The Sea Inside

branches perch three ravens, ‘as blacke as they might be’, one saying to the others, ‘Where shall we our breakefast take?’ The story comes from an old English ballad, but the strangely submerged scenario could be set in some un-defined future as much as in a romantic past.
    Modern art was in no mood for cheery birds. Corvids appear as scurrying shapes in Van Gogh’s
Wheatfield with Crows
, painted in the last weeks of his life in 1890, before madness and death overcame him, leaving his friend Gauguin to retreat to Tahiti, where in 1897 he painted his own dream vision of a nubile native girl overlooked by Poe’s raven. Meanwhile, in Henri Rousseau’s
War
of 1894, all the more macabre for its naïveté, a childlike figure rides a black horse over a field of dead bodies, among them one that resembles the artist himself. In the clutter of flesh, the crows peck and forage as if their bare and bloody beaks were descrying in entrails the Armageddon to come. Perhaps it was no coincidence that by 1918 there was only one raven left at the Tower of London, and its flock had to be replenished from the Dartmoor village of Sourton, over whose abandoned quarry the birds still swoop and soar, huge and black against the blue sky.

    A thousand years after Cuthbert retreated to Inner Farne, Thomas Merton, monk and poet, sought to step outside the world to see it better, to find God within himself and within nature. Like Cuthbert, he had led a worldly life until then; a dissolute one, even, in the teeming streets and seedy dives of downtown Manhattan.
    Born in France in 1915, son of a New Zealand painter and an American Quaker, Merton had an itinerant upbringing. His mother died when he was young, leaving his artist father to take him travelling: to the Cape Cod towns of Provincetown and Truro – ‘a name as lonely as the edge of the sea’ – where he first saw the ocean from windswept dunes; and to Rome and the south of France, where he felt his soul come alive.
    After his father’s early death from a brain tumour, Merton studied at Cambridge, where he drank and was said to have fathered a child. He left England in 1934, regarding it as a decadent place ‘full of forebodings’, ‘a vast and complicated charade’ whose people were ‘morally dead’. His ship ‘sailed quietly out of Southampton Water by night’, leaving behind ‘the silence before a storm … all shut up and muffled with layers of fog and darkness … waiting for the first growl of thunder as the Nazis began to warm up the motors of a hundred thousand planes’.
    In New York, Merton enrolled at Columbia University, became a Communist under the assumed name of Frank Swift, and in between visiting nightclubs and playing ‘hot’ jazz records, studied William Blake (to whom he swore allegiance, perhaps on account of the fact that the poet saw angels in the trees of south London) and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Among his friends was the avant-garde artist Ad Reinhardt, who sought to create entirely black canvases – the ultimate artistic gesture of the age.
    Veering from dissolution to devotion, Merton was twenty-three years old when he became a Catholic in 1938 – at the same time that my mother, then a teenager, was being received into the Church in Southampton. One morning, after staying up all night with friends drinking in a club, he suddenly realised, ‘I am going to be a priest.’ With war raging in Europe, Merton gave up his one-room flat in Greenwich Village for a cell in the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani deep in rural Kentucky, where he had watched a novice inducted into the order. ‘The waters had closed over his head, and he was submerged in the community,’ Merton wrote. ‘He was lost. The world would hear of him no more. He had drowned to our society …’ Having been rejected by the military draft, Merton burned all the manuscripts of his novels, gave away his possessions and money, and exchanged his 1940s suit for fifteenth-century underwear. He left modern America for a medieval enclave; the one-time Communist was given a new communal name, Frater Louis.
    Merton’s retreat was about being lost and finding a new home, a rebirth. Clad in brown cowl and white robe, rather like a bird, he declared, ‘I desire to be lost to all created things, to die to them and to the knowledge of them.’ The Trappists obeyed the rule of St Benedict, observing silence, speaking only when necessary. At first Merton was even forbidden