“He generates books in the silence that ought to be sweet with the infinitely productive darkness of contemplation.” - Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain.
I've never sat for so long in front of a blinking cursor...
Thoughts, intentions and desires flit through my mind while tiny contractions squeeze and release in my stomach. Words appear and disappear, merging to form sentences before they fade in the silence of inactivity, my hands refusing to move.
They refuse to touch the keys out of habit and fear. The fear of touching coming from a fear of being touched: something inside of me waking or stirring to complicate my simplicity; of a certain paradise being lost. They refuse to risk themselves in creation or synthesis, or the artful task of interpretation: the injustice of moulding the last few months of effulgent life into some museum taxidermy—a once fluttering butterfly, stuffed and pinned to a wall in a display cabinet.
I haven't written in months not for want of expression, but for the tragic inadequacy of expression.
Ex-pression: the mind pressing outwards, itself onto the world, in its famously deluded tendency to grasp and mould so that it can ‘understand reality.’ The gross approximation that often forgets that all understanding is mediated through the concepts already available to us: that which we wish to know, is already something of which we are conceiving, something that we are asking about. The line of questioning determines the possible answers
What could a monk possibly have to write? Our vocation is to feel, and feel genuinely in sustained doses—a rare thing nowadays. Not to speak, nor write; for the meaning is all in the feeling and the vibrating sensorium that makes feeling possible: complete and perfect in its own right.
To lose a single moment of tender sympathy with the world to the stain of self-reflexive awareness doesn't feel appropriate for this time and place in my life. Notions of recording and reproducing are disturbing, for the deep channels only open every so often, and to be off somewhere, beguiled by some sultry flute-song would be to miss the grand display; to abandon ones post.
The more I exist as a non-entity at the intersection of the timeless with time, a conviction slowly deepens that there is nothing to say, and that everything said—by nature of being said—is already a ghost of what was, for in saying it, it's already a representation: devitalised and desiccated. Its original richness has been truncated and stripped down; and done so through a system of amorphous, semi-agreed upon meanings, mediated through a series of curving marks on a page or the vibrating pulsations of heated air.
Yet, despite our famous reticence, people want to talk to monks when they get the chance. Old friends come knocking, strangers stop by and the unacquainted seek acquaintance. So we sit together, whether at odd angles or directly before each other in the anticipation of impending communion, on furnished verandahs or wooden benches when the coolness of the autumn air touches our skin with the first taste of winters chill. The silence breaks, someone asks: 'so, how are you going?'
Far out at sea, under the cloak of interminable night, a thin band of yellow light sways from a lighthouse beacon through the magisterial wisdom of the dark. It finds nothing.
The longer I've been alone, the longer it takes for the cogs and pinwheels of this vast meaning making machine to shudder to life: to churn out crude representations, sound bites and headlines. To machinate and squish infinity into a jar. To return the old sailors—lost for decades and presumed dead—from the oceans depths with naught but a thimble of meaning to tell of their odyssey below the surface.
How am I? All I can offer is a receipt for deceit. My answer is born a paltry thing, pallid and emaciated; blinking its veiny, jaundiced eyes to the light. I'm a thousand turbulent blips and flashes of sensation in a broad and fluctuating field of awareness. I'm also good, and my health is fine. I'm as feather light and paper thin as the wind that sways the branches around us. It's also nice to see you, and I'm sorry to hear about the divorce.
Every feeling and sentiment that was once alive on the knife edge of the ungraspable now is born autumnal and yellow as it leaves our lips, the language is devoid of the experiences original lustre and vitality, like a stray bird that has grown tired and lost its flight, so that it can be caught by our clumsy hands.
And yet, loathe to admit it, even a monk needs to rise above the primordial soup of sensate experience to see and be seen every now and then. To allow their personality some daylight, to reach a hand out for warmth and connection, to honour our often disdained birthright as a fundamentally relational being.
The danger comes when we forget that the language we share is the primary means for solidification and entrapment, when we take the castles in the sky bolstered by make-believe buttresses to be real. Conclusions are established, stories are told and futures loom with possibilities; yet all the constructed worlds and their inhabitants arise and cease like puffs of smoke.
Underneath our veneer of solidity we live as effervescent clouds of scintillations, with the lifespan of a champagne bubbles.
Even so, there's something crucial and wholly necessary about this crochet of silence and communion, the interweaving of contemplation and ordinary conversation, the formation and dissolution of identity in the daily routine of doing and undoing. If you want to see how the world is unmade, you need to see it made. Form becoming emptiness, emptiness returning as form.
So why would a monk speak or write? Because to permanently retire to our stony tower of contemplation would be to cut ones understanding short, to only familiarise ourselves with half of the equation. The dissolution of form into the formless can only be complete when united with its twin: the coming into being of self, world and other in the dance of dialogue and the intimacy of conversation with a reader or another perceptive human being.
We write not to scratch an indelible mark on the universe, leave a legacy or further reify a selfhood, but to remind ourselves that we only exist in relation to others in a wholly unique moment of time, and that in the end the way we chose to exist holds just as much weight as the way we chose to cease.