The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [20]
The popular, nineteenth-century image of the poet-as-Romantic; the lone rebel, free of restraint, seized by holy imagination, has proved dangerous for poets in this century. It has overshadowed the poet’s ancient communal role as historian, prophet, storyteller, and has mystified and idealized the writing process. But although poetry is taught notoriously badly in our schools and is no longer at the center of popular culture as it was even as recently as Tennyson’s time, the culture still has need of the poet-as-other. In fact, expectations of artists can run very high. The biologist Lewis Thomas has said that “poets, on whose shoulders the future rests,” are needed to help us make our way through “a wilderness of mystery . . . in the centuries to come.” The theologian John Cobb, in commenting on the history of art from the Byzantine age to the present, says that “the power that can transform, redeem, unify and order has moved in a continuous process from a transcendent world into the inner being of artists themselves.”
This is dangerous for artists to contemplate, that the culture that trivializes and spurns them would also, paradoxically, look to them for hope of transformation. Walter Brueggeman, in a book on the prophets entitled Hopeful Imagination, suggests that “a sense of call in our time is profoundly countercultural,” and notes that “the ideology of our time is that we can live ‘an uncalled life,’ one not referred to any purpose beyond one’s self.” I suspect that this idol of the autonomous, uncalled life has a shadow side that demands that we resist the notion that another might be different, might indeed experience a call. Our idol of the autonomous individual is a sham; the truth is we expect everyone to be the same, and dismiss as elitist those who are working through a call to any genuine vocation. It may be that our culture so fears the necessary other that it has grown unable to identify and name real differences without becoming defensive about them.
I think this explains our mania for credentials, which allow us a measure of objectivity in assessing differences. Credentials measure what is quantifiable; they represent results. A call, on the other hand, is pure process; it cannot be measured, quantified, or controlled by institutions. People who are called tend to violate the rules in annoying ways. Young professors clinging to the tenure track do not like to hear that Denise Levertov has taught at Stanford, despite having little formal education. It offended several of my Institute colleagues that a university had invited me for a week-long residency as a “poet and theologian.” My last formal course on the Bible was in eighth grade. How could I be a theologian? What good are the rules, the boundaries of our precious categories—“theologian,” “scholar”—if poets can violate them at will? Ironically, while the Institute’s director, Patrick Henry, has a deep commitment to breaking down the barriers between artists and academics, during that semester he found himself contending with personality clashes that made such bridge-building extremely difficult.
The poet, as a “necessary other,” is free to speak, and indeed must speak, in ways that scholars cannot. But that freedom comes at a considerable price. During that fall at the Ecumenical Institute, I began to suspect that just as monastic discipline looks to many people like restriction