Maybe you will find this film as ensorceling as I did. Robert Lax’s poetry is an extreme case of asymptotic minimalism, a poetry that gets as close to silence as one can if one is going to still use words at all. I realize his poetry’s not for everyone (is any poetry for everyone?). I like visiting it but I wouldn’t want to live there in that sort of radically pared down aesthetic. But I do go through periods where revisiting his work helps to liberate something in me. All that white space of the page and permission not to talk, talk, talk is liberating. It’s not surprising to learn that his life was spare the way his poems were. But this short film shows us exactly how spare and many might find that degree of austerity surprising. I have not read his biography so I don’t know all the spiritual apparatus (his long friendship with Merton, etc.) but you do get the sense that you are picking up that spirituality through his poems, listening to Lax speak them and talk about them. Also, I found this visually appealing, the starkness of the black and white suiting the austerity of Lax’s domicile and even his very face which looks like that of an ascetic of yore. The black and white highlights his island-weathered face like an Ansel Adams full-frame photograph showing off a mountain’s crevices in glorious detail. And he fed those feral Greek cats of Patmos, which was very sweet of him. I bet they missed him when he was gone,