even with motionless movement

"Untitled" brush drawing by Thomas Merton

(image size: 7 1/2" h x 4 1/2" w)

May 11, 1964 “So we must all move, even with motionless movement, even if we do not see clearly. A few little flames, yes. You can’t grasp them, but anyway look at them obliquely. To look too directly at anything is to see something else because we force it to submit to the impertinence of our preconceptions. After a while though everything will speak to us if we let it and do not demand that it say what we dictate.” (Thomas Merton, "Courage for Truth", p. 198)

Notes from Roger Lipsey:
“ … promise begins to be realized … Merton’s brush is now alive, pliant, and quick. We are beginning to see brush-drawn signs of genuine eloquence, sure in motion, sure in structure, at ease with the kinds of things that brush and ink do, thick and thin, wet and dry, contact and release, density and airiness. Merton has moved closer to his models in Zen calligraphy, priest-artists for whom the brush was infinitely varied in expression. And we encounter in this image a key trait of Merton’s visual art: dynamism. This was a man of boundless energy, an his art as it became more freely his own, through technical progress and greater familiarity with the brush, reflected his buoyancy. In his notes, he once described his art as “contracts with movement, with life”. … [His works] convey not thought but sensations of movement, buoyancy, and joy. …”
(“Angelic Mistakes, The Art of Thomas Merton”, by Roger Lipsey, pp. 43-44)