Posted: May 13, 2011 | Author: roy hamric | Filed under: buddhism, people, photography | Leave a comment:
Thomas Merton named this photograph “The Sky Hook,” but he wrote,
“It is the only known picture of God.” See my essayThomas Merton: Looking
Through the Window in the On the Record listing.
The Hameric Journal. https://royhamric.wordpress.com/?s=Thomas+Merton
https://royhamric.wordpress.com/?s=Thomas+Merton
Posted: May 13, 2015 | Author: roy hamric | Filed under: articles, buddhism, Buddhism Zen, states of mind, writing |Tags: Merton on
photography, thomas merton in
Asia | 1 Comment
Mount Kangchenjunga
from Darjeeling
Thomas Merton, during his Asian pilgrimage, waited for days to see and
photograph Mount Kanchenjunga, but it was covered by clouds. His visual sense
was acute. In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, he wrote: “Nothing
resembles substance less than its shadow [words, drawings…]. To convey the
meaning of something substantial you have to use not a shadow but a sign, not
the imitation but the image. The image is a new and different reality, and of
course it does not convey an impression of some object, but the mind of the
subject: and that is something else again.” I discuss his pilgrimage and his
photography in an essay under “On the Record,” which is listed in the column on
the right. Merton died in Bangkok in December 1968.
Posted: May 13, 2011 | Author: roy hamric | Filed under: buddhism, people, photography | Leave a
Thomas Merton named this photograph “The Sky
Hook,” but he wrote, “It is the only known picture of God.” See my essayThomas
Merton: Looking Through the Window in the On the Record listing.
Posted: May 15, 2010 | Author: roy hamric | Filed under: articles, buddhism, people, photography | 1 Comment
This is an expanded version of an essay that appeared in The Kyoto Journal, issue
No. 47 in 2001.
The Photography of Thomas Merton: Seeing Through the Window
By Roy Hamric
Trappist Monk Thomas Merton, in his twenty-seventh year at Gethsemani
Monastery, wrote to his friend novelist John Howard Griffin, in 1968, shortly
after he received the gift of a camera: “It is fabulous. What a joy of a
thing to work with.The camera is the most eager and helpful of all
beings, all full of happy suggestions. Reminding me of things I have
overlooked and cooperating in the creation of new worlds. So Simply. This
is a Zen camera.”
merton with his Canon
And so, Merton’s life as an amateur photographer intensified. One of the
most spiritual and literary men of our times, Merton had been taking
photographs of his friends and the surroundings at Gethsemani, near Louisville,
Kentucky, for several years. He enjoyed using the clear glass of the camera
lens and the frame of the viewfinder as tools to help him see and to understand
the world. The mirror-like view of the camera, recreating whatever it is
pointed at, was perfect for Merton’s practical blend of spirituality.
His spiritual path had evolved over the years, as he began to explore
the spiritual connections with Zen, largely through the writings of D.T.
Suzuki. He longed to become more deeply involved in the “ordinary.”
merton in a baseball
cap
Many of Merton’s earliest photographs are similar in style to early
Chinese painter-calligraphers who tried to capture the direct essence of form.
Merton wrote to his friend, John C. H. Wu, the translator of one of the best
English versions of the Tao Te Ching, that he was uncomfortable with “mystical
writings.” He expressed his desire to go to Asia “to seek at the sources some
of the things I see to be so vitally important–the Zen ground of all the
dimensions of expression and mystery in the brushwork of Chinese calligraphy-
painting, poetry and so forth.”
“On the contrary,” he wrote, “it seems to me that mysticism flourishes
most purely right in the middle of the ordinary. And such mysticism, in
order to flourish, must be quite prompt to renounce all apparent claim to be
mystical at all.”
It is no surprise that a monk who lived a life sequestered from society
should be attracted to the still, and silent, photographic image. Within
that visual stillness and exchange between the seer and the seen lies a
mystery–perhaps some of the spiritual mystery of why one would become a monk in
the first place.
During the sixities, as Merton began to explore Asian philosophy, he
also began to experiment with calligraphy, creating striking images. In
1958, he wrote in his journal that he had bought a copy of “The Family of
Man,” Edward Steichen’s landmark photography book which established
the power of photography to evoke universal truths. Merton saw the images as a
form of “writing” in which “no explanations are necessary!” “How scandalized
some would be if I said that this whole book is to me a picture of Christ, and
yet that is the Truth..” This reaction to the visual came in the same entry in
his journal in which he recorded what was later to be described as his
“Louisville epiphany,” wherein he wrote that he had experienced an
overwhelming sense of “oneness” with other people on a street corner.
John Howard Griffin, the author of the civil rights classic Black
Like Me, was also an amateur photographer. In 1963, he wanted to
build a photographic archive of Merton and his life at Gethsmeni. He wrote to
Merton mentioning his desire, and he visited him a short while later. While
there, he said, “Tom watched with interest and wanted an explanation of the
cameras––a Leica and Alpha.” Merton told Griffin, “I don’t know anything about
photography, but it fascinates me.”
Merton had begun his first serious exploration of photography when in
January 1962, he visited a Shaker village near the monastery. He found “some
marvelous subjects,” he wrote in his journal, and his description of what he
saw and photographed signaled that his search for subjects was part of a highly
developed visual acuity that unfolded in a charged contemplative state of mind
: “Marvelous, silent, vast spaces around the old buildings.” he wrote in his
journal. “Cold, pure light, and some grand trees…. How the blank side of a
frame house can be so completely beautiful I cannot imagine. A completely
miraculous achievement of forms.”
Merton and Griffin started a spiritual-literary friendship during a
retreat Griffin made at Gethsemani. Griffin sensed that Merton’s mind innately
took to the camera’s frame. He served as a constant source of
encouragement to Merton, volunteered to process Merton’s film and became a
casual critic of his contact sheets.
They exchanged regular letters touching on Merton’s photography from
1965 through 1968–the year of Merton’s accidental death in Bangkok, following
his epiphanic tour of Asia. Merton’s Asian journal of his
pilgrimage, and the inclusion of about 30 photographs that he took during the
trip, were published as The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton–a work
unlike Merton’s other books in its personal intensity. Upon finishing the book,
you have a sense that Merton’s life was in a profound stage of evolution.
That revelation, for me, comes through most strongly in the journal
entries chronicling the things he photographed during his journey.
But his earlier photographs also offer tantalizing clues to Merton’s
spiritual journey in his final years.
By 1964, Merton had regular access to a camera and his reading of Zen
books became an integral part of his life, no doubt stimulating his interest in
the visual experience itself through its emphasis on “attention” and
“experiencing the moment.” On September 24, Merton linked Zen and photography
in another journal entry: “After dinner I was distracted by the dream camera,
and instead of seriously reading the Zen anthology I got from the Louisville
Library, kept seeing curious things to shoot, especially a window in the tool
room of the woodshed. The whole place is full of fantastic and strange
subjects––a mine of Zen photography.”
In the following years, he moved on to better cameras, eventually
gaining access to a Rollieflex owned by the monastery. When it
malfunctioned in 1968, he immediately wrote to Griffin, who sent him a 35mm
Canon FX with 50 mm and 100 mm lenses.
The new camera was the springboard to more sophisticated pictures, and
Merton was soon comparing notes with Griffin on the ins-and-outs of
photography. He never took any interest in developing his own film or printing
his images, instead sending exposed rolls of film to Griffin, who with his son,
Gregory, developed the film and sent back contact prints for Merton to select
the images he wanted printed. Griffin recalls that he and his son were often
frustrated that Merton seemingly skipped over “superlative” images and instead
marked others that seemed ordinary to them.
“He went right on marking what he wanted rather than what we thought he
should want,” recalled Griffin. “ Then, as he keep taking photographs, more and
more often he would send a contact sheet with a frame marked and an excited
notation: ‘At last––this is what I have been aiming for.”
Griffin soon began to appreciate Merton’s personal visual quest: “He
focused on the images in his contemplation, as they were and not as he wanted
them to be. He took his camera on his walks and, with his special way of
seeing, photographed what moved or excited him––whatsoever responded to that
inner orientation.”
Merton’s interest in painting and photography had taken a decisive turn
in early 1965, after he read “The Tao of Painting” by Mai-Mai Sze, a
work he called “deep and contemplative.” He began practicing Chinese
brushstrokes in a freehand style, one of which he published on the cover
of Raids on the Unspeakable. In August of that year, he
moved to a cottage hermitage surrounded by woods on the grounds of Gethsemani
where he found more solitude and where nature increased his awareness of flora
and fauna. Writing in his journal of his early days at the hermitage, he said
the hermitage lifestyle challenged him “to see the great seriousness of what I
am about to do.”
“Contrary to all that is said about it,” he wrote, “I do not see how the
really solitary life can tolerate illusion or self-deception. It seems to
me that solitude rips off all the masks and all the disguises. It
tolerates no lies. Everything but straight and direct affirmation, or silence,
is mocked and judged by the silence of the forest.”
Merton’s natural visual acuteness was intensified during his walks
through the fields and woods at his monastery. As a band of deer appeared from
out of the woods one day, he watched silently:
“I watched their beautiful running, their grazing,” he wrote in his
journal. “Every movement was completely lovely, but there is a kind of
gaucheness about them sometimes that makes them even lovelier, like girls. The
thing that struck me most–when you look at them directly and in movement–you
see what the primitive cave painters saw. Something you never see in a
photograph. It is most awe-inspiring. The ‘spirit’ is shown in the
running of the deer. The deerness that sums up everything and is sacred
and marvelous.”
Merton described such deep perceptions as “contemplative intuition, yet
this is perfectly ordinary, everyday seeing–what everybody ought to see all the
time.”
“The deer reveals to me something essential, not only in itself, but also
in myself,” he wrote. “Something beyond the trivialities of my everyday
being, my individual existence. Something profound. The face of that
which is both in the deer and in myself.”
thomas merton
Whenever Griffin visited Merton, the two men often took long walks in
the woods and surrounding countryside looking for objects and scenes to
photograph. A letter dated Dec. 12, 1966, refers to pictures Merton took of
tree roots. “I signed them as you requested, and have sent back the ones you
want,” he wrote to Griffin. “They are really splendid. I find myself
wondering if I took such pictures.”
His life at Gethsemani was isolated, yet he became friends with another
most unusual photographer, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, who had photographed Merton
and who lived in Louisville. Meatyard had already achieved great recognition as
an exceptionally original and brilliant photographer. He was also interested in
Zen, and he took many mysterious, haunting photographs of Merton. They
exchanged 16 letters. Meatyard was not, unlike most people, awed by Merton’s
reputation, and he seemed to see the man whole: “[I was] photographing a
Kierkegaard who was a fan of Mad [magazine]; a Zen adept and hermit who droooled
over hospital nurses with a cute behind…a man of accomplished self-descipline
who sometimes acted like a 10 year old with an unlimited charge account at a
candy store.”
One of Merton’s most
personal photographs from that period is called “The Sky Hook.” He wrote
that the picture “is the only known photograph of God.” The picture’s
composition is balanced between material and non-material space, cut through
the center from the top by a steel hook, curled toward the sky–empty–holding
nothing.
Merton’s Asian pilgrimage had been an evolving dream, perhaps beginning
with his earliest letteers to D. T. Suzuki,whom he corresponded with in the
late 1950s. In one of his first letters to Suzuki, he included a picture
of himself. “There is no law against my visiting Japan in the form of a
picture,” he wrote. A few days
before Merton left for Asia in 1968, he had put the final touches on his
manuscript for Zen and the Birds of Appetite, which is still an
elegant introduction to Zen and to the similarities and differences between
Christianity and Zen, and how the two paths may merge. In the book, Merton
quoted Shen Hui: “The true seeing is when there is no seeing.”
Prior to leaving Gethsemani, he wrote in his journal: “I am going
home, to the home where I have never been in this body….” He had a stopover in
Bangkok for three days before flying to Calcutta and then New Delhi. On
Nov. 1, he was in Dharamsala where he met with the Dalai Lama three times.
Later, near Darjeeling, he met Chatral Rimpoche, a lama who had meditated
extensively for more than 30 years, and who, for Merton, “was the greatest
rimpoche I have met so far.”They talked for more than two hours, always coming
back to dzogchen (Zen). Upon leaving, they had “a kind of compact that we would
both do our best to make it [“complete Buddhahood”] in this life.”
His diary entries during the next days are full of descriptions of the
act of seeing new cities, new landscapes and new people. After viewing nearby
Mount Kanchenjunga, which seemed to both repel and attract him at the same
time, Merton made notes about its powerful force of nature. Kanchenjunga had
been constantly surrounded by clouds, revealing itself to him only grudgingly.
One night Merton dreamed about the mountain, pure white, and a voice said,
“There is another side to the mountain.” He then realized, in the dream, that
he was seeing the mountain from the other side and that, : “That is only side
worth seeing.”––an image that parallels the concept that the true nature of
reality cannot be experienced dualistically, but only through a unitive state
of emptiness and limitlessness.
His diary entries during the next days are full of descriptions of the
act of seeing new cities, new landscapes and new people. After viewing nearby
Mount Kanchenjunga, which seemed to both repel and attract him at the same
time, Merton made notes about its powerful force of nature. Kanchenjunga had
been constantly surrounded by clouds, revealing itself to him only grudgingly.
One night Merton dreamed about the mountain, pure white, and a voice said,
“There is another side to the mountain.” He then realized, in the dream, that
he was seeing the mountain from the other side and that, : “That is only side
worth seeing.”––an image that parallels the concept that the true nature of
reality cannot be experienced dualistically, but only through a unitive state
of emptiness and limitlessness.
Over the next few days his diary entries are discerning analyses of the
processes of discrimination and the subject-object dance of mind. Describing
his feelings about his frustrating attempts to photograph the mountain
while it was shrouded in clouds, he wrote:
“I took three more photos of the mountain. An act of reconciliation? No.
A camera cannot reconcile one with anything. Nor can it see a real
mountain. The camera does not know what it takes: It captures the
materials with which you reconstruct––not so much what you saw as what you
thought you saw.
“Hence, the best photography is aware – mindful, of illusion and the uses
of illusion–permitting and encouraging it – especially unconscious (and
powerful) illusions that are not normally admitted on the scene.” The last
reflection is an affirmation that the photographic process of seeing has
the potential–at least for some people –to be a powerful stimulant to the
unconscious.
Finally, the clouds lifted from around Kanchenjunga. Merton wrote:
“The full beauty of the mountain is not seen until you too consent to the
impossible paradox: it is and is not. When nothing more needs to be said, the
smoke of ideas clears, the mountain is seen.” *Footnote 1
After completing his visit to Mount Kanchenjunga, Merton returned
briefly to Calcutta where a package of his contact prints from Griffin awaited
him. “The one of the Dalai Lama is especially good,” Merton wrote. He arrived
in Kandy, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), on Dec. 2 and a car took him to Polonnaruwa, the
site of an assemblage of large stone Buddhas carved out of a hillside, and “the
most impressive things I have seen in Asia.”
Two days later, he wrote in his diary, “Polonnaruwa was such an
experience that I could not write hastily of it and cannot write now, or not at
all adequately.” During the visit, Merton’s spirit seemed to have opened to the
point of bursting forth upon seeing the languid, relaxed forms of the Buddhas
in peaceful repose.
“I was knocked over with a rush of relief and thankfulness at the
obvious clarity of the figures, 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. I don’t know when in my life I have
ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one
aesthetic illumination. I mean I know and have seen what I was obscurely
looking for. I don’t know what else remains, but I have now seen and have
pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise.”
buddha sculpture in
Polonnaruwa
Merton’s widely discussed Polonnaruwa diary entry describes an
overwhelming moment loaded with the nuances of Zen experince. In Zen, such
moments are sometimes of such depth that they are called kensho experiences, a
moment in which one experiences–in Zen terms– the ground of being. Earlier,
Merton, in trying to find an equivalent phrase for kensho in Christian terms,
in his conclusion to Zen and the Birds of Appetite, suggested
“divine grace,” or “perfect clarity.” Zen history is full of stories
recording moments when a particular sight of an object strikes a cord in the
seer, snapping the ordinary relationship between seer and seen. The physical
presence of the large reclining Buddhas seemed to have touched Merton at this
deepest level. He wrote in his journal:
“Looking at these figures I 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….The things about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem, and
really no “mystery.” All problems are resolved and everything is clear, simply
because what matteris is clear. The rock, all matter, all life, is charged with
dharmakaya…everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. I don’t
know when in my life I have every had such a sense of beauty and spiritual
validity running together in one aesthetic illumination.”
This illumination came a week before his death. On Dec., 7, he arrived
in Bangkok, where he was scheduled to deliver a paper titled “Marxism and
Monastic Perspectives” at a religious conference at the Red Cross Center on
the outskirts of town. He stayed at the renowned Oriental Hotel, known for its
association with writers traveling through Asia. From his hotel room window,
Merton took his last photograph, which looked out through the room’s window
onto Thailand’s sacred Chao Prayo River and a section Bangkok lining the other
side of the river. Later, he took nine rolls of exposed film to the nearby
Borneo Studio on Silom Road. After his death, Griffin wrote to the
photographic studio, obtained the rolls of film, and found the window
photograph, the last picture on the last role of file exposed. It is a simple,
ordinary, yet–for me–haunting image. I can only attempt to touch on the
power that resonates around the photophraph by referring to a dream recorded by
Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, and then to an early
essay by one of his early Buddhist mentors, D.T. Suzuki.
Merton described his dream: “I dreamt I was lost in a great city and was
walking toward the center without quite knowing where I was going.
Suddenly, I came to a dead end, but on a height, looking at a great bay, an arm
of the harbor. I saw a whole section of the city spread out before me on
the hills covered with a light snow, and realized that, though I had far to go,
I knew where I was: because in this city there are two arms of the harbor and
they help you to find your way, as you are always encountering them.”
Suzuki also used a window image in a short essay he read on the “Supreme
Spiritual Ideal” before the World Congress of Faiths, an assembly of
religious leaders, in London in 1936. Suzuki began the essay with a description
of his home in Japan and his windows looking out into his garden. He made the
point that in Japan when windows are opened, very often “one side of the house
is entirely taken away….There is no division between the house and the garden.
The garden is a house and the house is a garden; but here [in England] a house
is quite separate. A house stands by itself, and so does its occupant.
There is nature, here I am; you are you, I am I; so there does not seem to be
any connection between those two–– nature, natural surroundings and the
occupants of the house.”
thomas merton
Suzuki ended his essay by referring to Chao Chou’s stone bridge
[Case No.42 in The Blue Cliff Record] and the awareness
of being thankful that all things and beings are passing over the bridge at
every moment “from the beginningless past to the endless future.”
On the day Merton died, Dec.10, 1968, he read his conference paper
at the Red Cross center and afterwards retired to rest in a cottage on the
grounds. His body was found about two hours later. Apparently, after
taking a shower he had reached for a large standing fan and was
electrocuted. The fan was found lying across his body.
Merton would have relished the poetic irony that can be read into his
final photograph, a view of the Chao Phaya River. The photograph closely
mirrored his earlier dream image––the “snow” being replaced by a tropical day,
a “bay” by a river and the “two arms of the harbor [the relative and the
absolute]” by the two banks of the sacred river. It is easy to make too
much––or perhaps not enough––from the above description and speculation.
This is only my personal reading of Merton’s spiritual journey during his
Asian pilgrimage, and the role of vision in his meditative life. No one will
ever know for sure the dimension of his spiritual experience and awakening in
Asia, except through his words and photographs. But it is clear that Merton,
one of the 20th century’s greatest spiritual souls, had ultimate respect for
the beauty and mystery of seeing and experiencing the world as it is, and for
the mysterious space that unites the seer and the seen.
But that is not the end of the story. There’s one more photograph, a
photograph of Thomas Merton. While Merton was in Darjeeling and experiencing
his on-and-off-again affair with Mount Kanghenjunga, he was staying as a guest
in a house on a tea plantation. The owner had allowed Thugsey Rinpoche to build
a hermitage monastery in the forest near the plantation. The story goes that
after Merton’s death, his friend, Harold Talbott, saw the rinpoche, who asked
him for a photograph of Merton. Asked why, the rinpoche said Merton had liked
the hermitage, and he wanted to put a photograph of Merton on a shrine and say
prayers to encourage him to take rebirth as a monk at the hermitage. Time
passed. Later, Talbott asked the rinpoche about Merton. “He is here, but I
can’t say anything more,” said Thugsey Rinpoche.
Footnote 1: That Merton’s visual intellect was brilliant can be seen in
an earlier passage from his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander: “Nothing
resembles substance less than its shadow. To convey the meaning of
something substantial you have to use not a shadow but a sign, not the
imitation but the image. The image is a new and different reality, and of
course it does not convey an impression of some object, but the mind of the
subject: and that is something else again.
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