Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн
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Additionally, he wrote poems supporting the most marginal people. In “There Has to Be a Jail for Ladies” he empathises with the misfortune of prostitutes (“I love you, dusty and sore/I love you, unhappy ones”), and in “A Picture of Lee Ying” with the thousands of Chinese refugees during the communist government of Mao Tse-Tung. “Chant to be Used in Processions around a Site with Furnaces” also evokes the terrible suffering of the Jews in the concentration camps during the nazi regimen and criticizes the insane attitude of people such as Adolf Eichman who came to be convinced that his work of extermination was efficient and satisfactory: “In my day we worked hard we saw what we did our/self-sacrifice was conscientious and complete our work/was faultless and detailed.”35
To sum up, in Emblems… Merton did break his silence with such a cry as he had always been afraid of. In his opinion, Christian hope was “inseparable from an incarnational development in the struggle of living and contemporary man.”36 Therefore, he reconciled his contemplative vocation with his responsibility as social critic and prophet who announces and denounces the crepuscular hours of history, calling us to recover our original unity and integrity in the wisdom of Love and of the Cross.37