Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн

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WHETHER THERE IS ENJOYMENT IN BITTERNESS

This afternoon, let me

Be a sad person. Am I not

Permitted (like other men)

To be sick of myself?

Am I not allowed to be hollow,

Or fall in the hole

Or break my bones (within me)

In the trap set by my own

Lie to myself? O my friend,

I too must sin and sin.

I too must hurt other people and

(Since I am no exception)

I must be hated by them.

Do not forbid me, therefore,

To taste the same bitter poison,

And drink the gall that love

(Love most of all) so easily becomes.

Do not forbid me (once again) to be

Angry, bitter, disillusioned,

Wishing I could die.

While life and death

Are killing one another in my flesh

Leave me in peace. I can enjoy,

Even as other men, this agony.

Only (whoever you may be)

Pray for my soul. Speak my name

To Him, for in my bitterness

I hardly speak to Him: and He

While He is busy killing me

Refuses to listen.²³

With the venerable depth which distinguishes him as thinker and homo religiosus, Merton prepares himself to fight the only battle worth fighting: the battle against the falseness of his own self and against the accumulation of powerful and overwhelming lies of reality as a whole. This bitter struggle became a source of inspiration for most of the critical poetry he wrote in the sixties about a wide range of contemporary problems affecting a disturbed and unbalanced society. Books such as Emblems of a Season of Fury, Cables to the Ace, or The Geography of Lograire appeared as an inexorable denunciation of the confusion and error which reigns in the so called Western culture and of the misunderstanding prevailing in all its political, religious, philosophical and scientific heritage. They disclose a profound yearning on the part of the poet for unlearning, for not knowing. Killing knowledge means killing death, we are told, in a somewhat axiomatic manner.