Music, Mentors and Bob Dylan

I think that I only got myself confused with my last blog. Who needs spirals anymore when they all return to the beginning anyway? Trying to sort out the wheat from the chaff is a thankless and pointless task, especially from a Pure Land perspective of "no calculation" and things being "made to become so of themselves". Who is in charge here anyway?

No one? 

I was also thinking of mentors, but looking back in time it becomes difficult to sort the mentors from the mistakes. What was really happening in a world of "no calculation" where anyone or anything can be a "mentor" and where "every cut is the best"? Well, I'm waffling and rambling as usual.

Where will your next mentor come from?

My mind has drifted to music.

When I was a lad the word "music" suggested only the tastes of my dear old mum and dad. It suggested the "Billy Cotton Bandshow", the "Black and White Minstrel Show" ( what price PC now? ) and the - for me - dreary crooning of the Perry Comos and Matt Monroes of our world. Nothing there at all. And a spin of the dial of my little transister radio revealed only talk, talk and more talk, and if even more unlucky, a snatch of Beethoven or Bach. Well, yes, I was a youthful philistine.

What can you say? Apart from "Times Change"

I was far too young to catch the very first wave of "Rock Around the Clock", of Elvis and Buddy Holly. Once, about ten years old, on a family visit, a twenty-ish cousin put a record on the turntable and said :- "Listen to this". It was, I know now, Buddy Holly and "Peggy Sue". My cousin was enamoured, transported into another world. I was far too young. What was it all about? Not Billy Cotton or Perry Como, that was for sure. 

Buddy Holly (before the music died)

My next memories are of my bigger brother as he got "into it". Virtually the only "pop" on TV would be a track played between TV Shows, a small slot called Take Five; the music of a current single with some associated video. At one time my brother said "this is 'From Me To You', its by the same group that had 'Love Me Do'". The "same group"? Well, yes, "The Beatles". 

The Beatles. Early days

Then it all became real, for me and many others of my generation. Soon it was "She Loves You" ( yeah yeah yeah ooooooh ) Move over Billy Cotton, your days are over. Mum and dad, stand back. The times they are a'changing! 

Which brings me to Bob Dylan, a man who I first came to know as the "Blowing in the Wind" guy. Little did I know at the time that this was his folk interlude between his own first love, rock n roll and electric guitars. Alas, as a folk "hero" to many, he became for them a Judas, "betraying his roots" and all the rest of the drivel, when he "went electric". Dylan's answer to the accusation, made at the Manchester Trade Hall, was to cry "liar" at his accuser, then to turn and tell his band "play fucking loud".

Perhaps a better choice of words. Maybe not.

Myself, I never felt betrayed, but Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind" did capture my early ideals; anti-war, ban the bomb, love and peace and all the rest of the Sixties flower power. Does it all seem rather naive now? No, not really, why should it? We live and learn and sometimes we just might learn early.

"Love has no why" (Meister Eckhart)

I was very soon into "Blonde on Blonde", one of the first Double Albums. Dylan looked cool on the cover with his fuzzy hair, slighlty out of focus. Still my favorite album ever.

One memory is of the track "Visions of Johanna", which I regret to confess now, I found boring. When the album reached it I would jump up and move the stylus over the grooves to avoid it's dire droning monotony. Then once, listening with the lights out, reaching the track, I realised that the ambience of the moment would be lost if I turned on the lights and cut out Joanna's visions. The music continued. "H'm, not too bad really" I thought. From then on I always let it play. A great song! Thank heavens the lights were out!

"Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're trying to be so quiet?" 

Very apt! And how about this from the Nobel Prize winner:-

"Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial. 

Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while."

Must stop now before I start rambling.......

Related Quotes:-

 "There's a moment when old things become new again"

 (Bob Dylan)

"those who enriched our lives with the newfound arts they forged 

and those we remember well for the good they did mankind."

(Virgil, lines from "Aeneid")

"And Ezra Pound and T.S.Eliot

Fighting in the captain's tower

While calypso singers laugh at them

And fishermen hold flowers 

Between the windows of the sea

Where lovely mermaids flow

And nobody has to think too much 

About Desolation Row."

(Bob Dylan, lines from "Desolation Row")

Wisdom in Emptiness (revisited)

I was thinking upon the words quoted in the previous blog, those that D T Suzuki called "so important":- Praise be to God that I am not good. It led to me reflecting upon how much the same lesson (or teaching or reality) can appear in different guises. 

Praise be !!

I remember far back in time when in conversation with an ardent born-again Christian who was speaking of what he saw as the universal human recognition of our being "sinners". He spoke of how those in Africa, never having known the Bible, yet "sat in their huts whipping themselves because of their sin." Such were his thoughts. I'm not sure that his assertions would stand up to even a rudimentary anthropological investigation, yet he may well have "gained" from such a belief. Then again, maybe not. 

Who knows?

Whatever, true or not, I wonder how such relates to the words quoted above, of praising God because we are not good. To "praise" or reach for the whip? I'll leave it there and move on.

As I mentioned, I have recently reread the dialogue between Thomas Merton and D T Suzuki, "Wisdom in Emptiness". This is part of my own spiral (or possibly getting giddy spinning in circles) where revisiting various ideas, concepts and expressions help to clarify where I am (because, as Neddy Seagoon said, "everybody gotta be somewhere")  

In this dialogue, Suzuki contrasts the "innocence" of our natural state with the knowledge of good and evil, or in Buddhist terms, discrimination - moral or metaphysical. Such discrimination is "ignorance", which Suzuki claims obscures the original light of "suchness"/"emptiness".

Forbidden or...………..?

As the "Hsin Hsin Ming" begins:- 

"The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When not attached to love or hate, all is clear and undisguised."

But as the dialogue evolves - and as I see it - innocence and knowledge are not opposites, not opposed to each other; nor should we reject "knowledge" as such. But knowledge, and therefore differentiation, must arise from innocence/suchness, or else, in indentifying with our choices, we become lost in the sea of samsara. Identifications and choices will then be used to justify ourselves, others can be judged as falling short or for choosing differently. A persona is built of our own making.

"The Dharma (truth) is for passing over, not for grasping." The truth is never "ours" (though perhaps it can be for "others" - the Tao can be shared but not divided)

Shared but not divided

It often seems that love must have a "why". Our world is linear, it progresses, has purpose, we need to be getting somewhere, "salvation" is always tomorrow, even "the world to come". 

In a slightly different context, Merton speaks of there being no positive idea of personhood in Buddhism, "it is a value which seems to be missing." Yet, as he then goes on to say, Suzuki states that when we become "absolutely naked" we find ourselves becoming once again the ordinary "Tom, Dick or Harry" we have always been. True persons.

Persons. Tom, Dick and Harry?

In another essay by Suzuki, on Pure Land doctrine, he quotes from the Christian mystic Johannes Tauler:- "All that God would have from us is that we be idle and allow him to be the master craftsman; were we to be completely and utterly idle, then we would be perfectly human." 

Leaving aside the word "idle" (which is alluring in its own way, certainly for me) it seems significant that here, for a Christian, to be totally empty of self (idle) is nevertheless to be "perfectly human". 

Has something been lost in the translation?

In Suzuki's essay on Pure Land doctrine, he was in fact speaking of the two "ways" of Buddhism. Of "jiriki", self power, and "tariki", Other power. 

For Saichi, the myokonin (Pure Land saint) the two are known in faith (shinjin) as "one"...…

"O, Saichi, will you tell us of Other Power? 

Yes, but there is neither self power nor Other Power.

What is, is the graceful acceptance only."

Well, it can all become just a little confusing, yet this is only the faith v works question found in Christian doctrine but with an Inter-faith dimension. 

Merton speaks in this way:- 

"The innocence and purity of heart which belongs to paradise are a complete emptiness of self in which all is the work of God, the free and unpredictable expression of His love, the work of grace. In the purity of original innocence, all is done in us but without us. But before we reach that level, we must also learn to work on the other level of "knowledge" - where grace works in us but "not without us".

Within those words, for me, is the Pure Land way of "being made to become so of itself, beyond the calculation of the devotee, where "no working is true working", though perhaps with a little less intent to "learn". 

No calculation

In one of his journals Merton quotes a Church Father, Irenaeus, who wrote:- 

"If you are the work of God wait patiently for the hand of your artist who makes all things at an opportune time.......give to Him a pure and supe heart and watch over the form which the artist shapes in you......lest, in hardness, you lose the traces of His fingers." 

So yes, perhaps too much "idleness" may well put the whole thing in jeopardy! Who knows? Just as with the "raft" of the dharma for reaching the "other shore" ; when reached, the raft can be dispensed with, for it is for passing over and not for grasping. But beware of leaping off in mid-ocean. 

For passing over, not for grasping

But, summing up (perhaps not), to see the journey itself as "home" is not necessarily to discount the whole idea of life being a journey to somewhere; intentional or not. Which leaves it all as Merton and Suzuki leave it, with a slight difference between them, of a realised eschatology in the here and now of Buddhism, as compared with the eschatology of Christian speculation which always lies ahead of us. 

For me, "now" can (perhaps paradoxically) include a subsequent "tomorrow", but living with an eye on tomorrow would seem to exclude the living of now.

Well, that is it. Apart from, believe it or not, the clarity of my own mind.

Reality-as-is is for me infinite compassion, infinite wisdom, infinite potentiality. Whether heading for hell or heading for the Pure Land, all is within Reality-as-is. "Now" is unending. Idle or not. 

Revisits, spirals and back to the beginning

Following on from the previous blog and the use of the word "revisit". Apparently, reading the book referred to, of Merton's record player, Bob Dylan called his great album "Highway 61 Revisited" in part as an allusion to the novel "Brideshead Revisted" by the Catholic author Evelyn Waugh.

An old Dansette Record Player - we all had them!

Never having read the novel I have no idea of how one related to the other. Looking it up the novel is about "aristocratic privilege", a "nostalgic study of class and character". Quite what that has to do with Highway 61 I am unable to discern, but I assume Bob had his reasons - as we all do for the associations made by our own minds as we stumble along through this thing called Life.

Nevertheless, "revisit" does call me at the moment. Going back, knowing experience as being more a spiral than a direct line forward. Even if it leads back to the beginning and "knowing it for the first time."

Spirals in nature

Thinking back, I was first inspired to walk the Buddhist path by the words of the Buddha, as recorded in the Theravada Canon of Scripture, that he taught "this and this alone, suffering and the ending of suffering." Deeply involved then in theodicy and having read many weighty books on the subject, I had come to the conclusion that there was in fact no "answer" to our world's suffering. The various attempts to get God off the hook - so to speak - had failed to impress or satisfy.

It came close at one point, walking along, reflecting, adding up the many arguments and justifications; well yes, just maybe.......then a braking car, a squealing dog, and the terrible reality of pain and suffering swept the words away. "Only a dog". But for me, then, so much more.

A dog can be so much more

The closest any "answer" got then was from the Old Testament book of Job, where God speaks out of the whirlwind and as good as says, "don't try to figure it out, just suffer and have faith". Which is in fact profound, but I needed a few more spirals to know it. At the time, that "answer" gave no satisfaction. The Buddha promised an "end to suffering" and claimed to have found it. 

Around this time I remember asking, on a Buddhist Forum, the question:- "In what sense does suffering end?" Like most questions on Buddhist Forums, it received no definitive answer, though some there - I am sure - considered that they had found it, lived it, shared it. And perhaps they did. We need the eyes to see and the ears to hear. It takes two to tango and just then I could not dance. Life goes on...…

It takes two

"Master, master, what must I do to gain illumination?"

"Well, my son, to gain illumination you must rise in the morning, dress and then eat." 

"But master, I do not understand"

"Well, if you do not understand, you must rise in the morning, dress and then eat."

So it was back to the kitchen sink for me where, fortunately, things can happen beyond our calculations, where things are made to become so of themselves. It is called grace. Which, come to think of it now, is close to the word gratitude, which is the Nembutsu of Pure Land folk in colloquial English; thank you. 

Revisiting some of my very own spirals, there was the "contact of two liberties" where I was, in the transition between theism and non-theism, disturbed by Meister Eckhart's words that if we "left ourselves" then God must enter in. Where then was the liberty? As the spiral turns, comes the realisation that the gift is of God Himself, that He is His own gift, and that it has already been given, eternally. The freedom and the liberty are in fact the gift itself. Yet we cannot know it until we know it.

Freedom?

Another spiral were the words of Eckhart that "love has no why". What is the point of anything, why is there something rather than nothing? We always seem to be trying to get somewhere, become something more, never satisfied. "The jaws of hell are never filled". Various turns of the spiral led to the journey itself being home, of each moment being the "thing itself", that each cut of meat is the best", each moment arising from emptiness and returning, unowned. 

And if the moment is one of suffering, of grief, of loss?

Just suffer and have faith? Not quite. But close enough. Close enough to reach out to others, to open to others without judgement; each has so much to share and give themselves.

"Differentiation does not mean separation"

To finish, I now recall that part of the intent of this particular blog was to speak of revisiting the "Wisdom in Emptiness" dialogue between D T Suzuki and Thomas Merton, an essay in "Zen and the Birds of Appetite". I tend to reread, or revisit, this every now and again to find just how the sand has shifted. But this blog never made it. It was going to drift towards some words of a South American theologian that Merton recited to Suzuki when the two met in New York:- "Praise be to God that I am not good". Suzuki was moved by those words.

Suzuki, a Zen Buddhist, with leanings towards the Pure Land, said "those words are so important."

Suzuki - just thankful that he is not good

 Yes, very much so. But this blog never made it there! Perhaps another day.

Related Quotes:-

 "When we go out of ourselves............and strip ourselves of what is ours, then God must enter into us; for when someone wills nothing for themselves, then God must will on their behalf just as he does for himself." 

(Meister Eckhart from "The Talks of Instruction" , "On true obedience")

"In giving us His love God has given us the Holy Spirit so that we can love Him with the love wherewith He loves Himself."

(Meister Eckhart, and Merton states this is "perfectly orthodox and traditional Catholic theology."  Suzuki states that the lines were "the same as Prajna intuition.")

"

Thomas Merton Revisited

I have just finished reading a book on one of my many mentors, Thomas Merton aka Father Louie, "The Monk's Record Player", sub-titled "Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966." 

Thomas Merton outside his hermitage

Bob Dylan and The Band outside Big Pink

Having finished it I endeavoured to write a blog. Alas, as I stumbled through, the words never flowed and I had no idea of just what I wanted it to be about. I left it as a draft and then went back to the book to write a review for Amazon. This time the words just flowed more freely although I still remained blind to any particular direction. 

Anyway, for better or worse, I will start here with my review of the book then follow it with the blog. Maybe after that I will read it all through and add a few words in an attempt at clarification. 

For those who only know of Thomas Merton from random quotes on the so called "spiritual life", this book could come as something of a revelation. Hey, the "spiritual life" can be fun! Ethereal quotes can create in our minds a cloistered Merton, perhaps a Merton floating a few good inches off the ground as he drifts rather piously down silent monastery corridors. Here we have him in dalliance with a young nurse, a visitor of Jazz Clubs, even getting slightly pie-eyed on Jack Daniels before heading off late at night with Joan Baez to meet up with his loved one. They eventually abandoned the escapade half way there but it gives an element of Keystone Cops to Merton's monastic life.

Strange as it might sound, the whole story here is told without sensationalism, and with Bob Dylan thrown in for good measure, it makes for very entertaining reading.

Robert Hudson knows Merton well from his Journals and uses some of the entries here to set the scene and does so in a way that manages, in spite of all else, to give great depth to the story - even spiritual depth. And why not? All of us are contradictory and multi-layered, even if "all is transparent" or, as the zen master Dogen said:- "In all of the universe there is nothing that is hidden."

Dylan and Merton never actually met in person, but did meet in words and music. Merton would have loved some of his own poetic words set to music by Dylan, thinking that then they would actually have been sung with a modern prophetic spirit and not just forgotten and lost in the context of a hymn that "nobody would ever sing". Sad in very many ways.

As Bob Dylan wrote much later in "Every Grain of Sand":- "Oh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear". But who truly can distinguish the weeds from the flowers, or the indulgence from the true flowering of the spirit? As Thomas Merton once said, in one of his ethereal quotes, met with in pious books of "spiritual" homilies:- "Our real journey in life is interior: it is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts." Yes, it is, and often it can all happen beyond our calculations.

Well, so much for the review. Now for the blog (with apologies for the various repetitions):-

Just recently I was browsing the E-books on my Kindle and one rather strange title caught my attention, "The Monk's Record Player", sub-titled "Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966." Well, I always knew Merton was a little bit wayward, and the summer of 1966 was the time of his dalliance with a young nurse, Margie Smith. That Bob Dylan was thrown into the mix was that little extra spice that teased me into downloading the book.

 It was an entertaining read, the story told without sensationalism, though who needs that angle when the story tells of a monk, living as a hermit, spending some of his time in jazz clubs and meeting with the likes of Joan Baez and Thich Nhat Hanh? This is not to mention the full bottle of whisky downed one evening which led to an escapade with the said Joan Baez, who initially sought to reunite Merton with his young nurse (who in fact had a fiancée anyway) Halfway to that particular rendezvous Merton - and eventually Baez - had second thoughts and after a short stop returned to the monastery where Merton resumed his hermits life; if "resumed" is the correct word.

Merton attempting to look "monastic" but the bongo drums give the game away

Bob Dylan's part in all this was more mundane, but this too had its moments. A motorcycle crash, which some doubt actually happened at all, then the various recording sessions in the house known as "Big Pink", with the group of musicians who became known as The Band. 

Bob on bike - before, after or "during" the crash?

Well, the book related the "meeting of minds" of Dylan and Merton, although they never met in the flesh. Merton saw Dylan as a prophetic figure and liked to listen to a few of his albums, particularly "Highway 61 Revisited". Just in case any random reader doubts what is here being said - maybe having some idea of Thomas Merton as some sort of ethereal spiritual figure who perhaps floated a few inches above the ground - here is a short extract, where he is explaining the absurdities and contradictions of being "a priest who has a woman."

Various monks

He writes:- "All the things a hermit should not do I have done. Should a hermit like Bob Dylan? He means at least as much to me as some of the new liturgy, perhaps in some ways more. I want to know the guy. I want him to come here...…" (From Merton's Journals) 

Merton then ponders the thought of Dylan setting some of his poems to music. Alas, this was not to be. But myself, I wonder just how it might have sounded, with words such as this, from a poem entitled "Wisdom", with harmonica, and Dylan's nasal twang:-

I studied it and it taught me nothing 

I learned it and soon forgot everything else

Having forgotten, I was burdened with knowledge - 

The insupportable knowledge of nothing.

How sweet my life would be , if I were wise! 

Wisdom is well known 

When it is no longer seen or thought of 

Only then is understanding bearable.

These words make me think of a small section called "Means and Ends" from Merton's translation of Chuang Tzu:- 

"The purpose of a fish trap is to catch fish, and when the fish is caught, the trap is forgotten...….the purpose of words is to convey ideas, when the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words? He is the one I would like to talk to"

But moving on, Merton mused on another idea, that a song by Dylan's of his (Merton's) own words would perhaps not suffer the fate that they certainly would if becoming only a hymn that "nobody is ever going to sing". But as said, it was not to be. 

Later, Dylan would write "Every Grain of Sand" and speak of "the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear". By this time, Merton was long gone; yet, as another has suggested, as well as those with whom "we move through time together", others "beckon from eternity". 

Well, this is where my attempted blog ended. I had no idea exactly what is was about. All that really comes to mind is the purity of "all things being transparent", of nothing being hidden. 

I think our modern age seems so intent on filling a presumed "self" with so much baggage. Ids, egos, superegos, universal unconciousnesses, true selves and false selves and whatever else. Processes of the mind can be identified but it becomes very easy for this to slip into a reification of such concepts. And they all jostle about inside, jockeying for position. 

Related Quotes:-

 "Zen enriches no one. There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the 'nothing,' the 'no-body' that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey."

(Thomas Merton, from "Zen and the Birds of Appetite")

 

Eurocentrism

I was considering calling this particular blog something like "Neddy Seagoon and all points south" but decided against it. The intended subject demanded a degree of gravitas that such a title would probably deny it from the word go. So "eurocentrism" it is.

But getting back to Neddy Seagoon, one radio broadcast I recall of the Goons was when Neddy was discovered in the coal cellar. He was asked ( I forget by who ) why he was in the cellar, to which he replied:- "Well, everybody gotta be somewhere." Which is profound as well as funny ( funny, especially when spoken with the Harry Seacombe voice ) Indeed, we all do have to be somewhere - even if we are "one with the all"

Neddy Seagoon

At this point in my ramblings I think it appropriate to squeeze in another quote from Alan Watts, the subject of my last blog, a few words that he evidently considered important, as he found them worth repeating at various times. The quote is:- "Differentiation does not mean separation." If any random reader of this blog considers such worthy of consideration then so be it. It does indeed fit in but please feel free to ignore it. 

Differentiation does not mean separation - perhaps I could have found a better image?

Where was I? Yes, we all have to be somewhere. Which brings me to my subject, Eurocentrism, that pernicious and ubiquitous mindset that pervades virtually all of our history books written in the past. Recently, on a Comments Section of a UK tabloid newspaper I was introduced to a more limited version of the very same thing i.e. Englandcentricism. 

As an example, applying this mindset to World War 2, it goes like this. That war began with the German invasion of Poland when England (sic) reluctantly declared war on Germany. This was followed by Dunkirk (and the "little ships") the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, and finally the D Day Landings in Normandy and the liberation of Europe.

Alone we did it

If anyone thinks I am kidding, I invite you to visit such Comments Sections and open your minds to such insular distortion of the past. Alas, as I found to my cost, to point out the contribution of other nations, of the sacrifices of other people, to speak of other theatres of war - the Eastern Front or the Pacific - was only to bring down condemnation upon me for "belittling" and "scorning" the sacrifices of my own people. Obviously, such comments sections are not really the place for an in depth discussion of "either/or" versus "both/and" so I tended to take the flak and retire to lick my wounds.

Anyway, I am drifting from my subject. One step further back from that last example of a "centrism" is of course Me-centrism. 

Having said this it must be insisted that the wisdom of Neddy Seagoon must not be resisted nor ridiculed......"Everybody got to be somewhere" or somebody. 

(You have made me a kind of center, but a center that is nowhere. And yet also I am "here." - Thomas Merton)

The eurocentric version of history is mainly plain sailing. Forget "out of Africa", just mention a few facts about Mesopotamia, the diffusion of civilisation to the Aegean and thus the ancient Greeks, the Roman Empire and its fall, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the rise of science, and how "we" spread our superiority to the rest of the backward world. A world slumbering in ignorance until "we" came along with our "saviours" and our technologies. So the story goes. Fortunately the story is unravelling. Facts will have their day it seems.

 

In my own wayward mind, of relating each thing with all others, I see a link between the unravelling of such histories and the unravelling of "self". The constraints, the parameters, our very own stories that make us what we are. Unique individuals. Unravelling or not.

We have to be somewhere, but I think we have to sit lightly, laugh at ourselves, know that others also are unique worlds in themselves, each somewhere, simply because they have to be. Then we can be open to others, to other selves, to alternative histories.

Even perhaps acknowledging the 145 Polish fighter pilots who fought in the Battle Of Britain, and honouring the 29 who gave their lives. 

302 Polish Fighter Squadron RAF