Tag: Patmos

Greek Orthodox Easter on Patmos, 1989

The following description of an Easter eve service on Patmos comes from a journal entry I made on Easter Sunday, April 30, 1989.  Happy Greek Orthodox Easter 2016!

Spent a cool morning washing clothes and reading bits & pieces of Merton’s A Vow of Conversation.  Sleepy Easter morning after a late night of celebration.  Met Petros [Lax] & his two young friends—Eva from Switzerland and Gary from New York—and after a series of tête-à-têtes and a dinner of beans & bread, then pasta and finally lamb entrails in an avgolemono soup broth, all shared round and consumed with draughts of conversation about the place of eggs in religion and history and plenty of laughter, we set out into the unexpectedly cold night to attend an Easter service.  At first we couldn’t get a taxi so we tried the service at St. John’s in Skala.  I was itching to go up to the cave or monastery, though, and finally Gary indicated a similar wish, so he, Eva & I (Petros was not in a mood to wander far from home) tried the taxi stand again, finding a car this time and speeding to the top of the hill where cars were already lining both sides of the street.

We went in and found ourselves at the end of a large crowd on the steps just inside the monastery door.  Around us children with sleepy eyes clutched candles while their elders leaned against the whitewashed walls, waiting.  For what?  20 minutes, 30 minutes.  We could just barely hear the chanting of the monks.  We lit our candles from those around us and waited, too.  Then, at midnight, the bells began to ring and voices began to sound all at the same time as the people around us smiled broad smiles and hugged and kissed each other with cries of “Christ is Risen” in Greek.  Then the exodus began.  Those within the church and in the courtyard began to file out—gush out, actually.  They pushed and pushed, swelling from one to two and then three across, pressing us up against the walls and making it difficult for the children caught in the press to find space to breathe.  I moved to the top of the stairs and could just see into the courtyard where candlelight lit a hundred faces.

Along a stone gallery above, candles and faces alternated, solemn sentinels keeping the vigil.  We waited as the crowd continued to pour out; then there was release, we were in the courtyard and the blackened murals beneath the arches of the church were before us.  We moved to the church doorway, into the antechamber where we held our candles up with the others and watched the monks in their black robes and round, pill-box hats or gold and white embroidered garments, each with a medallion with the face of Christ on it placed between the shoulder blades.  Gushing gray beards, the soft faces with their few strands of black of the young.  Solemn islanders who broke into smiles as they filed forward and kissed first the silver-gilded book and then the ring of the abbot or patriarch, exchanging warm smiles and greetings with him.  As Eva said, there seemed to be a genuineness to their interactions.

More people filed out and we were within the church, standing in a corner near the altar screen beneath the great silver lamps that hung everywhere from the ceiling, beautifully clean and white against the black from centuries of candles.  Beneath a red & white Tiffany-style lamp to my left an old priest in gold and a young monk in black combined their voices with that of a young boy in suit and tie, trading chants with a balancing trio on the other side.  To my right an almost obscured ikon—St. John?—wore a silver halo built out from the flat surface of the painting.  The monks went in and out of the innermost chamber and by positioning myself in a doorway beside the ikon I could see inside it.  They chanted alternately before an altar, behind which languished a figure of Christ painted on a wooden cross with John and Mary kneeling on either side.  On the altar stood a chalice with a silver-threaded Greek-cross-shaped cloth covering.

Back out in the sanctuary a young monk brought in a tray on which a large, 30-foot-diameter loaf of bread had been placed.  It was prayed over and removed and a folding support with a cloth draped over it was brought out.  A monk appeared from behind the screen and after walking back and forth a couple of times, put down the book he had been carrying—a book covered in silver with images of saints or the trinity on its cover—and began to read—actually, chant—what I took to be the gospel.  While he was reading, the oldest monk on either side tapped a bronze bowl with a metal rod, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly.  Earlier, one of the younger monks had gone out into the courtyard and tapped a long piece of rough-hewn wood with two wood mallets.  This was the calling of the people of the world to Christ, using a replica of the piece of wood tradition holds was used by Noah to call the animals to salvation on the Ark.  The reading finished, the incenser appeared once more and was waved at the bowing, crossing few still left within the church.

All the senses but one had been involved—then the chalice appeared.  Bread was handed around and people began to push forward to the center entry through the altar screen where a priest stood with a long-handled, ornamented spoon and served bits of bread soaked in heavy wine to the supplicants while another priest held the end of a red cloth below each chin, wiping it after the giving of the sacrament, sure to let nothing fall to the ground.  A basket of plainer, dryer bread was held out by a young monk at the corner of the church.  I ate it first and then the sweeter, ginger-and-anise-flavored bread I had received earlier.  I went back out into the antechamber and left my candle in front of the ikon of St. John, a postcard of which I had taped up behind my computer at home.

It was after 2 a.m. when we began to make our way down the hill, a thousand stars and a wayward cloud or two above and the lights of the city petering out into the dark, distant sea below.  For some reason we spoke of the oppression of the Palestinians and in South Africa.  Our conversation was somber, but undergirded with hope, too, for we had each, in his or her own way, been touched by the gentle, loving finger of God.

A 53-Minute Film Featuring Lax’s World on Patmos, Poetry Readings and His Thoughts on Life

For what may be a limited time, the Bayerischer Rundfunk in Munich, has a link to an interesting film showing Lax in his later years on Patmos: Nicolas Humbert & Werner Penzel’s “Why should I buy a bed when all that I want is sleep?: A chamber film with Robert Lax.”  It’s a 53-minute look into Lax’s world, with him reading his writings and talking about his thought and life.  Don’t miss this opportunity to see Lax as those of us who were fortunate enough to visit him on Patmos knew him.

Today is Robert Lax’s 100th Birthday!

I took the picture posted here twenty years ago, in the spring of 1996 when my friend Bob Lax was 80. To mark his 100th birthday today (November 30), here are a few excerpts from journal entries I made during that visit. At the time, I was studying and teaching at Columbia University in New York, Lax’s alma mater, and reading French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. These entries give some idea of what my visits with Lax on Patmos were like:

March 10: I arrived at 2:30 this morning, having traveled for almost 30 hours. Bob had arranged for a room for me at the Rex and supplied it with two bottles of water, two candy bars, a package of cookies, some peanuts, plastic cups, and a small bottle of Metaxa. The woman at the Rex had been expecting two people so she had given me a double bed. She had also put a heater and extra blankets in the room. I said a prayer of thanks for my safe arrival, put an extra blanket on the bed and poured out a small amount of the Metaxa.

March 11: I stayed at Bob’s until about 12:45 a.m. last night. One of the things we talked about was the Deleuze book I’m reading. I mentioned Deleuze’s distinction between memory and remembrance, which I find especially interesting. Memory is mere repetition of an initial event, he says, but remembrance conceptualizes it, placing it in perspective and context: historical, emotional, developmental, etc.

Bob started talking about Cézanne. Perhaps he’s been thinking about him, picturing his work as if it were present in the room, because he gestured several times toward the wall where he tapes up pictures. Cézanne, he said, was only trying to paint woods as objectively as he could, as he saw them, but when they appeared in his paintings they appeared unique because Cézanne saw them only as Cézanne. This is why a writer should try to write objectively, to get down exactly what he perceives. What results will not be some non-personal, “objective” piece but one imbued with all that the author is, how he truly perceives the world. This should be the goal of art: to reveal the individual.

Both Sartre, in an excerpt I gave to my students, and Deleuze write about the sign or symbol in writing. A painter or sculptor creates an object; a writer creates only a symbol or manipulates symbols. A piece of writing, then, is only a symbol–or a collection of symbols–of the object, which is the writer himself. If the writer is exacting and faithful, that symbol or collection becomes an accurate projection of the object: more accurate than an encounter with the object–the author–in reality because the author is more focused in the creation of his art than in day-to-day living.

Later, Bob and I were talking about New York and what a wonderful place it is for anyone who likes meeting people. Bob said that each person we meet reveals some new part of ourselves. If we are alert and perceptive, the more people we meet, the more we learn about ourselves.

One of our subjects last night was the question What Is Art? We decided that it involves some combination of absolutely free expression and the constriction of form. It also involves some paradoxical combination of refined ideal and basic, unfiltered instinct. It combines the handful of dirt with the expanse of the universe, the center with the surface of the sphere, the specific with the universal.

This morning I began the day with Deleuze. He has shifted from talking about repetition to talking about difference. He defines the different not as that which is opposed to the original but that which differentiates itself by a determined movement away from the original form. The different defines itself in response to the original form but the original does not define itself in response in return. He gives the example of lightning, which flashes through the night, striking a counterpoint to what was before it but having no effect on what exists after it. It shows itself as different and yet the original remains unchanged.

This picture of difference differs greatly from that which has dominated Christian thought, which has equated difference with opposition. If difference is distinctive but not opposed, then difference becomes not opposition to God (embodied in the Christian mind, since the middle ages, as the social Christian congregation) but determined response to God. It becomes not antithesis (sin), not synthesis (syncretism) but pristine thesis. God created Adam not go be God, nor to be not-God, nor to be half-God, but to be Adam. Eve is not Adam, nor not-Adam, nor half-Adam, but Eve. When a person seeks to resemble (whether through obedience to laws or imitation or conformity) rather than embody, he or she does not bring God into the world but instead becomes a pale reflection–even a distortion–of a remote Idea.

(Although they aren’t about a conversation with Lax, I’ve included these last two paragraphs because they describe [in a Deleuzean way] how I see Lax’s life in relationship to mainstream Christian life.)

Happy 100th, Bob!

Three Short Videos of Michael N. McGregor Talking About Robert Lax

Oxford University Press, which is handling distribution for Michael N. McGregor’s Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax, has produced three videos in which McGregor talks about Lax’s friendships with Thomas Merton and others, his love of solitude, the relationship between his poetry and his simple life, and why he settled on the Greek island of Patmos.

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

After traveling with the Cristiani circus family through Western Canada in 1949 and finishing a draft of what would become his first book, The Circus of the Sun, in 1950, Robert Lax felt restless.  His observations of the Cristiani acrobats and reading of St. Thomas Aquinas had given him a clear sense of how he wanted to live in the world and a name for it: pure act.  But he didn’t know where he should be living or what he should be doing other than writing his poetry.

Aquinas had written that only God was pure act, but Lax believed that people could come close to being pure act themselves if they were filled with love.  According to his definition, pure act was a kind of mindfulness–a practiced way of being in the world–and yet it was a presentness too–a spontaneous living-in-the-moment without self-consciousness or hesitation.  Having heard that Catherine de Hueck had started Friendship House in Harlem simply by moving into a tenement and addressing whatever need was right in front of her, Lax decided to do the same thing in  Marseilles, the French city that had scared him the first time he’d seen it.

Nothing lasting came from Lax’s months in Marseilles other than a strong belief that simply being a loving presence could be as much of a vocation as anything else.  That was enough.  Although he continued to roam restlessly in future years–traveling with another circus in Italy, editing a literary journal in Paris, and working for Jubilee magazine in New York–he had narrowed his true desires to three: living a simple contemplative life, writing the kind of poetry he wanted to write, and being a loving presence wherever he was.

It wasn’t until Lax left America’s commercialism and relentless ambition behind and moved to the Greek islands, however, that he found a place he could feel at peace.  On the island of Kalymnos he discovered a whole community of fishermen and sponge divers who seemed to live lives of pure act, singly and together.  The smallest gesture was both practiced and spontaneous, ancient and new.  Everyone seemed fully present and alive.  He settled among them to learn from them while writing his poetry the same way.

When politics forced Lax to move to the nearby island of Patmos, he was momentarily dismayed.  But he soon realized that a life of pure act could be lived anywhere: circumstances didn’t matter.  In time he drew people from the around the world to the island of St. John, where they experienced and learned from his loving presence.  His pure act.

 

 

 

A Gyroscope on the Island of Love

Robert Lax with a cat
Photo: Nancy Goldring

by Michael N. McGregor—originally published in Image, no. 70, Summer 2011

I’d been meaning to call him for days and hadn’t, but that afternoon something made me search for a phone. The same something, maybe, that had led me to Robert Lax in the first place fifteen years before. My wife and I were walking through a small Turkish town where all I could find was a cheap payphone halfway up a dirt alley. Connections between Turkey and Greece were bad in those days and this phone looked especially dubious, but I pushed my coins into the slot and dialed his number. The usual clicks and beeps filled my ear, then the low, drawn-out brrrrrs as his line rang. Continue reading A Gyroscope on the Island of Love

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