.........................................................................................................................................................
On
September 13, 1968, at Christ in the Desert Monastery,
Thomas Merton wrote in his journal: "Bardo of small
bad hermitage, empty small, quiet musty, cobweb, some cardboard
boxes."
If he had
been given a cozy hermitage in New Mexico, he still would
have made the trip to Asia, where he was "suddenly,
almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied
vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if
exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious," standing
by the giant standing and reclining buddhas at Polonnaruwa,
Ceylon. And he still would have been electrocuted a few days
later by a faulty electric fan in Bangkok.
Two stone
ghosts rise from a fountain's circular basin conversing
in a language known only to themselves. I think: All those
academic discussions on ecology, the conferences and on-line
chatter, is so much dribble. Since they began, Arctic and
Antarctic ice, along with most glaciers in the world, have
been melting even faster! Nor will activism stop the failure
of our psyches to metaphoricalize realitiy.
Trees,
benches, various tropical plants cast shadows across a flat
steppingstone path. A leaf drops to the ground, a slim green
body grading to dark yellow. As the environment deteriorates,
will the best of our art survive, or only that which the
market has chosen?
A lovely
letter today from David Rosen, thanking me for forty years
of friendship. Our book will emerge next year, hand-bound,
from the bardo of out-of-print....
"Hermes,
who is given the epithets polytropos, many-turning,
and psychopompos, guide of souls, is the god
of the alternative possibility, of the next step." [S.
Post, In, Arche: Notes and Papers on Archaic Studies.
#1-2, 1980.]
......................................................................................................................................................... suddenly,
almost forcibly: The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. New York,
1975
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