Found a $2 roughed-up copy of The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, something I probably wouldn't have have bought but for the price. But it's funny how there's more depth in it than in 99% of the glossy, new bestsellers for which they ask high prices with little substantial delivery.
It seems that Merton's last words, public words anyway, were "So I will disappear." This was at the end of a talk he gave just before his death on December 10, 1968. The context of the remark is more banal: "I will conclude on that note. I believe the plan is to have all the questions for this morning's lectures this evening at the panel. So I will disappear."
A few excerpts...Merton quotes "The Mandala in the Human Body" in his journal:
Spiritual sterility can be due to the fact that fertilization by the union of (wisdom and discipline) has not taken place. Wisdom as sperm, discipline as ovum give us the 'new creature,' the living reintegrated and growing 'personality'.He quotes a translation of 16th century Bengali poetry:
I would set fire to my houseElsewhere he sounds almost like he's affirming "spam poetry", a genre in which snippets of spam are spun into...well snippets of spam that are supposed to read like poetry:
for him. I would bear
The scorn of the world.
He thinks his sorrow is joy
When I weep, he weeps.
When the sound of your flute reaches my ears
it compels me to leave my home, my friends,
it draws me into the dark towards you.
Marcuse has shown how mass culture tends to be anti-culture - to stifle creative work by the sheer volume of what is "produced," or reproduced. In which case, poetry, for example, must start with an awareness of this contradiction and use it - as ant-poetry - which freely draws on the material of superabundant nonsense at its disposal.
No comments:
Post a Comment