PRESS: What Is Begin Up To?
Powers, Thomas
MERTON ON THE MOVE JAMES T. BAKER Following his footsteps to Thailand I remember Thomas Merton as a man always on the move, always saying goodbye, always escaping. Strange ,to say this of one...
...She stared...
...A veil descended...
...Everyone lives and dies many times...
...Yes, indeed...
...Both are small, both obscure, both somewhat proud of thei~ varying degrees of illiteracy...
...I flew south from Hong Kong on a warm autumn afternoon, nine years after Merton made the same trip...
...Working blindly, I was fortunate to stop first at the Church of the Holy Redeemer...
...but it is obvious that they will have to become more socially active if they are to help their country through the difficult days ahead, it was thus the perfect setting for a conference on the themes Merton could address, themes he did address before he died there...
...Nothing helped...
...I left the Merton Library at Bellarmine College one He was gone, but he wouldn't leave me alone...
...He turned and waved and was gone...
...He joked about everything...
...in Rome and a Catholic President in Washington, when I first visited Gethsemani Abbey with a group of young Southern Baptist seminarians...
...On December 10, three months later, I woke to hear N.B.C...
...He was no longer the comrade, the jolly friend, now he was a priest--and worse, a famous priest...
...Again the veil...
...Fanlkner is not in Oxford...
...He led us through the bookstore, stopped and thumbed through a couple of his newer books, and signaled the brother at the cash register he was giving them to me...
...They had earned Gethsemani a million dollars...
...Yet he wasn't, not completely...
...Merton wasn't there...
...It's just as well you didn't turn it on, isn't it...
...sanitarium, later a home for the aged, lay along the road leading down to the Gulf of Siam...
...Inside a cleaning lady remembered the afternoon someone burst in saying a man had died...
...wise social commentators...
...After all, they were Mertou's books...
...Too mueb time had passed...
...Besides, a .person can't be found in one place or be judged by what happens there...
...It was snowing as we came to the door...
...Hot wires lay poised to strike...
...T, he very oddity of the two places, their unconventionality, their inhospitality to things foreign and inteUec~tual, their penchants for choking prophets, their earthiness, gave Merton and Faulkner great potential to exploit~ but without their chroniclers they are sadly empty...
...Merton had received a copy of my dissertation, read it, approved it with several reservations, and wanted us to get together to talk abou.t it...
...Once again I strongly felt the separation...
...A canal led through the fence and beside the hospital, then wound its way beside a large conference hall and several small dormitories in back...
...The agent promised to check it out and was the next morning conveniently killed in an automobile accident...
...From the picnic lunch he had told me to bring, he chose a hamburger sandwich and gave a strong "no thank you" to one with cheese...
...I went out in a Japanese-made, open-air Thai taxi...
...He was going ,to Asia...
...No, on second thought, no, I don't believe I will...
...I decided that if I kept looking I would be electrocuted too...
...This time it was for good...
...It was all something of a secret sti~l--to keep down the rumors he was leaving G-ethCommonweal: 269 semani for gcxxt--but it was all set...
...Then across the store a young man and woman spotted him and began to whisper...
...Too many bohemian artists had had babies there...
...We looked at each other...
...I stared at it...
...On my trips to Oxford ,I did see--because Faulkner stormy day and was almost struck by lightning...
...The year 1968, with all its carnage, led me into deep depression...
...It all even turned a shade morbid...
...She jerked the plug, wrapped the tattered wire around the fan's sullen neck, and carried it away down the stairs...
...We passed the large conference hall with screened windows where Merton concluded his last speech by saying, "I'll just disappear...
...It was a dream come Crue...
...I waited for my heart to slow...
...I stared...
...This time I was alone...
...I had been in Seoul less than six months when I was invited to read a paper at a conference on American religion in Bangkok...
...He talked more with her than with me...
...To the right Vietnam and Cambodia lay in darkness...
...He was nice a.bout it...
...As we once again headed north and east, up the Gulf .of Siam, ,the sun dropped into a bank of western clouds, leaving behind it a bloody gash over Burma and India...
...Knowing better but still drawn to it, I began my search for Merton, this time for the place where he died...
...It would be snowing back in Ket~tucky now...
...Buddhists may do it some, but they know better...
...He talked, he listened, he laughed and made us laugh...
...At Gethsemani, because Merton saw them and captured ~em in his poetry, I did see a partial vision of Reali,ty behind the common changes of season in nature, the ctassic conflict between the inner tugs of rejection and acceptance of life created by monasticism's paradox, the very real Eternal Flame in the Catholic festival of lights...
...I would go many ,times, but I would never find him...
...My first letters had not reached him, but then a mt~tual friend had intervened, and from tha, t point on he had faithfully and patiently answered all my correspondence...
...I accepted, knowing that I would go searching for Merton, convinced I would die...
...28 April 1978:272...
...The nurse smiled indulgently at my barbarian infatuations and led me out of the hospital and along the canal toward the dormitories...
...They might have been New Yorkers or Kentuckians: styles in hair and clothing were already beginning to make such identification difficult...
...Translated logically: I couldn't leave him alone...
...Do you remember a conference here nine years ago...
...Even amid the laughter and plain talk and give-and,take there was about him an elusive quality that separated him from us...
...He seemed to miss the noisy gaggle of Baptists...
...Strange ,to say this of one who lived twenty-seven years behind the same monastic enclosure wall--but true...
...Five years later he came back down that hallway to greet me...
...He might even get to live in an Indian monastery...
...I asked if I might walk up with him and see it...
...I had a hard time explaining to the nurse at reception what I wanted...
...Merton is not in Prades, Gethsemani, or Bangkok...
...The priest, a friendly sort of man with the air of benign early decay so typical of Americans in the ~opics, was happy ~o spend his morning telling me about the day Merton died: the mad race with the Thai Keystone Kops to an American army morgue: the hurried evaluation of Merton's possessions in which an illegible journal, later to be a famous book, was declared "no value": the joke he played on his friend the C.I.A...
...We .were totally unprepared for the casual, gregarious monk who came walking out in his off-white robe and oversized shoes, sat down in the middle of 'his blue-suited Protestant audience as though talking with separated brethren were old hat with him, and began talking w~th us as if Baptists were human beingsmmaybe even Christians...
...He pulled up his hood as he started across the meadow...
...He wasn't here...
...I stood for a long time in the hot November sun...
...Now that the new Communist governments were installed, we had to make a wide sweep around the bulge of southeast Asia...
...He was sorry, but no I couldn't go...
...We found the big Red Cross sign on the right...
...I was a scholar, a Protestant, a married man, and I don't know what else...
...I neither found nor exorcised him...
...Maybe the Buddhists do, as Merton suspected, know a thing or two...
...We talked of how he had left "the world" only to discover at Gethsemani that he was the world, only to return after twenty years to play his part (literary, prophetic) in a social revolution and in opposition to a war that would destroy a civilization in order to save it...
...He had wanted to be alone so he had taken the upstairs...
...Do you know the name Thomas Merton...
...He had escaged us all...
...This is apparently a peculiarly western Christian thing, this looking for the places holy men were born and died...
...Nothing...
...We were suddenly no longer two...
...He had of course been electrocuted...
...I watched from the window as she carried it, ,like some proverbial lost sheep, toward a distant repair shop...
...He liked women...
...It was a tall blue upright with a blunt base and a round head...
...He would study Buddhism...
...I had given tip The Ministry for Academia...
...Merton's Gethsemani and Faulkner's Oxford (Jefferson) were for the most part only in their heads...
...They had brought him down these stairs...
...I see, but the floor is plain hardwood, not terrazzo as reported, not as dramatic or reasonable, his crucifix more like Christ's than those with precious stones show...
...He posed for her to make sketches of him for a portrait...
...Before lying down he had reached .to turn on this fan...
...He had recently moved ou,t of the monastery proper to a hermitage in the hills...
...The opening and closing of the door frayed it and exposed the live wires...
...I was offered a job teaching in Korea...
...Merton smiled, waved, and went off down a long dark hallway to his work...
...At last we cleaned up our picnic scraps and started to go...
...He was one of us...
...They are in fact far less significant, less the microcosms of Reality than their creators made ,them...
...Yes, I knew...
...I wrote a book about Merton, then a series of articles, then a play...
...We were one---or so I thought until at the end I made a request...
...They came over and called him F~ther Merton...
...He told me how to find what Merton in his journal called "the Red Cross place" at the southeast edge of Bangkok, the place he was to die, and wrote the address in the strange mirror-latin Thai script...
...The reason it killed him, she explained, was that the wire must run under the door, like you see here, to plug in here in the next room...
...The nex~t September, in 1968, I returned once again...
...Back in Korea a letter waited for me...
...One of my students, another of the growing cadre of Met, ton followers, had spent the summer in France and had gone down to Prades where Merton was born...
...Buddhism, 28 April 1978:270 a strong dose of it, with roots clinging firmly to bedrock, gives a bustling, fume-choked metropolis crowded between old canals (now badly polluted) a disconcerting tranquiHity...
...Yes...
...Yes, him...
...The hospital, once a T.B...
...Did I care to turn the switch here, as he had done, just to see how it felt...
...l~his time he didn't return...
...saw and captured them in his stories--earth mothers like Lena Grove and Eula Varner Snopes, eternal black guardians of sense and sensibility like Dilsey and Luster, symbols of human freedom (tragic and comic) like Quentin and Quentin Compson...
...agent by telling him Merton had been assassinated...
...I could imagine Merton having a good laugh about it...
...Melton wasn't there...
...The Case of the Monk's Body, it intrigued me...
...He had escaped again---down some back bedroom drainpipe on Easter Sunday morning--like Fanlkner's Quentin Compson the younger...
...Now I was invited up for a long winter afternoon's talk...
...But I didn't find the Faulkner or the Merton I was looking for in either place...
...The one westerners are always asking about...
...In addition, something big was brewing for him, bigger than a new book or a papal commendation, something he wanted to share with me, a trip someplace...
...I followed her up, thinking how hard it must have been to negotiate that turn...
...No one there, not even the parish priest, know precisely where the poet was born...
...Oh no, the maid said, this wasn't the fan, not the one that killed him, but i.t was just like this one...
...We knew he was Someone Important and that we were extremely lucky to have him as our speaker, our pro[essor had told us so, but none of us had ever read his many books, and we were amazed to find that a man who had spent twenty years in a monastery knew as much and more about the world out there where we lived than we did...
...I went tp Gethsemani...
...Yes, of course...
...This was it...
...When we were finished, the older (less worldly) monks took us out to see chapel, barn, and cemetery...
...This time the separation was complete...
...He specifically asked me to bring my wife...
...Then 'he had come into the bedroom through this door...
...Bingo...
...Bangkok that night and in succeeding days gave no appearance of being the capital of a country threatened on every side by socialist neighbors...
...We were all a bit tense Caking our first shaky steps toward ecumenicity, a bit unnerved by the stark simplicity and unbearable silence of the Trappists, a bit obvious in our skeptical comments on this odd way of life...
...He had taken a bath here...
...I thanked him and left, not knowing whether I really wanted to go there, knowing I would...
...announce that he had been electrocuted in Bangkok, Thailand...
...The brother smiled and shrugged...
...I had given up my blue ministerial suit for jeans and a sweatshirt...
...The first time he said goodbye and escaped my inquiring eye was late in 1962, a year of Catholic reform...
...He good-naturedly passed up a chance for beer to drink Cokes with his Baptist guests...
...He told us of the trip...
...He would meet a lot of impressive people...
...The driver was glad to trade his Saturday of hustling for ten American dollars...
...But it was simply a tub with a faucet, not a shower as reported, a more fitting ablution than a shower...
...Gethsemani and Oxford: odd places to produce a Merton and a Faulkner really...
...He relished their company...
...I was in the midst of writing a ridiculously long doctoral dissertation on the life and thought of Thomas Merton...
...He gave them a blessing, seriously, quickly, turned and nodded to us, and disappeared through a side door...
...So speculated a Southr 271 ern Baptist searohing in vain for a Catholic saint in a Buddhist land...
...She opened the door to ~bow me...
...We couldn't go...
...But he was still eloquent...
...A priest there had been called on December 10, 1968, to help whisk Merton's body ou,t of Thailand before the Thai police could tie it up for weeks with red tape...
...He was a monk...
...The fan...
...He was there with us in the sunny November parlor, but he was someplace else too...
...and as the '70s dawned I found myself, along with many other people, looking for my roots...
...This time 'he was more restrained, more dignified, somewhat less comfortable in his role as An Important Person About Whom One Writes A Doctoral Dissertation...
...T, hai civilization, royalist, Buddhist, delicately pastel, is a rich and tortured blend of old and new--with all the problems that attend transition, problems so near Merton's heart: how to become new without destroying the old: how to become modern without ki.lling the beautiful...
...We talked frankly and openly...
...I would go to Mississippi to search for another of my spiritual fathers, Willi'am Faulkner...
...I looked around the bedroom, inspected the bath and hall, wandered back down the stairs and outside...
...Yes...
...A man died here--an electric fan...
...I wasn't sure what I wanted to find, but I had to go on looking...
...9 . ." We paused at a small building...
...This was the beginning of a quest that went much deeper than my earlier intelleetual quest...
...This had been Merton's...
...We were over an hour picking our way through fifteen miles of traffic, as I fought not to take deep breaths of poison gas and road grime, before we came to open countryside, clean air and canals, and a taste of what Thailand used to be...
...I found a simple white cross on a gentile hi.tl near the chapel...
...He had made too many "cheeses for Jesus" to eat the stuff...
...I would find his grave too (more elaborate, more secular than Merton's, surrounded by Compsons and Snopeses, those fictional families he made into universal archetypes), but I would no more find Faulkner in Oxford than ,I would find MeRon at Gethsemani...
...So, indeed, what difference does it make where a great man is born or lives or dies...
...Monks in Thailand are honestly poor, truly respected, firmly established as representatives and symbols of honor and decency...
...An Asian journey, like his...
...The cord on this fan was frayed too...
...Again the separation...
Vol. 105 • April 1978 • No. 9
