Larry sent this about Merton and Lax. Does it mean that Merton took thirty or forty years to realize who he really was? Was he also an otrovert like Lax? Or was his mimicry of Lax, if Larry is right, something else within his psyche?
Great advice. I’ll forward your email to Josh. I wanted him to hear the way you addressed Lax in your book as an abstract painter and reader of Lax. I was taken by a video interview with Lax on YouTube by how much Lax sounded like Merton. Same cadence, same pauses, same humor, same laugh as the Merton taped lectures and talks with the scholastics. I think Merton got this America New York voice directly from LAX because I myself remember talking like my own mentors the first years I taught—hearing their voices in my own as I played back their eloquence in my own head in unconscious mimetic adoration. LAX was a hero to Merton, I suppose, and became more of one as time went on. In fact, his search for a second hermitage out West mimics LAX's prior move years before. Any thoughts?
Larry
I know little about Merton. Same birth years but his was the less stable childhood than Lax's, so he needed the church and the monastery much more than Lax needed the circus family. Lax found his hermit nature much earlier, realized it more clearly from deep within his childhood, one supposes. Would Merton have allowed himself to see his desire for a hermitage as a mimicry or as a finding of his true nature after long years of searching? The whole thing of the voice is most interesting, think you are right about the new yorkishness of it. From Buffalo to NYC. Forget the exact Lax birthplace, near Buffalo.
Once I've adopted Kaminski's reading of my life (superimposed) it is difficult to think away from it. Joe clearly was an otrovert writer, just like Handke. Maybe the great majority of writers are. Writers, artists, with musicians a different story though. Performing another dynamic but surely there are otrovert musicians too. Joe and I were "friends" at a distance---the colleague structure gave us that link, across which we recognized each other and respected our differences. Phil I guess was an introvert, much less need for a pleasant social face, much greater need to stay within the key communities of church and college.
back to our trekking banker --- she dreads anyone knowing of her plan to cross the Sierra de Gredos
"as if my secret came to life, and that would mean humiliation, whereas unrevealed it remains a source of riches." 113
inevitable that I go to the Pueblo Center this morning, Saturday . . . . tried to forego the notion yesterday but nothing doing --- gorgeous day out now. 10:25
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