The Cloister Walk (7 page)

Listening to that dazzling convergence of the prophet's call with his pain and his hope, I realized suddenly that the prophet Jeremiah had become part of a remarkable convergence in my own life, a synchronicity of blessings and curses that had shattered certain boundaries that had long held me secure. For much of that fall, I experienced the most intense and prolonged writing period of my life. Poems were coming almost every morning and, unlike my earlier work, they came out whole, and nearly finished. As I hadn't written any poetry for several years, I was extremely grateful.

But at the same time that I was experiencing this rush of poetic energy, I was also experiencing bitter failure in my attempts to fit in with the rest of the “resident scholars” at the Institute. That was our official title, although I'm not a scholar in the conventional sense, and often find myself ill at ease in the academic environment. Denise Levertov once said that “the substance, the means of art, is incarnation, not reference but phenomena,” and like many poets, I'd much rather read a poem out loud than discuss it. Having to talk about what I do, what poets do, tends to make me stupid.

Two years before at the Institute, my attempts to explain myself and what I was doing there had been received by the group with a bemused toleration. One exchange I will never forget took place at a seminar that I'd been dreading because I had no idea how to conduct a seminar. I spoke on the topic of “Incarnational Language” in such a manner that one man fell asleep; maybe he, at least, had found me suitably academic. I hadn't given much thought to a precise definition of “incarnational language”; examples and stories attract me so much more, but they didn't seem to be what people wanted to hear. “You said the liturgy is like a living poem. What makes it like a poem?” one woman asked, and I replied, “Did I say that?” Apparently, I'd blurted it out during my so-called lecture, and had to try to remember what in the world I'd meant, while suppressing the sudden emergence of Emily Dickinson into my consciousness, whispering, “All men say, ‘What' to me.”

During the discussion period, one colleague, clearly frustrated with my response to a comment he'd made, said, “Kathleen, you could have come back at me much harder on that.” He then proceeded to list several points I might have made, and I nodded my assent to most of them. Finally, I said, “You know, Bill, I might have come up with all that, if I had more time, maybe two or three weeks. A month. I'm no good on my feet, I'm a slow thinker.” At least we all left that seminar wide awake. Uneasy, but awake.

During my second residency at the Institute, however, simple unease became a mean spirit. I suspect that I made a gravely wrong move early in the term, something I've not been able to identify, which led to distrust, misapprehensions, a tangle of unfortunate presumptions and graceless gestures that soon became impossible to unravel. None of us seemed capable of acting our best. A clique formed, which of course divided us into those within and those without. Discussions bristled with unspoken tensions, and no one had the good sense to bring them to light so that we might identify and defuse them. It was pure folly, a sorry accumulation of human failures, my own as much as anyone else's.

Scholars speak with authority, and they must, as they are trying to convince the reader that they have a worthwhile point of view. On the other hand, poets speak with no authority but that which the reader is willing to grant them. Our task is not to convince but to suggest, evoke, explore. And to be a poet, which at its root means “maker,” to be a maker of phenomena, speaking without reference to authority but simply because the words are given you, is not necessarily welcome in the academic world. That fall, the Institute became my crucible. I found myself deeply, helplessly engaged in the writing of a body of poems, even as I was experiencing, full-blast, the scorn of academics for a poet in their midst. It was the monks and their liturgy that kept me sane.

Ironically, it was a desire for liturgy that had led me to risk entering an academic environment in the first place. And now I found that liturgy was saving me. Writers become extremely vulnerable when a prolonged writing spell takes hold; sustaining such intensity has driven more than one poet to nervous breakdown, and even suicide. But the powerful rhythms of Benedictine life gave me balance, a routine. And the liturgy became a place where the prophet Jeremiah could help me understand my own life, my vocation as a poet. I am not making a facile comparison between myself and a prophet. I relate the tale only because I believe it illuminates the workings of
lectio.
The monastic liturgy plunges you into scripture in such a way that, over time, the texts invite you to commune with them, and can come to serve as a mirror.

All of us, I suspect, have times when we're made to suffer simply for being who and what we are, and we become adept at inventing means of escape. My means of escape that fall happened to be few—my husband was traveling halfway around the world, I was physically unwell. But Jeremiah reminded me that the pain that comes from one's identity, that grows out of the response to a call, can't be escaped or pushed aside. It must be gone through. He led me into the heart of pain, forcing me to recognize that to answer a call as a prophet, or a poet for that matter, is to reject the authority of credentials, of human valuation of any kind, accepting only the authority of the call itself. It was as a writer that Jeremiah spoke to me, and it was as a writer I listened. I couldn't have asked for a better companion.

It was the prophet who helped me understand that there wasn't much I could do about my situation, except to wait it out. I watched ice form on the river outside my window one Sunday afternoon and felt a loneliness more intense than any I could remember since childhood. The day had grown incredibly still—I spent much of that fall in solitude—and the silence was so deep it seemed poised at the edge of eternity. When it became too much to bear, words came to me: “the necessary other, a reminder and reproach; the ground of winter, watchful and chill, no longer looking for what is not there.”

I found this image of winter's encroachment curiously hopeful. Nearly empty, I could not hope to fill myself—certainly not with human companionship, although when it did come that fall even small acts of kindness and hospitality were resplendent—and I began to sense that this was exactly as it should be. God wanted me empty, alone, silent, and watchful. I was suffering from both severe laryngitis and a lame leg, and had to laugh at myself, wondering if I really were so dense that God had to resort to these extremes in order to get me to shut up and be still.

I spent fruitful hours meditating on what it might mean to be a “necessary other.” The phrase seemed to define Jeremiah, and the prophetic role. I also wondered if it might not help to serve to define the otherness of the poet, an otherness that typically emerges in childhood. Jeremiah 13:16—“When you look for light, he turns it into gloom,/and makes it deep darkness”—brought back to me a childhood image of God, which had led to nothing but trouble in my cheery, 1950s Protestant Sunday school. We'd been asked to paint a picture of heaven, and my effort, an image of God's throne surrounded by clouds, was a dismal failure. The newsprint cracked under all the layers of paint I had applied, in an attempt to get the image dark enough. It wasn't until I stumbled across Gregory of Nyssa in my mid-thirties that I discovered that my childhood image had a place within the Christian tradition.

Many people experience such otherness in childhood, but those who find their otherness integral to a calling—to religious life, to ministry, to the arts—learn to adjust to it as a permanent condition. William James, in
The Varieties of Religious Experience,
quotes novelist Alphonse Daudet on the death of his brother: “My father cried out so dramatically: ‘He is dead, he is dead!' While my first self wept, my second self thought, ‘How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at the theatre.' I was then fourteen years old . . . Oh, this terrible second me . . . how it sees into things, and how it mocks!”

When artists discover as children that they have inappropriate responses to events around them, they also find, as they learn to trust those responses, that these oddities are what constitute their value to others. They can make people laugh, or move them to tears. Under such circumstances, the second, mocking self can make the journey to adulthood extremely difficult and lonely, and artists are notorious for
not
making it, for becoming monsters of ego instead of human beings.

It doesn't help that others often encourage artists to think of themselves as somehow more special, sensitive, “creative” than other mortals. This is false doctrine. There is but one creator, and “creating” is the very thing that artists cannot do. The gifts of the human imagination that artists employ operate equally in science and scholarship, teaching and philosophy, business and mathematics, ranching, preaching, engineering, mothering and fathering. Still, it can't be denied that artists interact strongly with their world, and that there is a measure of suffering involved as they come to a mature understanding of their communal role.

The romanticizing of the artist, of course, has a flip side, a culture that often demeans, ridicules, or dismisses them, and artists soon learn that a strong ego is necessary if they are to practice their art. They learn that they must invent themselves, and in boldly appropriating for their art the raw material of their own lives, they are well served by a level of self-assurance and self-confidence that others find daunting, and often misread as self-satisfaction, or the annoying self-aggrandizement of the artist manqué. I suspect that this was part of my trouble at the Institute that fall. When I spoke as an artist, I was being heard as an artiste, a throwback to what Louise Bogan once termed “the disease of Shelleyism.”

The popular, nineteenth-century image of the poet-as-Romantic; the lone rebel, free of restraint, seized by holy imagination, has proved dangerous for poets in this century. It has overshadowed the poet's ancient communal role as historian, prophet, storyteller, and has mystified and idealized the writing process. But although poetry is taught notoriously badly in our schools and is no longer at the center of popular culture as it was even as recently as Tennyson's time, the culture still has need of the poet-as-other. In fact, expectations of artists can run very high. The biologist Lewis Thomas has said that “poets, on whose shoulders the future rests,” are needed to help us make our way through “a wilderness of mystery . . . in the centuries to come.” The theologian John Cobb, in commenting on the history of art from the Byzantine age to the present, says that “the power that can transform, redeem, unify and order has moved in a continuous process from a transcendent world into the inner being of artists themselves.”

This is dangerous for artists to contemplate, that the culture that trivializes and spurns them would also, paradoxically, look to them for hope of transformation. Walter Brueggeman, in a book on the prophets entitled
Hopeful Imagination,
suggests that “a sense of call in our time is profoundly countercultural,” and notes that “the ideology of our time is that we can live ‘an uncalled life,' one not referred to any purpose beyond one's self.” I suspect that this idol of the autonomous, uncalled life has a shadow side that demands that we resist the notion that another might be different, might indeed experience a call. Our idol of the autonomous individual is a sham; the truth is we expect everyone to be the same, and dismiss as elitist those who are working through a call to any genuine vocation. It may be that our culture so fears the necessary other that it has grown unable to identify and name real differences without becoming defensive about them.

I think this explains our mania for credentials, which allow us a measure of objectivity in assessing differences. Credentials measure what is quantifiable; they represent results. A call, on the other hand, is pure process; it cannot be measured, quantified, or controlled by institutions. People who are called tend to violate the rules in annoying ways. Young professors clinging to the tenure track do not like to hear that Denise Levertov has taught at Stanford, despite having little formal education. It offended several of my Institute colleagues that a university had invited me for a week-long residency as a “poet and theologian.” My last formal course on the Bible was in eighth grade. How could I be a theologian? What good are the rules, the boundaries of our precious categories—“theologian,” “scholar”—if poets can violate them at will? Ironically, while the Institute's director, Patrick Henry, has a deep commitment to breaking down the barriers between artists and academics, during that semester he found himself contending with personality clashes that made such bridge-building extremely difficult.

The poet, as a “necessary other,” is free to speak, and indeed must speak, in ways that scholars cannot. But that freedom comes at a considerable price. During that fall at the Ecumenical Institute, I began to suspect that just as monastic discipline looks to many people like restriction but ends in freedom, so what looks like the untrammeled freedom of the artist is, in fact, an exacting form of discipline. To employ yet another analogy, I'll use Robert Frost's famous comment that writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net. What he meant by that is that it's damned difficult. Imagine playing tennis
well
without a net. And doing it not only with your writing, but your very life.

The danger of going out of bounds is real. Poetry is a vocation without many guidelines for formation, and poets are often people who lack the religious underpinnings that might help them to take in stride both the intense seclusion of the writing process and the safe return to “the world.” Without such underpinnings, they've often turned to drugs or alcohol to help them manage the highs and lows; many poets' lives, since the late nineteenth century, have been demonstrations of William Blake's axiom: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” aptly titled one of the Proverbs of Hell.