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

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The dichotomy between world-God, city-monastery, solitude-solidarity continues to be present in A Man in a Divided Sea and Figures for an Apocalypse, collections of poems written before and after entering Gethsemani which clearly reflect his firm decision to begin a journey from the unreal city (London, New York) to what he thought to be the paradisiacal city, the Trappist community.¹⁷ As it has been pointed out, this trip was considered by the poet not as evasion but as a way of retreating into his own inner truth to find the Christ within.¹⁸ Overwhelmed by a post-war society ruled by false democracy and threatened by massive destruction, he writes:

Time, time to go to the terminal

And make the escaping train

With eyes as bright as palaces

And thoughts like nightingales.

It is the hour to fly without passports

From Juda to the mountains,

And hide while cities turn to butter

For fear of the secret bomb.

We’ll arm for our own invisible battle

In the wells of the pathless wood.¹⁹

Here the symbol of the nightingale could be identified with the poet himself, the prophet or the mystic who remains faithful to its own vocation: that of being the singer of Truth.²⁰ This prophet must abandon the city (the world of conventional knowledge) and climb the mountain (mirror of the divine order), making a spiritual voyage towards its peak, always regarded as the place of mystical union. The dense woods he must cross during the ascent contribute to this darkness which precedes the revelation of divine light to the people whose eyes are open to see it, and their unknown paths seem to be the only possible shelter of more genuine voices.