Kathleen Norris’ creative non-fiction novel, The Cloister Walk, is turning out to be a marathon read for me.  I’ve been at it for months; not because it’s a grueling long-distance calorie burner, but because it’s so packed full of ideas to reflect upon it would be a great disservice to read it quick.  I typically jog through a chapter, step back, and let the endorphins hum for a while.

This last chapter was an intriguing exploration of the “degenerate” quality that poets and monks share.  Well, according to our utilitarian society’s often skewed perspective.  Norris talks about the symbolic importance of poets / monks and why what they do actually matters.  Here’s what she says:

Poets and monks do a communal role in American culture, which alternately ignores, romanticizes, and despises them.  In our relentlessly utilitarian society, structuring a life around writing is as crazy as structuring a life around prayer, yet that is what writers and monks do.  Deep down, people seem glad to know that monks are praying, that poets are writing poems.  This is what others want and expect of us, because if we do our job right, we will express things that others may feel, or know, but can’t or won’t say…

Maybe it’s the useless silence of contemplation, that certain “quality of attention” that distinguishes both the poem and the prayer.

I regard monks and poets as the best degenerates in America.  Both have a finely developed sense of the sacred potential in all things; both value image and symbol over utilitarian purpose or the bottom line; they recognize the transformative power hiding in the simplest things, and it leads them to commit absurd acts: the poem! the prayer! what nonsense!  In a culture that excels at creating artificial, tightly controlled environments (shopping malls, amusement parks, chain motels), the art of monks and poets is useless, if not irresponsible, remaining out of reach of commercial manipulation and ideological justification.

And then she ends the chapter with this comparison of  how seemingly “meaningless” acts (e.g. poems, prayer) actually do hold significance:

Maybe monks and poets know, as Jesus did when a friend, in an extravagant, loving gesture, bathed his feet in nard, an expensive, fragrant oil, and wiped them with her hair, that the symbolic act matters; that those who know the price of things, as Judas did, often don’t know the true cost or value of anything.