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")