Welcome to Stonework
 From The Editor: At Home and at Peace In western But winter has another side. For all its sternness, it is a time of crystal mornings and brilliant fields, white and stunning in the low, sharp light. It is, more than any other season, a time to revel in the light, for winter begins at the moment of the longest dark and spins inexorably to the equinox and spring. So it is with the spirit. Attuned to the unchanging, ever changing light, it too turns and rises to meet joy. This came clear to me a number of springs ago. I was hiking the ridge north from Houghton to Fillmore. Though the day was bright, ice rimmed the puddles in the trail, and granules of snow still lay in the shadows and dusted the brittle, year-old leaves that crunched beneath my boots. I was moving slowly, watching for deer, hoping for signs of turkeys, when I caught a slight motion, a fluttering on the ground at the edge of my vision. I stopped. At first I saw nothing but leaves. Then, near a log, in a spot of sun, I saw what appeared to be a ragged wing lift and fall. I walked closer, bent down, and stared. I had seen correctly. a pair of wings, iridescent, edged by a rich creamy yellow band and a series of light-catching blue spots opened and closed in a slow rhythm that matched my respiration. I did not know that day about the mourning cloak butterfly, that it could last out a northern winter, appearing briefly, almost miraculously, whenever a sudden warming chanced to reach its sleep/. Had it not moved, revealing itself to me like the springtime itself, I still would not know of it, for even with its brilliant bands, motionless, camouflaged against the earth, it was invisible. I carry that butterfly with me now on all my springtime walks, pondering its name in my heart. Why would it be mourning, this creature of the winter springs and changing season? What burden of grief might it know rising in sunlight warm? Or is it cloaked in the funeral garb of our imaginations? We call the butterfly an emblem of resurrection. Does it mourn because we remember that before we rise we die, that sorrow comes before rejoicing, that even God turned away at the moment of loss? Probably not, but that cold and dark we set aside is a vital part of who we are and what we become. A few weeks after first seeing the mourning cloak, shortly after Easter, I followed tht same trail, aiming my steps for an opening overlooking the valley. Sunlight worked through the budding canopy. I was making too much noise to bother watching, and I was eager to stand at a I sat looking out over the stubble of corn in the field below me and a winding thicket of cottonwood along a streambed and allowed the sun to soak me with warmth and light. Then, I lay back, folded my hands across my chest, and without intending to, slept. I slept lightly, never losing the feel of the rough earth beneath me or the swirl of wind touching my skin. What I did lose was a sense of myself as a creature experiencing itself apart from its surroundings. I woke quietly, simply opening my eyes, and by that opening reentering myself and my knowledge of the world. Below me two retailed hawks rose from a treetop, found a thermal and spiraled upward. Higher and higher they rose until I could no longer see them. But I knew, as I knew myself, that they were there, that I resided in the widening gyre of their flight, at home and at peace in spring. ~John Leax, 2008  A Word These Words Have Failed To Say Saturday was a perfect day for a fire, and we had a good one. Six feet across and nearly that high, it wasn’t exactly a pillar, but it was a presence. Rain had fallen all Friday night—the gauge showed four tenths of an inch—and the woods were soaked. Around three in the afternoon, Willis and I hiked out the new fence line along Remnant Acres to the site where I had used to write in a slabwood lean to. I carried the chainsaw, a book of matches, and half a container of charcoal lighter. Willis carried the shovel and rake. The site, which had once been a lovely clearing with a stone fire pit and picnic area, was a tangle of multiflora rose and blackberry canes. The only thing standing in it was the lean to which had been roofless for two years. It was barely standing, leaning to the right at a dangerous angle. I fired up the chainsaw, and started to clear a small opening in the tangle. The canes were wet. They draped over my back and snagged on my hat as they fell. None of them, however, snagged or scratched me. Willis pulled them aside, and within ten minutes we had a space sufficient to build a fire. I flopped some small, wet logs, left over firewood from when I’d been writing there, into a four foot square to confine the fire in front of the lean to. When I pulled the battered, green table that had been my desk aside, dumped the soggy, decomposing leaves from it, and propped it inside the square, half the top fell off at my feet. Standing over it, I paused considering two things: I was about to burn an old table, and I was about to change my whole relationship to a place I love. What had been a place for writing and only incidentally a place where I happened to pray I was starting to turn into a woodland garden for intentional retirement and reflection. The fire would not be a simple burning. It would be a purging, a dismissal of the worst vanities of my writer’s ambitions, the first of the conflagrations I long for and fear. “How shall we do this,” Willis asked. “Kick it over?” His voice brought me to the task at hand. I grinned, said nothing, pulled the chainsaw starter cord, and stepped up onto the sagging floor of the leant-to. It sagged under my weight, and for a moment, I thought it wasn’t going to hold, but it did. I lifted the saw above a slabwood side and let the chain bite into the soft wood. In seconds I cut to the floor. Then I did it again. And again. One side lay in a pile on the ground. The pieces were surprisingly dry. I shut down the saw, and we pitched a half dozen two foot sections against the table, doused them with charcoal lighter, and set a match to them. We sat back on the lean to floor, watching the fire, as I have watched so often, sometimes pausing in my writing, sometimes just enjoying the falling darkness with friends. As it caught and grew hotter, we added more pieces. One side down, I started on a second. It fell away onto the ground, taking the back with it. As the fire grew larger and hotter, I started cutting the slabs into longer pieces, and we leaned them across each other. The flames crawled up them and reached grasping fingers into the air. They were hungry for more, more than the wood I fed them, and I kept returning to my thoughts. I wanted to be full of joy—and I was—but I wasn’t fully at ease. I wondered what exactly I was burning. In The Genesee Diary Henri Nouwen describes his retreat from the activity of his university, writing life: “Last week I asked John Eudes (the abbot) how he thought I was doing. He said, ‘I guess O.K. Nobody has mentioned you yet.’” He went on to reflect “solitude becomes really hard when you realize that nobody is thinking about you anymore.” When, I pulled up the plywood floor I had been sitting on and stood the pieces in the flames, the fire grew too hot to approach, and we sat, saying very little, as it burned. It burned for three hours. When it had collapsed into itself, and evening was approaching, I began raking the few larger slabs aside and stamping them out. Then I spread the coals into a bed about eight feet in diameter. Willis proposed walking across them, but we chose not to; it struck me, finally, as more of a folly than a spiritual opportunity. The heat from coals still threatened my eyebrows as I poured water on them and then began working around the bed, digging a trench, tossing the dirt on the fire to bury it. It was a grand fire, a perfect presence in the woods, a word these words have failed to say. ~John Leax, 2007  The Audacity of Truthfulness
Some years ago, I met weekly with two colleagues, The impulse driving me has always been a desire to know the truth and a faith that my best way to startle upon it is through a poem. As we talked, I heard myself affirming the propositional content of poetry. That shocked me, for I have always been and remain suspicious of propositional statements. I had thought my reading in spiritual traditions, my knowledge of the two ways—“This is Thou. Neither is this Thou.”—would have kept me from saying too much too directly. Apparently I was wrong. I encountered this view of my work for the first time when my second book of poems, The Task of Adam, appeared. A reader troubled me with the remark “Your style is so spare, so Evangelical.” I paid little attention then, but here I was making a very similar remark. What was I thinking? The summer of 1955 I turned twelve and joined the communicant’s class at Beulah Presbyterian Church. We met three hours a day for three weeks. We studied the Westminster Confession, endured lectures on theology we did not understand but knew was true, and we passed weekly exams. Finally, we stood before the Elders, answered questions about doctrine, and confessed Christ as our Savior. The following Sunday we entered into the mystery of the Eucharist. That summer marked me for life. I cannot go without the Eucharist and the creed. Both join me to the Body of Christ. My concern here, however, is with the creed. A most important part of worship is for me to stand and speak in unison with the gathered congregation of fellow believers: I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate: was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost; the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen. Saying this creed is declaring my faith in its boldest terms. No emotion. No art. Words. Me. The fellowship about me. And the Lord to hear our voice. My love of truth, my spare style, and my defining propositions are grounded in that worship, in my submission to the wisdom of my heritage, but my poetry—that word that springs from music and mystery—is grounded in my finiteness. In The Ministry of the Word, R.E.C. Browne writes, “To be a Christian is not to be delivered out of finite limitations but to see them clearly and to know the vastness of the resources within them and the richness of thought and life that belongs to human beings.” What I must not miss is that the wisdom of my heritage must also be seen from within my finiteness. Even the words of the creed are inadequate. We can say nothing complete about nature or God. We can only speak towards nature and God, our words becoming a dance of exultation offered to Him. It is the same for any honest witness. Browne continues, “The authority of the minister of the Word is manifest in his leaving only partly described what can only be partly described, no matter how disappointed or distressed his hearers may be. Every authentic proclamation of the Gospel has always a definite indefiniteness about it. The statement that rings with finality is false, it lacks the audacity of truthfulness which intentionally leaves rough edges.” My concern for truth, for the propositional content of poems, places me always at the edge of error. I am always about to be wrong. But the edge of error is also the edge of truth. I may never climb over that edge into surety, but the fear of risk guarantees I will fall backward into wishful thinking, falsehood, and perhaps actual heresy. I find comfort as a poet in the caution Browne addresses to pastors, “What ministers of the Word say may seem too little to live on, but they must not go beyond their authority in a mistaken attempt to make their authority strong and clear. That going beyond is always the outcome of an atheistic anxiety, or a sign that the man of God has succumbed to the temptation to speak as a god, to come in his own name and to be his own authority.”
The Incarnation Portal, Chartes Cathedral All This and More Thirty years ago or so I wrote a poem called “Stones.” When I showed it to an older colleague, she remarked, “That’s a young man’s poem. You won’t feel that way as you age.” Thinking about the themes recurring in writers featured in this issue of Stonework, I returned to it:
Rock hammer in hand, on the way to where An old man who talked of other times At the river we cracked cobbles, into light routed the easy sorrow calling sand effluents to itself But above us in the leafing trees a dozen Returning home, the live core of joy Melissa, I thought, outlast me child. The sticking point for my colleague, I’m sure, was that last line, “Given a choice, he would have hung around.” The line admits a certain mystery: we don’t know what’s ahead. But that mystery or any anxiety approaching it isn’t the source of the line’s sentiment. The line is, rather, an affirmation that the life appointed to me to live on earth is, like all other lives, a good gift given to me by Love. It is not something to be lightly tossed aside. It is, in fact, never to be tossed aside. Death is not a matter of choice. It is a reality to be confronted, not because it is evil, but because it is a good bringing to an end the richness of Grace poured on us in the fullness of our human lives. Though that Grace always includes a hefty portion of suffering, I desire every bit of it, however hard, that I can bear. I admit, if I were not a poet, I might not think and feel this way, but poetry, even as it praises God, is a worldly art and keeps me focused on God-with-us here and now. Wendell Berry says much the same thing in his early essay, “A Native Hill,” Though Heaven is certainly more important than the earth if all they say about it is true, it is still morally incidental to it and dependent on it, and I can only imagine it and desire it in terms of what I know on earth. And so my questions do not aspire beyond the earth. They aspire toward it and into it. Perhaps they aspire through it. The questions Incarnation is one of those words Kathleen Norris defines as scary. It certainly scares me, for it forces me to engage the humanity of Christ. What could it possibly mean that God, the Wholly Other, has become flesh? How could he do such a thing? The Athanasian Creed spells it out: “Not by the conversion of the Godhead into flesh but by the taking up of manhood into God.” This is a hard truth. The skepticism born in our common fallenness inclines us to hold back, to insist that the incarnation is something less than this wild embrace of the created by the Creator. We want to localize it, limit it for a short period of time long ago to the body of Christ. But we cannot. By his taking up of flesh, God has changed creation. He has inextricably and inexorably bound it to himself for all eternity. This act of grace and love utterly beyond my comprehension makes right my poet’s attention this world. It makes right Some years ago, I attended a conference on contemplation in a secular world that focused on the writings of Thomas Merton and Jacques Maritian. The critics and theologians mystified me with their erudition, and, as hours passed, I grew increasingly uneasy. I needed grounding. Finally Robert Lax, hermit and poet from Only one person had wisdom enough to answer—one of the previously silent women—and she said, “The world is an image of the Trinitarian life. We are working out how we are one.” Lax’s old friend Thomas Merton would have been delighted, for through all his many books he had one message: God calls us through Christ to be one with Himself. The incarnation tells us that God has accomplished that union for us and it begins here in this world in the flesh. And the poet, aspiring toward, into, and through the world tells us: “All this and more! Here is the world. Rejoice and be glad in it. You are created to be known and loved by the one lifting all to Himself. ~John Leax, Jan. 2007  "The black stream, catching on a sunken rock, Overturning the Metaphor Spring has come to Houghton. The students have broken out of their winter layerings of sweaters and coats. They’ve turned the quad into a playing field, and I’ve retreated to my office, still hoping to receive one last good essay, one last excellent poem. I’ve also turned to thinking of stonework. For me spring is the return to the garden. For the past few weekends in addition to cutting back the buddleia, raking off the mulch, and planting potatoes, I’ve been rebuilding my lily pond. That has meant pulling down the stone walls and laying them back up. At the same time I’ve been doing this, I’ve been working with a group of students completing this issue of Stonework. These two activities represent the constantly shifting movement of my mind from the objects and activities of this world to the metaphors I use to interpret them. I’m glad for the weight of the garden stones, the heft of the creation, and the reminder I’m not the biggest thing in my yard. I’m glad also for the lightness of metaphor and the light it sheds. I’m most glad for the way the two play against each other, and this gladness brings me to the lines from Robert Frost and the photo of the rock impeding the flow of the Oswegatchie near Houghton’s Star Lake Campus I’ve used to preface these comments. The rock is a metaphor. It is a writer. It is Stonework. It sits firmly in the current forcing the water to reckon with it. Just as the direction of the flow is determined by the rock, so must the reader accept the direction of the writer. The words on the page impede and force the flow of the reader’s imagination back on itself. It cannot go where it wants. Or take it another way. The rock is the reader. The writer’s intent flows up against it and is turned aside. The reader is immovable, solid, frustrating. How is it that this metaphor turns over so easily on itself and betrays my use of it? Part of the reason is that I not only discover metaphors, I make them, and like everyone else I tend to make and discover what I set out to find. As a writer, I want the reader to answer to me. As a reader, I turn the writer aside. I insist on staying put. Frost, however, provides me with a richer way to see my metaphor. In his vitally important essay “Education by Poetry” he writes,” All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it. It is touch and go with metaphor, and until you have lived with it long enough you don’t know when it is going. You don’t know how much you can get out of it and when it will cease to yield. It is a very living thing. It is as life itself.” Perhaps my metaphor betrayed me because I settled on it too quickly and failed to see a larger metaphor—the stream containing both the movement of the water and the rock. Here is something more interesting. The rock that shapes the current is shaped by what its shapes. The rock impedes the water giving force to the current. The water, deflected, carries with it a bit of the stone. The two are voices engaged in a conversation defining the stream at a moment in time. The engagement is abrasive. Both are changed. One might even say both suffer, but it is all to the good, part of making the world. So it is with readers and writers. We shape each other. Abrasively. And by this shaping we come to see the objects and the actions of the world. We come to the interpretive metaphors that give us our lives. In one of his best loved poems, “Mending Wall” Frost gives us another metaphor of stonework. Speaking of replacing the rocks winter has toppled from the traditional walls, he writes, “We wear our fingers rough with handling them.” And then he gives us an image of his neighbor: “I see him there/ Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top/ In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.” Together we build our defining walls, we shape our characters, we inhabit our world. ~John Leax, June 2006 A Community of Trust My first experience with publishing at She called me into her office, pointed to the line referencing Little Egypt’s animated hips, and told me it wouldn’t do. She suggested a revision. I rejected it. She told me I was right to reject her suggestion for it weakened the poem. Though she would not agree to print it as written, she agreed the poem should not be compromised to achieve publication. Strangely I felt no resentment. The experience of being censored was redeemed by Doc Jo’s direct graciousness. She pulled no punches, but she respected the integrity of the poem, and she never questioned my character or motives. Doc Jo taught me two things about editing that day. The first is a given: freedom of the press belongs to the owner of the press. The second is not so obvious: freedom is wasted if the noise generated by the form of expression obscures what an artist has to say. In putting together this first issue of Stonework, a journal representing A few years after I joined the faculty, I published a poem that raised an eyebrow and came under the scrutiny of President Stephen Paine. The poem was called “Slave Fences” and had a line in it that described the fences riding the land “as men ride women.” Doc Jo was retired by then, and my new chair thought I should allow him to “justify” and defend the poem. He waxed eloquent about personas and other literary devices. One day, against my chair’s advice, I chose to talk with President Paine myself. I explained my intent was to dramatize the hidden immorality of our racist history by equating it with a recognizable immorality. Though I can’t remember his words exactly, President Paine’s response was effectively, “Makes perfect sense to me.” I was relieved, but the most important part of our conversation took place as I was about to leave. President Paine acknowledged that incidents will occur when our different ages, backgrounds, and academic disciplines will lead us to different conclusions about how a subject should be treated. What counts, he went on to say, is not those small disagreements. What counts is our knowledge that we endeavor in common to serve the risen Christ. The end of that knowledge is trust, and the end of trust is liberty. ~John Leax, Jan. 2006 |
