The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [18]
During the discussion period, one colleague, clearly frustrated with my response to a comment he’d made, said, “Kathleen, you could have come back at me much harder on that.” He then proceeded to list several points I might have made, and I nodded my assent to most of them. Finally, I said, “You know, Bill, I might have come up with all that, if I had more time, maybe two or three weeks. A month. I’m no good on my feet, I’m a slow thinker.” At least we all left that seminar wide awake. Uneasy, but awake.
During my second residency at the Institute, however, simple unease became a mean spirit. I suspect that I made a gravely wrong move early in the term, something I’ve not been able to identify, which led to distrust, misapprehensions, a tangle of unfortunate presumptions and graceless gestures that soon became impossible to unravel. None of us seemed capable of acting our best. A clique formed, which of course divided us into those within and those without. Discussions bristled with unspoken tensions, and no one had the good sense to bring them to light so that we might identify and defuse them. It was pure folly, a sorry accumulation of human failures, my own as much as anyone else’s.
Scholars speak with authority, and they must, as they are trying to convince the reader that they have a worthwhile point of view. On the other hand, poets speak with no authority but that which the reader is willing to grant them. Our task is not to convince but to suggest, evoke, explore. And to be a poet, which at its root means “maker,” to be a maker of phenomena, speaking without reference to authority but simply because the words are given you, is not necessarily welcome in the academic world. That fall, the Institute became my crucible. I found myself deeply, helplessly engaged in the writing of a body of poems, even as I was experiencing, full-blast, the scorn of academics for a poet in their midst. It was the monks and their liturgy that kept me sane.
Ironically, it was a desire for liturgy that had led me to risk entering an academic environment in the first place. And now I found that liturgy was saving me. Writers become extremely vulnerable when a prolonged writing spell takes hold; sustaining such intensity has driven more than one poet to nervous breakdown, and even suicide. But the powerful rhythms of Benedictine life gave me balance, a routine. And the liturgy became a place where the prophet Jeremiah could help me understand my own life, my vocation as a poet. I am not making a facile comparison between myself and a prophet. I relate the tale only because I believe it illuminates the workings of lectio. The monastic liturgy plunges you into scripture in such a way that, over time, the texts invite you to commune with them, and can come to serve as a mirror.
All of us, I suspect, have times when we’re made to suffer simply for being who and what we are, and we become adept at inventing means of escape. My means of escape that fall happened to be few—my husband was traveling halfway around the world, I was physically unwell. But Jeremiah reminded me that the pain that comes from one’s identity, that grows out of the response to a call, can’t be escaped or pushed aside. It must be gone through. He led me into the heart of pain, forcing me to recognize that to answer a call as a prophet, or a poet for that matter,