In 1968, visiting friends and
Zen monasteries in Japan, I had also hoped to meet Fr. Merton,
when word arrived that he had accidentally died in Thailand. Ten
years later, living in Santa Fe, browsing through old issues of
New Mexico Magazine, I came across some photographs Merton had
taken during two visits he made to New Mexico during the last year
of his life. Although I didn’t think the pictures themselves
came up to the quality of his literary work, they intrigued me
enough to query the Thomas Merton Studies Center, in Louisville,
Kentucky, as to whether "there are enough of these photographs
to make a book worthwhile."
Why Thomas Merton? I had read
many of the details of his extraordinary life. His leap from rambunctious
college student to Trappist monk. The irony of his flowering in
midst of a religious order that demands almost total silence into
a world-renowned author. A voice. A scholar of the history of the
Catholic Church, who developed a deep interest in other spiritual
Ways, especially Zen Buddhism, going as far as to practice zazen,
and, in 1968, declaring, "I will be the best Buddhist I can
be."
On a more personal note, Merton
had published a poem mine in the last issue of Monk’s Pond,
the literary journal he edited during that fateful year of 1968.
His acceptance had been in the form of a warm letter, asking if
I had any more poems he could publish. For a young poet this is
an unforgettable experience, a debt of sorts. This was what I was
feeling when I wrote to the Studies Center.
A few weeks later, I received
a letter from Robert E. Daggy, then the Center’s Director/Curator,
with some information on the photographs. But he didn’t stop
there. To my delight, Dr. Daggy informed me that there was also
a manuscript, and offered to send me a photocopy. The winter of
1978-79 was a particularly cold one in Santa Fe. I was hibernating
in a claustrophobic apartment, cold even with the heater on, accompanied
only by the family of mice who visited at night. On the day the
manuscript arrived, with Merton’s penciled corrections still
visible on the photocopy, my life began to warm up.
The manuscript, which he had titled Woods, Shore, Desert, identified
itself not just with Thomas Merton’s deep grasp of the Christian tradition,
but also deployed quotes from the Astavakra Gita, an extraordinary text that
is one of the Vedantic roots of Buddhism. Although he set a Catholic table—"Return
to the sources. Vernacular use of the Bible and the Fathers. Emphasis on
redemption and grace. Emphasis on liberty or a more flexible idea of authority.
They were ruined by the authoritarians"—it was a rueful one. I
also noticed how Buddhism had refocused the base of his thinking: "Fatal
emphasis (in a monastic life) on acquiring something. What about this imperative?
Does it make sense? ‘Convince yourself that you exist!’ Baloney!" (He
is referring to Jean-Paul Sartre’s view of Existentialism.)
As I was acquainted with the director
of The Museum of New Mexico Press, I took the manuscript to him.
After months of negotiation between the Press and the Trustees
of the Merton Estate, I signed a contract to write an introduction,
and to annotate the myriad references alluded to in the text.
To begin, I wanted to get a sense
of the man who was perhaps the greatest Christian mystic of the
20th Century, and yet had remained so unabashedly human;
who, in midst of scholastic remarks, could write "Baloney!" Besides
reading many of his books—I had already read everything he
had written on Zen Buddhism—I visited the Monastery of Christ
in the Desert, near Abiquiu NM, where a portion of Woods, Shore,
Desert takes place. (The balance of the book was written in
that part of northern California where "The country which
is nowhere is the real home; only it seems that the Pacific Shore
at Needle Rock is more nowhere than this, and Bear Harbor is more
nowhere still".
Merton’s two short stays
at Christ in the Desert had become part of that monastery’s
mythology. Although the essence of monastic living is that of a
close-knit family, without subsuming this, following in the steps
of Fr. Merton several monks had become semi-hermits, and a few
of them began practicing zazen. His spirit seemed to infuse the
humor and lightheartedness of the Brothers, as well as in the river
and mountains beyond. "Distant sound of muddy rushing water
in the Chama River below me. I could use up rolls of film on nothing
but these rocks. The whole canyon replete with emptiness." During
my short stay there, I was bitten by a red ant. In retrospect at
least, it was an exquisite pain, a love bite from indigenous inhabitants
of that harsh, uncompromising, yet sacred, land.
I also visited Our Lady of Guadalupe
Abbey, in Pecos, New Mexico, and discussed Merton and monastic
orders with the monks. To several of the monks, Merton had become
a hierophant, a spiritual guide to a life not just of meditation
and prayer, but—as he had been a outspoken advocate of peace
and social justice--also of ethical concerns that lay beyond the
monastery’s walls.
Although each one of us must make
our own journey toward the Infinite, masters like Merton are markers
by which we can measure how far we still have to go in detaching
ourselves from the countless illusions presented to us along the
way. That he walked the path of the dominant Western spiritual
tradition, and yet came to embrace a truly ecumenical practice
is, I suggest, the crux of his message.
In reading Merton’s books,
one can hardly avoid the many pictures of him, which slowly worked
themselves into my subconscious. The genuine smile contrasted with
eyes that beamed wisdom, the burden of his intimate relationship
with God balanced with the comedy of the Void he knew was
behind the personae, the "Masks of God," in the famous
words of the mythologist Joseph Campbell. I hadn’t drawn for
more than ten years, when one sunny afternoon, sitting on front
steps of the roomy house I had recently moved to, I began to sketch
Merton’s compelling face. After completing a series of sketches,
I started to fashion his likeness with strands of wire from clothes
hangers. (It is only now that I remember something Peter Nabokov
wrote to me about when he met Merton: "I felt like a clothes
hanger made of wire beside him").
When I found that the wire looked
more like an armature than a completed work, and that it was also
too pliant, I bought a tube of Liquid Steel ™ and applied
it sparingly to the sculpture’s joints. But the more of the
gray toxic substance I added, the more I felt I needed to add,
until, dozens of tubes later, I had built half of Merton’s
face out of the hardened paste. Into its surfaces I rubbed various
colored waxes, then a protective layer of varnish. The other half,
the exposed wire, I painted with red acrylic. My thought was that
Merton’s work on himself, as representative of all our spiritual
endeavors, was only half-finished, as humanity is still
evolving into being; and non-being too.
The finished piece, owned by
the Merton Center, Bellarmine University, Louisville, KY., is titled "Thomas
Merton-Mask.." Woods, Shore, Desert—A Notebook,
May 1968, With Photographs by the Author was published in 1982,
and continues to remain in print.
© The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, Vol 22, No.1. 2003