CHAPTER 7

TRAPPIST, KENTUCKY: WORDS AND SILENCES

 In chapter seven, I travel back to Kentucky to listen to the archival recordings of monk, writer, and activist Thomas Merton (1915-68). I recount my years-long process of research, and how I gathered and assembled material for the album Words and Silences (2022). I also talk of a personal journey: alone and with family, across the nation and at home, and before, during, and after the pandemic. Throughout, I detail how this journey deepened my understanding of the archival material and the contemplative silence of Merton’s words.

Watch: A Full-Length Video of Words and Silences

Recordings

LYRICS

Ok, now I hope we can go on recording like this; I think it will stay down. Good, let’s go.

The sound of an unperplexed wren. No comment necessary.

A cardinal. Meadowlark. Cardinal. Flycatcher.

Voice of the tape, a comment on the silence of the hermitage. The silence commented on also by birds. Now some experimental reading. A piece of Samuel Beckett. Abstract, like a painting, two-dimensional. The colors: it is flat, but fascinating. Something like Klee, Paul Klee.

It has a strange effect. Like a message of spies. Definitely affected by the media that we use. The end of the piece sounds almost metaphysical. An interesting piece of writing. I wonder how it sounds. Perhaps I’ll play it back in a minute.

Sounds very good. What it brings out is the monotony of the language and of the syntax evading complicated statements. Simply stringing together nouns and adjectives and so on seems to emphasize the metaphysical silence behind the person, the persons that he is talking about. And in the end, the silence is emphasized as being metaphysical. This is a piece which does manifest the silence. The perplexity is very subdued in it. And this is the right kind of perplexity. Not an emphatic perplexity, but a subdued and deep awareness that everything is perplexed. And that in this getting back to a concrete elemental awareness of the things, without anything that we have added to them, without any comment of our own, seeing them in their bareness, their way of merging into each other, their flatness. Taking away the perspective that we have put into everything. Seeing them again as flat. Allowing them to make their own different perspective of something underneath which we have not presupposed, which we have not put there. Honest, Beckett.

LYRICS

Sunday morning, April 23rd, Fourth Sunday after Easter. Some notes from a book on Ibn al-‘Arabî, the Sufi, about how the Absolute cannot be known except as a synthesis of opposites and how God knows himself in us, and uh, recognizes himself speaking to himself in us. This needs to be louder, I think.

Ibn al-‘Arabî quotes a saying of a mystic of Baghdad, and then explains it: 

The inward belies the outward when the latter says “I,” and the outward belies the inward when the latter says “I.” And this applies to every other pair of opposites. In every case, the one who says something is one and yet he is the very same one who hears. This is based on a phrase said by the Prophet, “and what their own souls tell them,” indicating clearly that the soul is the speaker and the hearer of what is says at the same time. The knower of what itself has said. In all this phenomenon, the essence itself is one, though it takes on different aspects. Nobody can just ignore this because everybody is aware of this in himself insofar as he is a form of the Absolute.

Therefore, this business of speaking and hearing oneself with a tape recorder can be regarded as an extension of the coincidence of opposites by which the Absolute is present in oneself.

To return to Ibn al-‘Arabî then: “The inward belies the outward when the latter says ‘I’ and the outward belies the inward when the latter says ‘I.’” 

Who is this ‘I?’ I speak. Here I am speaking. And a moment ago the birds were singing. And the gas just turned off. Who is this I? Who am I who sit here? It’s very difficult to say. Because the I who speaks outwardly, who uses this tape recorder, who speaks back to itself in the tape recorder is to some extent an illusion, and to use a tape recorder is to perpetuate this illusion. Create this illusory identity, and yet it is a real identity. And inside, within, there is that which has just canceled and denied and negated this outer identity. And yet, the outer identity also calls into question, cancels, tends to negate the inner identity. And this produces the state which Ibn al-‘Arabî calls the “state of perplexity,” in which we are constantly canceling out each other, inward and outward, and this canceling out is the presence of God. And this mutual dialectic between the inner and the outer, for which there is no union except in the Absolute who is present, and who hears himself when I speak, and praises himself in this perplexed awareness of an identity, which I do not know, cannot grasp, cannot understand, but must affirm in simple faith and obedience to him who leaves me in this perplexity. And it is the best place to live, the perplexity of this solitude, in which you wonder who it is that looks at this valley, and says “I” and is aware of seeing all these being out there, which are in contrast to the “I,” which seem to deny it, and which yet affirm it. And the singing of the birds, make also, the Absolute present.

LYRICS

Sunday morning, April 30th. The bells ringing down in the monastery for lauds. It’s a dark, gray morning. It may rain later. I want to record some thoughts, from again Ibn al-‘Arabî on Islam, and on the relation of the Lord to creatures, and the relation of the Lord to nature.

Nature is described by Ibn al-‘Arabî as “the breathing of God”: all being is grounded in the divine breath.

The Prophet says, “He who wants to know the divine breath must try to know the world, for he who knows himself, knows his Lord.” We seek our Lord, then, in the midst of the creatures which he has breathed out, and which he breathes out around us, and he breathes us out also. And then he will breathe in and take us all back into himself, and we will realize that all the time that we were he.

More morning sounds, a bright morning. The sound of water dripping in the bucket is to be heard beside the wren and the other birds out there. Uh, for Ibn al-‘Arabî, water is the most appropriate symbol of life. He says, “The secret of life is in the act of flowing peculiar to water.” The watery element is, for him, the most fundamental element. Of course what he’s saying there, he’s simply expressing an intuition, of dynamism, movement and becoming in all things. A sense of vitalism and life in everything. Corresponding to his idea of God’s mercy breathing into everything. Of course the breathing would suggest that air is the most subtle element as some of these other metaphysicians would have said. In any case, for him water symbolizes the life that runs through everything. And to be immersed in water is a baptism in life, to be baptized in life. I would say that would be a very good symbol of the hermit life. To be totally baptized in the silence and the flow and the reality of life and thereby to know the full reality of existence.

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