Raids on the Unspeakable, by Thomas Merton

...a book review

Photo Cliff Scholz

When I was in my early 20s a girlfriend gave me the provocatively titled book, Raids on the Unspeakable. It’s a collection of essays by Thomas Merton. At the time, I greatly enjoyed the book, and since then I’ve aspired in my own writing to bring something of the combination of gentle audacity and fierce tenderness that I find in these pages.

Here’s how Merton begins the first essay, “Rain and the Rhinoceros” which was written, as we learn, in a cabin on the grounds of the author’s monastery in Kentucky, surrounded by woods and rain:

“Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By ‘they' I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market.” (p. 9)

If Merton’s proposition here seems outlandish — “Sell the rain! Yeah, right!” — maybe consider your cell phone. Talk is cheap, but not when we use such devices. And where once we were billed only for talking as with any telephone, to this basic fee-for-service value proposition another commercial scheme has been layered in so that the data collected by our phones is then put on the market: bought, sold, and commoditized. This certainly takes Merton’s observations about the marketing of camping lanterns to a whole new level. But what’s happening with our personal communications data, internet browsing habits, and biometrics represents a logical extension of the commercial mindset Merton identified as degrading to our experience of life way back in the 1960s.

Merton invites us to consider how in such a social environment the material world can be reduced from an experience of mystery and wonder to a mere dead object, a thing subject to externally imposed rules and endless manipulation. To this I would add that when we engage in such reductionistic modes of thinking and insist on putting price tags on everything, we tacitly offer our consent to being treated ourselves as dead objects and tagged and labeled the same way. We promote what we embody.

Thing is, if we choose to reduce our experience of the world in these ways, essays like the ones we find in Raids on the Unspeakable can fade in significance or possibly even become unintelligible to us. What’s the point of such challenging writing, one might ask. I suggest that maybe if we work our ways back to a place where we can see the value here and make sense of this kind of writing, it’ll change us. In fact, that’s my hope in reviewing a book that was written about 60 years ago.

Language is a strange thing. It’s quite possible for two people to be using apparently the same words and grammar but, owing to completely different underlying assumptions, values and mindsets, still have a total absence of comprehension when trying to communicate. In a way, whenever we engage in conversation we’re learning one another’s languages. Like any language acquisition process, this learning takes time. But what if we don’t take that time? Then what? In a marriage or a friendship, not taking the time to speak and listen typically leads to breakdown in the relationship. Likewise, looking at society as a whole, I can only imagine there is a threshold past which our proliferating mutual misunderstandings and unwillingness to talk and listen to one another might put everyone at risk.

So in a way, every piece of writing — and every conversation, for that matter — is a “raid on the unspeakable,” at least insofar as we are attempting to bridge gaps between ourselves and others, gaps that may include vastly different mindsets, values, interpretive frameworks and presuppositions.

Still, the word ‘unspeakable’ is itself, after all, speakable, and this book is filled with words. So what’s Merton really writing about? Well, maybe try reading it, even an essay or two, to find out.

As for speaking the unspeakable, I think we can learn to swim through that paradox. Personally, I’m fine with paradox because I am often tracing the limits of language, and, aside from silence, that’s one of the indicators that I’ve arrived there. On the other hand, I suspect that if we choose not to swim through paradox, we risk ending up stuck in the mud of plain old ordinary contradictions like Orwell’s famous “war is peace”. Such contradictions might look similar to paradoxes on the surface, but to me they indicate something different: not conscientiously applied thought but the absence of it.

It probably shows my personal bias, but it seems to me that when people of mystical bent resort to paradoxical constructions in their words it probably means something different than when masses of people start repeating contradictions with prescribed and socially conditioned emotional energy, expressions such as “freedom isn’t free” or “new normal.” The next thing we know, we’re hearing, or worse yet repeating, some brain-stopping version of Orwell’s aforementioned  “war is peace” and maybe even updated versions of his other maxims for dystopia: “ignorance is strength” and “freedom is slavery”. Such ideas are now gaining traction, from what I can see. Problem is, we’ve been here before: “We had to napalm the village in order to save it.” Something like this was spoken by officials during the Vietnam era. And heads nodded in unison. It’s always surprising to me how long such insanities can be broadly accepted.

But such nodding in unison happens, which is perhaps why Merton’s first essay also makes reference to Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, a play in which people are seduced by herd mentality to become, as Merton says, “a society of monsters”. Ionesco’s play and Orwell’s novel were both focused on totalitarianism. In many of the essays in this book, Merton appears to be gesturing toward the same ever-present social hazard, as well as some meaningful responses and alternatives.

And I hope readers do not conclude from all these references to writers and writing that I think there’s a literary solution to the problems we face, or that we should all read more books or something. That said, reading books, especially ones like this, might be more helpful or at least less harmful than other current, heavily promoted uses of our time, but take a look at my last several posts here and you’ll see that even though, yes, as a writer I’m still working with words, all kinds of other responses are on the table, from making kimchi to sitting on the floor to conscious breathing. Practical actions flow from our state of consciousness. For this reason, if Merton’s essays in Raids are difficult at times to understand, that’s kind of the point. They stretch us.

And I probably should state that I don’t find all the essays in the book equally compelling. Some readers will no doubt find some of the religious themes and language objectionable. Merton was after all a Trappist monk. For me, the question is: What’s alive in it? What is really being said? And can I find what’s alive in me by reading it?

Bottom line, to speak or to approach the unspeakable in any other way and still make some kind of sense — that’s a pretty decent working definition of art. And to my mind, Merton accomplishes this. It’s an art to write, but again, it’s also an art to read such writings, given what they demand of us. Anything well written is an invitation to a kind of dance. Essays can function much as Zen koans do in traditional Zen Buddhism. To move with writing like this can have a liberating effect on the mind. Here I’ve focused mainly on one essay in Merton’s collection, but there are gems to be found throughout the book.

Consider this, from the essay, “Message to Poets”:

“We who are poets know that the reason for a poem is not discovered until the poem exists. The reason for a living act is realized only in the act itself.”  p. 155

It’s so easy to gloss over a statement like that. Here’s what I get from it: Someone gave me this book decades ago. That was very much a “living act”. And I can only guess at the quiet impulse that motivated the gift, the significance of which continues to reverberate in my life today.

Interestingly, Merton alternates the essays with his own ink drawings. As we move through the book, each essay is an opportunity to explore different insights, different qualities of awareness. In a way, the drawings might be said to function like a soda cracker at a wine tasting, helping to clear the palate to better taste the next wine. But then again, it may be entirely the reverse: it may be that the drawings, wordless as they are, are the true “wine of the unspeakable” set out for tasting, and the essays themselves mere introductions and preliminaries.

I mean, since we’re already speaking of the unspeakable, we might at least want to discuss the possibility.