Angelic Mistakes: The Art of Thomas Merton

by Roger Lipsey, Paul M. Pearson (Preface)

In the last decade of his life, while living as a hermit-monk in dialogue with the world, Thomas Merton created a body of visual art that has remained largely unknown and little studied in the nearly forty years since his death. With this book, Merton's art at last moves out of the shadows to be appreciated for what it a revealing expression of his state of mind and heart in the 1960s, and a visual correlative to his mature works of spiritual writing such as New Seeds of Contemplation and Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander . Roger Lipsey provides a fascinating analysis of the simple and striking images and their significance in Merton's journey. He find in them resonances with Asian calligraphy and American abstract expressionism, and relates them to the influence of Merton's wide circle of friends, which included such diverse figures as the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, the poet Czeslaw Milosz, the Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki, and the artist Ad Reinhardt—among many others.

But the centerpiece of the book is the art itself, presented in a portfolio of thirty-four representative pieces that reflect the changing themes and methods of Merton's work. Each is accompanied by selections from his writings from the 1960s that reflect the inward and outward territories Merton was exploring in the period when these remarkable images were created.

Genres: Spirituality, Art, Nonfiction

197 pages, Hardcover

First published April 18, 2006

Reviews

[Wendelle]

browsed. interesting views of a hermit-monk-- fusion of Christianity and Chinese beliefs. it is thought-inducing to see a life devoted to the pure pursuit of an ideal.

[A.E. Reiff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Merton printed off of scrap paper. He lifted monotypes with the pressure of his hand with the vow of poverty, printed collages from stamped mailing envelopes with stiff inked paper and grass stems, wood veneers, green alfalfa, mustard or sienna sage (36), using Higgins India Ink. He made "drawings for us by dipping weeds in ink and slapping them onto a sheet of typing paper" says Guy Davenport, visiting with Gene Meatyard, who photographed Berry's Unforeseen Wilderness.

This spare aesthetic links with his love of the Shakers. For Merton each outing is an adventure: "Gabriel Marcel says that the artist who labors to produce effects for which he is well known is unfaithful to himself" (41). "The images are not 'mine' nor are they those of a particular artist." "I make the fastest calligraphic paintings in the world, twenty nine a second" (40) which really means "drawings brushed onto textured surfaces [of:] images far different from the source drawing, more aerated and porous, with the potential for velvety textures and minute, vanishing detail" (41).

Imagine what happens if this aesthetic is translated to writing. To Merton, "the proper life of a flexible instrument cannot be well ordered. It has to be terribly free. And utterly responsive to a darkly, dimly understood command" (18). His translation of The Way of Chuang Tzu (1965) is evidence of an earlier understanding, he "knows where he is going, but is not 'sure of his way,' he just knows by going there. He does not see the way beforehand, and when he arrives he arrives. His arrivals are usually departures from anything that resembles a 'way' (33).

This is like Eliot hiding in tradition and Shakespeare behind his masks, suggests impersonality, what Merton calls self-emptying, vanishing, a perequisite of the underlying unity, praising praise, thanks to the thanker "transferred in a flash, by a few brush strokes...not a representation of anything, but rather it is the subject itself"(40). He doesn't say writing is like this, someone else does. The idiots called it disconnected narrative, but the "images that are not mine, nor are they those of a particular artist" (41), but "collaborations with some force or shaper of outcomes other than himself.' So "the perfect act is empty," [but there is none:], "the images are drawings of, they are summonses to awareness," but "not to awareness of," "signatures of someone who is not around" (42,3), even if his language is judicial and he talks a lot, even if saying anything at all about any of this is imprudent, instead of just doing it. But it takes the wine a lot longer to mature in the barrel than the impatience to drink.

The only mistake is that the editor juxtaposes anthologies of Merton's writings to the other side of the prints on the verso of the page. These can be ignored.

What can't be ignored is the process, as Kafka says of his drawings, they "aren't drawings to be shown to anyone. They are purely personal, and therefore illegible hieroglyphs...my figures have no proper spatial proportion. They have no horizon of their own. The perspective of the shapes I try to capture lies outside the paper, at the other unsharpened end of my pencil--in myself" (Claude Gandleman,(http://www.springerlink.com/content/j...).

[Edward · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first came across Merton's "calligraphies" in raids on the Unspeakable and was taken by their elusiveness but odd intimacy. Roger Lipsey does a fine job tracing Merton's motives and working methods as well as putting him into a context of his times and among artists. Well-written and interesting, the text yields easily to the images which are eloquent in their silence.

[Maria Lancaster]

I loved this book of ink drawings combined with sayings of Thomas Merton.

[Diane McPhail · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very zen. Beautiful vision.