{"id":2378,"date":"2021-10-27T16:13:38","date_gmt":"2021-10-27T16:13:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2021\/10\/27\/jack-kerouac-on-robert-lax\/"},"modified":"2021-10-27T16:13:38","modified_gmt":"2021-10-27T16:13:38","slug":"jack-kerouac-on-robert-lax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2021\/10\/27\/jack-kerouac-on-robert-lax\/","title":{"rendered":"Jack Kerouac on Robert Lax"},"content":{"rendered":"

During his years of unsuccess, when he was actually at his purest and best, an "unpublished freak," as he describes himself in a late summer 1954 letter to Robert Giroux, living for his art alone, Kerouac contemplated entering a monastery: "I've become extremely religious and may go to a monastery before even before you do." [. . .] "I've recently made friends in a way with Bob Lax and I find him sweet — tho I think his metaphysics are pure faith. Okay, that's what it's supposed to be." (Selected Letters <\/em>1940-1956, ed. Charters, Penguin 1995, p. 444.)<\/span><\/p>\n

And then on pp. 446-448 we find an amazing 26 October<\/strong> [sic!] 1954 letter to Robert Lax packed with etymology and scholarly detail which ends:<\/span><\/p>\n

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I'm no saint, I'm sensual, I cant resist wine, am liable to sneers & secret wraths & attachment to imaginary lures before my eyes — but I intend to ascend by stages & self-control to the Vow to help all sentient beings find enlightenment and holy escape from sin and stain of life-body itself [. . .] but thank God I'm a lazy bum because of that repose will come, in repose the secret, and in the secret: Ceaseless Ecstasy.<\/span><\/p>\n

"Nirvana, as when the rain puts out a little fire."<\/span><\/p>\n

See you in the world,<\/span><\/p>\n

Jack K.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For information on the enigmatic hermit Robert Lax (1915-2000) , see here<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Robert Lax: A Life Slowly Lived<\/a> is especially good. Excerpts:<\/span><\/p>\n

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One of the touchstone words in Lax\u2019s spiritual vocabulary was \u201cwaiting\u201d. By this he meant being still, standing one\u2019s ground, knowing one\u2019s ground, but never quite knowing the reality of what was awaited, longed for. In his volume 33 Poems<\/em>, recently reissued by New Directions, he puts it this way:<\/span><\/p>\n

Wake up & wait. Lie down & wait. Sit up again & wait. All in the dark now. No way of telling day from night. Do I expect to hear a voice? See a light? A dim one? A bright one? See a face? I sit up. I\u2019m alert. Do I know what to expect? <\/em>[2]<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat you see,\u201d said Paul Spaeth, keeper of the Lax archive at St Bonaventure, \u201cis the opposite of what can be called social action. What you see is a slowing down and waiting on God. Very much in keeping with the monastic tradition. Also very similar to the Buddhist tradition of moment to moment mindfulness.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\"Ad<\/span><\/div>\n
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Robert Lax with his two close friends: Thomas Merton (middle) and the abstract painter, Ad Reinhardt (left). Photograph courtesy of the Thomas Merton Center \u00a9 Bellarmine University<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Unlike his friend Thomas Merton, the Trappist poet and author who shared Lax\u2019s interest in Buddhism and brought his name to the world in The Seven Storey Mountain<\/em>, [3] Lax never lived a life of structured monasticism. A Jewish convert to Catholicism, he built for himself an interior monastery, within which he wrote, prayed, contemplated, and received many visitors: poets, painters, writers (he\u2019d been friends with the legendary abstract artist, Ad Reinhardt, and with Jack Kerouac), and spiritual seekers.  \u201cLax can be thought of as a mystic,\u201d said his biographer Michael N. McGregor, who nevertheless refrained from using that word in his book Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax. <\/em>[4] He shared his subject\u2019s aversion to the superficiality of labels. He wanted readers to come to their own conclusions about who he was, what he was.<\/span><\/p>\n

Steve Georgiou, a seeker from California and author of The Way of the Dreamcatcher<\/em>, a book of dialogues with Lax, remembers their walks down to Skala, the Patmos harbour. \u201cHe would walk with a slow roll like the roll of a boat. He would take his meditative steps, encouraging you to slow down yourself and feel the actual experience of walking\u201d. [5]<\/span><\/p>\n

For Lax, there was no seam between walking, praying, writing. All experiences were to be fully absorbed, integrated into a life fully lived. Once Georgiou saw his friend writing a single word \u2013 \u201criver\u201d \u2013 over and over. He asked him why. \u201cI want to live with the word for a while,\u201d Lax said.<\/span><\/p>\n

one word at a time.
<\/em>I believe
<\/em>I believe
<\/em>that all people
<\/em>should stop their fight;
<\/em>I believe that one should
<\/em>blow a whistle or
<\/em>sing or play
<\/em>on the
<\/em>lute <\/em>[6]<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During his years of unsuccess, when he was actually at his purest and best, an "unpublished freak," as he describes himself in a late summer 1954 letter to Robert Giroux, living for his art alone, Kerouac contemplated entering a monastery: "I've become extremely religious and may go to a monastery before even before you do." … Continue reading “Jack Kerouac on Robert Lax”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[202,73,161,203,376,465],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kerouac-and-friends","category-merton-thomas","category-poetry","category-questers-and-other-oddballs","category-slow-down","category-solitude"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2378\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}