Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн

23 страница из 65

Body is truth, truth is body. Fat is all

We grow on earth, or all we breed to grow […]

Beauty is troops, troops beauty. Death is all

We grow on earth, or all we breed to grow.³

we read in his poem “The Philosophers,” an obvious reference to John Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn.”⁴ In the midst of this materialistic and violent context, however, the poet compares himself with a hidden seed, “buried in the earth/waiting for the Easter rains/to drench me in their mirth/and crown my seedtime with some sap and growth.” Merton’s monastery could be seen as the chosen place for this “burial” and this “waiting” for the vivifying waters of solitude and silence. It was considered by the poet as a more authentic space than the city which he regarded as “a stubborn and fabricated dream,”⁵ a world of mechanical fictions in which people are imprisoned in “the monkey-houses of their office-buildings and apartments,”⁶ living in a womb of collective illusion where freedom remains abortive and where distraction – the greatest of our miseries – helps people elude their true human task: contemplation understood as “the fullness of the Christ life in the soul.”⁷