“I am no more than a secretary of the invisible thing.” Czesław Miłosz begins one of his poems with this evocative declaration of artistic vocation. In this spare statement, the poet abandons any pretense of authorship in the conventional sense and presents himself as a vessel, one who listens inwardly and transcribes what he cannot claim as his own. The image is metaphysical, drawn from a lineage of writers who serve something higher than craft or culture, something closer to sacred obligation. Among the few who recognized this rare calling and lived its demands with equal gravity was Thomas Merton, the monastic contemplative who saw writing as a form of listening and language as a possible bridge to the divine. In “Secretaries,” Miłosz evokes a quiet community scattered across the globe. These fellow scribes do not know one another, and perhaps never will. Secretaries, mutually unknown, we walk the earth Without much comprehension. There is a tender humility here. These mysterious and diligent figures are possessed by a duty to record what has no fixed origin. They receive fragments, phrases that begin in the middle or trail off into uncertainty. They are faithful to what comes, though they may never understand what it means. Their labor is characterized by humble devotion. This sense of transmission deepens in “Ars Poetica?” in which Miłosz wrestles more urgently with the demands of his calling: I have always aspired to a more spacious form that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose, and would let us understand each other without exposing the author or reader to sublime agonies. Here the poet yearns for a language that does not distort reality for the sake of literary fashion. He dreams of a form capacious enough to accommodate the full weight of experience without exaggeration or disguise. The “sublime agonies” he speaks of are the wounds that authentic encounter inflicts: the cost of genuine transparency between souls, the pain of being truly seen and of truly seeing. This is a longing for a deeper sincerity, a mode of expression that neither conceals nor flaunts, but clarifies without inflicting such wounds. What Miłosz calls “a more spacious form” finds its echo in Merton’s yearning for a contemplative language free from violence — both artists seek words that heal rather than wound, that open rather than close. In “Ars Poetica?” Miłosz elaborates further on the burden of the secretary’s task. The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will. What I’m saying here is not, I agree, poetry, as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, under unbearable duress and only with the hope that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument. To write poetry, in Miłosz’s understanding, is a spiritual practice, a response to pressures that move beneath the surface of ordinary perception. Thomas Merton would have understood this calling and its attendant burdens instinctively. In his journals and letters, one discerns the same search for unguarded language, a mode of speech not marred by pretense. As a poet Merton wrote to reveal what could only be discovered in solitude. For him, words were vessels of reverence. He believed the truest writing arises from stillness and must preserve something of that stillness if it is to be believed. In No Man Is an Island, Merton describes the paradoxical power of creative work as transformative and self-effacing: “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” In their remarkable correspondence across continents — one writing from a monastic cell in Kentucky, the other from intellectual exile in California — Miłosz and Merton recognized in each other this same fidelity to the unseen. Merton found in Miłosz’s work the same refusal to domesticate mystery that characterized his own contemplative practice. Miłosz discovered in Merton’s letters a kindred spirit who understood writing as a form of prayer. The spiritual terrain they shared was unmistakably intimate, marked by the same willingness to serve as conduits rather than creators. When Miłosz writes in “Secretaries” “how it looks when completed / Is not up to us to inquire, we won’t read it anyway,” he articulates a rare trust in the work as something independent from the self. The poem, once written, belongs to a deeper order, one that resists the hunger for evaluation or finality. This surrender is faith by another name. It reflects a refusal to dominate what one has received, and a willingness to let it pass on into the world without being possessed or explained. Such submission characterized Merton’s spiritual life as well, who declared that “true contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us only as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever techniques.” His best writing holds space for bearing witness to that which exceeds the intellect. In passages such as this one from his journal The Sign of Jonas — “There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a hidden wholeness. In the visible world around us, there is a glory that is greater than anything else that can be seen, but this glory is not visible except by faith and by the interior light of wisdom” — we witness the secretary at work, transcribing what arrives from the margins of perception. The language is precise yet porous, faithful to an experience that cannot be fully captured yet must be attempted. Both men practiced an ethic of restraint that in our time appears quite radical. They did not chase acclaim, nor did they try to simplify their vision for popular understanding. Their fidelity was to the unseen, the unspeakable, the barely intuited. With his characteristic humility with regard to language and mystery, Merton put it this way in Thoughts on Solitude: “No writing on
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