LISTEN TO “WHO IS THIS I?”
AND READ AN EXCERPT FROM “THINKING OUT LOUD IN A HERMITAGE”

Below you’ll find a track from the album Words and Silences, which features the hermitage tapes of monk, writer, and activist Thomas Merton. His words — captured on tape and in solitude — reveal his innermost thoughts, and an uncertain self. I’ve also shared a transcription of Merton’s words to read while listening. Finally, I’ve included an excerpt of my essay “Thinking Out Loud In a Hermitage,” which explores my process of listening to these recordings and making the music to accompany them as a sonic portrait of Merton. To listen to the entire album or purchase a chapbook with the essay and a full transcription of the hermitage tapes used, you can do so here.

TRANSCRIPTION: WHO IS THIS I?

A TRACK FROM THE ALBUM WORDS AND SILENCES

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.

READ: “AN UNCERTAIN SELF”

AN EXCERPT FROM BRIAN HARNETTY’S ESSAY “THINKING OUT LOUD IN A HERMITAGE”

One night in Vermont, I forgo the evening social gathering, and walk back along the road in the pitch black to my studio, suddenly aware that my time there is coming to a close. There are no cars, and I make my way by feeling the asphalt underfoot, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the night. It is still hot, and a chorus of crickets and katydids sing antiphonally from fields on either side of the road. There is a rustle in the bushes; I jump, and then laugh at myself, realizing it takes a long time to become comfortable with the night, and with the noisy quiet of rural places. It is as if I too often hide in the light, and do not pay attention to what I cannot see. Here, I am forced to listen, to feel, to touch my way to the studio, and slowly I become accustomed to this world, and slip in. In the studio, there is a solitary light on at the desk. Insects clamor at the window. I try to embrace the unnerving quiet of solitude, and get back to listening. 

I play another tape. Merton is now reading the prominent Sufi mystic Ibn al-‘Arabî (1165–1240 CE),14 from a book recently given to him. It occurs to me that a great deal of the content on these tapes is due to coincidence: what Merton just happened to be reading or thinking about during that spring in 1967. Still, he takes this opportunity to read passages, and then uses the tape to explore “out loud” what the words sound like and how they influence him.

In one passage, Ibn al-‘Arabî reconciles and unifies pairs of opposites—inward and outward, speaking and hearing—as two sides of the same thing, both pointing to the presence of what Arabî terms the “Absolute.” Merton then shifts to his own preoccupation with the medium of recording, and how the tape itself illustrates both this contradiction and its reconciliation. And then, a remarkable moment. Merton states:

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? [pause] 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.

At first glance, the text above shows a detached exploration of Ibn al-‘Arabî’s words, which is then applied to Merton’s personal observations of the hermitage, and to the tape recorder. But this written text obscures an affective layer of meaning, only heard on the recording. When Merton says, “Who am I who sit here?” his voice wavers. Something is revealed, something deeply emotional—an uncertain “I”—and the tape recorder is there listening. In fact, it is the very presence of the recorder that disrupts and destabilizes Merton’s sense of self; it mirrors and splits not only his wavering voice but his wavering identity, too. There is a pause, and we hear the silence of the hermitage—the ticking of a nearby clock, the hiss of tape, the faint sounds of the furnace—and each is now part of a profoundly charged silence, full of meaning and bewilderment. All along, the tape recorder quietly clicks on, reflecting Merton, unsettling him, forcing him to remain both between and uncertain.

In that instant, I hear an acute sadness in Merton. Only three days earlier, he notes in his journal he is in a “hole of despair,” almost certainly as a result of his recent love affair with “M.”15 They had only stopped seeing one another a few months before, and Merton talked with her on the phone just two days before; she is still very much on his mind. I hear confusion and doubt and searching—a moment of inner conflict. It is as if the unlikely combination of Ibn al-‘Arabî’s words, Merton’s emotions, and the presence of the tape recorder so deeply touched him that he is physically, audibly shaken. 

Psychologists use the phrase “speech reveals and text conceals,” where many layers of information are built into the sonic qualities of the voice; information that is often hidden or obscured when written down.16 As an author, I am sure Merton would have found additional words to convey his meaning clearly. But here, emotion and affect work to convey something beyond the text, allowing us to hear exactly what he is talking about: between opposites and contradictions is a still point, a silence embodied and made audible. The remarkable thing is: we are able to witness this unguarded openness through the tape. Perhaps the agency of the tape recorder even encouraged him to open up. 

Lasting only thirty seconds or so on the recording, this moment is brief. A moment later, Merton finds composure, and continues his analysis of Ibn al-‘Arabî; but to my ear he remains transformed. In using the recorder as a critical lens on himself, he makes a piece of his own memory and experience known, and he recognizes his own uncertain self. 

This passage reminds me of just how much sound can touch. In fact, each time I listen to it, I am deeply, physically affected. As if on cue, my spine tingles, starting at my head and just below my neck. Waves of nerves radiate across my back and shoulders and down past my knees. My body is detecting and responding to the slightest emotion: a fever-chill of joy.