October 2015
Marion font, in honor of Rich’s birthday. Why is his middle name “Marion?” Question for the month.
Reading more on Lax. If only McGregor had had someone make him take out the two first paragraphs about Ad Reinhardt on page 219. They sound like potted opinions couched to apologize to the reader for talking so much about this old-fogey painter friend of Lax’s, now forgotten, unlike our dear hero, Lax himself, a painter of quaint abstract works “emblematic of a bygone era.” Oh the damnation that phrase places anyone under, the lowest depths of the inferno. “McGregor, by all that is plaid and shamrocky, I hereby curse thee thyself as a biographer, writer, and friend of culture, to become yourself, the sooner and the better “emblematic of a bygone era.”
Posted this via Twitter. Will I get into trouble? on my blog with link to it on twitter.
Reading more on Lax. If only McGregor had had someone make him take out the two first paragraphs about the painter Ad Reinhardt on page 219. They sound like potted opinions couched to apologize to the reader for talking so much about this old-fogey painter friend of Lax’s, now forgotten, unlike our dear hero, Lax himself, a painter of quaint abstract works “emblematic of a bygone era.” He cites Barbara Rose. Can you imagine? Oh the damnation that phrase places anyone under, the lowest depths of the inferno. “McGregor, by all that is plaid and shamrocky, I hereby curse thee thyself as a biographer, writer, and friend of culture, to become yourself, the sooner and the better, “emblematic of a bygone era.”
274 “a dribble of words” oh my goodness !
Oct 3 Saturday
Book did arrive at last today, so I was impatient and unfair to the amazon seller. Now it is here. Let the copying project begin. Imagine covering the pages and revealing them line by line only after I copy them and change or add to or subtract etc. Party prep all day tomorrow and party and then Sunday evening/Monday I can start “writing” this bloody novel. Copy-novel. Whatever. Me and Pierre Menard.
Now I’m on page 313 in McGregor. Maybe it is my imagination but the second part of the book feels so much better than the first half. McG feels relaxed and confident. He knows the older Lax, that is who he met, and he has little to work on other than mining Lax’s journals, poems, writings of all sorts and he enjoys doing this and does it well. Lax’s idea of his inner voice, each of us trying to listen to our inner voice, feels like pure gold, the sort of passage we’ve been looking and longing for in this life of Lax.
Sunday night
Get-together went well. Pat and Ted came too and Ted at one point quietly said to the table---“why would anyone want religion when we have this.” So soft and beautiful. He is weaker and more frail and needs to have some things explained to him, but still he sees this and says this. We all enjoyed it and we showed off the new kitchen with delight. Food went over well, what showed up all fit together well.
Thursday night Oct 8 Sat in the starry’s in Concord and was that guy taking up a whole table in the window writing for a few hours, copying, imitating, the stolen novel. Stolen Fiction. Would that be a better title?
Finished McGregor’s biography last night. He maybe rushes through the later years, listing the moments of fame and accolades. Sweet that Beckett and Lax exchanged books and compliments. Had not known that Lax published a piece on Beckett in the Review of Contemporary Fiction. By doing that he succeeds in turning the ordinary literary biography into a genuinely moving, graceful portrait of Lax as spiritual seeker and of himself as devoted younger friend during the final fifteen years of Lax’s life. It reminds me of when I visited Kenneth Burke at his home in New Jersey. As the younger writer and admirer the possibility is there one sees to write the life, become the Boswell. An age-old pattern there. Why it happens and doesn’t happen is also as age-old. McGregor has the conviction at the outset when he describes their meeting that Lax apparently saw something in him that he liked and trusted and thus the friendship took root and deepened over the years. In the final years I wonder if McGregor doesn’t artfully leave out a good deal so as ultimately to protect the friendship from the prying eyes of the crowds that had begun to flock to see Lax, the pilgrims. He gets in the one juicy anecdote about the American pilgrim who as astonished to meet Lax’s cousin, Marcia, on the beach. By the end each anecdote like this has the weight of the emblematic, a token illustration of much more that might have been said, that might be said at a later time. You can’t help but think that McGregor will do a good deal more publishing of Lax and on Lax. Perhaps. Surely given the Merton industry now fully renewed as the Merton-Lax industry, a new generation of scholars will want to bring into publication more and more of Lax’s journals and notebooks. Just as they might be waiting for the Trust to release more of Merton’s massive archives. I know one retired scholar who might inform me more fully on these matters, especially since they are celebrating this year the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Thomas Merton and of Robert Lax. Meanwhile McGregor’s new book will get lots of attention and it deserves it.
I had hurled a mock-curse midway into the book when I felt McGregor didn’t really try hard enough to appreciate the paintings of Ad Reinhardt. If you understand abstract painting at all, you know that Reinhardt’s black paintings are still far more important to the art world than McGregor seems to have comprehended. With his devotion to Lax and to Lax’s unique style of formatting his poems, how could McGregor not have understood the place of Reinhardt more deeply?
My other moment of high umbrage and disbelief came on page ----- of the book when McGregor says Lax’s poem “dribbles” down the left hand side of the otherwise blank page. Ouch. “Dribbles.” What an ugly and unfortunate choice of wording. The same word shows up way too soon within the next twenty pages, so perhaps there was some editing and final proofing glitch at work, always a problem in getting any book into production. But then later I wondered if he had had basketball in mind, the words dribble pointedly down the page like the ball under the commanding palm of the player? No, that would be a stretch. I considered synonyms he might have used---the words “flowed,” “processed,” “marched,” “stuttered,” “descended” (like the famous nude), “stained,” “swayed,” even “dropped.” All terrible. But “dribble” is still also terrible.
Monday night 12th
Incredibly social weekend: Hunnewells and Richards, Barb and Ed, Greg and Gerri.
Dennis wants to come up to see everyone, probably Nov 7 weekend.
Nicholas wrote a fine review of the Lax book and then in a private email voiced his reservations. He thinks McGregor really doesn’t get Lax’s love of, sense of, solitude, prayer and solitude.
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Dear Bob,
I enjoyed it very much and as you said improves in the second half when it is fused with his own friendship and recollection.
Slightly niggling is a kind resentment of Merton (very implicit) as if his fame detracts from that of Lax's achievement when in truth they are very different and I suspect Lax will grow in stature as poet (and in the quiet prophesy of his spiritual life).
Both too were hermits a state of life that McGregor just does not get imagining it as an exterior separation that is only the smallest part. My favourite hermit - Fr Silouan in Shropshire - is as gregarious as they come and as contained in solitude.
Love and best wishes, Nicholas
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being a hermit as a “state of life” would fit Nicholas very well.
Back to work on the novel. Now it seems very clear that I should not translate the philosophy stuff into literary stuff at all but strip the text of all of that puffery and pull forth the telling as a vehicle for simply the voice. How would Lax cut the text or simply re-say it? That could be the point of the copying and the translation.
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Dear Bob,
Five or six times. The last time I saw him on his hill in Shropshire was just before I left to come and live here. A peaceable man of good wisdom and an openness to other traditions; and, safely, himself, under the haven of the Rumanian Orthodox who leave him alone!
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Thursday Oct 15 Day for choosing the prescription plan. Staying with Express-Scripts for now.
Yesterday’s day off, drove westward. Phone call from S the evening before revealed lots that I had wondered about. Good ‘ol PH did write and rewrite much of the diss. Back two or more years it had been a collaborative effort (hmm, sounds familiar) and S wanted to take it in novelistic directions with personal material. Once Chuck threw in the retirement towel and gave him a deadline ultimatum, they went the other direction and pulled Bataille to the forefront to give the academics fiber for their cud-chewing. Rest is history. Now S and KaryK are an item and R is in pain and PH sez no morals and thief. In his way, waze.
All well but reminder once more, I never learn, that day’s off really have to be off and solitary. Sponge Bob
In the novel take out everything but the bones. Take out all the showy stuff about culture savy and sophistication. “Bernhard” it, Beckett it. “Simon Critchley published this novel a short time ago. Trouble is he rushed it into print, added extraneous material, made superfluous emendations, corrupted the text with sparkly fluff trying to impress readers with his sophistication rather than leading them deeper into the deepest solitude where voices speak to the aloneness that one is.” N provides the great phrase here “ It is about stripping down to the essentials, the aloneness that one is . . . . “ such that you are free to be with everyone, one particular gift to another, and you can do that in a car park or a Walmart but it is a mite easier if you have space to practice! You have to keep practicing.
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great letter from Nicholas--
Dear Bob,
I remember going to see an Edward Burra exhibition (another consummate 'peripheral man') and there was a film of an interview the BBC did with him where he is ever so politely but firmly refusing to answer any of the questions but in myriad ways inviting the (inter)viewer to go back to the paintings.
As I went around again, I got my first real glimpse what it meant to see and hear paintings in their own language without the translation (however beautiful or compelling or dumb traipsing through my head).
Reading the Lax biography, it came again, this time with 'abstract' painting in view and just at the point that MacGregor does indeed not 'get' Reinhardt's black paintings (that I am about to see in Basle as part of a wider show).
Perhaps 'abstract' painting ought to be 'formal' painting with the play on Plato deliberate - so what is blackness, how does it sing and dance its essence through things, through us etc. The mistake one makes is thinking that Plato's forms are elsewhere - in a realm of forms - rather than right here, swinging through us, weaving the world. Abstraction wants to look at just one thread (or assembly of threads), very intently, because, of course, it is itself/they are themselves separate and yet implicate every other thread/each other.
Like solitude - a hermit may indeed go sit on a mountain or an island physically but that does not make him or her solitary. It is about stripping down to the essentials, the aloneness that one is, such that you are free to be with everyone, one particular gift to another, and you can do that in a car park or a Walmart but it is a mite easier if you have space to practice! You have to keep practicing.
And yes, I felt a deep affinity with Lax - though I feel him a lot more courageous than I - the way he continually exposed himself to others (and took risks on their generosity)! I like too the proximity - see him wandering down the streets of Zurich and by Lake Lucerne!
I had the same misconception - about the legacy and not from you, so it must be 'out there somewhere' - I can remember it as a nice excuse to my own soul - you see if only...!!!
Love, Nicholas
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Trouble with timewarner tonight no internet
Nicholas’s reminder of the space to practice and you must keep practicing goes well with my own reminder earlier to myself. !
And this morning’s swim. Maybe the novel too.
Got the internet back this morning and the new phone works even though the official date for it is a few days away.
Reply I penned to Nicholas---but I think I will edit it severely before I send it. I ran on too much.
But maybe not. Nicholas knows me well enough to “take it” all.
You keep coming up with all the good language! Lucky you that you can see some of the R Black paintings, even though they will be wasted on you since you don't get abstract/formal art due to your slavish attachment to landscape. Still, . . . let me know what you see and think and what all else is in the show. Reminds me---I will forward news of a new show of Eric Aho's work---which is landscape/abstract or landscape formal in the most exciting and silent ways. He is a local/regional artist here (Vermont) whose work I've seen develop. We had a chance to buy a beautiful small oil of his twenty some years ago, have regretted it ever since. Didn't have the money then, we thought (we might have had but we just didn't get into the habit of buying art) and now for sure we can't afford him. Might get the catalog though.
Anyway---love this passage in your letter--" the aloneness that one is, such that you are free to be with everyone, one particular gift to another, " Great phrase, the aloneness that one is. Do we both share the sense that we learned this most deeply in the midst of the crisis/breakdown that we experienced at differing times many years ago? Or that a sense of that solitude went way back into childhood (that golden thread) and so later when the crisis unfolded it is from within the solitude that one was able to say, oh, so that's why I've been aware of this without understanding yet why that has been woven into my sense of all experience until now).
Lax's great risk taking---no I could not go that far either but the fact that he saw or felt it (perhaps without theorizing about it) as the gift of self, the giving and receiving of self, at the heart of all love and search for love. Again, McGregor can only comment a few times on the "strange" periods in Lax's life (Marseille) when he hung out with men who most people would have avoided. He was almost a one person "foundation" or "soup kitchen" or "dorothy day" "social worker" having nothing but himself to give. He was like a founder of a religious group, casting about for suitable members of the invisible society of fellow solitaries---an Ignatius founding a non-society of non-jesuits who would have as their mission not the "winning back" of Protestants to the truth, Roman way but simply the continuance of love as it works both with and without all the organized attempts to foster it.
In that line, too, is McGregor's careful "certification" twice, almost in the language of a lawyer, no evidence can be found in the texts, the notes, the journals, the poems, or the reports about the life that neither Lax nor Merton were gay. This sounds to my ears like a very American nervousness. is it? Part of academic or campus PC language---not gay, no harassment, no inappropriate behavior, no grounds for suspicion or indictment. Maybe I am overreading McGregor here? Like trying to defend Dorothy Day from being really a Communist. All of that anxiety runs through the intellectual lives of her generation, Kenneth Burke's generation, being a communist or a fellow traveler.
yeah, cut the final paragraph. by now it is probably an official position by the Merton industrial complex and McG is repeating it out of duty.
what more do I think about Merrill and the summer? resonances of twenty years ago. PTSD in their ways. I was 50-ish. who can remember all of that? decade from 40-50, Azevedo and Cummings, Tommy Lee and Ryan Hale, Robert Tisdale, Ethan Paquin, Rupert, et al
oh, get this---Scott says Phil suspects Mark VonD might have some involvement in the Gardner theft! holy cow (he would) He did work there at the time as a security guard. whoaa
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Sunday Oct 18 night
snow flurries, light on way to Nashua this afternoon.
exchange with Phil
today
with morning coffee I was working out a huge theory (brilliant) about
those who hit early adult right as the war broke out, plus or minus,
as result of reading the Lax bio. By now, evening, that feels like the
leaves falling outside, dulled by the weather and giving in to the pull
of gravity.
You are no doubt in post-partum let-down if you've finished the book.
Congrats on that & hope Peg corrects the typos and finds nothing else
worth consideration.
Lax had a year gig at the new yorker soon after college and felt he
was a total failure at it. Lived the rest of his life as what our parents
would call "being a bum" or close to it. Did little or nothing to make
a iiving beyond the few paid writing things that fell his way. Today
I wonder if younger people would call him "aspergers spectrum
disorder" or "autism spectrum" or some such. He lived in Greece because it was so
cheap and whatever he had would stretch there as far as possible.
Proto-hippie, keruoacean easy rider, drop out, saintly humility. When
you've got the garment of spiritual seeking and living as poorly as
the chinese sages to wrap around you, plus early roman C, so that
you "embrace the life of poverty" like St Francis, it puts it all in a
heroic life, after the fact, for the biographer, especially when eventually
the poetry gets published thanks to devoted friends from the new
york days, and makes a splash. But I've known a few of such
people, more or less, and trusting in the grace of God for the next
dollar can be pretty exasperating for those most close by who
might be called upon to cough up that dollar.
Maybe I don't like sounding to myself resentful and cynical but I
guess it is my solid middle-class background a upward good luck
that has made me so hard-hearted. As though I had ever worked
hard in my life! well, yes and no, no and yes.
Maybe biography always makes me dither back and forth like this,
especially when it is about famous or successful writers. Have
you left a will specifying all your papers must be burned?
Don't dare look at the piece in the Times yesterday about the death
of one George Bell. Alone and absolutely unknown but comfortable
until his death in Queens. What a downer that piece of investigative
journalism is. When I am elected president no news agency will
be permitted to be run and staffed by anyone under 45.
B
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Nicholas added an important postscript---about solitude in childhood----
Dear Bob,
In truth, I think reading the Lax book interestingly gave me a better understanding of "abstraction" in art - that concentrated exploration of a form - by linking it to Lax's 'concrete' poetry (as did reading Lipsey's great book on the spiritual dimension in twentieth century art). That sense of wanting to purify a word/color/form so as to renew the freshness of potential associations.
For me the solitude goes back into childhood - the place when you realize that the only person who sees with your eyes is you, so in what way do you learn to gift yourself so as to be received by others?
Greetings from California - at Santa Clara University today supping with Jesuits.
Love, Nicholas
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Tuesday afternoon
delightful chat with Ethan. He has a new girl, Andrea Rook, divorced with one eleven year old girl. Puerto Rican from NY, works in Concord. He bought a house in Bristol looking over the lake. He and Kelly fought it out for nearly nineteen years. Two divorces. She leaves him. Wants the suburban dream.
found this terrific link between Burke’s novel and Beckett’s Unnamable--in the Believer from 2006
Towards a Better Life is the longest piece in this collection, a sort of one-sided epistolary novel with a flamboyantly solipsistic narrator. Ostensibly, the story is about the narrator’s relationship with the ex-friend to whom the epistles are addressed, but the discourse seldom escapes the confines of his own mind; instead of relying upon external images or events to explain his emotional state, the narrator writes in carefully balanced aphorism and analysis, something like Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable from the point of view of Jane Austen. by a Dan Johnson who seems no longer around ??
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Katherine Anne Porter took a few copies of Burke’s new novel to Paris to have Sylvia Beach sell them in Shakespeare and Company. Beckett bought a copy there perhaps five or so years later.
part of my invention about “Unknowing Fiction.”
love the fact that I “invented” this link last night and then sure enough found enough evidence that it really could have happened even though any astute reader would sense at once that it really did not.
Talking with Ethan today was fun. I suppose it was a new/old sort of nervousness and too much coffee that made me talk the way I did. He seemed delighted too but then he is in a new/old phase of his life. Forty, three kids, divorced from same wife a second time. She gets rid of him, he says, disappointed that he doesn’t want the kind of regular suburban achievement life that she does. She’s getting her masters now in something. Deep cultural divide but why he went back a second time, a second try, is not clear. Duty, wanting to be super good? Glad he has a new girlfriend and she sounds interesting enough. He doesn’t think I should be writing a novel. But what does he know?
Oct 21 Weds day off Finally, finally, walked all over lots of town. Skimmed through the Fortune show. Now at Coffee Roasters Cafe in Campton.
Good chat with Scott M earlier. He wants to pursue a feature on bdsm culture in silicon valley. A few confessions but no word about the current situation with kk. Saw Leif second day in a row. He was complaining about how basic and backward the college kids are these days. The Fortune show is nicely done but as good as much of it is, it still leaves me cold. Not enough color. No color, basically. One stunning and dark piece looks like the palace of Carlos V in Granada but it could be imaginary and/or Mexican or elsewhere.
Two conversations in two days. Too much? Every week? violation of day off policies? Too intrusive? Satisfying?
Suddenly today, (Thurs) it seems I want to show the two mss to Phil, Ethan and Scott and see what reactions they might have.
Dec 6 We Blackmail Ourselves
“In the last analysis a man tended to yield instinctively to a form of indirect blackmail exerted on him by his own personality.”
Bernhard 195 The Lime Works
May 10 One day it will all pour out
“ Like thousands of others before him, Konrad said, he too had fallen victim to a mad dream of one day suddenly bringing his great labor to fruition by writing it all down in one consistent outpouring, all triggered by the optimal point in time, the unique moment for perfect concentration on writing it.
. . . . .
. . . but he had lacked what was perhaps the most important quality of all: fearlessness in the face of realization, of concretization, fearlessness, simply, when it came to turning his head over, suddenly, from one moment to the next, ruthlessly flipping it over to drop everything inside his head onto the paper, all in one motion. "
240-241 The Lime Works
Sunday Oct 25
website called interesting literature
Austrian writer and journalist Karl Kraus (1874-1936): ‘Every journalist has a novel in him, said Karl Kraus, and if he’s smart, he’ll keep it there.’ Andrew Ferguson, the author of that Time article,
W. Somerset Maugham. In his 1938 memoir The Summing Up, Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) wrote: ‘There is an impression abroad that everyone has it in him to write one book; but if by this is implied a good book the impression is false.’
from Phil
I’m not sure where you are going in either work. However, in my opinion the Courier story has more possibilities. It is the one I think you should pursue. The "Unknowing" is, so far, really formless. It wanders over a lot of references to books and writers and never really seems to engage with any of them. At times it seems like the narrator is just free associating ideas and memories. Nor does the narrator and the English guy seem to have enough of a connection to merit a story. And while the narrator claims the Brit was really insightful, that's a case of saying, not showing.
So, if it was up to me I would continue the Courier story and put aside the Unknowing. However, in the Courier story the three-hotel idea seems a bit bizarre - and unnecessary. I would just have him staying in a hotel in Copenhagen and go on from there. And your first task is to show why we should be interested in this character who gave up being a therapist and moved to Copenhagen. Is this leading him to engage with anything or anyone in an interesting way?
Well, that's about as much as I can say at this point.
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I am deflated of course but that is what I wanted to hear, after all. I new my work with Critchley’s text was doomed to fail. I made it a certain way in with some sloppy tweaking but now I am ready to stop.
I could gather it all in “False Starts” and indeed my memory is good---‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins” from The Waste Land according to the note “The Prince of Aquitaine to the ruined tower.”
Penned a letter to Nicholas about how Lipsey’s account of the spiritual is reshaping my story about dad taking me to the doctor to see if I were queer. Or would be queer. He didn’t understand me---he didn’t comprehend my developing sense, developed sense, by even then, of the inner solitude of the pilgrim. It’s not that I was going to be queer it was that I was going to be a pilgrim. Gay or not gay is beside the point to anyone who understands this inner reality. I think Nicholas will endorse this in reply to the note I just sent him.
Which takes me all the way back to my encounter with the gay professor at Maryland who gave me his books of poems. My original essay about that was and is the accurate one, the one on the money.
Fits right in with Jim A’s discovering he really belongs with the Quakers and not with the Catholics or the Brothers. And our encounters so much later in our lives are part of that too. The room for doing yoga at Ammendale, the hunger for yoga, for comprehending the practice of silence and solitude---these are what these moments of recognition and affirmation have always been about.
I can never write a novel that will meet Phil’s concept of what a novel should be like or do. Its not that I should not have asked for his response. It’s that I should really write what I want to write and go with it. True I could say I went to Copenhagen to meet x who had a project for me. etc He works for a charitable foundation in Zurich. Over coffee one day in Boston he outlined a special project he had been considering, a smaller line in the foundations budget and a smaller-scale effort but one that held promise of different sorts. Would I be interested?
That sort of thing. Why not? Could layer in all sorts of things including the detective novel armature, the fear of the former patient, the loss of Claudia, etc etc.
Taking, making, resolutions to myself already to take weds totally off by myself somehow, somewhere. This copying of someone else’s novel can feel like a worthy project in the enthusiasm of the uprushing. After a while, it deflates. I made it to page 37 in Critchley’s work. But it is taking in, taking on, someone’s story and work that is not mine. That old trap.
Knausgaard agrees: “To write and read means, at its most profound, to search for freedom, for routes into the open and it is the search for freedom that is fundamental and not whatever one tries to be free of, be it an identity, an ideology about equivalences or an idea about reality. Or, as my editor said the other day when we were talking about Peter Handke’s books: a definition of the task of literature could be to take you to where storytelling cannot reach. In other words, to where nothing is but everything is becoming.”
translation Anna Paterson 2014-04-03 in Eurozine First in Samtiden 3/2013
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So. Bringing in Lipsey opens vistas I have been wanting. Freedom from that copying obsession. Today while swimming I could hear the Courier book opening up and expanding with the possibilities I’ve been wanting for it. Put Memory Theatre away and never go back to it or go back months and months from now and find it strange ever to have occupied my time.
“Hotel Patronyme”
Offer of a new line of work from a stranger named Constantine Gregorius. Or some other such name. A young man in his early to mid 40s, very assured, very knowledgable. “The last time we saw you you were taking photos of the Knights of Malta headquarters in Paris, in an area few tourists ever chance upon.”
Lipsey even has a brand-new book on Merton. Lipsey is amazing, what a career.
from The Spiritual page 16 “Oneself as one might be. . . . This blend of hope and remorse is a sign that one has encountered the spiritual in art.” What a great passage this whole paragraph is and how beautifully the whole chapter addresses the question “What is the Spiritual?”
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gave my two youngster’s a “test” with my two mss---
here is Scott’s response---he likes “unknowing” better
I just read the second one.. where is it going? I ask because I like it. it's biographical and suspenseful. and that makes me want to know more. maybe time for the protagonist to kill somebody...no, a betrayal, a secret? what was this relationship really? And that dream scene was pretty good. beautiful... I would definitely continue it. Maybe condense some of the names though...you could focus on one or maybe two to illustrate the relationship or whatever it is that's going on in his head. I guess that would be Burke? I don't know him but maybe I should. What I know about symbols and how they work is mostly from a social science perspective. Geertz's idea of the religious symbols containing or reflecting both an ethos and a worldview...the world as it should or could be and the world as it is. And then there are all the other's, Sherry Ortner's notion of key symbols which perform different functions having to do with social action and with metaphor or conceptual understandings. Summarizing and performative I think she calls them. But how do they work? The social scientists are too matter of fact or descriptive for me usually.
I think you have a good idea or setup for something good...
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no word yet from Paquin---
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Nicholas posted on facebook in response to the link via blogspot that he liked Hotel Courier ---
two other replies from N
Dear Bob,
I am afraid San Francisco is airbrushed. What you do not see is the extraordinary number of homeless people, out and about, drawn presumably by weather and 'liberal tolerance', many of whom are clearly mentally ill, and I am afraid leave me with an uneasy sense of the inequality of the place, a dark thorn in the apparent beauty, so no desire to live there, despite its many charms (though also burnt to a virtual crisp by its drought).
Andrei has just left (for a seminar in Constance on digital memory). Parabola is a good choice - it is the only magazine I currently subscribe too! Delighted you like the Lipsey. I think it is a wonderful book. He is a very precise writer (I have read his biography of Hammarskjold and his book on Merton's art).
Love and best wishes, Nicholas
Dear Nicholas
If I am being intrusive with this query, just say I'll pass on this one. Or some such.
Lipsey's discussion of What is Spiritual? is so excellent it emboldens me to ask a question the Lax bio raised for me (at McGregor's promptings) that I will go ahead
and ask you.
In your experience was the discovery of solitude and the spiritual ever feel confused with, or entwined with, thinking it was about being gay, searching to find your gayness? Which i guess in larger formal terms is a question about sexuality and spirituality in general.
I was struck in the Lax bio how McGregor twice insisted that neither Lax nor Merton were gay (homosexual) either in "tendency" or experience. That this was not part of the tie that bound them. It struck me as a wholly unnecessary attestation on the part of McGregor but then someone explained since that the conventional rumor about Merton was that he took up his Asian travels to pursue his gay identity aware from the monastery.
All of which strikes me as a peculiarly American obsessiveness of the past twenty years, or more.
And yet at the personal level Lipsey's discussion has me recasting an experience from my late childhood. My father had no idea what to do with me because unlike my older brother I was terrible at sports and had no interest in them whatsoever. Etc. So when I was completing eighth grade he took me to see his doctor, saying, "look him over and let me know if he's queer or not." I sort of knew what that meant without fully knowing what that meant. The doctor used a stethescope and the other routine things and then told my dad, he's fine, don't worry about him. I was upset though and hurt but said nothing. In long hindsight I can see that what my father really couldn't see or fathom was this inner sense of "beyond" that I had been experiencing, all that Lipsey describes. He simply had no framework for comprehending that (that I could ever see) and so he wondered if I were queer. "Queer" being back then a flexible term no doubt for a wide range of strange behaviors variant from the normal.
After one realizes and claims one sense of sexual identity, the same confusion still persists because to others (my students and some friends) the reality of the spiritual solitariness is so much more invisible and incomprehensible. Hence in the Bio, McGregor has to deal with Lax living with men in Marseille and seeking and finding figures like Mogador etc and he has to disclaim for himself and us over and over that it was nothing sexual . . . that it was a sharing and giving that is about Lax's identity as a spiritual seeker--pilgrim as I think Lipsey uses the term.
Love
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Dear Bob,
It so happened that the three gays in the classroom at school (as far as I know) were all drawn to each other not I think by any unconscious attractor on sexuality (which we mutually discovered only much later and were never, I think, attracted to each other, as it happens) but our overlapping artistic and intellectual pretensions (for which we might have suffered more if our classmates had not been so extraordinarily 'nice' as our headmaster once described us collectively at a parents' evening)! I may have suffered more too (as you obviously did) if my parents had not been so respecting of my privacy (that my father worried over my normality I knew but he was so restrained a man (and kind) that he was not going to intervene).
So, in my case, I think my spiritual oddity simply coincided with my sexual oddity to make me doubly so without the one necessarily feeding into or off one another - except the latter probably did deepen the reality of the former, giving my solitude a lonelier form initially than it need or might have had; and, thus, probably giving a nudge towards breakdown (though my sexuality was never to the foreground of the breakdown itself).
I never knew that there was a Merton gay myth (and, frankly, find it almost wholly implausible)!
But I agree that McGregor falls into our current trap of first wanting to know what our subject's sexuality is and that 'is' must be one thing or the other thing - even if, as in Lax's case, it is not going to be exercised because he has chosen (or been chosen) by celibacy; and, whatever this 'is' is, it is going to have to be seen not through the lens of history but whatever our current obsession is. There is a great chapter on this in Michael Robertson's 'Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples' on whether or not Whitman was gay - to which the answer is obviously not in the sense we mean it (even when one of the great protagonists of that emerging meaning, Edward Carpenter, was one of Walt's disciples and claimed to have lain with the man himself)!
I suspect with Lao Tzu that all this earnest discussion of sexuality is symptomatic of an age that has junked all real presence of sensuality and polyvalence of approach and is emotionally as flat as the proverbial pancake. (Lao Tzu famously said when men discuss the good it is because it is absent).
I suspect that part of the uncommonness of Lax is that he did what he did, mostly generously, in response to what he had received and simply got on with it - and his strangeness is that we find this strange!
Love, Nicholas
P.S. Great about India - you will not regret it whatever happens!
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good reassurance about India
Reading Lipsey feels like such a homecoming. So welcome is it. Why did it take so long for me to find his work? On the other hand, for fifteen years I was painting, so there is that.
Phone call to Pat. Ted now had a fall, now needs a walker for stability. Carpenters fixing up utility room as his bedroom. Handrails on the stairs. I said have them put them on both sides. Revelation. She sounds really stressed and scared. Afraid of losing the money, not leaving Ted alone. Want to help. At same time, am saying, no, tomorrow you’re going off on your day off. Might go sit in the lobby of the Radisson to “do research on my novel.” !
If Paquin doesn’t respond at all, damnation and hellfire to ‘im.
Most are on the ground by now but the leaves that are hanging on are pretty golden looking. It's been a good fall compared to others. Will send you a photo.
Feel the same way about a friend, mathematician, who goes to the casinos in CT. Of course the hope of winning a hat full of quarters seems like "something" to gain but in my mind the same as sodoku. Must be an "inner spritual" satisfaction that we can't see. Like Tibetans spinning a prayer wheel or something. Just the inner mechanism of problem/challenge resulting in task completed.
Not unlike reading detective fiction. I am mid-way into PD James novel. I plod about a paragraph a day. Not even sure why. Pass the time. Not at all enthralled by the characters or the crimes or the situations. Even though Dagliesch the main guy is a "poet" and all. Oh, yeah, right, as if that makes this creaky british detective novel any different. Like so much of "masterpiece" style british fiction
it fits and feels like an old shoe, a nearly worn-out bedroom slipper.
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Matisse via Lipsey “To be sincere is to know oneself privately and well, quite apart from the web of influences, however helpful. Sincerity provides the clarity and staying power to uncover internal resources, from which alone an independent art may grow.” 252
For the remainder of my life I will read only first-person narratives.
Thursday Oct 29 Now I’ve lost track of which document is the working draft of Hotel Courier. At least Unknowing Fiction is over. That’s a relief. Unusually warm even hot outside today---in the 70s and sunny. Tonight we go to see Mama Mia at the Capitol Center. Earplugs in the pocket in readiness. Decided to cancel travel vaccines idea after chat with Annie Valdmanis last night at opera. Opera really bugged my ears last night---Manny had his mike and everything turned up too much. Plus I had been in the car with music most of the day. Barnes and Noble plus buying the travel scale at Premium in Merrimack. Lunch at Qodoba there. Full of tech guys. Could have been religious monks, teaching brothers. Guys in groups behaving like they always do, always have.
First reading of Modiano---one third into After the Circus. Pretty impressive first impression.
Somehow “blaming” the Lax biography for putting me into a kind of funk. But now feeling cured of that by both the decision to take an interest in things parabolean, and Modiano’s voices, and the ditching of Critchley, and other progressive developments. Roger Lipsey’s books and voices. Email from Pat--Ted did not shatter his knee after all. She’s in shock, the first shock of the new life. It’s almost like one waits to see, feel, when she is ready to receive help and clarify what sort of help she really wants and needs. Needs and wants. Each shock takes great discernment to pay attention to what should happen, where one’s energy should go and be.
Being Lax and Copenhagen. Andrew Campion. Is that the right name for the figure who offers the new life, the longed-for escape, the angelic message of transportation? That’s the name at this point.
Need for the pile of books, piles of voices. Weaving a potholder novel out of flotsam, jetsam, lines from multiple voices. Hints, inklings, stolen phrases, borrowed hunches. Modiano has given me one astounding passage that I loved as soon as I saw it: “But topographical details have a strange effect on me: instead of clarifying and sharpening images from the past, they give me a harrowing sensation of emptiness and severed relationships.”
Friday 30 October 2015
Great swim this morning. Remembering the yoga room at Ammendale, how full of discoveries it was for me and wondering whether to tell Jim any of it. In line with what I imagine the theme of the novel to be it would seem better to keep these things to myself.
Tons of books arrived. Between Lipsey and Modiano I have huge amount of quality reading for the long long winter as well as the India trip. But don’t let these keep you from writing the novel. A new Pamuk thrown in to boot.
Also thought of the idea of Lax’s notebooks being piled up in the archive. Now with Cloud etc publication should reverse the processes of the centuries. The archive should be put into digital and then onto handy volume of print so that it is readily available to all. Look for blogspot to book apps.
“A diffuse melancholy floated over us.” Modiano Circus 133
Lipsey, Modiano, from now on I will read only books written by writers born in 1944. well Modiano is 1945, Lipsey 1942.
