Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн
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For we are fled, among the shining vineyards,
And ride in praises in the hills of wheat,
To find our hero, in His tents of light!
O sweet escape! O smiling flight!
O sweet escape! O smiling flight!
The vineyards break our fetters with their laughter!
Our souls walk home as quiet as skies.
The snares that death, our subtle hunter, set,
Are all undone by beams of light!
O sweet escape! O smiling flight!
O sweet escape! O smiling flight!
Unlock our dark! And let us out of night!
And set us free to go to prison in this vineyard,
(Where, in the vines, the sweet and secret sun
Works our eternal rescue into wine)
O sweet escape! O smiling flight!
We’ll rob Your vines, and raid Your hills of wheat,
Until you lock us, Jesus in Your jails of light!
O sweet escape! O smiling flight!15
At first, Merton thought that contemplative life at Gethsemani would help him in this way of negation. He wrote that the monastery is “a place in which I disappear from the world as an object of interest in order to be everywhere in it by hiddenness and compassion. To exist everywhere I have to be No-one.”16 During the first years in the cloister, he even considered that his writing vocation could be a hindrance to contemplation. He expressed this fear both in prose and poetry. In one of his autobiographical passages we read: “There was this shadow, this double, this writer who had followed me into the cloister […] He is supposed to be dead. But he stands and meets me in the doorway of all my prayers, and follows me into church. He kneels with me behind the pillar, the Judas, and talks to me all the time in my ear […] And the worst of it is, he has my superiors on his side. They won’t kick him out. I can’t get rid of him […] Nobody seems to understand that one of us has got to die.”17 In spite of all these vicissitudes, Merton composed several books under the obedience of his Abbot such as Figures for an Apocalypse, from which I have taken the next poem. The poet could never stop writing. On the contrary, his vocation as a writer accompanied him like “a Sinbad burden” all his life – let us remember that Sinbad always had a “little man” on his shoulder. Eventually Merton learned how to reconcile both vocations, as monk and poet, and ended up seeing writing as a medium of creation, contemplation and criticism.18