Robert Lax’s PAX and the Politics of Art and Peace

(Note: These thoughts and other Lax-related news and commentary were included in the December issue of the Lax Newsletter, sent out last week.  If you’d like to receive the newsletter, which is mailed to your inbox once every two months, just fill out the form on the Home page.)

“I may be wrong about Pax, but keep feeling that through good poems and pictures, peace can travel.”
–Robert Lax to Thomas Merton, 1953

The image here is from the third issue of Robert Lax’s broadsheet Pax, which he published sporadically between 1956 and 1962, adding three new issues in 1985.  I’ve been thinking about Pax in the wake of the American election because Lax’s idea in publishing it was to spread peace by sharing the work of writers and artists.  The work didn’t have to be about peace per se; the simple act of making art, Lax thought, is a peaceful–and therefore peacemaking–activity.

I don’t know any more than anyone else what the coming months and years will bring, but I’ve seen the agitation and rancor the election has fostered already.  I’ve seen people say on Facebook and elsewhere that everyone should take to the streets or get involved in politics.  A former writing student of mine said over tea the other day that she was unsure about writing in these times, worried that writing an essay about something other than current issues might be trivial.  I’m pretty sure I know what Lax would have told her: that we need people thinking deeply and imaginatively about life right now; that we need those people to put their observations and intuitions into words and images; that we need books with those words and images in our hands and on our shelves and in our beds at night when we’re prone to worrying about where our world is heading.

When I was on my reading tour for Pure Act, an audience member asked me if Lax was political at all.  I said no.  But two or three days later, someone who had been at the reading suggested (gently) that I was wrong.  Lax’s politics, like Thomas Merton’s, were the politics of peace, this person wrote.  And he was right.  Pursuing peace through whatever means, even a fragile newsprint broadsheet that few people read, is a political act.

“To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times.”  –Thomas Merton

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”  –Thomas Merton

(You’ll find information on all Pax issues, including a list of the poets and poems in each one, here.)

Robert Lax Talks About Art as a Guide to Love and Understanding

Robert Lax in conversation with Michael N. McGregor, March 12, 1996 (an excerpt):

RL: I think that evolution, and all of history, moves through three classical stages: from power to wisdom to love.  The ultimate one is love.  You can say the reason for gaining some power is so you can gain some wisdom; the reason for gaining some wisdom is so you can finally understand or live in a state of love.  We talk about going from earth to paradise and we think of paradise as being the whole kingdom of love.

MM: So where does art fit into that movement?  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 that leads you along to upper levels.  It doesn’t drag you along by any means.  At most it coaxes you or invites you.  You might think, if you’d never seen any art or read any poetry, that your dreams and things that go beyond the ordinary 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 so much beyond what, in the ordinary course of things, you’d expect them to be—she slammed the door; she didn’t slam the door, she just shut it a little quietly but still I’ve been thinking about it all day, the way she closed that door—if you’re alone with those thoughts and have no art to open up that world to you, you could be in trouble.  But fortunately somebody learned to write about these things.  Somebody learned to put them on stage.  That helps the whole community know how to understand those moments—not just to deal with them but to understand and even appreciate them.

MM: I’m thinking about that phrase from Blake: the doors of perception.  Is that what you’re talking about with art?

RL: Yes.  I think that’s very apropos.  I think that’s exactly it.

Turning the Jungle Into a Garden

by Michael N. McGregor—originally published in Poets & Writers, March/April 1997

There is no easy, efficient way to reach the Greek island poet Robert Lax calls home. A nine-hour flight from New York leaves you less than halfway there, subject first to an adrenaline-draining, needle-threading, joint-jangling taxi ride from the Athens airport to the harbor at Piraeus, then a nine- or twelve-hour (depending on the seas – everything in Greece depends upon the seas) passage on an aging, noisy, smoke-filled ferry that might not even make its scheduled stop.

That is, of course, if the ferry is running that day at all – and if you haven ‘t had the misfortune to arrive on a day when the ferry is traveling to Piraeus instead of away from it, or when the engines have gone out, or when the ferry workers are on strike.

By the time you arrive on Patmos, usually at 1:00 or 2:00 A.M., the New York world of instant gratification, instant communication, instant everything seems strangely, almost painfully, remote. Continue reading Turning the Jungle Into a Garden