The Sea Inside

from writing poetry, although by 1948 he had published his autobiography,
The Seven Storey Mountain
, which brought him to the world’s attention, appearing in England under the title
Elected Silence
, edited by Evelyn Waugh and championed by Graham Greene.
    Enclosed in his new order, Merton withdrew from the world and its problems so as to address them in the silence of his calling. Yet he could not resist speaking out. A contemporary of Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the Watts riots, he was the first Catholic cleric to protest publicly against the Vietnam War. He saw it as his duty to be, and in being, to reflect, in the manner of an artist. ‘The monk is not defined by his task, his usefulness,’ he wrote. ‘In a certain sense he is supposed to be “useless” because his mission is not to
do
this or that job but to
be
a man of God. His business is life itself.’
    Out of the contemporary cacophony – literally, shit sound – Merton listened to the voices around him. Hugin and Munin had gathered the news for Odin; this modern monk was God’s radio receiver for what was going on in the world, and what was going wrong with it. When the marine biologist Rachel Carson published her book
Silent Spring
in 1962, exposing the terrible effect that pesticides were having on the natural environment, Merton wrote in support. He bore the same witness in his poetry and his photographs – ‘The monk is a bird who flies very fast without knowing where he is going’ – and increasingly looked east to Buddhism. In his book
Zen and the Birds of Appetite
, published in 1968, he drew comparisons between the Zen masters and the Desert Fathers, with their own relationships with animals. And reading
Moby-Dick
, he declared it had ‘a great deal to do with the monastic life and perhaps a great deal more than the professedly spiritual books in the monastic library’.

    The only known photograph of God

    To Thomas, the raven – emblem of St Benedict – was the symbol of both salvation and mortality. Its black wings, as black as Reinhardt’s canvases, might as well have been an augury of the nuclear explosions now taking place in another desert.

    May my bones burn and ravens eat my flesh
    If I forget thee, contemplation.

    Merton’s own end was abrupt, fiery, and shocking. He died while visiting Thailand in 1968, accidentally electrocuted by a faulty electric fan. He was fifty-three, the same age as Cuthbert when he died. Witnesses described his corpse in exact detail – the fearsome burns to his torso, contrasting with the placid expression on his face – as if he might be incorrupt too. His body was flown back to the United States on a plane carrying GIs killed in Vietnam. It seems a violent conclusion for a man of peace, for all that he’d appeared to predict his fate in the last line of his autobiography: ‘That you may become the brother of God and learn to know the Christ of the burnt men.’ There were even rumours that dark forces had conspired to do away with this troublesome priest.
    By the mid-twentieth century the symbol of the raven had been perverted. In Norman Bates’s motel, the shape of a stuffed raven looms over the shoulder of Miss Crane, an omen of her imminent murder at the hands of a psycho dressed as his own dead mother. But people did not need Hitchcock to scare them witless with scenes of psychotic corvids and gulls turning on the inhabitants of a seaside town. For generations they had suspected birds, and declined to have pictures of them in their houses. They were spooky, unpredictable creatures out of the shadowy past; lurking, dark-feathered contradictions; not symbols of beauty, but faintly repulsive and reptilian creatures, ready to turn back time and become the terrible lizards they once were.

    Here, on the clear, pure heights of the island, is a landscape left to the birds. Up close and in reality, its ravens are huge, made bigger by their fluffed-up ruffs and feathered legs. I stalk one bird as it stabs at the earth, making myself look as ravenly as possible in my black anorak. If ravens are so clever, says a friend who lives on the island, how come they occupy such a limited niche, when you’d expect them to reign supreme? Having been forced from its inland home to more remote coasts, this alpha corvid is slowly recolonising the southern country it once knew well; and as with human beings, intelligence is not always a sign of success.
    The raven pair are cold-shouldered by other birds,