Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн
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The next poem is as splendid as it is audacious, and it immediately reminds us of T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land and of García Lorca in Poet in New York. It is included in his book Early Poems (1940-1942) and draws its inspiration from the time when Merton spent several years as a student of English Literature at Columbia University before becoming a monk. It is a direct affront, a genuine portrait of New York’s reality at the time of the Second World War, with many European cities already destroyed and bombarded. In my opinion, the lines of the poem are very close to Christ’s teaching: “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also” (Luke 6:29).
Merton does not remain silent but instead, in a kind of painful and jubilant ritual, he spells out city life and its progress, a sort of prison where alienated masses survive and are subdued to the vanity of the faith ruling the world. With an unwonted and ambiguous rhythm throughout the poem, Merton casts an unceasing rain of images shaping a grotesque scenery to denounce the monotony, weariness, luxury, squandering and superficiality of the American society: a whole collective illusion based on false ideas, fantasies and distractions which power imposes on it. We are all accomplices – he explains –, perfectly adapted to a futile world which has lost all its moral values and suffers the ever-growing sadness and condemnation to personal individuality. This is a theme that he further discussed in his essay “Rain and the Rhinoceros.”7 The poet, like Berenger, the main character in Ionesco’s play, challenges “the entire herd” and he urgently gets involved in the task of revealing to us the pack of lies which comprise this reality. This unveiling becomes, without a shadow of doubt, a main source for his rebellion, for all his creative thrust. His cry against money and imposed poverty, true essences of modernity, brings the following poem to an end, leaving it open for further reflection by the reader.