Want a NOOK? Explore Now
InThe Tree of the Doves, Christopher Merrill tackles several fundamental and ageless questions—Where do we come from? Where are we going? What shall we do?”—and provides a provocative and highly insightful reflection on the related issues of terror, modernity, tradition, and epochal transformation. He offers the associative perspective of a poet to a set of problems more often approached by journalists and historians. This collection consists of three extended essays that take the reader on Merrill's own journey across the globe, and explore the following in vivid detail: a performance of a banned ritual in the Malaysian province of Kelatan; Saint-John Perse's epic voyage from Beijing to Ulan Bator in 1921, and how it relates to the China of today; a trip across the Levant (Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, and the Gulf States) in 2007, in the wake of the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Merrill asserts that it is in this trinity of human actions—ceremony, expedition, war: all devised to keep terror at bay—that history is formed, and that the technological, political, environmental, and social changes we are witnessing now presage the end of one order and the creation of another.
A celebrated poet, essayist and newly appointed (by President Obama) member of the National Council on the Humanities eloquently considers the global impact of our "Age of Terror."
Merrill's (Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, 2005, etc.) treatise explores the nature of terror, its place in the post-9/11 world and how it unites and galvanizes those in the throes of it. His trio of meditative essays is derived from exotic journeys to Malaysia, China and the Dead Sea, as well as from a panoramic view of war-torn Syria atop the plateau of the Golan Heights while pondering "the consequences of living in fear." The setting for his first essay is the muggy jungles of Kelantan in Malaysia, where Merrill observed the performance of a now-forbidden spirit-raising healing ritual presided over by a shaman to rid a village girl of her maladies. Seated with a tour guide on a wooden plank just beyond the stage, he takes stock of the state of faith, the nation and the aftermath of the turmoil of 9/11. A wandering expedition partially retracing the Beijing sojourn 19th-century poet-diplomat Saint-John Perse finds Merrill transfixed by Chinese history; he recounts a visit to a Zen Buddhist poet in Maui where he pensively tapped into the nature of human suffering after a week-long bout of stomach flu. The final section details the writer's adventures visiting the Middle East's Levant territory, where the American military occupation of Iraq still evokes local scorn. The author's poetic background is evident in many lushly descriptive passages, and he clearly, rationally articulates his astute worldview. The essays can be hyperactively circuitous, however, with frequent digressions into the allegorical and the anecdotal. Terror, Merrill posits, is a fact of life, and his philosophically acute amalgam of religious, historical and political reflections will surely incite discussion and lively debate.
A unique travelogue boosted by wonderfully creative thinking with a political slant.
Overview
InThe Tree of the Doves, Christopher Merrill tackles several fundamental and ageless questions—Where do we come from? Where are we going? What shall we do?”—and provides a provocative and highly insightful reflection on the related issues of terror, modernity, tradition, and epochal transformation. He offers the associative perspective of a poet to a set of problems more often approached by journalists and historians. This collection consists of three extended essays that take the reader on Merrill's own journey...