Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн
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Asking no more questions
Forgetting how to spell the thought of scrutiny
And wanting no secret
You died to the world of concept
Upon the cross of your humility.22
Verse by verse, line by line, Merton’s poetry aspires to contemplate the nakedness beyond any ideology or dogma, in order to reach a deeper wisdom, the wisdom of the divine within man, that is to say, a clear unobstructed vision of the true state of affairs, an intuitive grasp of one’s own inner reality, as anchored, or rather lost, in God through Christ. As the Desert Fathers, he is going to desire more and more solitude in order to strike out fearlessly into the mystery of life, a territory which does not belong to us but by which we will remain eternally seduced.
His next book of poems, The Tears of the Blind Lions (1949), expresses the need of having a fruitful interior life of thought and love in the midst of a noisy world full of “lighted beasts” and threatened by the Cold War. It is a poetry characterized by a more direct style, concise and vigourous, with a less lush imagery and an increase in the use of the first person, and it shows more clearly than ever before the Agustinian polarity Merton saw between the earthly city (the Babilon of Louisville), where “the windows shiver with business,” and the Sion of Gethsemani, a dwelling of vision “whose heights have windows finer than the firmament.”23 Within the context of his own monastic community, which at that time was mainly characterized by a superficial and external religiosity based on abstract ideals and self-complacency, this work reflects how Merton tried to strengthen his contemplative vocation and how he retired more frequently to a kind of shelter in the woods whenever the busy monastic schedule allowed him to do it. Over there he would write: