Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн
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As Anthony Padovano has suggested, the four “Cantos” tell “the history of a human family tragically torn asunder but pathetically persistent in its dream for harmony.”40 They present a world threatened by wars, genocide, poverty and degradation, but they are also an evidence of Merton’s hope for a spiritual revolution which may reveal to us the path to unbounded life and sincere union beyond the collective illusion of division and separateness. As a matter of fact, the whole poem is about unity, final integration and it places emphasis on the oneness of all existence:41 “same is the Ziggurat of everywhere/I am one same burned Indian/purple of my rivers is the same shed blood/all is flooded/all is my Vietnam charred/charred by my co-stars/the flying generals.”42
To conclude this promenade along the poetry of Thomas Merton, it could be said that within the context of a world possessed by the demon of alienation and destructiveness, in his lyrical fragments Merton tried to recreate a political and poetical area wherein man could imagine new forms of awareness rooted in the hidden ground of love. It is in this sapientia cordis that remains unknowable in the non-limitation and non-definition of the infinite, that Merton sees an extraordinary potential for profound changes within the material concreteness of our world and amidst the contingencies of human and personal stories.