyond both
that includes
both

---

not a matter
of mélange
des genres

a reaching
beyond known
genres

for a new one

a direction of
the discovery
of new ones

(from thesis
antithesis
to synthesis)

a reaching beyond
what is
to what
(may become)

---

is there a sense
in which all that
may ever become

already is?

yes, is
in potentia

–pp. 350-351, Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax

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

 

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.”

Looking for Online Examples of Robert Lax’s Poetry?

Garrison Keillor has featured Robert Lax’s poetry on his “The Writer’s Almanac” radio show several times and the poems are all still featured on the “Almanac” website.  You can even listen to Garrison Keillor read them.  The one to read or listen to now, perhaps, is “Greeting to Spring (Not Without Trepidation),” which first appeared in The New Yorker in the early years of World War II.

For those who like to watch something while listening, here’s a YouTube video of Keillor reading “The Alley Violinist.”  Keillor included this one in his 2002 book Good Poems.

Happy spring!