SEGUNDA PARTE El primer Estado sahraui
A- Constitución
It was a hot day, a rainy day, in the middle of August when I came out of the sub-way into the heat of Harlem. There were not many people on the streets that afternoon.
I walked along the street until I came to the middle of the block, and saw one or two stores marked “Friendship House” and “Bl. Martin de Porres Center” or some such title in big blue letters. There did not seem to be anyone around.
The biggest of the stores was the library, and there I found half a dozen young Negroes, boys and girls, high school students, sitting at a table. Some of them wore glasses, and it seemed they were having some kind of an organized intellectual discus-sion, because when I came in they got a little embarrassed about it. I asked them if the Baroness was there, and they said no, she had gone downtown because it was her birthday, and I asked who I should see, so they told me Mary Jerdo. She was around somewhere. If I waited she would probably show up in a few minutes.
So I stood there, and took down off the shelf Father Bruno’s Life of St. John of the Cross and looked at the pictures.
The young Negroes tried to pick up their discussion where they had left off, but they did not succeed. The stranger made them nervous. One of the girls opened her mouth and pronounced three or four abstract words, and then broke off into a giggle.
Then another one opened her mouth and said: “Yes, but don’t you think…?” And this solemn question also collapsed in embarrassed tittering. One of die young men got off a whole paragraph or so, full of big words, and everybody roared with laughter. So I turned around and started to laugh too, and immediately the whole thing became a game.
They began saying big words just because it was funny. They uttered the most profoundly dull and ponderous statements, and laughed at them, and at the fact that such strange things had come out of their mouths. But soon they calmed down, and then Mary Jerdo came along, and showed me the different departments of Friendship House, and explained what they were.
The embarrassment of those young Negroes was something that gave me a picture of Harlem: the details of the picture were to be filled in later, but the essentials were already there.
Here in this huge, dark, steaming slum, hundreds of thousands of Negroes are herded together like cattle, most of them with nothing to eat and nothing to do. All the senses and imagination and sensibilities and emotions and sorrows and desires and hopes and ideas of a race with vivid feelings and deep emotional reactions are forced in upon themselves, bound inward by an iron ring of frustration: the prejudice that hems them in with its four insurmountable walls. In this huge cauldron, inestimable natural
A THOMAS MERTON READER · 2.7 The Sleeping Volcano 91 gifts, wisdom, love, music, science, poetry are stamped down and left to boil with the dregs of an elementally corrupted nature, and thousands upon thousands of souls are destroyed by vice and misery and degradation, obliterated, wiped out, washed from the register of the living, dehumanized.
What has not been devoured, in your dark furnace, Harlem, by marijuana, by gin, by insanity, hysteria, syphilis?
Those who manage somehow to swim to the top of the seething cauldron, and remain on its surface, through some special spiritual quality or other, or because they have been able to get away from Harlem, and go to some college or school, these are not all at once annihilated: but they are left with the dubious privilege of living out the only thing Harlem possesses in the way of an ideal. They are left with the sorry task of contemplating and imitating what passes for culture in the world of the white people.
Now the terrifying paradox of the whole thing is this: Harlem itself, and every individual Negro in it, is a living condemnation of our so-called “culture.” Harlem is there by way of a divine indictment against New York City and the people who live downtown and make their money downtown. The brothels of Harlem, and all its pros-titution, and its dope rings, and all the rest are the mirror of the polite divorces and the manifold cultured adulteries of Park Avenue: they are God’s commentary on the whole of our society.
Harlem is, in a sense, what God thinks of Hollywood. And Hollywood is all Harlem has, in its despair, to grasp at, by way of a surrogate for heaven.
The most terrible thing about it all is that there is not a Negro in the whole place who does not realize, somewhere in the depths of his nature, that the culture of the white men is not worth the dirt in Harlem’s gutters. They sense that the whole thing is rotten, that it is a fake, that it is spurious, empty, a shadow of nothingness. And yet they are condemned to reach out for it, and to seem to desire it, and to pretend they like it, as if the whole thing were some kind of bitter cosmic conspiracy: as if they were thus being forced to work out, in their own lives, a clear representation of the misery which has corrupted the ontological roots of the white man’s own existence.
The little children of Harlem are growing up, crowded together like sardines in the rooms of tenements full of vice, where evil takes place hourly and inescapably before their eyes, so that there is not an excess of passion, not a perversion of natural appetite with which they are not familiar before the age of six or seven: and this by way of an accusation of the polite and expensive and furtive sensualities and lusts of the rich whose sins have bred this abominable slum. The effect resembles and even magnifies the cause, and Harlem is the portrait of those through whose fault such things come into existence. What was heard in secret in the bedrooms and apartments of the rich and of the cultured and the educated and the white is preached from the housetops of Harlem and there declared, for what it is, in all its horror, somewhat as it is seen in the eyes of God, naked and frightful.
No, there is not a Negro in the whole place who can fail to know, in the marrow of his own bones, that the white man’s culture is not worth the jetsam in the Harlem River.
THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN
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Poems
AUBADE—HARLEM (For Baroness C. de Hueck)
Across the cages of the keyless aviaries,
The lines and wires, the gallows of the broken kites, Crucify; against the fearful light,
The ragged dresses of the little children.
Soon, in the sterile jungles of the waterpipes and ladders, The bleeding sun, a bird of prey, will terrify the poor, Who will forget the unbelievable moon.
But in the cells and wards of whiter buildings,
Where the glass dawn is brighter than the knives of surgeons, Paler than alcohol or ether,
Grayer than guns and shinier than money, The white men’s wives, like Pilate’s, Cry in the peril of their frozen dreams:
“Daylight has driven iron spikes, Into the flesh of Jesus’ hands and feet:
Four flowers of blood have nailed Him to the walls of Harlem.”
Along the white walls of the clinics and the hospitals Pilate vanishes with a cry:
They have cut down two hundred Judases,
Hanged by the neck in the opera houses and museums.
Across the cages of the keyless aviaries,
The lines and wires, the gallows of the broken kites, Crucify, against the fearful light,
The ragged dresses of the little children.
A MAN IN THE DIVIDED SEA
A THOMAS MERTON READER · 2.8 Poems 93 DIRGE FOR THE PROUD WORLD
Where is the marvelous thief
Who stole whole harvests from the angry sun And sacked, with his bright sight, the land?
Where he lies dead, the quiet earth unpacks him And wind is waving in the earth’s revenge:
Fields of barley, oats, and rye.
Where is the millionaire
Who squandered the bright spring?
Whose lies played in the summer evening sky Like cheap guitars?
Who spent the golden fortunes of the fall And died as bare as a tree?
His heart lies open like a treasury,
Filled up with grass, and generous flowers.
Where is the crazy gambler
Amid the nickels of whose blood have fallen Heavy half dollars of his last of life?
Where is he gone?
The burning bees come walk, as bright as jewels Upon that flowering, dark sun:
The bullet wound in his unmoving lung.
Oh you who hate the gambler or his enemy, Remember how the bees
Pay visits to the patient dead
And borrow honey from their charitable blood.
You who have judged the gambler or his enemy Remember this, before the proud world’s funeral.
A MAN IN THE DIVIDED SEA
94 2.8 Poems · A THOMAS MERTON READER
AN ARGUMENT OF THE PASSION OF CHRIST
And what one of you, by taking thought, can add to his stature one cubit?
ST. MATTHEW, 6:27
1
The furious prisoner of the womb, Rebellious, in the jaws of life,
Learns, from the mother’s conscious flesh, The secret laws of blood and strife.
The demon raging at the breast,
Arrayed in cries, and crowned with tears, Has sucked the magics of the east, The doubts of the philosophers.
In the red straits of his arteries, Love runs, lost and ravening;
Nothingness feeds upon itself And swells up to a mighty king!
Wit walks out, in envy’s mask;
Love will hide, and be a lecher.
Adultery, by taking thought, Adds a cubit to his stature, Until we scan the wastes of death,
And wind blows through our cage of bones;
Sight leaves the sockets of the skull, And love runs mad among the stones!
2
The worm that watched within the womb Was standing guard at Jesus’ tomb, And my first angry, infant breath Stood wakeful, lest He rise from death.
My adolescence, like the wolf, Fled to the edges of the gulf And searched the ruins of the night To hide from Calvary’s iron light:
But in the burning jaws of day I saw the barren Judas Tree;
For, to the caverns of my pride Judas had come, and there was paid!
A THOMAS MERTON READER · 2.8 Poems 95 3
Seeds of the three hours’ agony Fell on good earth, and grew from me, And, cherished by my sleepless cares
Flowered with God’s Blood, and Mary’s tears.
My curious love found its reward
When Love was scourged in Pilate’s yard:
Here was the work my hands had made:
A thorny crown, to cut His head.
The growth of thoughts that made me great Lay on His cross, and were its weight;
And my desires lay, turned to stones, And where He fell, cut to the bone.
The sharpnesses of my delight
Were spikes run through His hands and feet, And from the sweetness of my will
Their sponge drew vinegar and gall.
A MAN IN THE DIVIDED SEA
CRUSOE
Sometimes the sun beats up the rocks of capes And robs the green world with a clangor of banks.
Then the citizens
Come out to stone the sky; and with their guns Mean to shoot the highpowered spheres to pieces:
At dawn, the laws, in the yards of all the prisons, Propose to hang the robber, the breeder of life.
What if no more men will learn to turn again And run to the rainy world’s boundaries?
What if no more men will learn to atone
By hard, horseplay of shipwreck in the drench of Magellan, And still steer by the stars’ unending Lent?
What if the last man Will no more learn, and run
The stern, foundering ocean, north of the line,
Where crew and cargo drown in the thrash of the wreck, The day he’s driven to his Penal Island,
His own rich acre of island, like the wiseguy Crusoe!
A MAN IN THE DIVIDED SEA
96 2.8 Poems · A THOMAS MERTON READER
THE BOMBARDED CITY Now let no man abide In the lunar wood The place of blood.
Let no man abide here, Not even in a dream,
Not in the lunar forest of this undersea.
Oh you who can a living shadow show Grieving in the broken street,
Fear, fear the drowners, Fear the dead!
But if you swagger like the warring Leader Fear far more
What curse rides down the starlit air, Curse of the little children killed!
Curse of the little children killed!
Then let no living man, or dead, abide In this lunar wood,
No, not even in a dream.
For when the houses lean along the night Like broken tombs,
And shout, with silent windows,
Naked and windy as the mouths of masks, They still pour down
(As conch shells, from their curling sleep, the sea) The air raid’s perished roar.
But do not look aside at what you hear.
Fear where you tread,
And be aware of danger growing like a nightshade Through the openings of the stone.
But mostly fear the forum,
Where, in the midst, an arch and pediment, Space out, in honor of the guilty Warlord, A starlit area
Much like the white geometry of peace:
A THOMAS MERTON READER · 2.8 Poems 97 O dread that silent place!
For even when field flowers shall spring Out of the Leader’s lips, and open eyes, And even while the quiet root
Shall ravel his murdering brain, Let no one, even on that holiday, Forget the never-sleeping curse.
And even when the grass grows in his groin, And goldenrod works in his rib,
And in his teeth the ragweed grins, As furious as ambition’s diligence:
And when, in wind,
His greedy belly waves, kneedeep in weeds, O dread the childish voices even then, Still scratching near him like a leaf, And fear the following feet
That are laid down like little blades, Nor face the curses of the innocent That mew behind you like a silver hinge.
For even in the dream of peace All men will flee the weedy street, The forum fallen down,
The cursed arenas full of blood,
Hearing the wind creep in the crannied stone:
Oh, no man can remain,
Hearing those souls weep in the hollow ruin.
For there no life is possible,
Because the eyes of soldiers, blind, destroyed, Lurk like Medusas of despair,
Lay for the living in the lunar door, Ready to stare outside
And freeze the little leaping nerves Behind the emperor’s sight.
And there no life is possible Because a weeping childvoice, thin Unbodied as the sky,
Rings like an echo in the empty window:
And thence its sound
Flies out to feel, with fingers sharp as scalpels, The little bones inside the politician’s ear.
98 2.8 Poems · A THOMAS MERTON READER
Oh let no man abide In the lunar wood, The place of blood.
Let no man abide there, no, Not even in a dream.
A MAN IN THE DIVIDED SEA
SONG
Come where the grieving rivers of the night Copy the speeches of the sea:
And hear how this devouring weather Steals our music.
Under a tent of branches
Let grow our harps in windy trees.
But, in the flowering of our windless morning We should be slow-paced watchmen,
Crossing, on our ecliptics, with a cry of planets, Homesick, at the sharp rim
Of our Jerusalem, the day.
Then weep where the splendid armies of the sky Copy the prisoner’s visions:
Yet keep the arrows of your eyes unquivered.
Light more watch fires:
Because the thieving stars may come And steal our lives.
A MAN IN THE DIVIDED SEA
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