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

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Silence is louder than a cyclone

In the rude door, my shelter

[…] I eat my air alone

With pure and solitary songs

While others sit in conference

[…] I no longer see their speech

And they no longer know my theatre.²⁴

Merton becomes an exile in the far end of solitude, living as a listener and praying for a world which is tumbling down, “for a land without prayer.”²⁵ Nevertheless, this dualism between the sacred and the profane sphere present in The Tears… would be partially overcome in The Strange Islands (1957) when the poet talks about the possibility of building a new Jerusalem on the Ohio shores: “Gather us God in Honeycombs,/My Israel in the Ohio valley!/For brightness falls upon our dark/[…] Bless and restore the blind, straighten the broken limb/These mended stones shall build Jerusalem.”²⁶ Although the book cannot boast of a deep lyricism or a formal complexity, it illustrates a much more committed and critical poetry which hopes for a radical transformation of humankind and, thus, of the whole society. It was written at a time in Merton’s life when, as we have just pointed out, he felt a more profound necessity to go into solitude,²⁷ but also saw the urgency to open a dialogue with the world outside the walls of Gethsemani.