The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [62]
Poets and monks do have a communal role in American culture, which alternately ignores, romanticizes, and despises them. In our relentlessly utilitarian society, structuring a life around writing is as crazy as structuring a life around prayer, yet that is what writers and monks do. Deep down, people seem glad to know that monks are praying, that poets are writing poems. This is what others want and expect of us, because if we do our job right, we will express things that others may feel, or know, but can’t or won’t say. At least this is what writers are told over and over again by their readers, and I suspect it’s behind the boom in visits to monastic retreat houses. Maybe it is the useless silence of contemplation, that certain “quality of attention” that distinguishes both the poem and the prayer.
I regard monks and poets as the best degenerates in America. Both have a finely developed sense of the sacred potential in all things; both value image and symbol over utilitarian purpose or the bottom line; they recognize the transformative power hiding in the simplest things, and it leads them to commit absurd acts: the poem! the prayer! what nonsense! In a culture that excels at creating artificial, tightly controlled environments (shopping malls, amusement parks, chain motels), the art of monks and poets is useless, if not irresponsible, remaining out of reach of commercial manipulation and ideological justification.
Not long ago I viewed an exhibition at the New York Public Library entitled “Degenerate Art,” which consisted of artworks approved by Hitler’s regime, along with art the Nazis had denounced. As I walked the galleries it struck me that the real issue was one of control. The meaning of the approved art was superficial, in that its images (usually rigidly representational) served a clear commercial and/or political purpose. The “degenerate” artworks, many crucifixes among them, were more often abstract, with multiple meanings, or even no meaning at all, in the conventional sense. This art—like the best poetry, and also good liturgy—allowed for a wide freedom of response on the part of others; the viewer, the reader, the participant.
Pat Robertson once declared that modern art was a plot to strip America of its vital resources. Using an abstract sculpture by Henry Moore as an example, he said that the material used could more properly have been used for a statue of George Washington. What do poets mean? Who needs them? Of what possible use are monastic people in the modern world? Are their lives degenerate in the same sense that modern art is: having no easily perceptible meaning yet of ultimate value, concerned with ultimate meanings? Maybe monks and poets know, as Jesus did when a friend, in an extravagant, loving gesture, bathed his feet in nard, an expensive, fragrant oil, and wiped them with her hair, that the symbolic act matters; that those who know the exact price of things, as Judas did, often don’t know the true cost or value of anything.
NEW
MELLERAY
ABBEY LITURGY
SCHEDULE
3:30 A.M.—Vigils
6:30 A.M.—Lauds
9:15 A.M.—Tierce
11:45 A.M.—Sext
1:45 P.M.—None
5:30 P.M.—Vespers
7:30 P.M.—Compline
CHICAGO:
RELIGION
IN AMERICA
I have a deep affection for Chicago, although I don’t know the city well. In the 1930s, when they were music majors at Northwestern, my parents courted along Michigan Avenue, at the Art Institute, Symphony Hall, the old Opera House. My own memories of the city come from the 1950s, when my father directed the band at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in nearby