I want to be a monk.

I feel bad about it sometimes.  It’s a selfish desire for a married man.  Stupid, too: Victoria is my soulmate and beautiful, nine years younger than I, and the work we’ve put in over almost seventeen years of married life has been paying off, we both think.

My therapist, Dr. Kennedy, told me ten years ago that couples with exactly opposing temperaments – she’s an ESTJ (a guardian) on Myers Briggs’s indicator, and I’m an INFP (an idealist)  – often have a hard go of it for the first twenty years, but if they work through their differences, they may have a great relationship thereafter.  (Dr. Kennedy’s marriage exemplifies his assertion, by the way.)

But Dr. Kennedy also inadvertently started me on this monk idea.  While helping me through an identity crisis, Dr. Kennedy clued in on my charismatic and rather evangelical form of Christianity.  He suggested that I read some devotional classics – a genre that had never appealed to me before – to reinforce what I had been learning during my crisis.

I read Augustine, St. John of the Cross, and others, and I was hooked right away.  The writers spoke to me about a side of spirituality that was at the edges or entirely outside of my Protestant experience, a spirituality that insisted on a deeper knowledge of self.  No heights without depths, the concept goes.  The road to self-knowledge is a paradox: it’s humbling and hard, but effort alone isn’t enough; it also requires God’s grace.  For the first time in my life, I was learning what Benedictine monk Anslem Gruen calls “spirituality from below”:

By descending into our earth-boundedness (humility is derived from humus, or soil), we come into contact with heaven, with God.  When we find the courage to climb down into our own passions, they lead us up to God. [Gruen, Heaven Begins Within You, p. 21]

I had been living in an Evangelical world that couldn’t even agree on whether it was appropriate to call Christians sinners in any sense.  Those who feel the word “sinner” is exclusively a label for unbelievers argue that we Christians need to identify ourselves as children of God so as not to void his work on the cross.  I’ll leave my rebuttal for another occasion; my point is that I now believe we can’t know God’s love to the extent we were created to experience it unless we go with God to the bottom of our false nature and discover more than we’d care to about our depravity.  When I read in these classics and in related books about spiritual leaders and explorers who openly acknowledge their status as sinners and who are frank about their sins and faults, I got courage to do the same, and I found a new place of fellowship and consolation with God.

I was almost forty years old when Dr. Kennedy made these reading recommendations, and I had just extended my first real invitation to God to peel away my false self.  I was motivated to do so by a deep-rooted, existential fear that I had avoided for years by constructing my own identity.  A career change and Victoria’s own personal growth conspired to finally expose it as a fraud.  I was about to discover that my approach to God and the Bible had been limited by the contradictory and patchwork manner in which I had built my identity (“I’m a fearful person.”  “I’m better than most people.”  “I’ll never measure up to my father.”)

Most of the devotional writers I read at Dr. Kennedy’s instance are monks, hermits, or spiritual fathers of nuns or monks.  You probably know the names: Thomas a Kempis, Ignatius, John of the Cross, Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Thomas Merton, others.  Something in their writing speaks of the fire that they permitted to burn away a good deal of their false selves.

During my crisis, I shared some of the rudimentary experiences some of them speak of.  I found the grace to admit more of my depravity to myself.  I know that, over twenty years into my Christian vocation, I would have consented to Jesus’ death had he been living then.  I discovered God in the people around me – Christian and non-Christian alike – and I found a new place inside me that seemed to respond to God in a more lissome way.  God was beginning to answer my prayer for intimacy with him.

My stagnation

In the years after my identity crisis waned, my spiritual progress waned, too.  In a way, I have been living out the Song of Moses: my rescue and my ride on God’s wings, followed by my complacency and distraction.  (A lot of great stuff having to do with my spiritual life has occurred in the past ten years, but I am speaking here about an elemental area of my prayer life.)

About seven years ago, I flushed when I read this passage from Merton’s The Ascent to Truth, part of a larger passage parsing John of the Cross’s stages of spiritual development:

. . . the Night of Sense and the period of consoling quietude are only a preparation for the mysticism of the Spiritual Night, Betrothal, and Transforming Union.  In the Night of Sense and the Prayer of Quiet, the contemplative is still in his infancy, and the tragedy is that in most cases mystical prayer does not get beyond this cradle stage.  The cause of this arrested development is to be found in subtle forms of attachment to which the spirit clings perhaps without ever realizing its own imperfections. [pp. 288-89]

It is probably presumptuous for me to claim to be even at the “cradle stage” – stages of spiritual development lose their allure and are no end in and of themselves, anyway – but somehow I recognized myself as suffering from something like this “arrested development” Merton describes.

Part of this stagnation was natural.  Over the last ten years, I’ve had a new career and a growing family.  I couldn’t focus on my spiritual life to the extent I did when my self-identity seemed at stake.

But before my identity crisis, struggles, blessings, jobs, relationships, and coincidences – everything usually seemed to feed into spiritual challenge and growth.  I haven’t felt that way over the past ten years, generally.  The job, the relationships, and the responsibilities – as important as they are – usually feel like more of a distraction than a teacher.  I’ve often been bitter about the great amount of time my job takes.  I often wince or curse when the phone rings.  I pray and meditate, but it seems to take me an hour – and an hour of prayer and meditation is a very rare event, given my schedule and spiritual torpor – just to clear my mind.

I pray and do Christian stuff.  But at some fundamental level, I miss God.

And I keep reading works by or about these monks and hermits, past and present – at least twenty-five books by now.  I’ve read enough to know that monasticism isn’t glamorous (or even necessarily spiritual or healthy, depending on the monk).  That doesn’t seem to lessen my ardor for the vocation, however.

Listening to fantasy

My ardor reached a fever pitch over the past month as I read two books my friend Bill gave me about the Orthodox monks and hermits on Mount Athos and some of their spiritual descendents: Kyriacos C. Markides’s The Mountain of Silence and Gifts of the Desert.  These books demonstrate to me that the tradition and spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers is alive.  Men and women are living out Anthony’s pattern of withdrawing from the world in order to rid themselves of every vestige of their false selves and in order to love the Lord without distraction.  Many of them have become spiritual parents and counselors, and many of them have been sent outside of their monasteries to help others.  Like Anthony, many men and women are leaving the world in order to return to it as better conduits of God’s love.

These two books confronted me with my lukewarm spiritual condition, and they encouraged me with what is possible in God.  They also fed my monastic fantasy, of course.

There are several reasons why I fixate on the monastic life, I think.  First of all, writings by and about monks have helped me.  Second, I am an introvert with a job that quickly drains my limited extroverted energy.  My favorite monastic daydreams therefore involve orders that severely limit talking.  Third, I feel more and more trapped by the ascendant values of Western civilization – time management, consumerism, and logic, for instance – and so my favorite daydreams drift also to more Eastern monastic traditions.

My monastic fantasy is somewhat like sexual fantasy, I think.  I have learned to neither repress sexual urges nor give in to them.  Instead, I listen to them as friends (old friends!).  What should I pay attention to about them?  Probably not the precise fantasy that they may couch themselves in, but a particular need that I may have overlooked.  Similarly, I should neither ignore my monastic fantasy nor leave my wife and family to establish a hermitage.  (I assume no sound monastery would accept me.)

I laid out my monastic fantasy to Michael last week as plainly as I have to anyone.  (Michael is my best friend and spiritual father.)  He thought a long time before he said anything.

We ended up comparing our fantasies of the future, analyzing and laughing at their specifics and considering what they might mean.  Michael pointed out that many people either ignore their higher callings expressed in such fantasies or set out to fulfill them in the half-baked form they usually arrive in.  Our talk was a huge help.

I think I’m itching for the next season in my life, whatever it is.  My fantasy may provide some hints about it, and I think it’s asking me to take some steps in preparation.  For one thing, I need to allow the inward part of me to be developed.  It may not be smart for me to take my ball and go home because God won’t play by my fantasy’s rules.

Two elements of Orthodox mysticism

I hope also to continue examining Orthodox mysticism.  I’m already about through with Timothy Ware’s excellent book,The Orthodox Church and Vladimir Lossky’s classic book, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church.  I also hope to blog about some of the stuff I discover.

And I mustn’t forget the twofold purpose of much of Orthodox monasticism expressed well by Theodorus the Ascetic, a seventh century monk who lived near Bethlehem:

When you are in love, surely your constant concern is to be near the beloved at any and every opportunity, and you avoid anything that would hinder you from being in the company and the society of your loved one.  So it is when someone loves God. One constantly desires to be with him and to speak with him.  This can only be achieved though pure prayer.  So let us apply ourselves to prayer with all our strength, for it makes us become like the Lord.  This is the meaning of the Scripture that says, "Oh God, my God, I cry to you at dawn, my soul has thirsted after you."  This person who, in the psalms, cries to God at dawn signifies the spiritual intellect that has withdrawn from every evil, and that has been wounded to the heart by the love of God.

As John McGuckin, a professor at Union Theological Seminary, points out in a podcast I listened to today, Theodorus’s coupling of active purification and an inward turning in prayer to God as to a lover is common in Orthodox theology.

McGuckin’s podcast and Theodorus’s words reminded me of how these two elements were coupled for me just a few years before my identity crisis.  Here’s how I wrote about it to myself in my journal during my identity crisis:

The morning of your wedding, you sensed the Holy Spirit’s grief.  You knew your fellowship with God would suffer from the marriage.  That does not mean it was a mistake to marry.  It means you were fixed on substituting Victoria for God.  God is using this struggle to restore Jesus’ place as your beloved and to put your marriage in its proper place.

Three years ago, God showed you a powerful image of Jesus looking at you with the eyes of a lover.  His expression was engaging and jealous, like a lover’s.  You felt both broken and happy because you thought your marriage had ended a close relationship with Jesus.

A moment later, God allowed you to see yourself as a furnace.  As the fire burned, light from the furnace flashed different colors.  These colors represented impurities God wanted to burn out of your life.

Both of these images are beginning to be fulfilled.  The purpose of this struggle is to remove impurities, but the greater purpose is to prepare you for your beloved, Jesus.  Victoria has beautiful eyes, but you have never seen eyes like Jesus’ eyes, and you never will in this life.  Let the longing come.

I know my religious ideation, now as well as then, involves these two elements: purification from the false self (a process involving self-knowledge) and relationship with God.  Orthodox monasticism is not the only way God can fulfill these to my heart’s satisfaction.  (God, I know from my limited experience, is more willing than I am when push comes to shove.)

Two things you should know, since you’ve read this far.  Victoria is quite good-natured about this.  She is too experienced with my idealistic tendencies to be alarmed by them.  Second: I do know myself well enough now at least to know that, even if every impediment to a monastic or hermitic life dissolved today, I’d chicken out.

I tried to keep July relatively free of obligations so I could get in touch with myself a little bit again.  Schoolwork resumes the second week of August.  I’m glad I got to bring my fantasy to the surface of my mind, even if that is all I accomplish this month, and I’m grateful, more than ever, for good friends like Victoria and Michael.

“Why didn’t Warren empty the dishwasher this morning?” I asked.

“Franklin had to cancel,” Victoria explained.

“So?”

“I told Warren that he had to empty the dishwasher before Franklin could come over.  Warren took that to mean that he had to empty the dishwasher because Franklin was coming over.  The condition precedent failed, so he didn’t have to do the job.”

Warren is still at it.  He squeezes conjunctions out of prepositions whenever possible.  Three and a half years ago, it was unless and until.  Today it’s because and before.

I’m a Nouns, Whatever type, really I am.  But Warren, an inveterate Conjunctivite, seems to bring out the Prepositionists in Victoria and me.

Stage curtains kind of kick as they close,
kind of sweep the act up before them, then
bow, broom to dustpan.

Can we still pretend once the curtains
have put on such a show?

After the sex scene, two housecleaners
snap and levitate the sheets while
speaking in an unknown tongue.

Curtains shush their own pulleys and
the stage whispers of pulling hands.

Ever watch a sail unfurl, the hands
watching as it fills?  They’ll watch
until the wind pulls.

A flower unfolds like dark intermission
between birth and death.  It has its own beauty.

Paratroopers ache mid-fall
between draft and deployment.

They giggle and bend over the ropes,
those girls in black shirts, but the audience
stays in its seats.

In the morning, I can read only in her basement.  Every other room has someone sleeping in it, usually on a couch or floor.  Betty’s house is small, but it’s big enough.  One toilet and bath got seven of us through with a little charity.  I fixed the toilet yesterday and was treated like a hero.

I read on the floor of Betty’s office, the only room in the house with wall-to-wall carpeting.  She keeps a lot of her books down here.  Like her home, her shelves are simple and Spartan, clean of unexplored interests.  She cooks, and she collects cookbooks.  There are also books about God and lots of Victoria’s old storybooks, textbooks, and yearbooks.  Each summer, two or three of Victoria’s old friends come over, and we inevitably open the yearbooks.  Pictures of Victoria at every stage of life grace about every room, even in the basement.

And Betty grows roses.  This morning I discovered Betty’s vases, the delivery systems for her simple charity, hidden in a basement recess.  I found some roses in her icebox last night, ready to go.  Yesterday I spent time in her garden, photographing her flowers.

I have a photograph of five generations: B (my daughter), Victoria, Betty (my mother-in-law), Granny (Betty’s mother), and Grandma H (Granny’s mother-in-law, who at the time was 109 years old).  Betty’s in the middle, the hinge in this lineage.  She takes care of Granny and showers gifts on us, too.

B inherited Betty’s quiet and her gentle fingers.  Betty holds and arranges and mends with entire attention, and her artisan ways made room for B’s art.  Her concentration and fingers, which seem dexterous enough to have four joints each, remind me of a spider at work.

We just got back from ten enjoyable days in Nashville this morning.

We don’t need an “office” anymore, so we threw away our desks and turned the basement office into the spare bedroom last month.  We made the old spare bedroom into B’s art studio, so now she holds two of the four upstairs rooms.

B came home from school at year's end with a trove of artwork, and she opened an exhibit in her studio last night.  “Art Through the Ages,” the banner over the studio door reads, and the “Ages” are her ages.  The exhibit is a B retrospective covering her artistic development from first grade through the present (rising high school junior).  Some stages are better represented than others, but there’s enough from my favorite years (seventh and tenth grades) for me to make the case for my preferences to patrons.

This may be the most comprehensive exhibition of my daughter’s art ever.

The pictured figurine from the current epoch began as a self-portrait but grew into a bust of the artist’s brother.  Those who know W recognize this stare as his signal that he wants something. (The foreground figure is actually a Happy Meal toy, I think, though its face shape uncannily resembles my own.)

School ended two days ago.  Last summer was pretty much planned out: a week with friends on a mountain, a five-week graduate course, a week at the beach, a week for chores, and back to school.  Not this summer.

This summer I have little planned.  I’ve got some school stuff to do – an article to write, a couple of meetings, an in-service to plan for – and I hope to implement a writer’s workshop model more extensively into my planning for this fall – but I’ve turned down some bigger projects.  We’ll go to visit our families in Nashville and Tidewater.  But, in between, I want to take time.

For what?  For my family and for me. On the me side, and on a lark, I decided on the first day of vacation to learn a little Welsh.  This is odd.  I haven’t taken on a new hobby on a lark in years.  Also, learning any language is crazy.  I demonstrated little aptitude for languages when I was taking French in high school and college, the last time I tried learning a language.  But if I just take it slow and let it all be discovery, I think it could be fun.

I don’t have any goals.  I don’t plan to become fluent in Welsh.  I just want to see if learning a language can be fun.

I’m not sure why I picked Welsh.  Welsh isn’t a dead language, but almost no one speaks only Welsh.  (Most Welsh don’t speak Welsh, but almost all Welsh speak English.)  That makes me feel more comfortable – less responsible, somehow – than if I were learning a language that one or more nations rely on, like Spanish or Japanese.  I’ve never been to Wales and have no plans to visit.

I know I want to get some objectivity on English in order to read, write, and teach English better.  Welsh is not closely related to English – it’s the most prevalent extant Celtic language – but it uses the same alphabet.  I want to get away from Romantic languages, but I don’t want to mess with a new alphabet.  In Welsh, the letters more consistently represent the sounds that you learn to associate with them than do the letters in English.  So that’s handy.  But I’ve read that it’s a hard language to learn.

I got the idea the night before last reading Hopkins.  I discovered that he learned Welsh.  I thought of Dylan Thomas, though I discovered yesterday that he never learned Welsh.  I just thought: maybe I can learn a little Welsh!

I’ve started with the BBC's The Big Welsh Challenge, which seems wonderful.  It is slow going for me, though.  I worked at it for an hour and a half Thursday night, and, on Friday morning, I could remember only the phrase for “good morning”: “bore da.”  But I walked all over the house wishing everyone bore daseveral times, just like they do on the BBC Flash videos.  And just like a two-year-old might.  It is sort of like rediscovering the world and my place in it.

I wish I had a two-year-old’s aptitude for language.  Think where I would be when I would turn six!  But I’m on it for the ride.  Right now, no goals allowed.

the heat came too early
overhead, early june

raced off like two balloons
attached, screaming

let go
when her mother was
helping her into the back seat

her parents shut
their bedroom door

she saw her
life through tears

she saw herself
too early
the white between
two clouds

the lines between
two stanzas

she got rich
writing verse

but she never
let go

Where the sun lies abed, he glows with tomorrow.
His bridal tent distends with the air of tomorrow.

Every creature that swells to attract its lover
    makes out to have swallowed him.

The morning’s the heat of his night’s satisfaction.
He discounts the ropes of the afternoon clouds.

Each evening the moon pulls off a part of him
    and mounts him with bright nails on
    the walls of her rib cage.

the end.
ing credits rise at
not appear when the roll
could cleanse, and you may or may
a silent film that no amount of washer fluid
our read?  her head meets your shadow-head against
in feet-first were she naked on a late-afternoon bed.
shadow might lead you to the pedestrian and take her
finally, in the time remaining, contemplate how your
you would've said it at recess: the ing-xay & the ed-pay.
answers in the form of questions, & remember how
punch lines (backstroke, waiter, fly, soup), put your
the end in mind.  write your own storyline.  anticipate
bottom’s up, we say, but think a brew thru – begin with
inattention accounts for more fatalities than alcohol.
top-down works only in spring – only when
to change your reading habits.  ponder:
have less than a millisecond
studies show you
our traffic

I love East Coker. I do. Last night I patched up my thirty-year-old copy of Eliot’s Four Quartets with clear packaging tape. When I was in college, one of my friends paid twenty dollars to rebind my twenty-five-dollar, leather-bound King James Bible for my birthday. But by last night no one had offered to rebind my $1.65 Harvest Book paperback edition ofFour Quartets. Maybe I’m supposed to have internalized all the words I need by now.

The paper is thick, and the pages haven’t yellowed at all. The top edges of the pages have inexplicable, rusty freckles like the ones on my arms. I’m also “in the middle way.” In fact, I’m as old as Eliot was when he wrote East Coker.

Since when is fifty “the middle way,” by the way? Was Eliot flattering himself? My life divides neatly into smaller, decade-long lives, as if I were leading six different lives, and my fifties life makes me feel old, a lot like my thirties life did. My thirties were a little hard. I was out of shape and had lots of aches and pains. Some clock went off in my head at age thirty: I’m not married! What divides our lives?

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?

When I was forty, I discovered the fountain of youth. An identity crisis and a slow recovery made the world seem new. I started an exercise-and-diet regime and a new career. I rediscovered poetry. My forties fulfilled the promise of my twenties – all of that Bible study and those fifty-four hours of English courses. But old age seemed to return with vigor last year about the time I turned fifty. For the first time, I know in my bones that most of my life has passed.

But, as I say, my youth and old age seem to come and go.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

A lifetime burning in every moment. “That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past,” says the Preacher.

I was twenty when I wrote the first marginalia in my Four Quartets. What gets across the naiveté: my balloon-like script or my borrowed thoughts? Today my handwriting looks more wrinkled – more nuanced, I think. In college I wrote “the neg. theology” beside these lines:

In order to arrive at what you do not know

     You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess

     You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not

     You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

I remember the professor mentioning negative theology, which was the first time I had ever heard of the idea. I remember thinking that it sounded rather holy and cool, kind of like the essence of what my Jesus buddies and I were after in pursuing our very positive theology.

Why did I like Four Quartets back then? I remember liking the somewhat stiff diction that circled around on itself. The “dust in the air suspended” and the roses and bowls reminded me of quiet rooms of now-dead relatives and their loud, slow-ticking clocks. There was something quieting and alarming about rooms like that, and you can’t experience them after middle age. You’re too busy remembering them, outfitting them.

Earlier in his career, Eliot used the inherent contradiction of his language (his diction and syntax are at once kind of stately and creaky) to saturate his voice with irony. But Eliot uses his contradictory language in East Coker to achieve something quieter than irony; he achieves a kind of wisdom-poem, and his language seems perfect for an examination of negative theology. All that dust in the rose bowl and all that shadow fruit, all those footfalls in the garden. It’s an elegant and “a worn-out poetical fashion” all at once. In his end is his beginning.

But little in East Coker would have made sense to me in the beginning except for some of the more aphoristic and outwardly Christian portions of it. My overall attraction was inexplicable. Perhaps my spirit had found a kind of blueprint.

              My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

East Coker is built on an Ecclesiastes chassis, and, like Ecclesiastes’s body, you can’t tell if it’s coming or going. Old age, darkness, wisdom, despair, writing, and life cycles of people and families and civilizations circle around one another.East Coker has Ecclesiastes’s “a time for”’s, and it has a loosened pane and a tattered arras for Ecclesiastes’s loosened silver cord and broken golden bowl. The sun also rises:

        Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence.

A lot of people think Ecclesiastes is depressing, and a lot of people think East Coker is depressing, too. But those people don’t understand apophatic theology, I say. The only thing that seems to depress Eliot in East Coker is his writing.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate . . .

The subject of preaching and writing is the toughest part of Ecclesiastes for me, too, because the moment preaching and writing point to negative theology (the “goads” and “nails” below, perhaps), they also create a chasm between positive and negative theology:

Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity. And moreover, because the preacher was wise, he still taught the people knowledge; yea, he gave good heed, and sought out, and set in order many proverbs. The preacher sought to find out acceptable words: and that which was written was upright, even words of truth. The words of the wise are as goads, and as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd. And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

Do you feel the chasm? After all he went through, the Preacher was stuck looking for acceptable words.

According to the negative theology, God is ineffable, so suddenly you have a problem if you want to explain him or the dance he set in motion around him. Here’s the other point in East Coker where Eliot seems to throw down his pen:

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.

These appearances make the poet a subject of his own poem. As Eliot moves from the irony of his early poetry to negative theology, he replaces the anti-heroes of his early poetry with his narrator – himself. Ecclesiastes is a personal book, a working through, a seeker’s journal, and East Coker is, too. Eliot’s ancestors emigrated to America from East Coker.  He chose the poem’s opening and closing lines for his epitaph on the commemorative plaque in the church where his ashes are buried -- St. Michael's Church in East Coker.

In East Coker, the only anti-hero – the only fool – is the narrator, since anyone who preaches (or writes about) the negative theology is a fool. Ask the apostle Paul, who in his second letter to the Corinthians only risked preaching it in a clown suit.

East Coker shares Ecclesiastes’s ambivalence toward old age and wisdom just as it does toward writing. In East Coker, old men have nothing positive to offer the young.

Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.

The only wisdom resides in the darkness of God, and the only thing old men have to offer is something negative: the loss of themselves, a kind of death before death.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

But works like Ecclesiastes and East Coker are meant for the young as well as the old. In fact, East Coker reconciles the young and old, the ends and beginnings, in darkness. Perhaps Ecclesiastes and East Coker lend a little mystery to life, or at least to old age. I remember thinking as I read Proverbs and Ecclesiastes as a teenager, “Maybe the hoary head is a crown of glory, after all.” Young people feel a connection with a long, authentic life, or at least I felt one back then. Even if I couldn’t decipher the old stone in my youth, I could at least carry it around with me.

Ecclesiastes ends rather perfunctorily: “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.” I can hear Thoreau rage against this ending, much as he raged in Walden against the Westminster Catechism’s summary of man’s purpose: to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Suppose Shakespeare had taken Polonius’s famous aphorisms early in Hamlet and had put them in the prince’s mouth at the end. That’s the feeling I get from Ecclesiastes.

To be fair, Ecclesiastes’s end seems to focus on its younger readers – all of us, I guess, with beginner’s mind – since the fear of God and the keeping of his commandments may lead us, by God’s mercy, into the dark night the Preacher and John of the Cross and Eliot’s other mystic heroes believe in.

But East Coker ends with a challenge to the old:

Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

Eliot has given me a vision for my fifties, and maybe for my seventies if I go that long. (My sixties will take care of themselves, I reckon, like my twenties and forties.)

I carry my Harvest Book edition around now like I carried my pocket New Testament around as a teenager. In my beginning is my end.

[This article appeared first in The Journal of the Virginia Writing Project's spring 2008 issue.  I have made a few minor changes to it for publication here.  My thanks to the Project for permission to republish.]

Good courses teach me stuff I don’t know, but great courses are more like revelations of things I didn’t know that I didn’t know.  Last year’s summer institute was a great course!  I discovered that I am permitted to use my writing instincts in teaching writing.  That may seem obvious, but it was a revelation to me. I love to write and to self-publish, but I never honestly thought these loves would also interest my students or affect my teaching.  Instead, before this past summer, my main means of motivating students to write well had been to instill the fear of my red pen.  But this year I’ve been selling my ninth graders on what has always sold me: writing for an audience.

So far, my classes are using three ways to discover audiences outside of the classroom: web logs (otherwise known as blogs), a class literary anthology, and submissions to print publications.  This article presents what my students and I did this year with the first of these efforts.  Through a lot of trial and error, I figured out one way of including blogging in a writers’ workshop classroom model.

Authentic Audiences

Before this year, I was already discovering that students usually put more effort into their writing when they know other students will read their work than when they know that only I will read it.  Also, when I tell students that their peers will be reading their papers in the next class, I find that all but one or two of them get their papers in on time.  Real-world deadlines involving real audiences seem to work better than my artificial deadlines, even though I enforce my artificial deadlines with real penalties.

This past summer’s institute opened my eyes to my hypocrisy concerning audiences – a hypocrisy that should have turned my writing focus around years before.  Before this past summer, I had made my students pretend that they were writing for real audiences, even though they were writing for only me.  Indeed, the audience in a typical student paper is not a teacher but a construct, a kind of dramatic convention the student and the teacher pull off to make the paper assignment work.  Since the teacher usually knows more about the paper’s subject than the student, the student is conscious of telling her one-man audience something he often already knows.  Despite this, students and teachers pretend that someone besides the teacher will eventually read the paper to be informed or entertained.  It’s a fake audience, and the cost is often a paper with a strained, pretentious, and fake voice.  The long-term cost may be a student with a learned loathing of writing.  So why just pretend?

Why Blogs?

Blogs, the popular, shorthand name for web logs, give students an authentic audience in a twenty-first-century medium with which they are comfortable. Blogging also helps students associate good writing with their increasingly technological future.  Blogging may not be the latest online phenomenon, but its current growth is still phenomenal.   As of this past September, a recognized tracking service counted over a hundred six million blogs worldwide, up fromseventy-five million this past April. Over fifty-seven million Americans read blogs. The number of readers worldwide, of course, is far higher.  Blogs are a recognized medium with an authentic audience.

Blogs are the most writing-oriented of Web 2.0 type web sites. (Web 2.0 is shorthand for web sites with visitor-generated content, such as blogs, social networks, and photo- and video-sharing sites.)  Blogs, after all, evolved from online diaries. Despite their technical evolution and subject-matter expansion over the past ten years, good blogs still require good writing.

Blogging demonstrates that a popular online medium can honor good writing. My survey results indicate that most of my students either blog or participate on social networks. By incorporating good writing in a popular teen genre, teens are more likely to write and are more likely to discover more sophisticated possibilities for their existing online spaces and, more importantly, for their future online endeavors in whatever form they may take years from now.

Ensuring a Positive Online Experience

Around the beginning of November, I launched our multi-user blogging network.  Each student had her own blog site and was free to choose from a number of skins for her readers’ interface.  When she posted on her blog site, she came up with her own topic, title, and genre listings for the post. 

I was blogging on our site along with them.  Like many of my students, I took on a blogging alias, and we kept a running list of who was who to make it fair.  Ostensibly, I was modeling blogging for my students, but the main reason for my participation was that I just didn’t want to be left out.  They were having too much fun. (I must not have been getting enough attention on my adult-world blog site because, after our site got going, I started checking my site on it for comments after I published something halfway decent more often than I checked my adult-world blog for comments.)

I required that students leave eight comments per blogging check (usually, every two or three weeks) on other students’ posts.  I didn’t comment on my students’ blogs because my students may not have been ready for their teacher as a subjective reader.  It also sounds potentially creepy: “I heard this teacher was leaving comments on his students’ blog posts!”

My students and I deliberately kept our comments positive.  In the classroom, we have writer support groups where the students and I can receive all the constructive criticism we want.  Online, though, I wanted my guys to experience what I struggled to accept during the first three years of my own blogging: specific, unmitigated praise.  This past summer, I was fuming in a post that my blog readers weren’t leaving any constructive criticism of my writing in their comments.  One comment a reader (another writing teacher) left me in response to my post helped me see things differently:

As a teacher and reader of your blog, I'd much rather enjoy what you write and respond to what inspires and excites me--as this piece has--than edit and critique your work. I trust that as you write more, you'll find your way to more and more clarity about how to polish your writing to a shine. I think celebrating what's working in a piece has far greater value in keeping us inspired to write and improve than anything else.

Her comment led me to understand that purely positive comments on blog posts were more important in the long run to me as a writer than critical comments.  I also began to see how my own writing had improved over the three years I had been blogging despite the lack of criticism.

I emphasized to my students that praising doesn’t mean faking it.  Blog commenters maintain their integrity (and credibility) by selecting an aspect of a post on which to lavish praise.  Of course, a comment can be effective even if it involves no praise, so long as the commenter expresses some connection with even just part of the post.  This specificity is what gives a comment its worth.  When someone picks something in one of my posts to either compliment or to expand on, I feel read.  After blogging for three years, I know that some stuff just isn’t getting read much.  Some of the other un-commented-upon material was probably read or appreciated, but readers just don’t have much to say about it.  (I’ve learned also that longer pieces don’t usually get read very often unless they’re personal or funny or both.) 

Student commenters were also free to politely disagree with the substance of any post.  The disagreement could be strong, I told them, but they were not to criticize or even to point out perceived mistakes in other students’ writing (grammar, syntax, etc.).  I found that it was important to drill students on the art of good commenting.  I warmed to my task; I think students need to learn how to be both honest and positive with each other and with each other’s writing.  Despite my drills and my entreaties, I still had to ask a student to modify a comment every now and then.  Sometimes I redacted a comment as soon as I read it, fearing that the comment might hurt relationships or tear down the encouraging atmosphere the students and I had worked to inculcate on the site.

Feeling Read All Over the World

Comments make students feel read, and feeling read is one of the best things about writing.  If you ask a writer how she came to see herself as a writer, she will probably tell you a story or two about some of the first times her words got to other people.  Maybe she published a poem in an elementary school anthology.  Maybe a class put on a play she wrote.  One way or another, she felt read.

Site stats also confirm to my students that their blogs command a higher readership than they could probably expect from taping their work onto our classroom walls.  I reminded students that anyone on the planet with Internet access could read our posts – a potential audience of millions.  I did get practical when I explained the site statistics, which amounted to hundreds of visitors instead of millions, but they were pretty impressed with the few hundred unique visitors over the life of their blogs.  I also explained search engine dynamics.  I told them how more words and the passage of time means more hits and more links and maybe more readers.  Many of them quickly grasped another rule I never taught them: the more regular the posts, the more regular the readership.

I hope that other readers outside of our class members have been (and will be) drawn to something fairly unique: a self-contained community of online writers.  I hope also that readers will be drawn to the writing itself.  Of course, there’s no hiding that it’s ninth grade writing.  I didn’t advertise the writers’ age or make the site look like a school site, though.

A Gated Community

More words on our site may have meant more readers, but not more commenters.  We blog in a kind of gated community.  Everyone can see us, but only my seventy honors students can comment on posts there.  The site’s gate keeps out possible predators as well as commenters who may not wish to play by our rules.  But the site's exclusivity also gives the students another way to experience the writing community that they’ve begun face to face in class in writers’ support groups and other activities.  Internet safety, then, dovetails with my vision of augmenting our experience as a writers’ community by bringing it online.

I also described this fishbowl feature in an email introducing our site to my students’ parents.  I invited the parents to enjoy their students’ posts and comments.  I employed my reverse-psychology, parental-relations strategy here: I find that the more I tell my parents, the less they think there’s anything to be concerned about.  Each month of the school year, I send them long, colorful ezines of what we’re doing in class.  Most parents delete them without reading them, saying to themselves, “This guy must have it together.”  So, predictably, I didn’t get any emails, positive or negative, about any online content during the four and a half months our site was up and running.

I instituted some other policies to maintain online safety.  I told the students that I would read every post and comment, and I followed through with that.  I did not allow any music, pictures, or videos: I had enough to keep track of just with the writing!  I disabled trackbacks and pingbacks to insure that no spam reached our sites.  I made students sign a code of conduct that referenced the school’s online acceptable use policy the students signed at the beginning of the year.  The code of conduct also contained specific and dire consequences for code infractions.  I assured parents that the sites were in compliance with our school system’s policies and regulations manual.

Not a “School Site”

I have discovered that high school students don’t go out of their way to write on “school” sites.  According to the results of my written survey, a majority of my current students have a social network page (e.g., My Space or Facebook), a YouTube account, or a blog.  Moving from such user-centered environments to an institution-centered one is comparable to returning to dial-up after a few months of high-speed Internet.  I’m not trying to compete with Facebook, of course, but I’m not going to needlessly repel students, either.

Besides, how could my students feel like real writers if they were writing on a school site?  They’d probably feel like they were on training wheels as the "real" Internet writers streaked by them on motorcycles.

I did a great deal of research to find out what multi-user blogs and private social network sites are available.  All of them that I found last year were either too “educational,” too inflexible, or too easy for students to bring objectionable material into.  Others did not have the right combination of universal viewing with membership-only interaction.  Some services may be right for you, such as Blackboard (if your school system subscribes to their blogging services), Edublogs.org, and Ning.com.  This last is a social networking site that is working hard at meeting teachers’ needs, but it didn’t offer enough teacher control when I was researching sites.  Besides, my school system’s Internet filter began blocking Ning around the beginning of this school year.

I gained a lot of flexibility by building the site on WordPress MU. I had my Internet server download the MU (“multi-user” blog) software from MU.WordPress.org, and then my server followed that site’s instructions to install and configure it.  MU has a sensible interface that all of my students understood almost at once.  It comes with several “skins,” or blog-page looks, for students to choose from.  I also installed simple plug-ins that enhanced the sites’ capabilities.

I have no training in computer technology (though I admit that I enjoy technology), so I needed lots of help customizing the site to fit my purpose.  I found MU’s online forums to be helpful, though many of the old pros helping out the rest of us were often cranky.  (Well, how pleasant would I be if I were giving away my time and being asked the same question three times a day – questions that could be answered by digging a little in the forum’s back pages?)

How Blogging Fit into My New Writers’ Workshop Model

Around the same time we started blogging, I started to use the writers’ workshop model I had discovered at the Summer Institute through the writings of Nancie Atwell and Lucy McCormick Calkins.  About a month into the blogging, I began to see how the blogging and the writers’ workshop could complement each other.

I showed students how their writing might progress from their English class sketchbooks through very polished pieces for print publications, and I described blogging as falling in the middle of this continuum. I taught students to take material out of their writer’s sketchbook (free-writes, reader responses, and poetry “messes,” for instance) and to develop them into blog posts.  I also asked the students to choose some of their blog post writing, in turn, to revise for more polished writing.  By making the blog posts a kind of middle step between sketchbook writing and more formal pieces, I was able to claim that blogging wasn’t really all that much extra writing.  These writing “steps” also got students practicing revision without my having to force them.

I also let students post any writing they wished to (school appropriate, of course).  Most students published a mix of sketchbook work that they developed for their blogs, work they wrote for other assignments and classes, and work they wrote specifically for their blog sites.  I introduced a few genres in writers’ workshop mini-lessons, and students often experimented with these genres on their blogs.

I required my students to publish at least 300 words in blog posts per blog-check period, which became about every two weeks.  Four of the eight comments each student had to leave on others’ posts had to be either the first or second comment to a post.  This latter requirement assured that everyone got some of these valuable comments and that early postings did not attract all the comments just because they were at the top of the list.  I was afraid also that kids would get cliquish and that less popular kids wouldn’t get as many comments as the others.

At first, I made the posts and comments due every two weeks, but when we had to focus on other parts of the curriculum, I stretched it to every three weeks.  I was glad to stretch it out because it took me about eight hours to read and tabulate all of the posts and comments for a given blog-check period.  I have seventy-five honors students, so every third weekend was pretty much shot.

In keeping with the positive spirit with which I wanted my students to approach their blogging, I never formally assessed the quality of their online work.  I had enough assessments of their writing from the more formal pieces that the county curriculum guide requires and from the few blog posts the students developed into more polished pieces.  Besides, any kind of assessment of this material on top of the time I was already spending reading all of it would have done me in.

Despite the lack of formal assessment, I found that the writing quality overall on our site was pretty good.  Five or six of my writers occasionally amazed me, writing poetry or stories at a level most college students probably haven’t reached.

With all of the reading I had to do to adequately oversee the material, I was delighted to find that, for the first time in my career, I was beginning to know my students as writers.   As a result, I have been able to encourage my students to write in certain directions based on how effectively they’ve used their blog space.  I now have a few budding poets, fiction writers, and personal essayists!

Student Feedback

My students gave our blogging positive marks in a survey I gave them about a month after we began blogging.  Over ninety percent of them rated it either “It’s okay” (Hey, that’s effusive for ninth graders!), “I like it,” or “I love it.”   When I modified the question somewhat to ask if they would prefer to write the same amount but in more traditional assignments handed in to the teacher, only two students in the fifty-nine who responded to the survey indicated their preference for traditional assignments. 

The survey also brought me some good news related to whether students were “feeling read.”   In response to a question about how much they liked reading their fellow students’ blog posts, only six percent of my students expressed any distaste for it.  Also, all but three of the fifty-nine responding students enjoyed reading the better comments to their own posts. 

Here are a couple of the more positive student comments:

I love how I can see what other people like about my writing without being in class. It is a way to encourage other's writing and to grow in my own writing. I have found that I have a nice poetry voice through the blogging. I HATED writing before this year, but now that I get positive feedback, I am liking it more and more. THANK YOU [our site]!

I really like using [blogging]. I really enjoy reading some of my class mates work that I wouldn't have gotten to read without our blogs. I also really like that we can post whatever we want (we don't have specific papers we have to post or pieces on certain topics). I like that we have so much freedom with our blogs.

One of my biggest success stories involves a young man whose parents introduced me to him just before the school year began.  He and his parents told me that he loves reading (he had read most of Shakespeare’s plays, for instance), but that he has always hated writing.  They were concerned about his being in honors English because English class had not been his strong suit.  Some of his other, current teachers have since told me that he has been writing for our site just about every chance he has gotten.  He has written a wonderful science fiction serial that developed quite an online readership.  He’ll be submitting the serial for print publication in the next couple of weeks.  His expression and punctuation have improved in the process, too.

More critical comments from my survey responses involved the site’s navigation, my refusal to allow pictures and music, and the amount of writing I required.  Many students didn’t like my rule that four of the eight comments had to be one of the first two comments to posts.  In response to their concerns, I added a Google reader in order for students to find new posts quickly to meet their “four comments must be one of the first two comments to a post” requirement. 

For an experiment, I also threw out the “first two comments” requirement for the last blog-check period.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that the comments were as evenly divided as they had been before.  Next year, I’ll still keep the rule for the first couple of months, but then I think I’ll drop it once I feel like students have broadened their blog-reading horizons sufficiently.  From what I could gather, about two-thirds of my students were sorry to see us stop blogging in mid-March, but the rest of the students were somewhat tired of it.  Next year, I need to figure out a way to have more frequent checks, which makes students focus on the site more.  I think the blogging will be more integrated into the students’ writing plans as I increase the use of the writers’ workshop model next year.

Blogging for Academic Students

I wouldn’t try this broad form of blogging with my academic students.  They just don’t have the interest in writing that my honors students have, and many of them wouldn’t take the assignment seriously.  Besides, seventy students turns out to be enough for this exercise.  It would have drained the life out of me to have had my other fifty-four students blogging, too, considering that I was responsible for reading everything that goes up on the site.

I have a more focused blogging lesson plan that I’ve been using over the past few years for both my academic and honors students.  I’ll use it again this spring to teach all of my students Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men, a play about jury deliberations after a murder trial.  I assign each student a juror number and split each class into two jury rooms (i.e., two multiple-user blogs).  The students spend two days in the computer lab interacting with their fellow jurors and discussing the play’s evidence.  That’s more of the assignment size and time span I need effectively to get my academic students involved with blogging.

Please feel free to visit our site anytime to see for yourself the good and bad aspects of my approach to student blogging.

work

she
taught
us

make
them
work

she
said

they
won’t
like
it

you
know
unless
they
work

work

work

(work

#
taught
#

#
#
work

#
said

#
#
like
it

#
know
# #
#
work)

hello
said the
poem

&
hopped
off

The plan was for 6.3 miles, but Warren and my first Boy Scout hike ended up being 9 miles yesterday.  “The GPS maps were bad,” insisted the scoutmaster.  Prince William Forest Park offers its own trail maps for its 15,000 acres of piedmont forest, but I’ve learned that doing things the easy way isn’t part of the Scouting culture. 

We all slept well in our tents last night.

The Spirit is not the rock, but the night and the rock.
The Spirit is not the rain, but the rain and the rock.
Don’t write it, don’t paint it, don’t touch it.
Don’t use it.  Just worship.
Just worship.

Don’t look for the way the night and the rain
The way it came for you.
Don’t look for the rock again.

The face has lifted into fog
And the Spirit is high overhead
Opposite the sun.

I'd never seen a hawk light on anything around here.  Its presence in our backyard just before supper tonight seemed as exotic and as portentous as the scarlet ibis’s coming in James Hurst’s short story – more visitation than visit.

At first we thought it was injured.  It stayed in one spot in our high grass and appeared to be picking at its leg.  Victoria was dialing the number for the animal shelter when B’s friend told us it was eating a rabbit. You can see a trace of rabbit in the above photo’s lower-left corner.

Some of our backyard birds took exception to it, and one of them took a few swipes at it (see photo).  Nothing ruffled it. I got right close to it, too, hoping it would spread its wings.  At my closest point, it merely lifted up its back tail to me and shit.

When we looked for it again after supper, it had left, apparently sua sponte.

We had two doves live for a short time in a short tree against our townhouse.  That visitation comforted me when I was emotionally flat on my back with an identity crisis.  I didn’t want them to go, but they left when they had done their bit.

I don’t know what to make of myself a decade after the doves.  The doves purred with sanction from a treetop.  This hawk looked me in the eye.

I’m blessed.  This doesn’t happen every year.

Every year many Jews, heeding the levitical command “And you shall count . . .,” count off the fifty days between Passover and Shavuot in reflection.  Having thrown off Pharaoh’s law (Passover), they seek to prepare themselves to receive God’s law at Sinai (Shavuot).

Written during this fifty-day period two years ago, Rabbi Shai Gluskin’s Omer Journal is one of the finest blog series I’ve read.  Shai takes part in the traditions that have grown up around “counting the omer” by connecting his life to the aspects of our personalities associated with each day of the count.  (Here’s an article on counting the omer and on Shai’s journal.)

Shai is journaling again this year.  My spring is far richer for it.

Bill is out of his mind, but he's happy: forty-five people recline at his table tonight. Rocket Scientist Friend ("RSF") leads Bill's Seder. 

RSF explains part of a five-hundred-year-old Haggadah [above].

Michael [above] watches RSF elucidate a shankbone.

Bunny [below], wearing a bunny yarmulke, washes people’s hands.  She's a nurse, and she looks like a nurse anytime she helps out with anything.

I’m full.  I’m awash with chocolate-covered matzo.  Regular matzo would have been enough.

°°°

dry
lan
d

        sea

dry
lan
d

                sea

dry
lan
d

                       s ea

                                    s e  a

a je
sus 
fre
ak
sang me a song

her
hair
vert
i
cal

her
hea
rt

emp ty

& full
like lungs

her
song

high

& i
can i

ha
ve
lo
ve
can i

be
lo
ng

can i

i
as
the
heave
n
s

ea
ch
str
ing

plu
ck
ed

ju
st
e
n
ough

cho
rds
cir
cle

be
lo
w

& i
& i

be
lo
ng

tom would hum
for days
before
we recognized the tune

i forgot the tune
so
tom’s
humming again

Bob Lax would have liked blogging, which was born just about the time Lax’s health began to fail.  In his heyday, Lax printed and distributed his own broadsheet, Pax, among his friends as the spirit moved him.  And blogging is for friends, for people you can picture reading your stuff the way you would picture, on the bus ride home from Kindergarten, your mom making over your new artwork.  Lax was also something of an artist and a photographer, pastimes that make for better blogs.

I’m glad Lax had Pax, because Lax didn’t get but about ten percent of his poetry published during his lifetime.  Why?  First, Lax’s poetry looked too easy to be good.  From the 1960’s on, his poetry tended to be in the minimalist vein, and he would often use only five or fewer words per poem, though the words were often repeated.  The second problem was that much of his work resisted analysis.  It was meditative and largely free of metaphor; the words seem chosen for their lack of clear connotation.  He eschewed “good” and “evil,” for instance, and took to “black” and “white” (and “blue” and “red,” too).  As time went on, Lax posed less of a challenge to his audience’s intellect.

But the main problem with his poetry from a publisher’s standpoint was its vertical orientation.  Much of Lax’s poetry is narrow. Maybe the most challenging of Lax’s poems was “Sea & Sky,” which, when finally printed, covered 117 pages mostly with the words “sea” and “sky” printed on separate lines with a lot of lines in between. A lot of Lax’s poetry has only one or two words per line.  Publishers couldn’t give up that much white space, and they told him so.  But he kept on.

We bloggers can give up unlimited white space (or whatever color space we wish).  We can get a lot on a page, too, since the Internet has returned the reading world to scrolling.  We don’t go from right to left like the Torah Scrolls, either; we go up and down, so we can get a lot on a page. “Sea & Sky” would have fit on a single page on Lax’s blog, so its presentation would have been more true to the poet’s intent than the poem’s print version.

Thoughts while reading Merton & Friends: A Joint Biography of Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, and Edward Rice, by James Harford

I feel a tension between my devotional life and my love of writing.  I have recognized this tension also in the writings of Trappist monk Thomas Merton, a modern-day contemplative and a gifted writer. I bought Echoing Silence: Thomas Merton and the Vocation of Writing, a 2007 compilation of Merton’s writings on writing, to see how Merton lived with a calling to both writing and devotion.

I’ve always found Merton’s distinction in New Seeds of Contemplation between a poet and a contemplative both true and tough:

The poet enters into himself in order to create.  The contemplative enters into God in order to be created.

I found language in Echoing Silence (this from “Poetry and Contemplation: A Reappraisal” in 1958) that expands on the New Seeds aphorism:

Now it is precisely here [a novice contemplative’s tentative experiences of grace, which reflection threatens to spoil] that the aesthetic instinct changes its colors and, from being a precious gift, becomes a real danger.  If the intuition of the poet naturally leads him into the inner sanctuary of his soul, it is for a special purpose in the natural order: when the poet enters into himself it is in order to reflect upon his inspiration and to clothe it with a special and splendid form and then return to display it to those outside.  And here the radical difference between the artist and the mystic begins to be seen.  The artist enters into himself in order to work.  For him, the “superior” soul is a forge where inspiration kindles a fire of white heat, a crucible for the transformation of natural images into new, created forms.  But the mystic enters into himself, not in order to work but to pass through the center of his own soul and lose himself in the mystery and secrecy and infinite, transcendent reality of God living and working within him.

Consequently, if the mystic happens to be, at the same time, an artist, when prayer calls him within himself to the secrecy of God’s presence, his art will be tempted to start working and producing and studying the “creative” possibilities of this experience. . . . The artist will run the risk of losing a gift of tremendous supernatural worth, in order to perform a work of far less value.  He will let go of the deep, spiritual grace which has been granted him, in order to return to the reflection of that grace within his own soul.

(Merton isn’t always so categorical in seeing a contemplative’s role as higher than a poet’s.  In another selection from Echoing Silence, he advises some to accept their vocations as writers – the grace given to them – and to stop pining for a contemplative vocation that God probably did not intend for them.)

Merton fights this writer-versus-contemplative battle less abstractly and more personally in his letters and journal entries.  In one 1948 letter to a friend, he resolves not “to either renounce or to adopt whole ‘blocks’ of activity – cutting out ‘all’ writing or ‘going into solitude for good’ (as I would like to) . . .”  On the other hand, a 1949 journal entry states, “At the moment the writing is the one thing that gives me access to some real silence and solitude.”  Later on, however, especially in the 1960’s, he sometimes describes his writing as a distraction and an obsession.

When I bought Echoing Silence, I bought a recent biography of Merton, Robert Lax, and Edward Rice at the same time to get free shipping and to learn more about how Merton got along with his Columbia friends – Lax, Rice, and others – once Merton took his vows a couple of years after leaving Columbia with a master’s degree in 1939.  James Harford’s Merton & Friends: A Joint Biography of Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, and Edward Rice introduced me to the poetry of Robert Lax.  If Merton’s life and writing have clarified my struggle with writing and devotion, Lax’s life and writing have helped me see how devotion and writing may come together for me.

With regard to Merton, Lax, and Rice’s relationship after Merton entered Gethsemani, they stayed in close contact with one another through their letters and publishing endeavors.  Rice founded and edited Jubilee, an influential and unprofitable American Catholic magazine published from 1953 through 1967, and he relied heavily on his Columbia buddies to supply articles, photos, artwork, and other writers.  Merton was a frequent writer-contributor.  Lax, who published earlier than his Columbia buddies – a few poems in The New Yorkerin the 1940’s – was a more sporadic contributor of both photography and writing to Jubilee.  When Lax was in New York, he’d hang out at Jubilee’s modest, crowded office.  Staff members would often find him meditating on the office’s fire escape to escape the commotion.  But Lax spent many of the Jubilee years in France, North Carolina, Connecticut, Greece, and elsewhere.

Lax, Rice, and Merton, along with fellow-Columbia pal and painter Ad Reinhardt, increasingly influenced one another as their fame grew.  Reinhardt’s paintings were moving to purely black canvases about the time Lax’s already spare palette was frequently cleaned of all but six or seven words per poem, words that were repeated in vertical shapes that invited contemplation more than mental work.  Reinhardt’s paintings and ideas influenced Lax a great deal.

But Lax was a gifted copy editor, and he was known for his concision long before he came under the influence of Reinhardt’s minimalist theories. One photographer at Jubilee said, “If you worked with Lax, you didn’t need Strunk and White.  My eight pages of pictures and his forty words caught the whole story.”  Lax’s concision and his quiet spirit seemed to affect his poetry more as the Jubilee years went on.  During the fifties and sixties, Lax’s poetry reflected a more contemplative bent, employing little religious imagery – in fact, little metaphor at all.  Here’s “The Port Was Longing,” an example of his poetry from the early 1960’s:

The port
was longing

the port
was longing

not for
this ship

not for
that ship

not for
this ship

not for
that ship

the port
was longing

the port
was longing

not for
this sea

not for
that sea

not for
this sea

not for
that sea

the port
was longing

the port
was longing

not for
this &

not for
that

not for
this &

not for
that

the port
was longing

the port
was longing

not for
this &

not for
that

The increasingly spare and simple words in Lax’s poetry and his experiments with vertical forms got Lax labeled as an abstract minimalist.

Lax’s move to Greece was as seemingly impulsive as his previous moves, but he settled there. Before Greece, Lax made several moves and career changes by jumping in the backs of friends’ cars as they were leaving town.  The Circus of the Sun, published in 1958 and arguably Lax’s best book of poems, was the result of a year he spent as a circus clown and juggler.  His meditation on a picture of John writing the Apocalypse in a cave at Patmos precipitated his move to the Greek islands in 1963, and he lived there until just before his death in 2000.

Lax didn’t move to sparsely inhabited Greek islands to become a hermit, but to become a better poet.  As he explained in his introduction to A Greek Journal, “I thought I needed [a quiet place] for my work, as a photographer needs a darkroom.”  Lax became fascinated with the Greek fisherman and other characters near his modest, rented home, though, and he enjoyed his island contacts.  Nevertheless, he gained an international reputation for being a hermit, much as he had gained a reputation among his coworkers at Jubilee’s offices years before as being a kind of quiet “clown saint.”

At Patmos and the other Greek islands on which he lived, Lax seems to have found the quiet, contemplative place that Merton had hoped to find at Gethsemani.  Merton did move to a hermitage at Gethsemani, but the move never seemed to fit him.  Unauthorized picnics with friends (including, famously, Joan Baez) and a romantic interlude seemed to make some of his Catholic friends feel that the regular monastery life was a better fit for him.  But much of the distraction came from the chief demand on Merton’s time – his writing. Merton lived under the pressure of constant writing deadlines.  One visitor to Merton’s hermitage described the atmosphere there as a one-man newsroom. 

The difference between Lax’s and Merton’s spirituality had something to do with their temperaments.  Lax once described Merton as a “type A” and himself as a “type Z” personality.  Merton’s temperament reminds me of the Apostle Peter – strong and restless, sometimes at home, but more often picking fights.  Lax reminds me of John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” the one who leaned on Jesus’ breast at Passover and whose portrait in Marseilles involves him both writing and praying and caused Lax to pick up his tent for the last time until his health declined in old age.  Lax, like John, was the last of his old buddies to die.

Their temperaments also influenced the way they negotiated their vocations as writers with their callings as contemplatives.  Somehow Lax witnessed a more joyful marriage of contemplation and writing than did Merton.  Lax found and arranged shapes and sounds and expressions that, for me, largely bypass the ego and suggest meditation.

Here are some thoughts from James J. Uebbing’s introduction to Lax’s Love Had a Compass (1995) that I think rings true:

[Lax’s] insistence upon patience, upon attention to trivialities is not an incidental element of design, for simplicity – its centrality as a human virtue and the necessity of its cultivation – is at the heart of Lax’s achievement as a poet and as a man.

º º º
With Lax it is necessary to put aside the very notion of interpretation, the expectation – so basic to us that it is barely recognizable as a strategy – that an author’s art will by its nature be linear and syllogistic.

º º º
The elements of his art are the elements of the created world: the sea and the men and the animals and the light.  Like every artist he makes his use of them, but unlike most he acknowledges that they do not belong to him.  They find their origin elsewhere.  It is in this respect that Lax must be acknowledged as a religious man, insofar as for him artistic creation is not a ransacking of the visible world or an assertion of some unfettered consciousness so much as it is a participation in a process that was already in motion long before he arrived on the stage.

Lax’s poetry often feels like a clear reflection of God creating.  It also seems beyond the inspiration and creation that Merton suggests can keep an artist from losing herself in God.

Unlike Merton, who remains one of my favorite writers, Lax was at peace with his art.

lap                        lap

lap                        lap

him

lap

                             lap

bob lax dried his lines
on the bright rocks
of his dumb revelation

today he pulls
on a sweatshirt

never the same gull
pecked at itself
always the same gull

john’s cave keeps him centered
able to amplify
helped the waters lap
& the seagulls cry

tomorrow he stood
on a crag

he went home & died asleep
his dream was that real

[This article appeared first in The Journal of the Virginia Writing Project's winter 2008 issue.  I have made a few minor changes to it for publication here.  My thanks to the Project for permission to republish.]

You’re back in ninth grade.  Take a moment to reorient yourself, and then say these words out loud, slowly: “Literary.  Analysis.  Essay.”  Repeat.  How do you feel?

Hmm.  Maybe you don’t remember ninth grade.  There were those moments when your mind showed signs of catching up to your body.  In them, you laid claim to adulthood. But there were those other moments – moments too protracted to be “moments” – when your disorganization, your concrete thinking, or your lapses in behavior made you look like a misidentified middle-school student.

Reoriented now?  Let’s start again.  Your English teacher introduces you to something his county’s ninth-grade pacing guide describes as a “literary analysis essay.”  If you’re an academic student, you write two of them that year.  Double that if you’re in honors.

Snap out of it.  Now you’re the English teacher.  Oh, all right: I’m the English teacher, and I might as well switch to the less theoretical, more confessional past tense.

Last June I wanted a little affirmation from my departing charges before I hit the Northern Virginia Writing Project’s summer institute, so I read some of the responses to my end-of-year survey.  Peg, an honors student and one of those sweet, positive, and brilliant kids you’d like to stock your classroom with each year, wrote the following as part of her response:

Though I enjoy writing and reading, I don't like analyzing what I read. It loses all power and becomes boring and hateful. I once liked the story of Romeo and Juliet. I now despise it. Many of the poems we read that would have been rather enjoyable turned into crummy pieces of literature upon analysis.

Peg (not her real name) was kind enough, though, to make clear that I wasn’t alone in screwing up literature for her.  She perceived it as a trend in her language arts and English classes over the past few years.

I started the institute a week after exams with Peg’s words still irritating me.  After three years of teaching ninth grade, am I still messing up this essay assignment, this chief manifestation of all the wretched analysis Peg complained of?  In the process of meeting my county’s benchmarks, am I alienating kids from the very subject I love?

This is not the story of how this summer’s NVWP institute changed all that.  Here’s my thesis: Through my three-week immersion into writing instruction theory and practice at the institute this summer, I discovered that I was not alone in opposing the literary analysis essay’s prominent role in the ninth-grade curriculum. I also learned some new strategies in teaching that essay, and I met with some success and some failure in trying out those strategies this past fall.

Ninth grade is a big year for literary analysis in Loudoun County.  Peg’s past language arts teachers introduced her to most of the literary terms I use, and Peg has been writing essays since at least fourth grade.  But I introduce my kids to formal essays analyzing literature.  From the written analysis standpoint, then, it’s zero to sixty from middle school to high school in my county.

Peg was one of my few students to get the literary analysis essay this past year, or at least she figured out how to write one.  Most of my students’ first drafts sound like book reports – long plot summaries sandwiched by superlatives such as, “This story will make you hold on to the edge of your seat with excitement.”  That kind of writing drives me to teach model essays, which only makes my students’ papers come across as cheap knock-offs of the models.  So then I teach structure, such as the five-paragraph essay and a formula for writing its body paragraphs.  Those papers, in turn, come in sounding fake, strained, and pompous.  Meanwhile, a vague feeling of alienation begins to pervade the classroom: I’m losing the kids, and the kids are losing literature.

Peg’s comment was my focal point this summer.  She had been astute enough to spot what I consider to be my biggest failing as a teacher: I have never taught writing about literature well.  Worse, she had argued what was becoming my own opinion about ninth-grade literary analysis essays: they do more harm than good.  Not only had Peg pegged me as one of the heavies in her literary analysis drama, but her thinking about literary analysis in the classroom was also a step or two ahead of mine.  I also didn’t want to have another year of turning off even my brightest students with this essay assignment.

The institute’s mock trial of the five-paragraph essay really got my juices flowing.  Each fellow had a role in the trial, and, as fate and Don Gallehr would have it, I was picked as the lead prosecutor.  Our team put an elementary school teacher, a high school teacher, and a college professor on the stand to demonstrate the corrupting influence of this popular essay structure on the writing of students at every age.

You know our defendant, the five-paragraph essay?  The introductory paragraph grabs the reader’s attention and orients her to the subject.  The paragraph ends with a thesis statement promising three ways in which the essay will address a central point.  Three body paragraphs flesh out these three ways, and a final paragraph restates the thesis (careful to use different words) and either suggests an extended application of it or sums up the essay’s findings with an apt quote or witticism.  The body paragraphs’ topic and concluding sentences sport transition words – words like “not only” and “second.”

I poured my three years of essay-teaching frustration into some frantic trial preparation.  (We had one day to prepare for trial.)  I found lots of ammo in the mass of used books I had purchased at the suggestion of the institute’s reading list.  For instance, in his book Crafting Authentic Voice, Tom Romano says that the five-paragraph essay produces “a voice of serious-minded pretentiousness, statements of the obvious, and high-flown diction.” I researched Amazon and found no five-paragraph essay anthologies in print (big surprise).  I showed up the next morning with a stack of books and a smug look for opposing counsel.

But the jury split three to two against us.  I’ll spare you a difficult post-mortem.  Suffice it to say that the adverse outcome was more of a verdict on my lawyering skills than it was on the five-paragraph essay.  None of the summer’s twenty-five fellows supported Ms. Essay (as we called her) without reservation.

My trial preparation made me a believer in my cause, but – along with Peg’s comments – it focused me on the chief reason for the five-paragraph essay’s persistent use in ninth-grade English classes.  Most students seem incapable of writing a literary analysis essay without a lot of structure, of which the five-paragraph essay is the most famous example.  I spent much of my time this summer researching the history and use of the literary analysis essay.

The literary analysis essay, of course, is a kind of secondary writing.  Secondary writing is writing about another’s creation, and it is a rare teenager (or adult, for that matter) who can make his secondary writing a fresh creation.  I think many writing teachers can relate to what Natalie Goldberg says in Writing Down the Bones:

The terrible thing about public schools is that they take young children who are natural poets and story writers and have them read literature and then step away from it and talk “about” it.

I think most high school English students can relate to the concluding stanzas of former national poet laureate Billy Collins’s poem “Introduction to Poetry”:

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

I love really creative literary criticism, but I find a vague brutality in most written analysis of literature.  The brutality isn’t deliberate.  It’s like the brutality one feels when another talks too much about what one considers holy.

If you don’t see the discussion of a poem’s meaning as something akin to desecration, perhaps you would concede that secondary writing is often a fumbling attempt at expressing in words something that, ultimately, cannot be expressed. Essayist and poet Thomas Merton believed that aesthetic experience “transcends reason” and “leaves all analysis far behind.”  Francine Prose describes a similar experience in her bookReading Like a Writer when she writes about reading sentences from celebrated passages of literature:

The sentences affect us as much as music does, in ways that cannot be explained.  Rhythm gives words a power that cannot be reduced to, or described by, mere words.

I need to push my concrete-thinking ninth graders toward appreciating and expressing the abstract.  But I would rather spend most of my efforts having my students read such celebrated passages as a writer might instead of merely analyzing them.  I want my students to discover what an author is doing so they can learn to write more like her.   If students can make elements of a writer’s style their own, then they will have learned far more from her work than if they had merely made it the subject of their written analysis.

Of course, most of my students don’t argue their case against the literary analysis essay as well as Collins or Goldberg or even my former student Peg.  They don’t tell me about how my assignments violate their sense of the holy or prevent them from reading like writers.  Most of them – at least most of my academic students – suffer through their essay writing and end up with unpleasant memories of the literature I assign as the essay’s subject.

As a result of the institute and my reading this past summer, I reoriented my writing instruction this fall to bring out the natural poets and storywriters that Goldberg speaks of.  I couldn’t eliminate the literary analysis essay, of course, but I used some creative writing to lead into this year’s first foray into the essay.

I oriented the school year’s first quarter to prepare students for the essay, and I assigned the essay at the end of the quarter.  At the outset of the school year, I had my students write a story about themselves, and then I had them map their individual processes in writing the story.  Then I had them write a sports column or a movie review.  My idea was to use the writing process to break down and to demystify the essay, and to use the column or review to segue to the essay.

When I assigned the essay – a literary analysis of Richard Connell’s short story “The Most Dangerous Game” – I pointed to the students’ successful columns and reviews.  “Remember the difference between a sports article and a sports column?” I then asked.  “The article tells what happened, and the column analyzes the game.  It is the sa