love – Robert Lax

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.

A New Book of Lax’s Contemplative Writings, edited by S. T. Georgiou

S. T. [Steve] Georgiou, who knew Robert Lax for many years, visiting him on the island of Patmos and exchanging numerous letters, has published a small but impactful collection of Lax’s observations and poems called In the Beginning Was Love: Contemplative Words of Robert Lax.

Drawn mostly from Lax’s journals and published works, the 81 numbered selections provide a rich and eclectic look at Lax’s thoughts about the world and spiritual matters. Georgiou has added several facsimiles of Lax’s handwritten poems and a handful of photographs of Lax and his Patmian world, along with notes that give the sources of the book’s quotes. Georgiou’s nine-page introduction is focused on Lax as a spiritual figure and, although it contains a few small factual errors and occasionally drifts into academic language, it gives a good sense of Lax’s spirit and makes a strong argument for why his life and words are important in today’s world.

This is a book to keep by your desk or bedside to dip into when you need inspiration or a peaceful spirit before sleep. The entries come from many parts of Lax’s life and aren’t dated, so you have to give yourself over to the general spirit that animated him throughout his days: a spirit of love and peace, prayer and patience.

Paperback, Templegate Publishers, 136 pages, with a foreword by Jonathan Montaldo, $15.95

“A luminous offering of poetry and prayer; every page is a meditation.” — Jonathan Montaldo, editor of The Intimate Merton

The Presentness and Mindfulness of Robert Lax’s Pure Act (part one)

When Robert Lax was a student at Columbia University in the late ‘30s, he and Thomas Merton liked to go to jazz clubs late at night to watch jazz musicians jam. These jam sessions were more spontaneous than a regular performance, but they weren’t entirely freewheeling and they certainly weren’t chaotic. What gave them form and flow was a combination of the musicians’ training, whatever tune they were using as a base, and their presentness and mindfulness. The musicians were fully in the moment, listening and responding to each other.

When the time came for one of them to solo, he knew it, not because a leader gave a nod but because the music shifted his direction, an opening invited him to shine. In that moment, as he blew his horn or strummed his bass, he did it more intensely and more soulfully than he had before, playing, as George Clinton once said, like his mamma just died. He didn’t do it to outplay the others but because playing his best, expressing what he could best express, was the best way of both respecting and encouraging his fellow musicians. Each one playing his best brought out the best in the others.

A worrier by nature, Lax longed to be as present and as mindful, as disciplined and yet insouciant and spontaneous as those musicians were. His relationship with Merton and their other college friends gave him a taste of how a constant jam might feel: the free exchange of new ideas and views, the playing off of one another, the applauding of creative accomplishments. But college ended and his friends scattered. Merton entered a monastery. Jazz musicians were still playing, of course, but the world offered few other models of the concept Lax would come to call pure act, and his understanding of it remained more theoretical than actual.

Until, that is, he met the Crisitani family. Performers since they were young, the family’s eleven brothers and sisters were the world’s leading equestrian acrobats. Catholics all, they shared a faith and an understanding of each other built from countless hours of practicing and performing together. Each had his individual talents and personality but all were serious and sober, happy and playful, graceful and skillful, as Lax would describe them in his poem cycle Mogador’s Book.

About the skill of Mogador, the brother Lax felt closest to, he wrote:

Like the highest art,
it is a kind of play
which involves
responsibility
and control;
An activity which involves
awareness and appreciation;
Its own symbolic value.
Like the prayers
of the old in wisdom,
it has the joy
and the solemnity of love.

Lax’s first book, The Circus of the Sun, was an attempt to show the relationship in spirit between the performers in the Cristianis circus and the Creation story:

“We have seen all the days of creation in one day: this is
the day of the waking dawn and all over the field the
people are moving, they are coming to praise the Lord:
and it is now the first day of creation…

He succeeded wonderfully in portraying the grace and beauty of both circus and creation, but the writing of the book did not come easily. And after writing it, he still felt far more anxious than he wanted to. To live and make his art as freely as the Cristianis did, he’d need a deeper understanding of himself and what he meant by pure act, a phrase he’d borrowed from St. Thomas Aquinas. He’d need to make a move, too: from overly commercial and distracted America to a tiny room beside the waterfront in dangerous Marseilles, and then an island far from anyone or anything he knew, in the middle of the vast Aegean.

(part two to come…)