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

58 страница из 65

Understandably, then, the following poems by Merton are specifically rooted in the rich apophatic Christian mystical tradition as well as in Zen Buddhism.²⁴ In the first one we listen to him talking with great simplicity about the incompatibility and perpetual contradiction of “being,” or “self” and “life.” This seems a mystery which embraces and burns itself out in what is beyond consciousness, as Merton also conceived it in his book New Seeds of Contemplation: “Contemplation is precisely the awareness that this ‘I’ is really ‘not I’ and the awakening of the unknown ‘I’ that is beyond observation and reflection and is incapable of commenting upon itself.”²⁵ His true nature lies in being hidden, anonymous and not being identified within society, where people talk about themselves and about one another.

The next poem is entitled “Night-Flowering Cactus,” and it conveys the atmosphere of a quiet and silent night, of a rare joy afire with the plenitude of the void:

NIGHT-FLOWERING CACTUS

I know my time, which is obscure, silent and brief