The last weekend in January, a few artmonks gathered at a private home in Kenginston, CA, to experiment with a new form of the Artmonk Retreat. The idea was to share silence and contemplation and from that space collaborate on a shared project: creating a recording. This concept was developed within the context of the first Art Monastic Cycle: Death, darkness, no-form, the void, the mystery. As such we practiced the Vigils service each night, singing Gregorian chant at midnight. More to come on this fruitful time!

On Saturday, February 18, in the Diego Rivera Gallery of the San Francisco Art Institute (800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco), the Artmonks will perform a concert that is the culmination of an 8-day meditation retreat. During this week these artists will have been diving in deeply together, mostly in silence, marking the beginning and ending of each day with Gregorian chant. We look forward to inviting you in to our “dropped in” state, sharing with you the music that unites us all.

Last year’s concert, held at the Integratron in southern California, brought numerous folks — both audience members and performers — to tears. There is something magical that happens when a group of people sits in meditation together, and these concerts illustrate that aurally. Please enjoy this video from the Artmonk Retreat Concert 2011.

Contemplation cannot construct a new world by itself. Contemplation does not feed the hungry; it does not clothe the naked… and it does not return the sinner to peace, truth, and union with God. But without contemplation we cannot see what we do… Without contemplation we cannot understand the significance of the world in which we must act. Without contemplation we remain small, limited, divided, partial; we adhere to the insufficient, permanently united to our narrow group and its interests, losing sight of justice and charity, seized by the passions of the moments… Without contemplation, without the intimate, silent, secret pursuit of truth through love, our action loses itself in the world and becomes dangerous.

Thomas Merton, in the introduction to the Spanish language edition to his complete works:

Contemplation cannot construct a new world by itself. Contemplation does not feed the hungry; it does not clothe the naked… and it does not return the sinner to peace, truth, and union with God. But without contemplation we cannot see what we do… Without contemplation we cannot understand the significance of the world in which we must act. Without contemplation we remain small, limited, divided, partial; we adhere to the insufficient, permanently united to our narrow group and its interests, losing sight of justice and charity, seized by the passions of the moments… Without contemplation, without the intimate, silent, secret pursuit of truth through love, our action loses itself in the world and becomes dangerous.

The passion and devotion Matson offers in his poetry really captured my attention, though. And I’m a sucker for the old mystics.

The winning comment:

Nathan and Christine,

Thank you for this wonderful podcast. It was good for me to hear the effect that being a Benedictine oblate has had on Christine’s artistic practice, as I am considering oblation myself.

In support of contemplation bearing fruit in artistic creation (as in a motto of the Dominican Order, “to contemplate and to share the fruits of contemplation”), I thought I’d share with you a couple of the poems that arose out of a recent Ignatian silent retreat, after I had been reading John of the Cross and Lady Julian of Norwich.

“For John of the Cross”

Lord, let me love You
with the flame of ten thousand fires.

Let me love You
with a flame that dries and crackles,

burns and blackens the crust of my soul,
hides deep down in the heart of things,

to warm and beat,
flickering forth with tongues of fire

to burst through the shell of my cindered soul,
and leap to dance as love again.

Lord, make me all flame.

“For Lady Julian”

Lord, teach me to love my weaknesses
as Lady Julian loved hers,
seeing that the soiled, torn stain of our sins
blackening the white cloth of our humanity
was such a little nothing
because that cloth was worn by Christ,
who picked us up out of the Pit
and sat us next to Him at table,
with His Father and His Spirit,
all of us dazzling white,
with the wounds we ripped into our flesh
shining scars praising God’s glory,
His merciful meaning: ‘Love’.

Blessings on your work.

Cole

Runners up

I loved this, from Greene Fyre, via facebook:

To oblate in clarity, nor obtuse. To endeavor obscurity: a recluse? Divining the divine: propinquity. A pursuit sublime from antiquity.

Thanks also to Donelda Seymore, Genora W. Powell, Jaqui du Rocher, Jann Durkin and many others for your thoughtful reflections.

Contact nathan@artmonastery.org if you’re interested in joining our Artmonk Reading Group, where we’re about to go through The Artist’s Rule together.For his comment on Otherhood Podcast: Episode 1 with Christine Valters Paintner, Cole Matson is hereby awarded a copy of Paintner’s book, “The Artist’s Rule.” The comments were all great, and the decision was a hard one.

The passion and devotion Matson offers in his poetry really captured my attention, though. And I’m a sucker for the old mystics.

The winning comment:

Nathan and Christine,

Thank you for this wonderful podcast. It was good for me to hear the effect that being a Benedictine oblate has had on Christine’s artistic practice, as I am considering oblation myself.

In support of contemplation bearing fruit in artistic creation (as in a motto of the Dominican Order, “to contemplate and to share the fruits of contemplation”), I thought I’d share with you a couple of the poems that arose out of a recent Ignatian silent retreat, after I had been reading John of the Cross and Lady Julian of Norwich.

“For John of the Cross”

Lord, let me love You
with the flame of ten thousand fires.

Let me love You
with a flame that dries and crackles,

burns and blackens the crust of my soul,
hides deep down in the heart of things,

to warm and beat,
flickering forth with tongues of fire

to burst through the shell of my cindered soul,
and leap to dance as love again.

Lord, make me all flame.

“For Lady Julian”

Lord, teach me to love my weaknesses
as Lady Julian loved hers,
seeing that the soiled, torn stain of our sins
blackening the white cloth of our humanity
was such a little nothing
because that cloth was worn by Christ,
who picked us up out of the Pit
and sat us next to Him at table,
with His Father and His Spirit,
all of us dazzling white,
with the wounds we ripped into our flesh
shining scars praising God’s glory,
His merciful meaning: ‘Love’.

Blessings on your work.

Cole

Runners up

I loved this, from Greene Fyre, via facebook:

To oblate in clarity, nor obtuse. To endeavor obscurity: a recluse? Divining the divine: propinquity. A pursuit sublime from antiquity.

Thanks also to Donelda Seymore, Genora W. Powell, Jaqui du Rocher, Jann Durkin and many others for your thoughtful reflections.

Contact nathan@artmonastery.org if you’re interested in joining our Artmonk Reading Group, where we’re about to go through The Artist’s Rule together.

“The mercy of truth – it is to be truth.”

In reading Paul Auster’s fantastic collection of essays, The Art of Hunger, I came across Truth, Beauty, Silence, a stunning look at Laura Riding’s life and work. As the poets she influenced (Auden, Ashbery, etc.) are among my favorites, I have read a little of her work before, but Auster’s take has compelled me to look again at this enigmatic artmonk.

“The World And I”, by Laura (Riding) Jackson:

This is not exactly what I mean
Any more than the sun is the sun.
But how to mean more closely
If the sun shines but approximately?
What a world of awkwardness!
What hostile implements of sense!
Perhaps this is as close a meaning
As perhaps becomes such knowing.
Else I think the world and I
Must live together as strangers and die—
A sour love, each doubtful whether
Was ever a thing to love the other.
No, better for both to be nearly sure
Each of each—exactly where
Exactly I and exactly the world
Fail to meet by a moment, and a word.

Riding was prolific from the early 1920′s until 1938, at which point she reached, in her words, “a crisis point at which division between craft and creed reveals itself to be absolute.” She then abandoned poetry to pursue truth elsewise. A prose work published in 1967 called “The Telling” gives us an impression of what it was she had pursued in poetry that she felt she had to renounce poetry to attain.

There is something to be told about us for the telling of which we all wait. In our unwilling ignorance we hurry to listen to stories of old human life, new human life, fancied human life, avid of something to while away the time of unanswered curiosity. We know we are explainable, and not explained. Many of the lesser things concerning us have been told but the greater things have not been told; and nothing can fill their place. Whatever we learn of what is not ourselves, but ours to know, being of our universal world, will likewise leave the emptiness an emptiness. Until the missing story of ourselves is told, nothing besides told can suffice us: we shall go on quietly craving it.

Elsewhere she writes:

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth…But only a problem of art is solved in poetry. Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth. Poetic art cheats truth to further and finer degrees than art of any other kind because the spoken word is its exclusive medium…

There might be a Laura Riding a the heart of every art monastery. Someone for whom the questions of art and truth are primary (e.g. “What is the value of art?”, “Is art perhaps not just a distraction from truth?”, “To make art, or not to make art? To make art or to wake up?”) would act as a necessary force of challenge to the art being made. Of course, also at the heart of every art monastery are artmonks for whom those questions are resolved already, as well as artmonks for whom there are no questions of art at all, for who there is only the making of art.

In order to make art that is art monastic art, and to make it better and better, each of these artmonk archetypes is important.

Read Auster’s essay (minus the first two pages!) here (he has another, short essay on her, “Itinerary”, if you can get your hands on it).

Read more about Riding here.

Read Marjorie Perloff’s critical essay on Riding’s language philosophy (“the Witch of Truth”) here.

“The mercy of truth – it is to be truth.”

In reading Paul Auster’s fantastic collection of essays, The Art of Hunger, I came across Truth, Beauty, Silence, a stunning look at Laura Riding’s life and work. As the poets she influenced (Auden, Ashbery, etc.) are among my favorites, I have read a little of her work before, but Auster’s take has compelled me to look again at this enigmatic artmonk.

“The World And I”, by Laura (Riding) Jackson:

This is not exactly what I mean
Any more than the sun is the sun.
But how to mean more closely
If the sun shines but approximately?
What a world of awkwardness!
What hostile implements of sense!
Perhaps this is as close a meaning
As perhaps becomes such knowing.
Else I think the world and I
Must live together as strangers and die—
A sour love, each doubtful whether
Was ever a thing to love the other.
No, better for both to be nearly sure
Each of each—exactly where
Exactly I and exactly the world
Fail to meet by a moment, and a word.

Riding was prolific from the early 1920′s until 1938, at which point she reached, in her words, “a crisis point at which division between craft and creed reveals itself to be absolute.” She then abandoned poetry to pursue truth elsewise. A prose work published in 1967 called “The Telling” gives us an impression of what it was she had pursued in poetry that she felt she had to renounce poetry to attain.

There is something to be told about us for the telling of which we all wait. In our unwilling ignorance we hurry to listen to stories of old human life, new human life, fancied human life, avid of something to while away the time of unanswered curiosity. We know we are explainable, and not explained. Many of the lesser things concerning us have been told but the greater things have not been told; and nothing can fill their place. Whatever we learn of what is not ourselves, but ours to know, being of our universal world, will likewise leave the emptiness an emptiness. Until the missing story of ourselves is told, nothing besides told can suffice us: we shall go on quietly craving it.

Elsewhere she writes:

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth…But only a problem of art is solved in poetry. Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth. Poetic art cheats truth to further and finer degrees than art of any other kind because the spoken word is its exclusive medium…

There might be a Laura Riding a the heart of every art monastery. Someone for whom the questions of art and truth are primary (e.g. “What is the value of art?”, “Is art perhaps not just a distraction from truth?”, “To make art, or not to make art? To make art or to wake up?”) would act as a necessary force of challenge to the art being made. Of course, also at the heart of every art monastery are artmonks for whom those questions are resolved already, as well as artmonks for whom there are no questions of art at all, for who there is only the making of art.

In order to make art that is art monastic art, and to make it better and better, each of these artmonk archetypes is important.

Read Auster’s essay (minus the first two pages!) here (he has another, short essay on her, “Itinerary”, if you can get your hands on it).

Read more about Riding here.

Read Marjorie Perloff’s critical essay on Riding’s language philosophy (“the Witch of Truth”) here.