The Jiu Jie of Amiri Baraka and Thomas Merton

The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones by Amiri Baraka

Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton

There is a word in Mandarin, Jiu Jie (纠结), which loosely translates as twisted. All twisted up in knots about something. This twisting can manifest as an unease, an anxiety, a feeling that all is not right in the world. Jiu Jie can also mean tangled, confused, or at a loss. Like many Mandarin words, it’s full of numerous meanings that are heavily reliant on the context. There’s no way to fully nail Jiu Jie down with one English word. It’s like an adolescent angst, a dread, a crossroads in the forest with no clear outcome. But more than just the crossroads, it is the forest itself, a lostness.

Yet somewhere deep in the meaning of this word is also a hope against hope that there is a way out of it all.

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Amiri (pr: Ah Mee Dee) Baraka (1934-2014) and Thomas Merton (1915-1968), were two different men, of different times that experienced the Jiu Jie of feeling that their purpose was yet to be fulfilled. Both of their books are difficult to read in their own way. Merton’s dense style, can at times take you down aisles of Catholic thought you were not prepared to go. Baraka’s book reads more like poetry and has the feeling of walking into the middle of conversation that’s already started and you’re trying to get caught up on what they’re talking about.

Amiri Baraka is like the avid reader’s version of a friend of a friend. There were passing references to him in other books, but he is generally not discussed in American classrooms. He was not originally on my radar, yet I became more intrigued by his life the more I heard.

I was drawn to his work because he had a bold vision for what art could do. As a middle-aged man, having been a noteworthy artist in New York City, he returned to his hometown of Newark, New Jersey and purchased a house. He and his wife remodeled the basement, turning it into a small performance space, and began to put on plays and events. They called it the Spirit House. This venue wasn’t built for commercial success, but rather for the creation of meaningful art, for impact and for the creation of community. He wrote:

We were starting to have regular productions at the Spirit House and trying to raise an audience. Our theatre could seat maybe fifty people if we squeezed…People were coming to the plays and music and poetry, not only from Stirling Street area but from all over Newark, and even from out of town. We had a small intense audience, an audience that influences others…

Thomas Merton on the other hand, is an author I’ve read since college.  Merton spoke with an authority that is largely absent in church leaders. He saw through the deception of the modern world, the “rat race to nowhere” and analyzed it with surgical precision. I was familiar with his writings, but curious about the man’s life. Plus, I had heard Seven Storey Mountain is one of the great autobiographies of the 20th century.

As I read these two books a connection began to appear in my mind between these two seemingly unconnected men. The details of their lives are quite different. Merton, born in France before World War I, later moved to America, and would become an orphan as a young man. He was born to be a writer and despite his unreligious background, he had a powerful, though gradual, conversion experience. However, even as a Catholic, as a young man he was chasing something: a calling, a purpose for existence. He was often not satisfied and confused.

Baraka grew up in the post-World War II racial environment of America. He too was seemingly chasing something. From the halls of legendary Howard University, to the west Caribbean airfields of the US Airforce (which he hilariously calls the Error Farce), Baraka eventually landed in Greenwich Village during the beatnik heyday. He was mentored by Allen Ginsberg, rubbed elbows with the poet Kenneth Koch and Jack Kerouac and was on the fast track to cool.

But eventually that Jiu Jie feeling got to him. Baraka rejected the Village life and relocated to Harlem, where he founded the Black Arts Repertory/Theater School (BARTS). For a time, it was wildly successful in bringing the stories of people’s real lives into artistic reality. But the project was undone by petty agendas and big egos, by the muddled humanity inherent in all lives.

Merton, for his part, had the idea to become a monk. The majority of his memoir is held by the tension of not knowing whether or not he’ll be successful in being accepted to a monastery. At one point of particular despair a trusted friend asks him “What do you want to be Tom?” He says, “I just want to be a good Catholic!” To which his friend responds to be a good Catholic is not good enough, he should rather want to be a saint!

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And what exactly is a “saint”? The word brings to mind the dusty cathedral windows, where obscure European men are pictured quietly praying. A saint is thought of as unflappable, impersonal, mechanical and cold. But this definition of a saint as an unrelatable old man in robes, is false.

A saint is a person on the path to becoming fully human. A saint does not shy away from the gut wrenching twist of Jiu Jie. So-called ‘saints’ are never the elite, but rather any and all who will move closer to their vocation and purpose.

Vocation comes from the Latin vocare, and shares roots with word vocal. Vocation is not necessarily a job, but a call. The thing inside that twists at our souls, if only we can manage to not medicate the voice away. Being a saint is about answering vocare.

Have you ever seen someone who was fully responding to their vocare? Someone who leaves a residue of peace and purpose when they leave the room? And makes it seem like it’s possible for you too?

Their essence lingers. In their saintly journey, the people who spent significant time with them are assumed to have moved towards a fuller humanity as well.

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By the end of one man’s story (Baraka) he is a communist artist, continuing to create and also clearly mellowed by the passage of time and family. The other (Merton) would live a life of physical solitude at a monastery in Kentucky, while being a spiritual father to many. Merton died in 1968 at a conference in Thailand, slipping in the shower and hitting his head. Baraka would live long enough to see bulk of Obama’s presidency.

Perhaps the connection between Baraka and Merton is too contrived. My own vocare as a counselor and comic is to highlight difficult to perceive connections. To point out how two things can be associated. To see the ways the world and others intertwine through everyone and everything.

Jiu Jie also can mean intertwined. A connection between two seemingly disparate parts that draws them together. To see a piece of ourselves in others. To see two unrelated pairs as one. To see the connection, the river of humanness that runs through us all. Do you see it?