AN INNER WORLD OUT THERE

GETHSEMANI

--- ---
ABBEY OF OUR LADY OF GETHSEMANI
FOUNDED 1848 0F THE ORDER
OF TRAPPIST-CISTERCIANS,
FOUNDED 1098 IN FRANCE.
NOTED FOR PRAYER, LABOR
AND SILENCE.

Thomas Merton was loaned a camera in the mid-1960s by his friend John Howard Griffin (Black Like Me), and this opened up a whole new world for him. He came to refer to his camera as a "zen camera" - by which I understand him to mean that the images produced are somehow seen only in the present moment - there is no past or future reference in them; they somehow stand on their own as "pure" (my word) images. In other words you see the image and that's it. You don't need to interpret it or talk about it; it just is. The zen photography of Thomas Merton.

So he photographed the ring pattern on sawn logs, shadows and light, patterns produced by ordinary things but that were somehow extraordinary. Very abstract. Kind of visual haikus, but I would say even more so.

Following his lead, as I wandered the abbey grounds on that Tuesday in January, waiting to hear news of my stranded and forlorn car on the train, I began to experiment with my own camera in the snow and ice of that winter's day... In particular, I discovered the macro-feature on my camera that for me opened up a whole new world - a world that is more about seeing than, interpreting or understanding - or even experiencing - it just is.

A whole new perspective...

And more... That was just the beginning:

"To see things whole is to be whole."

Henry Miller,

Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch (p.144)

"All prayer, reading, meditation, and all the activities of the monastic life are aimed at purity of heart..." (Merton); Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. "To see things whole is to be whole" (Miller). Two very different writers, and yet a strange confluence in perspective and spirituality, that finds resonance in my own soul. A way of being, a be-attitude, stemming from a way of seeing - ? Or providing a way of seeing? Which comes first - how we see the world, and so live in it; or how we live, and so are able to see the world? Or perhaps the two are the one and the same: to see things whole is to be whole.

VISIONS OF GETHSEMANI

When it became apparent on the day after "The Beaches" picture was taken - a Friday - that the car was not going to be available until after the weekend we decided to head south in another rented vehicle to spend the weekend in Memphis, Tennessee before heading to Thomas Merton's monastery in Kentucky on the Monday.

Gethsemani in Ice

Trappist Monastery, Kentucky

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

"Thomas Merton was a monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani from 1941-1968. This was the day when I heard that my car was finally ready for collection, and I set off for Toronto that evening in the worst ice-storm in living memory. The evening before, Father Damian (the Guestmaster) had been telling us that we were at Gethsemani not because we chose to be, but because God wanted us there. This is what he called 'special grace.' So, I reasoned, that if I had to go away it was because God didn’t want me there after all; he wanted me on the road instead. This was my extra-special grace. But before I set off I spent a peaceful day in and around the monastery getting to know the macro-photography feature on my camera. The snow and ice made everything even quieter; it was as if time itself has stopped – a moment frozen in eternity. I especially love this picture which seems to capture that moment with the depth of field between the ice-encrusted tree and the entrance to the abbey church."

In his book Contemplative Prayer, Merton writes:

"All prayer, reading, meditation, and all the activities of the monastic life are aimed at purity of heart, an unconditional and totally humble surrender to God, a total acceptance of ourselves and our situation as willed by Him." (p.68)

Merton's life as a monk was aimed at "purity of heart" - this was what his spiritual path was all about, developing "purity of heart." He defines this as "surrender to God" which he equates with acceptance of the present moment - "ourselves and our situation" - as willed by God.

In The Beatitudes in Matthew's Gospel we read that the pure in heart are blessed for they will see God.

There seems to be a link between acceptance/surrender, purity of heart and true seeing - vision of reality.

In all of this talk about acceptance - even embracing - whatever the circumstances we find ourselves in, looking for the hidden gift within, I am conscious of and uncomfortable with the potential for this to come across as trite - fatalistic and platitudinous. A car stuck on a train is hardly a life crisis; driving through the worse snow & ice storm to hit the mid-west in living memory was a bit more scary (and I had to give myself a good talking-to); but everyday people are confronted by huge challenges of life and death - chronic illness, sudden calamity, injustice, torture, imprisonment, the loss of loved ones, the list is endless. Ultimately we are all faced with our own mortality - as was Neal Cassady by a railroad in Mexico in 1967, Merton in a Bangkok hotel room in 1968, Kerouac while watching the Galloping Gourmet on TV in 1969 - what poetry in our deaths. Actually I suspect they all faced their mortality way before any of their deaths; these were just the times and places of their final showdowns.

And yet... and yet, all of that notwithstanding, there is still huge power in the way we are able to accept what must be accepted - that which cannot be anything other than accepted because it cannot be changed - even though it may threaten to rip our very souls out from our mortal skins; the surrender that brings peace; the purity of heart that enables us to see clearly.

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God" - a beatitude; a be-attitude - a way of being that has to do with a way of seeing. A long time ago Kerouac made the link between the word "beat," as in the "beat generation," with the word "beatitude" meaning being in a state of "blessedness." And how are we to understand "blessedness"? It suggests to me a state of peace, and an invulnerability against all that would destory us and tear us down, it is the ultimate overcoming. It is the ultimate justice in overturning the fortunes and the values of the world, the ultimate putting right of wrongs, the last shall be first and the first, last. Blessed are the poor in spirit... blessed are those who mourn... blessed are the meek... blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice... blessed are the merciful... blessed are the pure in heart... blessed are the peacemakers... blessed are the persecuted... blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you. Make no mistake.

A NEW WAY OF SEEING - A NEW WAY OF BEING

"Aloysha is now capable of abandoning himself to divine providence - not in the passive sense of taking whatever life gives him, but in the prophetic sense of accepting life's difficulties and imperfections as the very stuff of his destiny. Nothing must be rejected but everything accepted as from God's hand. That is what Zossima meant when he told him that in his sorrows he was to find his happiness."

Robert Inchausti, Subversive Orthodoxy p. 58
writing about Dostoyevsky's Bothers Karamazov

Subversive Orthodoxy was one of the books I began reading after I had arrived on "The Coast" and was staying with the New Camaldoli in a hermitage named "Kyros" - a Greek word that means for me "the fullness of the present moment." It has the connotation of "God's time," or a "moment of significance," "a moment pregnant with meaning." It is the eternal moment as opposed to simply a moment in time (chronos - as in chronology).

The quote from Inchausti's reflections on The Bothers Karamazov expresses something of this new way of seeing that came out of my experience at The Beaches, Toronto and the whole fiasco over the car. It is not passive resignation to a situation - just accepting what can't be changed - but rather seeing the gift within the situation. Providence is ultimately benign and leads us in the path we are meant to walk, the road we are meant travel - not in a fatalistic sense (which is blind) but but "in the prophetic sense of accepting life's difficulties and imperfections as the very stuff of his destiny" - which is about seeing clearly the true essence of things. As Kerouac says, "Believe in the holy contour of life."

THE LEUTY LIFEGUARD STATION

The Leuty Lifeguard Station

The Beaches, Toronto

Thursday, January 22, 2009

"This bleak but beautiful picture reflects the bleakness of the outlook of that cold January day. Sean and I had driven up from Maryland in the early hours of the previous day to retrieve my car that had been shipped by train from Vancouver. Alas, the car was still stranded on the train, and was to be so for another few days. Snowbound in the frozen north when we should have been somewhere down in the south nearing New Orleans, we had an acute sense of displacement, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet as the trip unfolded I realized that this is an illusion, and that wherever I happen to be is the right place to be, even if it’s not where I intended to be. It’s all about outlook: this may appear to be a bleak picture, yet I treasure it as one of the most beautiful images of the whole journey."

In many ways this is the heart of my vision - the epitome of what the whole journey came to mean for me - something that in the year that has followed has sometimes been obscured and yet I have come back to it again and again.

For reasons that I need not go into now, I decided to ship my car from Vancouver to Toronto by train. This was in a year, unlike the present, when there was record snowfall in Vancouver - such that on the day I intended to take my car to the train depot for shipping the weather was so bad that it was decided to delay it for a week or so. This together with the fact that the train was then delayed leaving Vancouver meant that when I arrived in Toronto my car had not arrived. In fact at that point (January 12) it had not even left Vancouver. I had no choice but to rent a car and begin the first part of my journey with the intention and necessity of returning to Toronto when the car had arrived.

So I drove from Toronto to Lowell, Massachusetts in the snow and spent a wonderful three days wandering around Kerouac's hometown, hanging out in the places he grew up; then on to New York to meet up with Sean who was flying in from England. We spent the weekend in NYC then headed out on the Monday, January 19 - Martin Luther King Day - heading south for Maryland following the route Jack and Neal would have taken 60 years earlier, all the way to Baltimore. January 20 was the day of Barak Obama's inauguration of course, and we got to hangout in Washington D.C. and heard his swearing in and inauguration speech. A stirring day. Then that night I got an e-mail saying that my car had arrived in Toronto, and foolishly (as it turned out) we set out at one in the morning to drive back to Toronto arriving around breakfast time. Problem: no car - it was still on the train which was sitting outside the train depot in the snow waiting for off-loading. Uncertainty as to when it was to be off-loaded - maybe the next day, definitely by the next day - they said.

So we stayed the night with kind friends in The Beaches area of Toronto and cooled our heals. Next day we took a walk along the boardwalk - where I'd actually been on my first visit to Canada back in 1997 when I visited the jazz festival there, and the kids were young. Something struck me about this lonesome building standing there like a widow in the snow. I only took that one picture that day. I love it - something about the bleakness of the weather reflecting the bleakness of our spirits; and yet the peace of the silence and stillness of the snow. Despite it all - all the frustration and uncertainty, and the feeling of dis-place-ment (being in the wrong place at the wrong time) - I came to realize we were in the right place. This is how it was meant to be. This was the right place to be.

INTRODUCTION - WHAT THIS BLOG IS ABOUT

This blog is part of my preparation for a presentation I am giving at the Vancouver Public Library on March 10, 2010 (at 7pm). The title of the presentation is:

VISIONS ON THE ROAD:
A Personal Odyssey
with Jack Kerouac, Thomas Merton and Henry Miller

This draws on my experience of a sabbatical journey I made last year with a friend, driving from New York to San Francisco via New Orleans, commemorating a journey made 60 years earlier by Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady (et al.) and fictionalized in Part 2 of Kerouac's On The Road. (ontheroad2009.blogspot.com)

Although the original aim was to recreate that journey of 1949, it was apparent early on that this would be something very different. In part this was by design - we planned to make a number of side trips; in part it was by force of circumstances that demanded changes and adaptations as we went along.

What this presentation is about is what I learned (or maybe re-learned, or learned in a deeper way) through the process of undertaking this journey. In many ways this can be summed up as being about a way of seeing or simply vision. Hence the title: Visions On The Road.

This was the recurring theme in the reading that I was doing both on the journey and in the times of solitude and retreat that immediately followed; it was present in how I came to respond to the various circumstances and challenges that presented themselves along the way; and most strikingly the theme of vision manifested itself in the photographs that I took during this time - pictures that are literally a record of what I saw, the vision before my eyes, and that somehow may convey that vision to others. Though even as I say that, I am immediately conscious that vision, by definition, is subjective and that it is not possible for others to see what I saw, or how I saw, because they are not me, and they were not there. Just as what Sean and I saw and experienced is different from what Neal and Jack did all those years ago. What others will see is something different; nevertheless they will have visions of their own.

What I plan to do in the presentation at the library therefore is to present a number of the images as literal visions that arose out of this journey and weave these in with the insights that I gained in my reading, and the story of the experience as the journey unfolded - though not necessarily chronologically.

Along the way there were numerous unseen fellow travelers accompanying Sean and myself - Jack Kerouac of course, and his account of that earlier journey was often in our hands and on our lips and always in our minds; Thomas Merton whose home monastery we visited in Kentucky, and which was perhaps the place of conception for the most significant in-sight for me in interpreting the visions before our eyes - though Merton, like Kerouac, remained with us throughout; and Henry Miller who made his appearance only after we'd reached "The Coast" when Sean had flown home and I was alone, beginning to process the whole experience.

But there were others too - Martin Luther King on whose public holiday we left New York on the eve of the inauguration of the first black president of the U.S., and whose path we crossed again in Memphis, Tennessee; Elvis of course, also in Memphis, the echo of whose voice we heard - with tears - in the legendary Sun Studio on a sunny spring day, and whose ghost we glimpsed in Graceland, and whose place of holy birth we hallowed in Tupelo, Mississippi; other authors and poets and musicians who accompanied us across the country, and all the people we encountered on the way who gave us rest and hospitality, encouraging us on our pilgrimage.

I want also explore something of the "parable of the road" as a metaphor for the experience of life - the paradoxical nature of this experience that is conveyed in this picture from a twilight highway heading for east Texas:

Heading for East Texas

Saturday, January 31, 2009

"On the road into the warm mystic night, and the true west at last. We crossed the Mississippi at Port Allen having driven up Highway 61 from New Orleans; now on local Hwy 12 in Louisiana bound for Beaumont, Texas and then Austin where we’d arrive after midnight. Texas, where you drive and drive and you’re still in Texas tomorrow night. This picture captures the freedom and the movement of being in an automobile out on the highway, with the blur of the trees flying by, the on-coming headlights and the glow of light beyond the western skies."

The onrush of the road captured in a single moment; the paradox of living in the present moment in the midst of the unstoppable flow of time. As Neal said to Jack: "We know time."