Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн
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By making an inner journey towards what he called “the inward Stranger,” Merton could overcome all divisions and paradoxes within himself and open up to an awareness of interbeing.30 As he wrote in the poem “In Silence”:
And all things live around you
Speaking to your own being.
Speaking by the Unknown
That is in you and in themselves.31
Everything speaks about God, and God speaks in all and through all. The poet encourages us to enter a sonorous solitude which, far from secluding men from the rest of people, awakens in them a new perception based on the certainty that we are united to one another by a unique Love, “God’s love living and acting in those whom He has incorporated in his Christ.”32
At the beginning of the sixties, Merton began to speak about a wide range of contemporary problems, advocating peace and social justice in a season characterized by social and political unrest and deep emptiness of spirit. He considered he could not ignore horrors such as nazism in Germany, the Vietnam war, the Hiroshima disaster, or the latent threat of a nuclear war. All these bad dreams, – “the dreams of giants without a center”33 – were dealt with in his books of poetry Original Child Bomb (1962) and Emblems of a Season of Fury (1963), where he strongly denounced the illogical and nonsensical attempt to establish peace through war. Compositions such as “And the Children of Birmingham” shows Merton’s defence of non-violent action exemplified in the strike that black children and young people held in the city of Birmingham with Martin Luther King as the leader of the pacifist movement against racial, political and economic discrimination.34