alt="" src="https://www.servicespace.org/inc/ckfinder/userfiles/images/conv/Patmos__gs.jpg" style="border-style:solid; border-width:1px; float:left; height:495px; margin:7px; width:700px" />It’s like what we’re all called to do, to enter our own inner dimension and come back with gifts to share with others. Over at the GTU one of the buildings has these words on it: “Enter, Seek, Find, Go Forth, and Give.” That’s the whole mission of life, really.
RW: You’re bringing this to life in a beautiful way and I feel Robert Lax in your descriptions.
SG: Well, he had a lot of disciples—or friends, as you might call them. Sure, he knew that he had these things—disciples, a hermitage, wisdom, but he didn’t like inflated words. He never promoted himself. He’d bring books, articles, old editions of things down to the dock and sit there next to you and open something up. And it would be like a genesis.
RW: That’s just so wonderful, someone who has the capacity to do that.
SG: Right. And then there was the cloth bag he always carried when we took a walk. It might sound self-centered, but during one of our summer wrap-ups, I asked him, “Hey, can I have one of those bags?”
“Sure," he said, "You can have this one," an old bag made of denim.
And I still have it, all beaten up. His father was a clothier and so he knew about the value of clothes. But a lot of what he had was given to him. Basically, he lived on people’s generosity. I might see him wearing a pair of bright blue Alaskan canner pants and a Chinese-looking hat with tassel cords. He favored things that were rough-cut and spoke of life-immersion.
RW: In your book, it’s said that Lax didn’t worry about getting recognition. He gave himself over to allowing something else to take care of such things. I was touched by that.
SG: Yes. I don’t think he wrote to be recognized. There’s a funny story about him when he was at the New Yorker. One of the editors next to his office was quite well-known. And he kept hearing Lax banging away on his typewriter. He started thinking, “This guy is going to become the next genius, and here I am with writer’s block!”
But it was Lax who also had writer’s block. He was just banging away on his typewriter in nonsensical fashion, thinking it might help. I suspect he had writer’s block because he was in the concrete jungle. But getting back to what you’re were saying, he didn’t want to get involved in that self-promotional world. He saw how people’s psyches could be entirely changed by it. He said, “If I just trust in my gift and the Source from which it came, then everything somehow will be okay.”
Along the way, Lax's writings gradually made it into print. People might find his poems in magazines or published by very small presses. Beginning in the 1980s, Pendo Press in Zurich published numerous English-German bilingual editions featuring his poems and journals. Only in the 1990s did anthologies of his poetry emerge. Interestingly, some readers somehow felt guided to his work.
RW: It’s curious that in his college years, he was friends with a bunch of people who did become very well-known. Do you think he knew Ginsberg and Kerouac?
SG: Yes, he knew about that circle of writers. Ginsberg and he had some correspondence. He was also a kind of mentor to the young Jack Kerouac.
RW: I associate Columbia University with Daisetsu Suzuki and I wonder if Lax knew Suzuki? I think Kerouac and Ginsberg took courses from him.
SG: He knew about him, partly because Merton and Lax exchanged letters since college.
RW: Now there was an amazing episode in Lax’s life where he joined a circus. Could you talk a little about that?
SG: It was a circus in Western Canada. He learned to be a juggler and he also filled in as a clown.
RW: So he was actually performing.
SG: Yes. He had a lot of performance artists surrounding him and saw how play, prayer, poetry, drama—well, it’s all about human expression, which could have kind of a divine quality and/or direction to it as well. I believe he met the Circus Cristiani as part of a writing assignment. That’s interesting, too, the name "Cristiani" being “Christ-like,” and God being like a great ringmaster. Everything revolves around the Divine, and in many ways, circus performances are kind of doing that. We’re all like acrobats, in a way, or clowns, or whatever we are; we’re all important characters in this great orchestration of what life is about.
RW: This grand circus.
SG: Grand circus, right. In a way, Patmos was like that, too, with the towering monastery in the island's center, and all the participants—monks, fishermen, farmers, shopkeepers—all circling the sun, or the Son.
Lax's first great poem is Circus of the Sun, published in 1959 by Journeyman Press, a fine example of his pre-minimalist contemplative style. Everything is revolving around the sun, or higher consciousness, and we’re all called to participate. There’s also Mogador’s Book, which is based on an acrobat he met in his circus days, a wise, beautiful man.
Bob writes of how when circus performers do their acts—just like when poets write poetry, or musicians play music—the important thing is, as he wrote in Circus of the Sun, "It is like a wind that surrounds me, a dark cloud, and I am in it, and it belongs to me, and gives me the power to do these things." And that’s the magic spirit-space that people can feel with heart-feeling, through acts of love, really, which makes everything go in the first place.
I'm teaching world religions over at SF City College, and we arrange the chairs in a circle. One of my students brings bagels in for everybody and it's perfect because the most important part of a bagel is what? That mystical nothing in the center. It gives definition to what we can tangibly move toward—that mysterious emptiness that holds up everything.
RW: That gets back to Lax’s poem about the emptiness that can be like a fountain.
SG: It is, if you are truly awake, receptive.
RW: It sounds like a negative thing, “empty,” but I think something like this is in all the mystical traditions.
SG: Exactly. They say in the East that what is empty is actually full, because it is on the "empty space" that everything depends. It’s like what Lax writes in one of his Circus poems. He’s saying we subtract and subtract until nothing is left that we can subtract from. That’s the foundation of all things; it is the fountain.
In one poem he’s talking to his friend Mogador, the circus performer, about talking. “It was good,” Mogador said, “to talk thus. Whatever is withheld is lost. Whatever we give away, whatever we throw away, what we disburden ourselves of, is profit to us. We keep giving things away, throwing them out like old chairs out of a house. Keep destroying, until we can destroy no more, because what is left is indestructible.”
In our busy society, nobody is pointing to this, and people can go mad from its lack because they find no space in which to live or dream.
RW: I think people are not aware of what they’re despairing the lack of and I suspect there’s a lot of hidden despair.
SG: Indeed.
RW: But if something of that deeper possibility is glimpsed one recognizes instantly, “This is what I want.”
SG: Right.
RW: It’s interesting to think about what you might have missed if you’d Googled Robert Lax before you met him.
SG: Yes. The way it happened—I just had to go back and talk to him more because, Why did I feel these things? Why was the room resonating? Here was a man eighty years old and yet it felt like he was a child with the open smile and bright eyes, the laugh and a grace beyond what you can prepare for.
Merton used to say, “become like a chip on the water and the waters take you where you go.” There’s a whole art in getting that chip to float down the river. Nobody can make that happen; it happens because you trust in something greater, you put yourself in concert with a bigger symphony and give it your all. Increasingly, wherever Lax went as he got older, he simply said, in effect, “God will provide. Let go, let God.”
When the young Lax was in Marseilles the first time, he saw that the area around the docks where he was living was full of bums. It wasn’t like Paris. But years later, he decided to return to Marseilles to face his earlier uneasiness and fears. He got a place in a down and out area and invited street people to live with him in a very cramped space. So he was walking his talk.
RW: What a gift that you met Lax. And you felt something that compelled you to see him more often.
SG: Yes, I came back to Patmos numerous summers to be with him.
RW: Switching gears a little, I’d like to ask you to talk about your Augustine book. Was that your first book?
SG: Actually, it was based on my M.A. thesis; I developed it into a book.
RW: Okay. What was the idea there?
SG: Well, I was drawn to Augustine from reading his Confessions. I was moved because of his eloquence and yet down-to-earth descriptions of a struggling soul. Of course, his being a playboy before becoming a man of God was also interesting.
I saw, as I was reading, how there’s a journey of light in the book that drew from both pagan and Christian traditions—his father was pagan, his mother, Christian. Early on there were Greek philosophical and Neoplatonic influences. And there were many biblical images of light, symbolic of the divine. So I tried to follow Augustine’s growth in terms of light, particularly light in a dark age, when the late Roman Empire was in decline. It was called an "Age of Anxiety." Things were falling apart and in metaphysical fashion he was trying to liberate himself from that. That’s what I remember from that book just now; it's been a while.
And in terms of the Christian perspective, Jesus says, “I am the light of the world.” There’s something resurrecting about that. I mean, I've had many a dark night of the soul, and then, when the light comes—even just ordinary sunlight—you really feel that there’s a way out.
RW: Some time ago I was thinking about the earth as it was before there was life on the planet, and the sun out there 93 million miles away radiating light across that vast distance. And now here we are with trees, plants, animals, insects—life on earth. It was the sun’s radiation across empty space that created life. Suddenly I felt something of the mystery of that, and it just blew my mind.
SG: It sounds like when things are in sync, everything is traveling at the speed of spiritual photosynthesis.
RW: I like the sound of that!
SG: Yes, everything is called to spiritually photosynthesize. Things are called to wake up and see the light, and to work with it together, because nothing, nobody can do it alone.
In his journals, Lax liked to talk about going to the ocean, to the shoreline where he would think about his friends. Essentially, something higher was generated there, something created together. We have to go back to that place, that unknown space, and give honor to each other, he would say.
In one of his poetic reflections, he writes, “I remember the people I loved who have died, or have just disappeared, remember their traits as though it were a sacred duty. What possible use for all those memories unless we are somehow to meet again?
We really don’t know why things happen in life or how it'll all come together. I think one of our great challenges is to work our way through the dark nights, and wake up to the spiritual energy which is around us. When we let unnecessary things go, meaning our egos, inhibitions and fears, when we just wake up, once we’re there, we'll consciously participate in something greater.
Lax used to tell me, “All that metaphysical stuff is cool, but when you end up getting into a dark night, what do you do then? You go out and you give a bowl of soup to somebody. Forget about the other stuff. Just go out and give someone a bowl of soup.”
RW: You’re bringing this to life in a beautiful way and I feel Robert Lax in your descriptions.
SG: Well, he had a lot of disciples—or friends, as you might call them. Sure, he knew that he had these things—disciples, a hermitage, wisdom, but he didn’t like inflated words. He never promoted himself. He’d bring books, articles, old editions of things down to the dock and sit there next to you and open something up. And it would be like a genesis.
RW: That’s just so wonderful, someone who has the capacity to do that.
SG: Right. And then there was the cloth bag he always carried when we took a walk. It might sound self-centered, but during one of our summer wrap-ups, I asked him, “Hey, can I have one of those bags?”
“Sure," he said, "You can have this one," an old bag made of denim.
And I still have it, all beaten up. His father was a clothier and so he knew about the value of clothes. But a lot of what he had was given to him. Basically, he lived on people’s generosity. I might see him wearing a pair of bright blue Alaskan canner pants and a Chinese-looking hat with tassel cords. He favored things that were rough-cut and spoke of life-immersion.
RW: In your book, it’s said that Lax didn’t worry about getting recognition. He gave himself over to allowing something else to take care of such things. I was touched by that.
SG: Yes. I don’t think he wrote to be recognized. There’s a funny story about him when he was at the New Yorker. One of the editors next to his office was quite well-known. And he kept hearing Lax banging away on his typewriter. He started thinking, “This guy is going to become the next genius, and here I am with writer’s block!”
But it was Lax who also had writer’s block. He was just banging away on his typewriter in nonsensical fashion, thinking it might help. I suspect he had writer’s block because he was in the concrete jungle. But getting back to what you’re were saying, he didn’t want to get involved in that self-promotional world. He saw how people’s psyches could be entirely changed by it. He said, “If I just trust in my gift and the Source from which it came, then everything somehow will be okay.”
Along the way, Lax's writings gradually made it into print. People might find his poems in magazines or published by very small presses. Beginning in the 1980s, Pendo Press in Zurich published numerous English-German bilingual editions featuring his poems and journals. Only in the 1990s did anthologies of his poetry emerge. Interestingly, some readers somehow felt guided to his work.
RW: It’s curious that in his college years, he was friends with a bunch of people who did become very well-known. Do you think he knew Ginsberg and Kerouac?
SG: Yes, he knew about that circle of writers. Ginsberg and he had some correspondence. He was also a kind of mentor to the young Jack Kerouac.
RW: I associate Columbia University with Daisetsu Suzuki and I wonder if Lax knew Suzuki? I think Kerouac and Ginsberg took courses from him.
SG: He knew about him, partly because Merton and Lax exchanged letters since college.
RW: Now there was an amazing episode in Lax’s life where he joined a circus. Could you talk a little about that?
SG: It was a circus in Western Canada. He learned to be a juggler and he also filled in as a clown.
RW: So he was actually performing.
SG: Yes. He had a lot of performance artists surrounding him and saw how play, prayer, poetry, drama—well, it’s all about human expression, which could have kind of a divine quality and/or direction to it as well. I believe he met the Circus Cristiani as part of a writing assignment. That’s interesting, too, the name "Cristiani" being “Christ-like,” and God being like a great ringmaster. Everything revolves around the Divine, and in many ways, circus performances are kind of doing that. We’re all like acrobats, in a way, or clowns, or whatever we are; we’re all important characters in this great orchestration of what life is about.
RW: This grand circus.
SG: Grand circus, right. In a way, Patmos was like that, too, with the towering monastery in the island's center, and all the participants—monks, fishermen, farmers, shopkeepers—all circling the sun, or the Son.
Lax's first great poem is Circus of the Sun, published in 1959 by Journeyman Press, a fine example of his pre-minimalist contemplative style. Everything is revolving around the sun, or higher consciousness, and we’re all called to participate. There’s also Mogador’s Book, which is based on an acrobat he met in his circus days, a wise, beautiful man.
Bob writes of how when circus performers do their acts—just like when poets write poetry, or musicians play music—the important thing is, as he wrote in Circus of the Sun, "It is like a wind that surrounds me, a dark cloud, and I am in it, and it belongs to me, and gives me the power to do these things." And that’s the magic spirit-space that people can feel with heart-feeling, through acts of love, really, which makes everything go in the first place.
I'm teaching world religions over at SF City College, and we arrange the chairs in a circle. One of my students brings bagels in for everybody and it's perfect because the most important part of a bagel is what? That mystical nothing in the center. It gives definition to what we can tangibly move toward—that mysterious emptiness that holds up everything.
RW: That gets back to Lax’s poem about the emptiness that can be like a fountain.
SG: It is, if you are truly awake, receptive.
RW: It sounds like a negative thing, “empty,” but I think something like this is in all the mystical traditions.
SG: Exactly. They say in the East that what is empty is actually full, because it is on the "empty space" that everything depends. It’s like what Lax writes in one of his Circus poems. He’s saying we subtract and subtract until nothing is left that we can subtract from. That’s the foundation of all things; it is the fountain.
In one poem he’s talking to his friend Mogador, the circus performer, about talking. “It was good,” Mogador said, “to talk thus. Whatever is withheld is lost. Whatever we give away, whatever we throw away, what we disburden ourselves of, is profit to us. We keep giving things away, throwing them out like old chairs out of a house. Keep destroying, until we can destroy no more, because what is left is indestructible.”
In our busy society, nobody is pointing to this, and people can go mad from its lack because they find no space in which to live or dream.
RW: I think people are not aware of what they’re despairing the lack of and I suspect there’s a lot of hidden despair.
SG: Indeed.
RW: But if something of that deeper possibility is glimpsed one recognizes instantly, “This is what I want.”
SG: Right.
RW: It’s interesting to think about what you might have missed if you’d Googled Robert Lax before you met him.
SG: Yes. The way it happened—I just had to go back and talk to him more because, Why did I feel these things? Why was the room resonating? Here was a man eighty years old and yet it felt like he was a child with the open smile and bright eyes, the laugh and a grace beyond what you can prepare for.
Merton used to say, “become like a chip on the water and the waters take you where you go.” There’s a whole art in getting that chip to float down the river. Nobody can make that happen; it happens because you trust in something greater, you put yourself in concert with a bigger symphony and give it your all. Increasingly, wherever Lax went as he got older, he simply said, in effect, “God will provide. Let go, let God.”
When the young Lax was in Marseilles the first time, he saw that the area around the docks where he was living was full of bums. It wasn’t like Paris. But years later, he decided to return to Marseilles to face his earlier uneasiness and fears. He got a place in a down and out area and invited street people to live with him in a very cramped space. So he was walking his talk.
RW: What a gift that you met Lax. And you felt something that compelled you to see him more often.
SG: Yes, I came back to Patmos numerous summers to be with him.
RW: Switching gears a little, I’d like to ask you to talk about your Augustine book. Was that your first book?
SG: Actually, it was based on my M.A. thesis; I developed it into a book.
RW: Okay. What was the idea there?
SG: Well, I was drawn to Augustine from reading his Confessions. I was moved because of his eloquence and yet down-to-earth descriptions of a struggling soul. Of course, his being a playboy before becoming a man of God was also interesting.
I saw, as I was reading, how there’s a journey of light in the book that drew from both pagan and Christian traditions—his father was pagan, his mother, Christian. Early on there were Greek philosophical and Neoplatonic influences. And there were many biblical images of light, symbolic of the divine. So I tried to follow Augustine’s growth in terms of light, particularly light in a dark age, when the late Roman Empire was in decline. It was called an "Age of Anxiety." Things were falling apart and in metaphysical fashion he was trying to liberate himself from that. That’s what I remember from that book just now; it's been a while.
And in terms of the Christian perspective, Jesus says, “I am the light of the world.” There’s something resurrecting about that. I mean, I've had many a dark night of the soul, and then, when the light comes—even just ordinary sunlight—you really feel that there’s a way out.
RW: Some time ago I was thinking about the earth as it was before there was life on the planet, and the sun out there 93 million miles away radiating light across that vast distance. And now here we are with trees, plants, animals, insects—life on earth. It was the sun’s radiation across empty space that created life. Suddenly I felt something of the mystery of that, and it just blew my mind.
SG: It sounds like when things are in sync, everything is traveling at the speed of spiritual photosynthesis.
RW: I like the sound of that!
SG: Yes, everything is called to spiritually photosynthesize. Things are called to wake up and see the light, and to work with it together, because nothing, nobody can do it alone.
In his journals, Lax liked to talk about going to the ocean, to the shoreline where he would think about his friends. Essentially, something higher was generated there, something created together. We have to go back to that place, that unknown space, and give honor to each other, he would say.
In one of his poetic reflections, he writes, “I remember the people I loved who have died, or have just disappeared, remember their traits as though it were a sacred duty. What possible use for all those memories unless we are somehow to meet again?
We really don’t know why things happen in life or how it'll all come together. I think one of our great challenges is to work our way through the dark nights, and wake up to the spiritual energy which is around us. When we let unnecessary things go, meaning our egos, inhibitions and fears, when we just wake up, once we’re there, we'll consciously participate in something greater.
Lax used to tell me, “All that metaphysical stuff is cool, but when you end up getting into a dark night, what do you do then? You go out and you give a bowl of soup to somebody. Forget about the other stuff. Just go out and give someone a bowl of soup.”
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Beautiful, and what prompted Richard Rohr to write Immortal Diamond. }:- ❤️