Reveries of libraries, the thirty-ninth: Papal Pulp

 
 

In sorting large Catholic donations of books, there is going to be the gold and the dross. The gold can be some unremarkable looking book in pale blue cloth cover, long worn, that happens to be the only copy in the country. The dross can be something that was a sensation when it appeared, a copy on every shelf, and the talk of the town. The talk has faded. 

Donations boxes disgorge the sameness of some of this Catholic literature. Every religious house had to order a copy. Catholic libraries were required to collect the same until it became very much all the same. Theology courses got class sets that now cascade from the boxes in their all too familiar jackets. 

There are subsets of this literature that no one will read. At least, are not going to read in a hurry. They were possibly read by borrowers when they were children, or when they studied theology, if they studied theology, but now is no longer the time. The talk on these subjects has moved on, leaving the dross in its wake. 

And no one will buy this literature anymore, it cannot be given away. Does a man offer writing that no one will read? saith the Preacher, and well no he doesn’t. Even sending this literature to sale seems to be a waste of energy. 

A good example of a subset is the literature that emanates from the Vatican machine, that eddies around it like the Tiber after a big storm, the never-ending flow that pours from the Eternal City. Reaching over a billion people is no easy task, the presses run hot. Language is no barrier. The wash-up in donations boxes can best be described, in library terms, as papal pulp. 

Being amongst other things a solid Catholic library, the Carmelite Library already accessioned most of this stuff when it first came out. It is held in other Catholic libraries, where it easily accessible. Much of the crucial material is online via the Vatican net service and other reputable sources. The books have become of purely research interest only. One copy of each is sufficient. 

There are large glossy reports of international tours, with colour photographs of the pontiff kissing the tarmac, laughing with the president (or even the monarch), visiting a shrine, admiring a national monument, and lecturing a roomful of priests. Encyclical booklets topple like a waterfall from the boxes, leaving us to ask how many copies we need of Humanae Vitae before we get the gist. Biographies of popes are a major industry, or at least keep a lot of authors industrious, but the half-life of these works after their time has come, is brief. The Second Vatican Council continues to have its commanding and disputatious outcomes discussed, but there is only need for one set of the official documents, not one hundred. 

We already have all of these. We don’t need more. Nor does anyone else, in most cases. So, what to do with papal pulp? 

The librarian must engage in an act of discernment. Huge souvenirs of papal tours serve an historic function, so we are on the lookout for rarities that a researcher may find useful, especially in Antipodean settings. Encyclicals and other papal statements are all online, but one print copy of each is added to the collection; we know they are borrowed. Biographies of popes fall into the categories of Before and After. Death, that is. Biographies written in their lifetime could be described as careless raptures, explanations, propaganda, updates, political point scoring. Very often their purposes are purely ephemeral. Retrospective biographies raise new questions, make assessments, grapple with larger social and political implications. The biographical literature of Pius XII, for example, booms because of that pope’s role in the events of the Second World War and its aftermath. Everything of significance about Pius XII is added to the collection, though the majority of popes seem to have a way of fading into the past, like the pages of their biographies. 

Of course, behind all of these scans and scruples, these prevarications and judgements, lies another concern. It is one shared by many librarians, expressed in the final lines of Amanda Witt’s sonnet on the subject. Are we committing a sin by disposing of these extras? Shouldn’t we be saving all of these works, even if no one is going to use them?

Papal Pulp, a Sonnet by Amanda Witt

 

Boxes unpacked, three a week

Some books are set aside,

We are on a wild ride

And cannot be meek.

 

Some books the library already holds,

It is checked all the same,

By the title, author name

For others I hear “It’s gold!”

 

Then the books that make us gulp –

Numerous copies, all the same

These become the Papal Pulp,

In the Disposal Game.

 

Out the door they go, and in the bin

Though it feels like a Cardinal sin.

Papal Pulp, a Sonnet by Amanda Witt

 Boxes unpacked, three a week

Some books are set aside,

We are on a wild ride

And cannot be meek.

 

Some books the library already holds,

It is checked all the same,

By the title, author name

For others I hear “It’s gold!”

 

Then the books that make us gulp –

Numerous copies, all the same

These become the Papal Pulp,

In the Disposal Game.

 

Out the door they go, and in the bin

Though it feels like a Cardinal sin.

 

 

See also Philip Harvey’s response to this sonnet at Reverie 39.

 

Thomas Merton Poetry 9. Mortal. Poem: ‘A Psalm’

On the 17^th of March Philip Harvey conducted a Spiritual Reading Group on Thomas Merton. Pursuing a biographical line, poems were read and discussed that identified nine different aspects of Merton’s life, self, and work. Each aspect was illustrated by one of his photographs. Here is the text, with comments from the group about the poetry. 

Thomas Merton died in Thailand, before Christmas in 1968. He was 53. Was he ever planning to leave the Order? Was he moving into a whole new phase of inter-religious conversation? Was his death an accident, or not? Such questions rivet biographers, inspire books, and start fan discussions, but they are not really the questions that Merton himself is asking of us his readers. Prolific is a common word used to describe Merton and this is true too of his poetry. Not all of his poetic explorations work, yet exploration is always what’s going on. Much of his poetic exploration continues to defy easy analysis. He makes universal his own concerns. He wants us to be in on the conversation and the experience. He is very interested in our own limits as humans.

Like all other Cistercians through the ages, he sang the psalms almost every day. His own writing on Psalms reminds us of their continuous connection with existence and with God, their daily sustenance whatever the weather. Here he writes ‘A Psalm’. This psalm is in praise of psalms. It opens with the unexpected analogy of poetry to rum, though the effects of a good psalm seem to be more lasting than liquor. Their repetition through the year enlivens his love and awareness of all creation. Half way through the psalm, however, he moves from ecstasy into a letting go even of those things that make a psalm happen. In such a state “music turns to air and the universe dies of excellence.” The psalm is left behind, as it were, when the true author and receiver of the psalm is all in all. Such is the visionary state entered into that soon only “God sings by Himself in acres of night.”  

A Psalm

 

When psalms surprise me with their music

And antiphons turn to rum

The Spirit sings: the bottom drops out of my soul.

 

And from the center of my cellar, Love, louder than thunder

Opens a heaven of naked air.

 

New eyes awaken.

I send Love’s name into the world with wings

And songs grow up around me like a jungle.

Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes

Your Spirit played in Eden.

 

Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise

Shine on the face of the abyss

And I am drunk with the great wilderness

Of the sixth day of Genesis.

 

But sound is never half so fair

As when that music turns to air

And the universe dies of excellence.

 

Sun, moon and stars

Fall from their heavenly towers.

Joys walk no longer down the blue world’s shore.

 

Though fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf,

All fear another wind, another thunder:

Then one more voice

Snuffs all their flares in one gust.

 

And I go forth with no more wine and no more stars

And no more buds and no more Eden

And no more animals and no more sea:

While God sings by Himself in acres of night

And walls fall down, that guarded Paradise.

 

Thomas Merton Poetry 8. Conversationalist. Poem: ‘Great Knowledge’

 On the 17^th of March Philip Harvey conducted a Spiritual Reading Group on Thomas Merton. Pursuing a biographical line, poems were read and discussed that identified nine different aspects of Merton’s life, self, and work. Each aspect was illustrated by one of his photographs. Here is the text, with comments from the group about the poetry. 

 

The opening up of other religions to the West in the 20^th century is one of the most profound cultural shifts that we inherit in the 21^st century. The conversation between East and West became one of Merton’s most absorbing interests and pursuits. He dialogued with Daisetsu Suzuki and the Dalai Lama. He went into in-depth study of Buddhism and many other religious traditions, including the great Chinese tradition of Taoism.

It is while working on Tao that he produced a book of translations of the fourth century BC philosopher Chuang Tzu (Zhuang Zhu). Merton calls them not translations but ‘imitations’ or ‘readings’, based on his study of four versions of the poetry, two in English, one in French and one in German.

This poem searches for origins and arrives at first principles. To begin at the end of the poem, once we ask who is the True Governor of all the foregoing reality, we are in the place where the poet finds himself after all his deliberations. Wisely he admits that this cannot be named, but is nevertheless certainly there, ultimately, behind all the forms. He starts out with what a person may know; he ends after all the complexity with the temporary conclusion, we can only try to understand. He is sceptical of the claims of the social world, saying that people’s “pronouncements are as final as treaties between emperors”, i.e. about as final as the next disagreement. But he steps away from simple irony, expressing his observations of human behaviour and thought in candid, direct sentences. For all our talk, here we are again, same old same old. Opposites exist together, but why and how? Emotions and desires, “all are sounds from the same flute.” We get the sense that the poet has been here before, where “talk flows out like piss, never to be recovered.” If he is going to talk, it must be in words that are true, or at least the closest approximation to truth available, given they are only words. The poet lays it all out for our quiet reflection. Any line could be the place where we find ourselves now. That is the best place to start reading.

Great Knowledge

An ‘imitation’ of Chuang Tzu by Thomas Merton

 

Great Knowledge sees all in one.

Small knowledge breaks down into the many.

 

When the body sleeps, the soul is enfolded in One.

When the body wakes, the openings begin to function.

They resound with every encounter

With all the varied business of life, the strivings of the heart;

Men are blocked, perplexed, lost in doubt.

Little fears eat away their peace of heart.

Great fears swallow them whole.

Arrows shot at a target: hit and miss, right and wrong.

That is what men call judgment, decision.

Their pronouncements are as final

As treaties between emperors.

O, they make their point!

Yet their arguments fall faster and feebler

Than dead leaves in autumn and winter.

Their talk flows out like piss,

Never to be recovered.

They stand at last, blocked, bound, and gagged,

Choked up like old drain pipes.

The mind fails. It shall not see light again.

 

Pleasure and rage

Sadness and joy

Hopes and regrets

Change and stability

Weakness and decision

Impatience and sloth:

All are sounds from the same flute,

All mushrooms from the same wet mould.

Day and night follow one another and come upon us

Without our seeing how they sprout!

 

Enough! Enough!

Early and late we meet the “that”

From which “these” all grow!

 

If there were no “that”

There would be no “this”.

If there were no “this”

There would be nothing for all these winds to play on.

So far can we go.

But how shall we understand

What brings it about?

 

One may well suppose the True Governor

To be behind it all. That such a Power works

I can believe. I cannot see his form.

 

He acts, but has no form.

Thomas Merton Poetry 7. Translator. Poem Translation: ‘Memories of the Ancient World’

When we recall Merton’s upbringing in France it occurs to us that he is multi-lingual from an early age. This was to prove an immense gift when he came to write on the spiritual life because he could work across the languages of Christian tradition. He could also therefore translate poetry.

Translation of ancient and modern texts was a job at the monastery. It is quite likely we have not seen all the translations made by Merton. Nor could we identify them, as the productions have been published without ascription.

The following poem expresses certain central concerns in Merton’s work. Peace is upheld. Community is available. You belong in community. The natural world is familiar in shape and colour. The rest of the world exists outside our immediate concerns. We continue to exist happily while the rest of the world continues outside our concerns. We are free to enjoy the sky and the beauty of creation. We are bodily, we breathe in and out. Best to keep minor the things we worry about. It is good to live in expectation of something new, like a letter. There are some rules in life that keep things orderly and meaningful. We don’t wear our best clothes every day, that’s what makes them best. We are reminded and remind ourselves to be grateful. Gratitude extends to things we generally take for granted, like gardens and the future. We live inside time, and even though we seek that which is timeless, and we would be free of time, nothing would make sense without time. We live in the ancient world. Morning is when we wake up.

Memories of the Ancient World

Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Translated from the Portuguese by Thomas Merton

 

Clara walked in the garden with the children.

The sky was green over the grass,

Water ran golden under the bridges

And other elements were blue, or pink, or orange,

The policeman smiled, and bicycles went by

The little girl ran on the grass to catch a bird,

The whole world, Germany and China, all was quiet around Clara.

 

The little ones looked up at the sky: it was not forbidden.

Mouths, nostrils and eyes were wide open: There was no danger.

 

The only dangers Clara feared were influenza, hot weather, insects.

Clara feared to miss the 11 o’clock bus

And hoped for letters that were slow in coming,

She was not always able to wear a new dress.

But she walked in the garden, in the morning!

 

For, in those times, there were gardens, and there were mornings.

 

Sources

Thomas Merton. The collected poems of  Thomas Merton. New Directions, 1977

 

 

 

Thomas Merton Poetry 6. Hermit. Poem: ‘Oh Sweet Irrational Worship’

On the 17^th of March Philip Harvey conducted a Spiritual Reading Group on Thomas Merton. Pursuing a biographical line, poems were read and discussed that identified nine different aspects of Merton’s life, self, and work. Each aspect was illustrated by one of his photographs. Here is the text, with comments from the group about the poetry. 

Merton’s desire to live an even more isolated and more creative life at one stage drove him to want to swap orders and become a Capuchin monk. It seems that one way to resolve this need was for Merton to go and live in a hermitage on the estate of the Cistercian monastery. It can be concluded that the abbot therefore gave Merton enough freedom to get more work done, more prayer, and a life of self-subsistence within the abbey community.

Going there meant going further into the desert. He would write that “It is truly God who is calling me into the desert. But this desert is not necessarily a geographical one.” (Moses 40-2 ff.) He could say, “I don’t need to take a long journey in order to find the desert: the desert is myself.” By which he was saying, “the real desert is this: to face the limitations of one’s own existence and knowledge and not try to manipulate them or disguise them.” But it also led him to ask, “What is my new desert? The name of it is compassion. There is no wilderness so terrible, so beautiful, so arid and so fruitful as the wilderness of compassion. It is the only desert that shall truly flourish like the lily. It shall become a pool, it shall bud forth and blossom and rejoice with joy. It is the desert of compassion that the thirsty land turns into springs of water, that the poor possess all things.”  

Hermitage life expanded the creative possibilities for Merton. He started making Eastern calligraphy. He cultivated the practice of what he called Zen photography. His writing increased in scale and variety to reach new audiences and meet his own needs and answer his imaginative capacities. Writers know that their lives are hermit-like when it comes to the actual demands of time and thought necessary to complete their writing. Merton took this simple reality to a practical level by becoming literally a hermit. So much of his contemplative writing was informed and shaped by the poetic discoveries he made in the actual poetry.

It is the Merton of this period who can write as follows: “You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.” This is the learning that Merton gives to others. It is the learning that informs his own life as he lives an isolated basic existence in the woodlands of Kentucky.

Here is a poem that comes out of this newfound place in his own life. Bobwhites are native quail that live in the forests nearby. The poem lets go of any formal signposts as it declaims the ecstatic oneness of self and nature. He has even let go of his name.

Oh Sweet Irrational Worship

 

Wind and a bobwhite

And the afternoon sun.

By ceasing to question the sun

I have become light,

Bird and wind.

My leaves sing.

I am earth, earth

All these lighted things

Grow from my heart.

A tall, spare pine

Stands like the initial of my first

Name when I had one.

When I had a spirit,

When I was on fire

When this valley was

Made out of fresh air

You spoke my name

In naming Your silence:

O sweet, irrational worship!

I am earth, earth

My heart’s love

Bursts with hay and flowers.

I am a lake of blue air

In which my own appointed place

Field and valley

Stand reflected.

I am earth, earth

Out of my grass heart

Rises the bobwhite.

Out of my nameless weeds

His foolish worship.

 

Sources

Thomas Merton. The collected poems of  Thomas Merton. New Directions, 1977

John Moses (editor). The art of Thomas Merton : a divine passion in word and vision. Franciscan Media, 2017

Thomas Merton Poetry 5. Social Activist. Poem: ‘The Great Men of Former Times’

On the 17^th of March Philip Harvey conducted a Spiritual Reading Group on Thomas Merton. Pursuing a biographical line, poems were read and discussed that identified nine different aspects of Merton’s life, self, and work. Each aspect was illustrated by one of his photographs. Here is the text, with comments from the group about the poetry. 

The monastic town of New Norcia in Western Australia has at least five libraries. I have visited all of the main ones, including the actual abbey library used by the monks every day. My most profound discovery was to find that they read all the latest magazines, newspapers, and social commentary. They are amongst the most well-informed people in Australia. I say this because we can say the same of the Cistercians at Gethsemani: they knew everything that was going on outside the walls, if they needed to. This is good to remember when we read anything Merton wrote on social and political activism, and there is a lot.

His protest poetry, if that’s a way of naming it, stems from realism, a desire to say things as they are, and justice, a desire to call out injustice and right that which is wrong. Look closely enough and again we find Christ as the original inspiration of the words, the maker of change from within, stepping into the dangerous places where violence begins. The 11-page prose poem ‘Original Child Bomb’ (1962) is a strategic takedown of the making and use of the atomic bomb. That poem is too long to read here today on zoom, and likewise the book-length poem ‘The Geography of Lograire’ (1968), a remarkable exploration of the spirit through time that, amongst other things, defuses the concepts of racial and religious divides throughout history.

Instead, I will read one of Merton’s short anti-war poems, a deadpan view of warmongers that exposes their cynicism while reminding us that there is a future while the voice of hope rejects their oppressive power. We may take it as given that Von Clausewitz, Napoleon et al, these representatives of war theorists, war mongers and practitioners, will be found at the Stock Exchange. Where else? A parade ground? Seriously? Their names are interchangeable and we will meet them again in the same location. At first we may regard the poem as cynical or despairing. This cycle will never end. But hope and opposition is present around the corners. In fact the poet Merton grows weary of their conversation. Unlike them he has other places to go. Ominously, some would say, he indicates that that they have the power to kill him too. The future is unwritten and unknown. He will go where he will. The priorities of those with power to wage war are demonstrated by naming boulevards after them, as we in Melbourne know who recognise a couple of the names. The poet stands as a witness to the wrongs being perpetuated by those he talks with. The poem shows its time period with the word “deter”, a relatively new concept in global military strategy at the time, but one that is still with us today. On a literary note, the poem seems to me to be possibly influenced by Merton’s reading of James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’, a book he had been familiar with since university days. Wellington, Napoleon and the rest play parts in that novel, as archetypes of the sort of thing Merton is saying in simplified form in this poem.    

The Great Men of Former Times 

 

Today I met Von Clausewitz

At the Stock Exchange

And said to him: “You’re dead, man,

What are you doing here?”

And he replied

“I have nowhere else to go

Nowhere else to go.”

 

I also saw Lord Nelson

The Duke of Wellington,

Napoleon and his Marshals

And many others with the names of Boulevards.

They all said the same.

 

And I said to Clausewitz

At the Stock Exchange:

“Don’t you know, men,

That all the wars are over?

We fight no more:

It is sufficient to ‘deter’.”

And they replied:

“You are wrong, and we will prove it

By killing you:

We will prove it by killing you.”

 

Lord Nelson,

The Duke of Wellington

Napoleon and his Marshals

And many others with the names of Boulevards,

They all said the same.

 

Then I grew weary

Of my conversation

With these great men of former times,

And quickly leaving them

Went far from the Exchange

But I know that tomorrow

Or the next day

Or indeed next year, if I return,

I will find Von Clausewitz again

I will find him there again.

 

With Lord Nelson

The Duke of Wellington

Napoleon and his Marshals

And many others with the names of Boulevards

I will find them again.

 

 

Sources

Thomas Merton. The collected poems of  Thomas Merton. New Directions, 1977

Thomas Merton Poetry 4. Poet-Theologian. Poem: ‘St. Thomas Aquinas’

 On the 17^th of March Philip Harvey conducted a Spiritual Reading Group on Thomas Merton. Pursuing a biographical line, poems were read and discussed that identified nine different aspects of Merton’s life, self, and work. Each aspect was illustrated by one of his photographs. Here is the text, with comments from the group about the poetry. 

 

In 1951, ten years after entering the monastery, Father Louis became the novice master. Although he produced many books during his life, his writings on the monastic life given to the novices are still only being published now. Much of what he writes in poetic form is a distillation, a playing with and dramatizing of the theology he is spelling out during other parts of his day.

Christian poetry is poetry in Christ. Merton makes this breakthrough realisation early in his time at the abbey. If Christ is for you the centre of creation, then Christ is the centre of the creative act. Everything is ultimately coming from that source. I have to say that this is not always what we think when we encounter so-called Christian poetry, which covers a multitude of forms and subjects. We are used to the panoply of social and historical reference that is connected however directly or tenuously with Christianity. But for Merton, the poetry happens because of attention to Christ, Christ is the centre, even in poetry where Christ is not named by name. 

Reading his essays on poetry is to find someone who questions his own motives all the time, and the purpose of writing. He is fiercely critical of art as production, as a product, as an end for capitalist gain, as the vehicle for cults of the artistic ego and fulfilment of false illusions of the self. He mistrusts words for their own sake; he rejects what he calls “word-magic” as “an impurity of language.”

Merton says “Poetry is the flowering of ordinary possibilities. It is the fruit of ordinary and natural choice. This is its innocence and dignity.” (Hart 373) We find the same tendency towards purification and simplicity of language in many of his great works of contemplation and the spiritual life.

When we think of  Merton teaching the novices, it is easy to imagine the in-depth coverage he gave to Thomas Aquinas. At first we may see the following poem as a complicated set of Thomist terms requiring a lexicon. However, I see the poem as treating these terms, e.g. Person, Presence, Pure Act, and so forth is a playful fashion to illustrate how Thomas explained the world. The poem is a kind of humorous sketch, serving as an introduction to these high-sounding concepts. The line “His intellect His Bethlehem” explains in four words the start of the theologian’s quest for understanding and the abiding peace that he speaks through his writngs. Saint Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican. He died at the Cistercian Abbey of Fossanova south-east of Rome, on his way to the Second Council of Lyon, in March 1274. In verse 4 we find mention of Fossanova, realising that we are present (at least in the poem) at the funeral of the great saint. The poem is, we suddenly become aware, a eulogy.  

St. Thomas Aquinas

 

The stars put out their pale opinions, one by one,

While the black-friar breaks the Truth, his Host,

Among his friends the simple Substances:

For thus he fathered minds to reason’s peace,

And fed the children of the Kingdom

With the Person in the intellectual Bread.

 

His mind had never smarted with the bitter reek

Of the world’s night; the flesh’s smoke:

His eyes were always cradles for the Word of God:

His intellect His Bethlehem.

 

Better than Jacob’s dream,

He saw how all created essences go up and down

Upon their Jacob’s ladder.

Finding their own degree of likeness

To the Pure Act and Perfect Essence.

 

When matter lay as light as snow

On the strong Apennine of form,

And morning rose upon the church of Fossanova,

All creation lay transparent, as serene as water,

Full of the Child Who consecrates the universe,

Informing all with power and meaning, like a Sacrament.

 

But oh, the day that sings upon the ridge

Steals from the stars the brittle fire of their analogies:

They vanish in the single intuition

Of the rising sun:

And the grey monks’ Cistercian “Subvenite”

Follows Aquinas in his ransomed flight,

And loses him amid the cheering cherubim.

 

Sources

Thomas Merton. The collected poems of  Thomas Merton. New Directions, 1977

Thomas Merton. The literary essays of  Thomas Merton. Edited by Patrick Hart. New Directions, 1981