Michael Mott's "The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton": Book Review

After a visit to the Abbey of Gethsemani, I wanted to find out more about where Merton had spent half of his life, and how the famous depiction of his first half, in 1948's The Seven Storey Mountain, differed from or confirmed what Michael Mott learned in his diligent research for this 1984 biography. Mott's documentation makes this the authorized biography, for he had access to primary sources and archives which previous scholars and biographers did not, and as he had the cooperation of the Order to enhance the interviews and correspondence he incorporates into a comprehensive representation. Luckily for all involved, this is no hagiography. It fairly analyzes what Merton wrote and what we know, apart his many writings in print or not, as judged in the context of his friends and his lifetime.

Highlights for me began with Mott's eloquent parallel of Merton's troubled year at Caius College, Cambridge, reading Dante with Professor [Edward] Bullough. But Mott does not give the professor's first name, presumably relying only on Merton's unpublished notes, and such small details, despite the meticulous attention the author devotes to his subject, sometimes disappoint slightly. For instance, while this is meant as a biography rather than a critical work, one finds many of the three-dozen-plus titles and countless essays or reviews Merton published in his lifetime mentioned as if in passing. A few gain from Mott's insightful excerpts or summaries, but more context on the rest of them, even if minor by comparison, would have enhanced the value of this book. Admittedly it's already long, but it's not dull or rambling. Snippets on Buddhism, for instance, late in the narrative could have also benefited from elaboration, as Mott compresses complex and disparate intellectual and spiritual contexts which Merton expanded. The shift of Merton towards the East is not an easy one to reduce to a few pages. The focus on main events is understandable, but again, the endnotes could have extended discussion.

He was full of contradictions. Gregarious, he chose a cloister. Restless, he wanted to be a hermit. Affable, he withdrew from a wide circle of friends. Proud, he resented his monastic discipline. Mott handles the tensions calmly, illustrating how Merton's early infatuation with his Trappist community gave way, as he matured, to conflicts with his fellow monks. However, when by the mid-1960s his dream of a hermitage on the property came true, Merton kept appealing for chances to travel, and opportunities to chat with visitors. He swung back and forth, longing for solitude but wandering back to the world, with dangerous results as have been revealed concerning his affair with a student nurse in Louisville when he was around fifty years old. I kept noting how Merton, vowed to poverty, somehow accumulated his beloved LPs by Dylan and Joan Baez and Mozart, so many books he needed a big set of shelves, and beer and brandy (the latter might have been sneaked in by visitors).

Certainly, he felt after a quarter-century of service as novice master, and as a productive if sometimes too prolific author, he generated attention and income indirectly or directly (how did royalties work out? Another area I puzzled over, as I figured the Order garnered the sales but somehow Merton had money to spend inside and outside the monastery during his later years at least there as a hermit...). So, he figured he had earned his keep. But I understood how his fellow monks may have rankled at his barbed wit and quick tongue, and also how Merton tried to make right some of the wrongs he inflicted on his confreres and his friends, given the pressures of living so long in such close quarters.

Mott delves into such difficulties well. "It was a voice breaking the silence to praise silence." (251) As acclaim for Merton made him a celebrity after his autobiography appeared, he sought the attention but also retreated from it, if it was not from those closest to him, perhaps. Some of the liveliest passages here are about the monastic hubbub that ensued when unwanted callers tried to crash in, or apply as postulants, drawn by Merton's fame. For a while, the abbey had to house monks under a circus tent, so great were the numbers. But that passed, and Vatican II itself, with the renewal Merton helped progress, led to the diminution of much that made religious life in the Cistercians so austere.

Social changes drew Merton into the conversation in the rest of the world beyond the walls, as the late-1950s agitation filtered into his reading and correspondence. Marco Pallis and Merton wondered in letters if the atrocities attributed to WWI sparked WWII propaganda, and Mott shows how Merton evolved from a Cold War proponent to a more balanced observer and challenger to capitalist cant. Opposing the Vietnam War, in 1965 he wrote "The Answer of Minerva." If the question is "Why must this pointless war go on?", then the goddess' response is: "You must fight on, for if now you make peace with the enemy, you will offend the dead." (qtd. 416) A perennial, if unfortunate, exchange. 

The reforms that changed Catholicism, I always figured, would have been supported without delay by Merton. But Mott shows more ambiguity in Merton as the 1960s revealed immaturity among clergy freed from restraint, and as a rush to improve liturgy and architecture and ritual threw out some of what made the Church so cherished by many. A letter in 1968 finds him at odds with both extremes. "Paralyzing incomprehension--what does one do when he realizes he is part of an organization whose members systematically try to 'make a fool of God'? I suppose I begin by recognizing that I have done it as much as the best of them." A characteristic note, for Merton in his private journals strives to meet the nuanced note, less combative or preening than some of his public proclamations betrayed.

He took a long time to get over the priggish or self-righteous attitude. After all, he was an intellectual probably more than the playboy his youthful memoir made him out (despite censorship from within or outside himself) to be. He talked his way around and in the monastery, where a promise of stability and discretion overruled his natural ebullience, if not his concomitant despair and self-loathing, the balance between good conduct and righteous morality never lasted long. He lived in tumultuous times, and he continued in one of those years, 1968: "But then a 'God is dead' Church is no better, or are the 'God is dead' Christians are an improvement over the others. Just the same established flippancy and triviality. And even more successful." He ends with "They make a good living out of God's death." (527)  A fitting sample of Merton's ability to turn a phrase, to cut through pretense. 

I liked the hints of how Merton related to his friend, the artist Victor Hammer (whose drawing of Merton graces the back of the dust jacket) as an "unbelieving believer." I would have liked more about this, as to how friends of Merton managed to align their own beliefs or lack of such with his. (Some material here, as in his affair, was redacted or limited, as at the time Mott prepared this, it was less than the quarter-century moratorium that Merton requested for release of his private documents. Since Mott's book, some of the journals and letters have been published, for better or worse, maybe.)

An "existentialist contemplative," Mott avers on the next page, beckoned as ideal. Not only for the hermit-despite-himself, as he prepared to depart for the West Coast and then a tour of the Southeast Asian landscape and monasteries who increasingly loomed as his final set of mountains to argue with, in Mott's construct (playing off of Merton's title and that Dantean depiction of Mt. Purgatory). Merton wanted not only to write about life, but to live it. He wanted to demonstrate his contemplative commitment and to withdraw (at least some of the time, him being Merton), from all the attention. 

In his Asian journal, his last set of writings, he muses over what he has learned after living with himself, itching to travel but insisting he was called to a vocation apart from even his fellow monks. "Our real journey in life is interior: it is a matter of growth, deepening, and an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts. Never was it more necessary for us to respond to this action. . ." (qtd. 543)  He was open to this spiritual evolution, and he struggled to progress. 

Mott can lighten the mood. As to the journal Monks Pond in its last year of the monk's life, "Merton made the mistake as editor of including the work both of poets who were friends and of friends who claimed to be poets." (503)  While his last recorded words in public have been taped in Bangkok, that day nearly twenty-seven years exactly from the time he entered the monastic life at twenty-seven, many cite the eerie premonition of the first clause. The second one also shows Merton, in his everyday side, that made him so much a figure of devotion or imitation or even excoriation by many.

"So I will disappear from view and we can all have a Coke or something." Then, a "Thank you very much" concludes his final address, preceding his electrocution by a faulty fan's wiring in his hotel bathroom. (564) That "you may know the Christ of the burnt men" in premonitory fashion also serves as the last phrase of his autobiography, another circle rippling across many decades and mountains. (Amazon US 12-17-14)

South Central Rain

We drove on through darkness, very dark, along an interstate into Kentucky. Two symbols of the New South, side by side, illuminated by headlights as Layne tried to keep straight on a road full of the usual construction, amidst impatient (people don't drive nicely down here) trucks and cars all around us. An abandoned barn and farm. A sign for Allison's Adult Superstore, open from 6 a.m. to midnight. I wondered, drowsily if briefly, who stopped there so early, and who had to work there, and what they sold.

Figuring Louisville brought us that much more west than would have Cincinnati, we opted for it. We got a dim sense of Louisville when we went a few blocks to find a short strip of neon. Walking down streets full of construction sites, we passed two city plaques noting the slave markets which had met around Market Street. Most of the sturdy buildings, true to urban fashions we'd seen, remained dilapidated, but gentrification encroached.

A few hipper restaurants, near the convention center, beckoned, and Layne chose Doc Crowe's. Jammed with lots of kids from the university, that sports powerhouse with pro-sized stadiums. I supposed a big game had happened, as we saw Stanford shirts here and there. A giant, restored distillery, it had dozens of bourbon types and loads of oysters. We contented ourselves with fried food. I had a Founder's stout, same brand as I enjoyed in Grand Rapids. Nothing overwhelming, but a popular place. The table next to us had a slew of conventioneers, well-fed and well-earning types, all white men chuckling except for one suited Japanese fellow who appeared to be sampling Southern fare for the first time. I thought of the Babbitt radio dramatization we'd been enjoying, as if updated.

We could not find a cheap room downtown, settling for a not-bargain Econo Lodge. It was central. At least it had (despite the warning in the lobby) free parking. But it was dismal. Even the breakfast was skimpier than in other such motels. All I could scrounge up was oatmeal in a packet and Raisin Bran. Around us, the workers waited for their 9 a.m. shift, and construction was happening as we tried to check out, the elevator full of laundry carts and the corridors full of hammering and hewing. We got out of there nearly as fast as we had Ann's Motel in Wall SD; these two were the low points so far.

Backtracking a bit, as the presence of Bardstown Road in Louisville led me to believe the next destination was just outside that small town and adjacent, we drove instead a lovely hour or so back into the Bluegrass State's heartland. I wanted to see, as we were not far anyhow, the Abbey of Gethsemani. When I was in junior high, the two books I read that left a lifetime impression on me were Tolkien's trilogy and Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain. I credit my medievalist path in college and grad school to these influences. Merton made famous the monastery he entered at 27 and lived, more or less, at until his death nearly 27 years ago to the day, if far from the Kentucky knobs, the wooded hills on the two-thousand acres the order of Trappists have farmed since 1848.

Leaving another interstate, we entered lovely terrain. Fall still glowed. A sign for Boston ahead meant only a settlement overlooking fields and railroad tracks. The sun shone. Little country roads kept diverting us, and a large set of factories in the middle of grass proved to be Jim Beam's distillery #5. I have no idea how blue bluegrass is, but the meadows and tidy farms and small houses we kept viewing kept us attentive. The route took us into New Haven, whose sign welcomed us to the "gateway" to the Abbey. A large Catholic church attested in that village to the presence around there.

We got sidetracked on Google in a field, near the Merton Retreat Center, but a few hundred yards in the other direction, a sign pointing us at a crossroads fork to "Trappist" on Monks Road said it all. The road curves into the verdant knolls, and Layne understandably asked if the prominent if still indefinite figure on the statue crowning a hill was of Merton. I think it's St. Joseph. Michael Mott's The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, which I am re-reading now, states early on for Merton the worst sin was idolatry. I admire his sticking it out at a place where, once the honeymoon wore off for a very recent convert, tested him. He broke silence to praise it, as Mott avers. Many of his seventy books are sold in the gift shop. The ancillary Merton line of souvenirs and tributes echo his predicament. An extrovert and wit who chose a cloister, he wanted to be left alone, he rankled at the community he praised, he courted a worldwide audience despite the Order's aim of anonymity. I found out recently from our dear friend Bob, son of a Free Methodist minister who spoke at our wedding, that the reverend had met Merton way back when he lived in Kentucky. I confess I am delighted to be two degrees of separation (as I am from Pope John Paul #2 and President #44) away.

Merton strove to live apart on the property, yet he, knowing his unreadiness, first asked to be made Novice Master. He chafed against the discipline imposed on him by an abbot, but he realized his vow of stability had to keep him there. He found his calling, but a complicated one and not a sinecure. After his autobiography with no promotion soared to the bestseller list in 1949, he brought necessary income to the struggling monastery, as well as so many applicants they had to live in a circus tent. Postwar trauma had already been attracting postulants and novices looking for renewal. Merton's book made him the most famous monk of modern times, even as he longed early on to be a hermit.

He got his wish, finally, but we had probably no permission to venture so far into the enclosure, and we had to content ourselves with examining the informative display outside the gift shop. A video showed us more, and I heard many East Coast and what regional and blue-collar accents as some monks in voiceover (one looked very Jewish and may have been once) explained their venerable routine. One reasoned bluntly, contrary to the naysayers like my dad who scoffed at a bunch of unproductive men getting room and board for nothing but praying all day, that such a demanding life (up in the middle of the night, hard work, scant food, and a regimen devoted to "ora et labora" first), that the monastic vocation required one to serve others, or else, what was this life good for, anyhow?

On a humdrum errand for the monastery, Merton found himself transformed. "In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers." A plaque marks this 1958 epiphany, which moved Merton towards pursuing social justice. (Walnut St has been renamed for Muhammad Ali!)

Merton hated the "Cheese Factory" and its grubbing for greenbacks, but of course, if not for the royalties from his books, popular from the 1950s ever since, would the Abbey have survived? Its boom came and went. As the placards tell, vocations have dropped now. The 40 or so monks number about the same as when Merton entered a few days after Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941. Most heads are grey and or bald, and as with other foundations I've read about, the future of Catholic monasticism appears to wane. Although as a letter posted from a retreat-goer with a Jewish surname suggests, many find the chance to share Benedictine hospitality appealing. Intriguingly, rather early in the postwar era, Merton popularized Zen presciently. Catholic institutions have been sold to other faiths more and more. Many monks rationalize that this decline speaks to a pattern only God knows.

Peter Owen Jones' BBC series Around the World in 80 Faiths featured a visit to the monastery of Subiaco in Italy, where St. Benedict prayed in a cave. A few tottering residents remain in that storied setting, amid medieval frescoes. New Age retreats buy out Jesuit seminaries. Burning Man creates its own annual ritual. Outside these walls, yoga may beckon more than Sunday obligations. Meanwhile, cheese is sold and fruitcake assembled, both by hand, and you can order both (we liked the garlic and chives cheese and the bourbon fudge) online at Gethsemani Farms. Layne also bought a Nicaraguan vase; the shop sells products made by Cistercian communities and far-flung fair-trade cooperatives.

I wonder, if Merton had use of the Net, what his vocation would be like? Could he have kept his solitude, so longed for? Layne contrasted the despair of prisoners in Canon City and Jackson compared with the contentment of the monks in cells nearly as spartan. We entered the guests' glassed-off portion to look down on the stark white chapel. We spent a few minutes standing there. Time stopped. I thought about Merton and all who had prayed below. It was absolutely silent.

I wish we had more time to walk around, even if the day was very blustery. But we had to make it back around south and head east as planned. We found ourselves, at Google's prompt, on a pretty road. Suddenly we passed a sign of Lincoln's first school, then another for his boyhood home at Knob Creek (closed for construction). The center of the modest town of Hodgenville has its own memorial at a roundabout, in a fittingly humble setting. You can watch more about Lincoln's birthplace here.

We edged back to the interstate, leaving Kentucky soon behind but wanting to go back to see more. We stopped at a K-Mart in Franklin, the same as any, but as it did not have sunglasses for Layne, we went to a mall across the street, as anywhere. Yet the people at Sunglass Hut helped, directing her to the kiosk selling a pair at a fifth of the price they did. On a sunny day, after avoiding most of Nashville, we headed west across some of the Volunteer State. We passed the site for Shiloh but already, the day lengthened. So, we stayed at an Air B'n'B find, a restored collection of Southern rural buildings and a two-story cotton gin, the rebirth of the roadside settlement where Alamo and Bells and two big highways merge. Dr. John Freeman has spent his retirement in this labor of love. We stayed in a moonshiner's cabin, diligently moved and rebuilt. We lit a fire and smelled the smoke.

I walked the 30-odd acres and learned about the different structures. You can too at this site for Green Frog. The sunset over the pines was brilliantly hued, and I tried to take pictures on my phone which inevitably fail to do it justice. That night, I tried to shut out the rumbling traffic and imagine life once. Next morning, we walked about the place more, and visited the gin as it was being worked on by an older man who told us of how he and his smaller sister tried to pick hundreds of pounds of cotton (one big bag filled can tote 200 lbs.) in an hour. That gin was amazingly designed, ingeniously so. What I figured vaguely was a contraption the size of a crate was an intricate, immense construction.

The tribute to a vanished way of life, with hardships perhaps outnumbered or balanced by such memories, stands as a reminder of what we today never know. Talking to the man who made his retirement a time spent caring for the cotton gin, he connected me with hardship, but also with a rooted sense of belonging on a farm, committed to a task. My Angeleno commute, my keyboard tasks, my mindset tired of "outrage" this and to-do task that, such trivia: one advantage of a monastery or rural surroundings is that they force you (or can or did) to listen. The highways never stopped whirring, but I tried there to hear the sense of life and how to live it (I had to fit in R.E.M. somehow), if not in a way I could ever do. As the Badlands showed, you have to go a very long time to hear the wind on the prairie, or look out over a clear vista to thirty miles away. As Layne did some work back in the cabin, I lingered to take photos, some on my stomach in the long grass, as I strove to find perspectives before the clouds let loose, and taking in the feel of the place. A woman leaving the front lot urged me to come back when the cafe was open, as the sandwiches were worth the visit.

The weather threatened rain, and by the time we headed south again, it hit. Layne and I reckoned we could dip into the Magnolia State, and she found a worthwhile byway taking us past to me oddly placed subdivisions, each on "wooded lots" if often cleared of such, an acre per lonely house, unlovely and awkward, which speckled the space we passed as red dirt took over and pines and scrubland receded. We were on the Cotton Trail in Tennessee, and all around, it dusted white as if snow had fallen. We took a weird off-ramp that failed to get us on the interstate but did take us on a mile that dazzled with beauty. Half cotton fields, half leaves golden or scarlet falling in the drizzle. 

Entering Holly Springs, you pass from the interstate (and another is coming, I-269, a north-south one bringing more subdivisions, Wal-Mart Superstores, maybe fracking) and endless construction maddening at the state border and thereabouts, worsened by rain and closed-off exits and ramps into a calmer South. Rust College, one of the first black institutions founded in Reconstruction, stands. Across, the brick and stone ruins of a state industrial academy loom. In the center, as if Santa Fe's adobe had been converted into humbler lumber structures two centuries later, a square of stores and a wooden awning and boardwalk remind one of what it might have been like, when the war came to the middle of the town, part of the strategies that drew in Shiloh and Corinth, into hatred and bloodshed.

A few blocks away, at a converted girls' school, the crammed three stories of 40,000 artifacts collected from the families who have lived there long make the Marshall County Historical Museum a must-see. Our guide, as we were surrounded by uniforms from wars then and since, and swords and buttons, bullets and badges, spoils and plaques, noted how the South had the unfair disadvantage of rifles taking a lot longer to load, half a minute, compared to the rapidly firing rounds of Union men, who hunched down in trenches while the rebels charged, much more exposed. I thought of how this must have been horrifying; at Corinth, the battle raged at the depot's rail tracks at point-blank range.

A more peaceful setting surrounded Holly Springs, even if one sensed decay. We scrutinized a taxidermy panorama, a must-see for its less accomplished examples.The museum documented the Coca-Cola bottler, the maker of novelty candy, the factories once supporting the town, but I had no sense that they continued today--despite the region's demands for sugary sweets. Segregation was apparent in the photos of long gone senior classes of the local high schools. Not until 1970 were two black students at the white school; the other one, named after Rust, was all black. The square seemed about half and half, from the people we saw scurrying about. Stars and Stripes still flew on small sticks, as Veterans' Day had been celebrated at the memorial stone with the names of the dead from wars since the Civil one. We left the town as rain fell, and soon got sucked into the rush hour snarl of the southeast section of Memphis, which looked forlorn. At night, not much to report, and we forced ourselves on until we could go no further, at another if better Econo Lodge in Brinkley, Arkansas. Signs indicated both a Lewis + Clark site not far south, and a Trail of Tears one for the natives forced out of their southern homelands by settlement in the wake of millions of Lewises and Clarkses, plantations and slaves, cotton pickers and red-dirt farmers, candy makers and now all pop guzzlers.

Layne's eagerness to try the Southern icon Waffle House, whose yellow logo I liked, faded soon after ordering from the limited (especially for non-meat eaters) menu. Our waitress was nice, however, named after one of the three cardinal virtues, and we tipped her well. The other patrons were loutish: one wore a red Chadron NE polka band t-shirt (despite the freezing temperature, as a polar storm plagued the region), and he and his young pals jeered at a family coming in. Our polka boy cued up on the jukebox some teen-pop songstress and CCR's "Down on the Corner." These preceded "There's a Special Lady at the Waffle House," which earned by its annoying presence whatever tip we left the staff who had to hear this ode to their employer. Corporate, sepia-toned enlarged photos of WH's postwar pair of owners and subsequently dutifully smiling contemporary staff surrounded the diner. A whiteboard encouraged patrons to add their own snapshots taken there to a display; few had. My portion was tiny, as if a kid's meal. The waitress had to invent a grilled cheese option, the hashbrowns lacked the onions I paid 40 cents for, and I was still hungry when I finished a few scant minutes later.

The clientele next room to us was also loutish, hanging out next to our car in the cold, and we left soon after we awoke. News was still lingering about the election, but Ebola had receded; Kim's derriere was unmentioned. We faced chilly weather as we crossed Arkansas, but the day brightened. We admired the Ozarks and their red, brown, and golden colors mingled in hues I lack adjectives for. Even from the comparative sameness of the interstate, the vistas rewarded. I can only imagine what back roads and panoramic outlooks reveal. We headed up to the northwest corner to visit the Wal-Mart funded museum of American art in the corporation's hometown of Bentonville. The entire region, from Fayetteville on, had all the sameness of, say, Irvine or any post-1970s suburban sprawl. Lingering fields lay fallow, for they were planted with real estate signs, one for a development called "The Farms." Whatever small-town ambiance as in Holly Springs the towns once had was gone, but at least the dogwoods and creek over which the museum is built do cling to a dignity of their own.

Crystal Bridges had fine colonial and 19-c. paintings, too. Karl Bodmer's Mandan bleak death scene, an eerie circle of human skulls overlooking a solemn vista, captivated me (if neither Layne nor anybody else at least on the Net, as I cannot find an image of it). I missed my meddlesome cat Gary, as I contemplated Thomas Eakin's "Portrait of Professor Benjamin Rand," the scientist stroking his black cat as it kept his place in an open book on his desk. The next century had an impressive if not astonishing selection. I liked a painter, co-founder of Synchromism, whom I had first seen in Chicago. I'd never heard of him but he lived in Santa Monica a century ago, Stanton Macdonald-Wright. His paintings hint at Buddhism and he mingles Cubism with a bold overlay of bright shapes.

Downstairs, a "State of the Art" installation featured a hundred supposedly cutting-edge artists. My attention failed to be halted by 98 of them, but Dan Witz' mural "Vision of Disorder: Frieze Triptych" in hyper-realistic detail of a moshpit caught my attention, and many other viewers. Layne was also not wowed, regarding the Crystal Bridge holdings as lacking substance. I concurred as I sat nearest the mural, but stuck in front of a display of half a dozen floor fans stacked up the wall, each blowing so to keep levitated a giant sombrero. Louis CK has an episode (can't find it all on YouTube as I tried when teaching an art course last summer) where he is stuck in a post-modern art gallery. I can relate.

All the same, an end room featuring Jawshing Arthur Liou's "Kora" moved me. He undertook a pilgrimage to the holy site of Mount Kailash in Tibet after his young daughter's death. Thirteen minutes, it gave me time for action as contemplation and Layne a seat to catch up on e-mails on her phone. The invitation to integrate duty and reflection, in ways inevitably dissimilar in substance if not entirely in form to monks who mingle "ora et labora," prayer and work, at Gethsemani, includes us. As our journey went on, thanks to Kindle, I began Robin Kirkpatrick's recent translation, musing (as Merton had), if and how one might find meaning in the Commedia, in another century full of doubt.

We headed to a Country Inn in the identical faceless suburb of Rogers. Compared to Brinkley and Louisville, it was palatial. Checking in we were frustrated by a computer being down, but the room was comfortable, and even if we had to settle for takeout pizza and beer (a local, Core Octoberfest Lager; licensing laws prevented the kind of takeout pairings we are used to), we were so tired and it was so cold outside we were content. The next morning, all eyes in the breakfast room turned to the weather segment. It was 28 in Fayetteville, but the polar storm luckily had drifted off. I had yogurt, fruit, granola, and oatmeal, for once not having to eat the Raisin Bran from its twirling dispenser.

A pause at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History taught us a lot about the region. "Aux Ark" comes from a French tendency to chop off the first syllable of a tribe's name, so "of the Arkansas" warped into the name we all know. The museum was not piled high or haphazard, yet this detracted from its impact for us after Holly Springs. But clean and orderly, it appealed doubtless to those less enchanted by clutter. A group of schoolchildren visited in a room as a woman in pioneer dress let them try out a toy gun to shoot bears. We were the only other visitors, as usual. The sufferings of ordinary people, black and white, both poor, were made deftly evident in a short video and display about the Civil War. Armies and bushwackers (I think of ISIS headlines) forced many to join them or be killed, and many families in this remote area found their farms burned and their possessions looted. The war swept across this contested territory along the Missouri border, and no celebration of the terror it unleashed was found on display. We watched a 1940 video about a fryer chicken contest, attracting tens of thousands to what was once a land of berry farms, egg ranches, and poultry production, albeit I bet pre-Tyson, whose big rigs we often found in front of us, and who accounted indirectly for the  museum's captions, and many of the local signs and businesses in Rogers, as translated into Spanish.

The video chortled that "the only journey of the chickens was to the frying pan," more or less. We watched as eggs hatched, chicks were sexed and sorted, and as fried chicken dinners resulted. A WPA mural of Springdale celebrated this agricultural heyday, but as with the region where we live in Southern California, only vintage postcards and histories preserve the vanished farmland or orchard.

Outside, a few cabins and structures were moved onto the lot. One was an outhouse, moon for women, star for men. Another was a cabin, each wall with its own door, but we could not enter, as it was all boarded up. A third was the original house from a century ago and more. The guide who showed us around pointed to the library, full of hardbacks from the 1940s, and observed "that was when people read books." A radio and comfy chairs stood for pre-WiFi, pre-TV, and pre-Wal-Mart. That company is ubiquitous, as you'd expect. Institutes for Workplace Management pop up next to chain motels, and whatever lure this corner of the Razorback State held, it must lurk in football now.

Siloam Springs was the last town before Oklahoma. It reminded me of Hot Springs SD, if more girt by the usual logos. According to the State Tourism website, "Food choices range from chain restaurants to sandwich shops to coffee shops to home cooked meals." A municipal page, with only one image of the city center's faded turn-of-century resort heritage, warns: "Tornados, straight-line winds, train derailments, natural disasters and civil unrest are all possible in Siloam Springs."

Photo: chapel + cemetery of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani's gallery via its website. 

Yangzom Brauen's "Across Many Mountains": Book Review

Probably the first Swiss-Tibetan ever, at least as a writer, actress, and activist, this granddaughter of a Buddhist nun who fled the Chinese invasion of her homeland, with her little child in tow, tells her family's story over three generations. Efficiently conveyed, without sentiment or romantic reverie, Brauen narrates how Kunsang, her grandmother, married in the Nyingma order, which tolerated if not encouraged such liaisons, her father, a monk. This period, of course, takes place in the pre-Chinese decades, when Tibet remained remote and its class structure and traditions firmly endured. Even now, Brauen admits, her "mola" affirms many of the old ways, despite a life which has pulled her away, first to refugee camp in India, then asylum in Switzerland, and now visiting her daughter, Yangzom's "amala," who resides as an artist in New York City's affluent enclave of cosmopolitan Chelsea.

The author compares herself to the bottom of a sandwich; between the tsampa dough of her grandmother and Sonam, her mother's "juicy filling" partaking of both ends but remaining intact and flavorful, Yangzom represents wholesome wheat bread. She tells the saga of half a century and more directly. Her highly educated grandparents did not feel, she insists, part of a backward society, nor did those under them feel that they resented the traditional ways. All was seen in thrall to a higher order. People did not question their place in a stratified and long-settled society.

With the Chinese refusing to let Tibet, then or now, develop in its own way and time to reform and modernity, it's sobering to find that Lhasa has been reduced to a garish, polluted Chinese city, and that the ancestral settlement of Pang, visited in a poignant journey back home, survives but part in ruins, as the monks resist the spies planted in such places by the PRC to ensure conformity. Brauen as an activist has been arrested for her part in demonstrating in Moscow against this regime when it held the 2008 Summer Olympics, and her path, from Bern to Berlin to Los Angeles, all bear symbolic territory, she observes, reveals her steadfast commitment to gaining if not independence then autonomy for her familial homeland. Since her birth in Switzerland in 1970, she has a unique p-o-v.

She reveals small tidbits which enrich her tale. I've read a few Tibetan accounts, but hers stands out for its natural and welcome portrayal of a rare combination of monastic and lay outlooks on Buddhism and Tibetan society within the same living lineage, its focus on women, and its European and American perspectives from one rarely and well-placed to make such a perspective come alive. For instance, we learn that meat was divided up among eaters as widely as possible to diffuse the negative karmic impact of its consumption in a harsh land; the wheel was known to Tibetans, but rather than revealing them as primitive for not using it, they preferred to keep it holy by not putting it into action. The result was that beasts of burden, animal and human, had to labor instead at raw toil.

Brauen presents fairly Tibet as it was, and she does not sensationalize or preach. Still, we see in Sonam's coming of age as a refugee and then immigrant to Swiss Germany the considerable challenge she and her mother faced, let alone the determination of her "pala," her father from another distinguished family, descended from an earlier religious exile, John Calvin. Martin Brauen's work as an ethnographer, sparked by youthful encounters with the first Tibetans who settled in 1961, led to his embrace of the culture, and his own curatorial career and friendship with the Dalai Lama. (See my review of his fascinating study into Western and Tibetan depictions of this land, Dreamworld Tibet.)

Translated from German in 2011 by Katy Derbyshire, this reads as if it originated in English, and flows. Brauen is not a fancy writer, and it's not often that we get such passages as simply describing the setting of the labor camp where Tibetans had to toil breaking boulders into gravel for roads: "The endless rains transformed the paths into raging torrents, the forest floor into a damp sponge, and the grand roads into washed-out, impassable tracks." But choosing to downplay the prose may be wise. The calm precision of her language and its modest focus prevent this from digressing, even if the pace and tone remain largely muted after the Tibetan sections, with naturally more drama and tension.

What she seeks is noteworthy. "I am determined never to stop standing up for human rights and far-reaching autonomy, so that my people do not face the same destiny as the Native Americans or the Australian Aborigines--leading a tragic life as dying races of insignificant and landless folklore performers." Given my own study of how Bhutan has faced its own pressures, caught in its own Buddhist redoubt between Indian expansion, Nepalese incursion, and Tibetan-PRC threat, and my own identity as a "native Irish" student of its ancestral language and cultural remnants, I can relate.

Bruce Wagner's "The Empty Chair": Book Review

These paired novellas explore a triple significance of this titular piece of furniture. They convey, in casual, yet learned while often blunt language, the lessons learned by those who grapple with sudden departures by loved ones. Their despair, mingling with a typically Westernized, upscale variety of spiritual quest, flows through these two monologues from Americans now in their fifties, told to what we assume is a fictionalized Bruce Wagner, who claims to have "redacted" them in "the summer of 2013".

Known for scabrous satire about Hollywood's addled or addicted insiders, Mr Wagner's here explores what may be a natural if less-known milieu for him and his affluent, privileged, and erudite storytellers. His fictional narrators look to "diet Buddhism" and New Age teachings for guidance; the author himself has been a devotee of Carlos Castaneda. Therefore, he knows this type of set and setting well.

Told by a "First Guru", the unnamed narrator of the first entry over a hundred pages relates his identity as a gay man. Molested by priests in his teens, married to Kelly, who does not discriminate between men and women in her own romantic liaisons, he lives now, in a furnished van shelved with his favorite books, in Big Sur. At the time of this story's telling, in 2010, he parks himself at a Catholic hermitage. At nearby Esalen, he meets "Bruce" in a hot tub. There, he commences what will be a back-story including Ryder, the son he and Kelly created.

A self-described "motor-mouth", the narrator worships the Beats and Thomas Merton, as well as medieval mystics Julian of Norwich and Hildegard of Bingen. He shares their search, while divesting himself of Catholicism to pursue Buddhism, along with Kelly. Yet, she surpasses her husband on the road to find, in her borrowed phrase, that "impermanence rocks". For, she markets the dharma to Marin County schoolchildren by her trademarked campaign to rouse "Armies of Awareness".

Mr. Wagner as expected sends up this sort of ambition. Kelly lands a $20,000 advance from Chronicle Books "for a memoir about being a menopausal, bisexual, Berkeley-bodhisattva". The glib catch-phrases she peddles will haunt her; loss forces the couple to confront their own heartache.

"To save herself from the unbearable anguish of the present--present imperfect tense--present impermanent--Kelly had to take up residence in the future--future perfect permanent. The present, once venerated while she was an ecstatic, card-carrying member of the All-We-Have-Is-This-This-Moment! cult, had been stuffed in the recycle bin along with its jealous, immutable, implacable shadow, the past."

The narrator longs for a "teachable moment of" one's "own death: the lesson of impermanence". This may arrive, but may not come until one's last breath. This story segues, after a second introduction by Mr. Wagner, into one told to "Bruce" five years earlier, in the New Mexico desert. There, a similarly affluent and formidably confident narrator, who nicknames herself as Queenie, lives also a nomadic if even more coddled existence. She travels about "in an imposing black bus with a full staff". Sporting kohl-lined eyes, she dons gypsy dresses, "half-Zaha Hadid, half-Stevie Nicks".

Her story stretches back to 1968, when she was sixteen. She, who seems more to boast than regret having "three kinds of VD" by the age of thirteen, grows from "wild child" to "Earth Mother" as a countercultural Eloise, rootless from normal residence, brought up allowed to roam her domain. However, as with "First Guru" as designated by the one who takes down on tape their stories to transcribe, "Second Guru" cannot escape the reminders of transience despite her own charmed life.

"Think of yourself as a spelunker--join me in my nightmare, won't you?" So she invites "Bruce" in, early on, and what follows in an extended cave-diving metaphor takes up five pages. This type of expansion, characterizing both garrulous tellers, may weary those less enchanted. As Mr. Wagner warns at the start: "The 'authors' here are vessels, not virtuosos." That is, they do yammer on and on.

Such verisimilitude--even as the transcriber assures us he has edited and streamlined their revelations--can drag down the pace of both novellas, even if it convinces us that "real" people told them. This type of craft, subtle in its insistence that these stories truly happened, displays the "real" Bruce Wagner's skill in a naggingly truthful manner, masking itself as what we find around us footnoted for our consumption as increasingly "inspired by true events" or "based on a real story".

Queenie possesses awareness of her own "inspired pastiche"; portions of this as tellers fold into each other layer four times over. No wonder she compares herself, on "silly tangents", to Scheherazade. 

One difficulty for believing these stories as genuine emerges in the similar tone of both novellas, and the manner in which long-ago monologues gain precise re-creation by considerably retentive hearers. Ryder's father admits of the aftermath of the discovery he and Kelly must deal with: "O we had mourning sickness (mourning with a 'u') for sure!" Despite the "fact" that narratives by Queenie, Kura (an African-born Francophile), an Indian "Great Guru", his wife, and the Guru's successor, "The American" all elaborate the second installment, these five international and multilingual tellers do manage to sound not much different (despite what we are told is the wife's "comically fractured syntax") in diction or content. For instance, Kura laments of the wife: "O, she cast her meretricious net far and wide, tarnishing all the fishies in the sea!" These tellers regale themselves with like wit.

Mr. Wagner may be indulging in his own reminder of truth-telling and fact-checking, as he too inserts himself into the two sections as listener and editor. However, both tales do, by revealing their protagonists' dogged efforts to break free of surety, manage to sustain interest, for those possessing a compatible interest in spiritual journeys told by affable, if coddled, guides who have been there and done that. Summoned thirty years after their first meeting to reunite with Kura, Queenie's hesitation proves recognizable to any reader. She sums up herself in 1997: "A depressed, childless, perimenopausal woman, unlucky in love, with a shelf life of self-esteem long past its expiration date, I presumed I would throw off a medley of scents: potpourri of moribund pheromones, burnt adrenals and brokenheartedness."

Near the end, the significance of the title Mr. Wagner offers deepens. He began by referring to the gestalt practice where his therapist set up an empty chair for the analysand to talk to, as that space allowed a place for the patient to make more concrete his absent focus, the invisible person from the past whom he or she wanted to confront or appease. Queenie reports, in one layered conversation, how her long-sought holy man asserts "it is only the second guru that allows you to make sense of the first". Another analogy then blends the two stories, and the two gurus, in patterns that reverberate.

Mr. Wagner wisely structures the two stories to draw out the maximum potential of his metaphors. While their pace may slow, for better or worse to make it appear as if we too are listening to hours of one confessing or chortling over past triumphs and present humblings, The Empty Chair succeeds in presenting the often-caricatured or sometimes smug searches undertaken by those able to afford such quests and it convinces the patient reader that revelation may lie within the reach of the lonely pilgrim, in the pages of the devotional text, or in the conversations of the fictional characters he tells us are real. (12-26-13 to New York Journal of Books)

David Chadwick's "Thank You and OK!": Book Review

After 22 years studying with Shunryu Suzuki-- whom he'd later write very fluently about in "Crooked Cucumber" (see my July 2009 review)--Texan-turned-San Franciscan Chadwick decamps for Japan in 1988. Interspersing an account of his second marriage, to Elin, and the birth of their son there with an immediately prior stint as a practitioner at the tiny temple he calls here (names are disguised) Hogo-ji with another teacher he knew back in the U.S, the elderly Katagiri, the results aren't truly what the subtitle reckons as "an American Zen failure" there. The point that he's already spent decades sitting and that he's ordained speaks for itself. The back-and-forth twinned threads can be unsettling as one constantly veers from a monastic situation to everyday encounters in the bustling place he calls Maruyama. 

Perhaps these shifts replicate the familiar tale of a foreigner struggling to find a place in Japan. A lovely moment comes as, comforting a Filipina barmaid, she asks him as a "priest" for a blessing. She takes his hands and puts them on top of her hair. "I felt the hands of a woman who has pulled men down on her many times." (20) Twice, black butterflies will hover together to express beauty. The fearsome incursions of giant wasps and enormous centipedes Chadwick summons up well, as well as more mundane encounters. The title itself comes from a ubiquitous box of matches. As he tells his fellow monk Norman: "'Thank you' is the gratitude, the gateway to religious joy, and 'OK,' which comes from 'all correct,' represents the perfection of wisdom. This is our mantra." Of course, Norman responds that David's infected with, using his friend's favored phrase, "brain weevils." (311)

His added Zen however wobbly enables him to be more patient than many would coming to the Far East from the Far West. There's an off-kilter sense often present here. A funny anecdote about the ridiculously pedantic forms required for his driver's license, the motions assumed one has to go through even if faking it, make for a great story about a rigid system that (as when he gets his visa extended) can still be bent. Late in this series of rambling vignettes, he reflects that Katagiri was suspected on coming back to his native land from his work in America, and that Japan tries to resist outside influences. "It's pretty obvious that the extent to which foreigners suffer here is the extent to which they try to belong." (386)

The push against innovation pulls against the subtly more gentle, more humane attempts of the few monks to lighten the weight of discipline and hierarchy that impose their presence on those at Hogo-ji.  Lightly, he critiques the way (this is delineated well in the "Crooked Cucumber") that for Japanese, Zen means the stick, the pain of sitting, and the hardship endured. As for "helping anyone or offering anything accessible to the average person in terms of daily practice," he wonders what the Buddha would have thought. He doesn't delve deep into Buddhism itself, but he suggests in zazen that one's "just finding out a hint of what we are beyond our little boxes of unfolding thought." (369) 

Chadwick does not come down too hard on Japanese Zen, but as the book progresses, you sense the need for American versions to adjust to their own culture. There's a telling scene after Katagiri's ashes are returned to his native terrain: the village has lost its young to the cities and the allure of the Western-imported ways; meanwhile, Americans clad in monastic garb, half of them women, attend the funeral in the dying rural village. 

The book is marketed as humorous, and it's in a light tone that helps readability. Yet, while for me it went on far too long, it's worthwhile to a patient reader for the subtler cultural differences. These need not be sent up always as folly. Surely Chadwick with his own relative fluency in the language he diligently studies accounts for more insight than many visitors possess. (5-2-13 Amazon US)

Bernard Fauré's "The Red Thread": Book Review

From this French post-modernist professor, it's no surprise that this collection of essays (more than a seamlessly argued or tightly assembled study) roams over not only the map but the territory into his "own private" excursions and byways. Bernard Fauré warns as he introduces "The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality" that it's not systematic, and that he favors Japanese sources for their own historiographical contexts over those of India and China, unlike many Buddhist or Asian scholars who try to cover this ideological and cultural realm. The result, as he promises, is more his "own private" record of what he finds, often in the nooks and crannies of monastic proscriptions, tall tales of mystics, and transgressive parables by Zen masters (male, at least).

This does drift into engaging moments. The "two truths" theory that ultimate revelation may necessarily override fidelity to the here-and-now conventions allows wiggle room for monks (for better or worse, this book focuses on male and monastic contexts as these tend to survive down to our times as obsessing most over violations of the precepts, sacred and profane). This underlying direction--it bobs up and down, submerged by hundreds of notes which appear to have been built into a chain of associated examples more than a tight thesis--does not prevent Fauré from digressions. These may be underwhelming--much more on Bhutan's Drukpa Kinley appears to be relevant to Fauré's study than the snippet he sums up meagerly. Or, as in the Japanese poet Ikkyu, emotion emerges as we read spare verse to share his bold vision.

Ultimately, after chapters on homosexual behavior in Japanese monasteries, and tales that promote a subversive (or maybe not) male archetype, Fauré's accounts end with more a whimper than a bang. Dutiful research offers few surprises: the yin/yang oscillates as do the Two Truths. Marginal nods to Martin Luther, Alison Lurie, Borges, the classics, and clerical casuists from the Catholic tradition demonstrate his broad learning as fun or sly asides.

However, his "Afterthoughts" allude if in haste to his most intriguing interpretations. He rejects any "'pure,' atemporal, and changeless doctrine." Flexibility rules. As he anticipated in his denial of the easy trope of anticlericalism and decadent monasteries as a reliable genre for East or West, he later opens up for scrutiny a preconception of a normative Buddhism. Given the Middle Way's path between desire and non-desire, interdiction and transgression, Fauré tracks it as itself "double tracked and double edged: maintaining in principle a precarious balance between the the two extremes, yet constantly torn in practice between these two centrifugal tendencies." (279)

Feminists offer a bold alternative. Instead of awakening "as a rupture, a reversal, a social drama" as in hagiographical treatments, feminine practices "tend to insist on the progressive, nondramatic, intimate character of their religious experience." (282) He promises a follow-up volume on this subject.

Finally, what of another direction? Earlier he quotes Georges Bataille's "Eroticism" (1947, p. 42; cited p. 98): "The knowledge of eroticism, or of religion, requires a personal experience equal and contradictory, of taboo and transgression." He muses perhaps both aspects may remain in a fuller consideration of religious impact upon the realms of the red thread which connects us all by blood. (Amazon US 4-7-13)

Jason Siff's "Seeking Nibbana in Sri Lanka": Book Review

This California meditation teacher draws upon his experiences as a monk abroad as inspiration for this 2008 novel of ideas and insights pursued by Buddhist seekers. These recollected concepts, developed further if in factual format as Unlearning Meditation, circle around the difficulty of pinning down the elusive "nibbana" (nirvana in Pali spelling via Theravadin tradition of Southeast Asia). Its practitioners puzzle out if the ineffable but presumably unconditioned realm of transcendence may be if not grasped then, by a meditator, glimpsed.

Jason Siff draws you in as monks, or "bhikkhus," convene at a forest hermitage in Sri Lanka. Its long civil war recedes into the distance, as Aggachitta's renown as a meditation instructor attracts Sumana, a San Diegan come to find himself as a monk near a far different, less balmy coast. There, he finds Rahula, a "temple boy" appointed to feed the monks and care for the simple hermitage; myriad rules prohibit its monks, for instance, from even dishing out food to their confreres. This rule-bound monasticism, as we see it through newcomer Sumana, gains neither romanticized nor cynical depiction in Siff's narrative. He gives an indirect first person, largely unadorned editorial perspective, allowing each main character time to reflect and filter what transpires (much of it over only a few frenetic days, it seems) as the group grows despite itself.

Sumana rushes into his next stage: "He is certain that he wants to make an end to this round of rebirths right now, before he turns thirty, and then he can face anything in life with calm equanimity," with an unshakeable peace of mind. (4)  The monk's way of life certainly has benefits. The layfolk wait until the monks have finished praying, as the merits then accumulated for these donors of food will increase. Such calculation, with enumeration of attainments doled out by masters to students, and steps up towards heightened ranks of enlightenment, demonstrates what Theravada has become.

Aggachitta wonders, sparked by Sumana's request to learn meditation and the teacher's simple if bold response to "just sit" and then report on whatever happens, threatens to upend the system. Rather than adding up what a meditator appears to have reached on a five faculties, five-point scale, Aggachitta counters that this venerable accounting may be "nothing more than an intellectual model made up by some brilliant bhikkhu ages ago as a way to measure and assess meditative experiences without resorting to theories of divine intervention, psychic powers, or mystical revelations." (70) Although the characters here report sometimes their own lively visions and vivid sensations, they don't appear to receive them as if from above, and Siff subtly integrates his own recollective awareness process which he has developed to demonstrate the relevance of realizing the impetus for such "revelations."

This long-solo adept starts to feel crowded. The arrival of mercurial, unstable fellow "white-skinned" bhikkhu Palaparuchi, Sumana and then Rahula and his erstwhile suitor Devi fills the hermitage, along with Aggachitta's colleague Maggaphala, who tends not to be the intellectual Aggachitta, a Ph.D. before he donned his robes, strives to be, after decades in the forest pursuing a less worldly vocation. Siff introduces each of these antagonists or protagonists and we see, for instance, in the careful details afforded to the act of bathing (a repeated motif), Maggaphala's incorporation of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet, and Rahula and Devi's attempts to sort out their relationship relevant scenes from a surprisingly varied array of contexts which play off deeper concerns of the characters.

While these could provide another review's worth of content, for a short entry, I will stick to Aggachitta's quest. He leaves for a town monastery to work out, in some snatches of quiet, what troubles him about what he has taught Sumana and discussed with Maggaphala. This novel will be challenging for a reader lacking familiarity with Buddhist philosophy, but I suspect those opening these 360 pages will know the basic material already. Aggachitta grapples with detaching from a view that conventionally sees the twelve-link chain of causation leading from delusions to ignorance to liberation from constraints as a forward momentum; he proposes that delusions (in the plural) and ignorance interplay. This takes close attention, but he develops a theory that dependent arising can be observed in one's life "without taking up either the belief in rebirth or in an imperceptible rapidly changing reality" that leads to consciousness envisioned as a white thin flat panel of infinity, lacking  any support from above, no strings attached, suspended in space, "emanating from itself." (180)

Quite a challenge to convey in an accessible work of fiction. Nibbana then might be hinted at as not constructed but wordless, for how if the mind's truly empty can nibbana be built up in one's own suppositions as if present? (184) Aggachitta tries to meditate on this conundrum, to see if his idea of emptiness might match that attributed to the Buddha. "He does not know what to call it. Words can't survive here, and meanings seem to be as empty as their evanescent shells." (196) Ultimately, before he falls asleep, Aggachitta feels that he again lives and knows nibbana without any desire or derivation of it. (Maybe as elusive as trying, for Shakespeare's lovers, to truly speak of love.)

The "gap" concept of "nirodha" may help, what is glimpsed between links in the chain as they emerge and then fade, but Aggachitta figures this better conceived as a "clear space of knowing the act of knowing." (252) This is not sophistry. It's a fleeting hold on what may be permanent. "Nibbana is the path to its attainment." (263) Although unelaborated by Siff's characters (who must reflect their own cultural backgrounds and denominational affinities, after all), I've come across this phrasing before, but probably from Zen rather than in the Vipassana tradition by which they were trained and taught.

Meanwhile, it's not all speculation. We see how, in a couple of apposite chapters, various meditators undergoing their own reporting of what they ponder, and this helps show the process Siff favors in action, within the student and the master in the aftermath of recollection and recital of what's happened. This dramatizes and humanizes the material in his follow-up book which offers a non-fictional analysis of the same procedure. For, Siff keeps the story moving well, and he packs a lot of character development in a short span. Sumana finds his own interest in fellow former San Diegan Gotami, a blonde (or is it reddish-brown as a few pages apart in his own imagined or unreliably fevered recollection?) if now shaven young nun looking for her own teacher, and finding the same in Aggachitta. Palaparuchi and Maggaphala square off as age-old archetypes appear to return. Rahula and Devi must battle with their own families and their own fulfillment, and we also see how men and women in this traditional society encounter different opportunities, given long-held proprieties.

Aggachitta has the last word. A penultimate chapter wraps it up in a sylvan ending that Shakespeare himself might have liked, but the restless drive of the meditation teacher keeps the plot pushing on, even as the other characters relax and enjoy their hard-won peace. Still, I understand the riposte of Suriya, Aggachitta's brother and Rahula's father, who wonders as we may in the East or the West if his son is there only to learn another lesson: "How to get everything you need given to you?" (272)

I also append the warning of Maggaphala to Sumana and Gotami, all perhaps familiar with such gurus: "Ask those who write the books on meditation and teach to crowds, who have big centers and wealthy organizations, who do missionary work under the guise of giving people the true teaching of the Buddha, and who make a mockery of the noble path by granting attainments to practically every student who comes their way." (219) I waited for more self-criticism, or awareness such as this. A hermitage, relying on the goodness of donors, a place where men seem not to be able to treat women with full equality, and a place that prevents monks from even feeding each other directly, represents in a war-torn society a rather complex haven; like Shakespeare's retreats, one reflects on its ideals.

What perhaps Siff's own method conveys as a remedy might be how insight may be open to all of us. I was lent this by a teacher (a student of Siff's) after I responded with interest to his suggestion that liberation itself may be a construct. This always made intuitive sense to me. Lately, as an instructor in Comparative Religions, I've found that, without hints, some students have asked the same question.

The teacher Aggachitta may not go this far in his quest for meaning, for he concludes: "It is faith in something that is possible for one to attain because someone once, long ago, attained it." (311) This trust that if one man did it, so may his followers, persists. "Sati," we are told, is not the platitude or buzzword of  'mindfulness," but what's created in meditation and recollection as an imperative to break out of "samsara," the ordered world of mindfulness where all is in place, the "dana" of food and goods is delivered by laity on time, and all know their place. This subversion never overthrows the hermitage, but I wonder if a follow-up novel might do that. Although I was pleased that his characters after a hectic week wound up relieved, I ended this novel with this curiously subversive expectation.

To order or sample chapters: Seeking Nibbana. This review 10-18-23 as a bit altered to Amazon US.

Unlearning Meditation (author's website); I reviewed this 2010 study on Amazon US (7-18-10) and in different form at the New York Journal of Books (8-12-10). For more: Skillful Meditation Project

"Thomas Merton + James Laughlin: Selected Letters": Review

"One begins to wonder about this realm, then. What is being prepared for it?": so reflects Merton amidst the death of many prominent figures, on 12/7/63. The gradual shift of this Trappist monk towards re-engagement with the world's suffering, by one who in his mid-twenties sought to flee the secular temptations and to devote himself to seclusion needs no introduction; it's well-known and a fascinating study in itself. Twenty-two years had passed between his entrance into the monastery and the time he wrote these sentences to his agent and friend, the well-off, well-educated James Laughlin. He shared and furthered Merton's connections with the New York literary realm and worldwide intellectual currents that a cloister could not block off. Laughlin founded New Directions, publisher of avant-garde novelists and the modernist poets whom Merton reflected in his own verse. Merton grew increasingly confident by the mid-1950s, taking on the Cold War's military-industrial complex.

So did his essays. As this collection edited well by David D. Cooper frames, in about one-fourth of the extant correspondence between 1945 and Merton's odd, premature death in 1968, we see the independent streak in Merton endure. The initial immersion into asceticism and denial understandably shook Merton up: he fears in early letters that being on the same roster as Henry Miller (whom he resembled and later struck up a friendship with) and Jean Genet might shake up Catholics. He wondered if his own inclusion in an anthology aside Genet or such might indirectly lead some young man into homosexuality; Merton scrupulously asked Laughlin if his own works for New Directions that funded the publication of less successful authors could make him (a term I employ but he does not) what used to be called a near occasion of sin.

However, by 1956, a change comes. As the Beats and rock stimulated the culture, so Merton might have been jolted. He begins to read Buddhism and ask about Zen. He no longer signs his monastic name in the very same letter where first he raises this interest, intriguingly. Laughlin must have labored well to assist Merton in obtaining books; consider this is but one of a series of volumes where Laughlin writes at length and in depth to such as W.C. Williams, Rexroth, Schwartz, Pound, and Miller at the same time. There's an affection on the page, even as the contents tend as the years go on to fill with worries over censorship by Merton's Order, the tensions of the superpowers, the war in Vietnam, and the pull of a nurse with whom Merton fell in love in 1966 (discreetly and sensitively handled by the editor and both correspondents; an afterword includes Laughlin's letter to her, tracked down over a year after Merton's death), and Laughlin's nimble recollections of his friend.

I agree with Laughlin that once one reads Merton, however imperfect some of his verse could be, one keeps on. His voice, approachable, ironic, sensitive, intellectual, compassionate, admonitory: it expresses insight and acuity. He's intellectual without posing as an academic, a committed priest who learned to let go of the narrowness of his call in its remote setting, so as to embrace the wider community. He gently early on encourages Laughlin towards faith, reminding him how a ritual rewards the body, which needs its own satisfaction along with the tug of the mind or pull of the soul.

Ultimately, the message Merton by the mid-50s articulates places him in the progressive movement's vanguard. His list of what he reads, who he writes to, what he knows, shows his curiosity and his drive to not cut any ties with society even as he seeks a hermitage to retreat to within the monastery's expanse. This energy, as he burrows down there in Kentucky even as he travels now and then before his final journey to Asia, compels him, and the need to resort to a mimeographed form of transmitting what the Order feared when they stopped him from publishing in print political anti-war, anti-nuclear content demonstrates his decision to address the "pestilence" of a dark time as a priest who had to act.

One passage stands out. On 11/26/63, Merton tells of the reaction in the monastery to JFK's murder. While he sympathizes with his family, he feels "more sorry for the national dance of death." That is, he reminds Laughlin of what I have never before seen publicized. The speech to have been delivered by Kennedy in Dallas was read in the monastic refectory. It's a "symptom of our whole condition," and revealing. "Strange thing: he lists all the increase in our weapons, missiles, bombs, polaris submarines etc. etc., and after doing so says that this would put a stop to any sinister plans of aggressors and.  .  . assassins. With all those missiles and submarines, all it took to do him in was a rifle and two bullets--one extra for the Governor of Texas." (234) Merton suggests this "angle" has "unconsciously unnerved people" and it unsettled me when I read his take on this mythic event. As far removed as he was from the non-stop media coverage that blanketed the nation then, he pinpoints the larger problem, and he refuses to idolize one who after all was responsible for some of the violence. One again sees the boldness of Merton's vision, and why he remained outspoken in his wisdom in a confusing age: he helped some of us react to it differently than did more popular media.

The contents show Laughlin's support and Merton's quest as it unfolds over more than twenty years. True, it's necessarily bogged down sometimes with details about what to print next, what needs editing, who wrote what, but this shows the passion with which Merton and Laughlin sustained their mutual support to connect him with a readership that at New Directions might not otherwise be open (then or now) to reading a Catholic convert's works. I also noticed how publications did not accept all of his articles or poems after his fame; you do get the sense Merton produced an enormous amount, and he seems to have an eye on practically publishing it all, even if not all of it during his lifetime.

Merton grows up to accept his burdens that he thought once might be relieved of him as a monk. He takes on more, willingly, and while he chafes at some of his adopted home's strictures, he loves the place and you read this collection understanding how he depended upon Laughlin to negotiate his intellectual journey as his mediator and yearly visitor, who enabled Merton to find us as his audience. Navigating between solitude and engagement, isolation and intimacy, Merton's again worth reading.
(Amazon US 5-18-13)

Matthieu Ricard's "Bhutan: the Land of Serenity": Book Review

Unlike other photo narratives on this often mythologized kingdom, this one from a practicing monk takes a sober, almost detached approach that reveals his calm. After a decade in the company of the Dalai Lama's tutor there, Tibetan refugee Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, and now the Dalai Lama's French translator himself, French-born Ricard brings the same considered evaluation of Buddhist practice and culture that his sponsorship and appearance in the films Brilliant Moon and The Spirit of Tibet (see my Dec. 2012 reviews) demonstrate about his devotion to his mentors. What this has to do with Bhutan as a larger entity comes across more gradually, and the brief three pages introducing each of these eight sections of his brilliantly reproduced color photography, 1980-2007, convey this more vividly than the miniscule font (too small, let alone the captions even smaller) do in this admittedly handsome, compact text, translated by Ruth Sharman.

About half of this content in words and images features or complements the surroundings of his dharma teacher in Bhutan. This complements Ricard's other treatments of him; it means that much of the photography documents monasticism and ceremonies around its operations. As for the country, this is not the best introduction, as no reading list, no map, and very little background is given about the region. The urbanization of many Bhutanese and the complications of modernization are barely glanced at. Intentionally, no doubt, but readers may want to consult other titles as well.

The typeface is as noted tiny and may not be legible for some readers. The book is elegantly laid out, but rather small. You get much less attention to the natural landscape and everyday people, although some stunning depictions of scenery (not only the expected panoramic vistas--one of Everest on the plane's way from Kathmandu to Paro--but abstracted patterns in reflected water) introduce the terse overview of the nation and its situation as the last Tantric Buddhist realm.

Taksang, the cover's Tiger's Lair, endures as the iconic image of the land, and its chapter shows it as before and then restored after the fire of 1998: it looks splendid in both incarnations. Sacred architecture and crafts show the incorporation of the spiritual landscape into art and costume, the Great Accomplishment ceremony, the intricate movements of dance and the composed presence of ritual. Ricard observes the "clear" lesson exemplifed by such as the Trongsar five-day festival dramatizing the message of Buddhism: "we are the architects of our own being." (153) 

While Ricard does not delve into his own manner of entry into such situations, one may assume his own position allows him a privileged status and a rare insider's perspective that allows him to bridge Himalayan contexts and Western expectations of what such mysterious presentations of Buddhism mean. Bhutan here shimmers more in its less commonly depicted textiles, paintings, and decorations that grace the inside walls of places perhaps prohibited to tourists, and his combination of exterior and interior illustrations works well to provide a Buddhist point of view. (Amazon US 1-13-12)