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Sound of an Unperplexed Wren
Merton Archive Tapes 231-01, 213-08
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.
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A Feast of Liberation
05:14
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A Feast of Liberation
Merton Archive Tape 213-03
Well, it’s night. We’re going to try an experimental meditation, against the background of some jazz. I think in terms of what’s going in Louisville tonight, maybe. There’ve been riots in Louisville for the last two or three days. The subject of the meditation is: ‘who are you identified with?’ It’s not a meditation with points in the background. It’ll speak for itself, and if I get some ideas, I’ll speak them, too. If I don’t get any ideas, I won’t say anything. Outside the moon is full. It’s very quiet here. In other parts of the world, people are being killed. [We’ll] see what it sounds like.
After I got through recording that I went out in the night. The beautiful smell of the grass, full moon. Cool. Dew on the grass. Dark. Lovely cold, quiet night. A little bit of noise from Fort Knox but I’ve.. some shooting .. but I haven’t recorded it cause I couldn’t pick it up, I don’t suppose. Sometimes, I’ll bet it’s loud enough to pick up: that stuff from Fort Knox. Tonight is a very beautiful night and I’m celebrating a feast of liberation. Now perhaps we might read at this point one thing I want to read but first I want to turn back a little bit and see how that sounds. See if it works. See if we’re knocking out some stuff that I recorded before; that’s important to know.
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Who Is This I?
07:42
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Who Is This I?
Merton Archive Tape 213-05
Sunday morning, April 23rd, 4th Sunday after Easter. Some notes from a book on Ibn al Arabi, 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 Arabi 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 Arabi 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 Arabi 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.
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Well, Cats, Now We Change Our Tune
Merton Archive Tape 214-03
Well, cats, now we change our tune, and we come to the poems, we come to the poetries.
It has occurred to me that it would be worthwhile to study intonation in speech and to study the whole question of linguistics, and that’s just by the way, to perhaps make a tape in which all the intonations are unfamiliar. In which I intone things in an unfamiliar, unacceptable way. The whole question of intonation comes up with tape. However, put it aside at the moment, no question of intonation arises here. Simply verse. Verse card. One should write verse cards. Interminable verse cards for the millenium. Here is a verse card for the oxygen millenium, to be sold in hospitals.
This probably wouldn’t be part of the same poem:
Weary the way home
Cold birch bark and fires and Christmas acres
Cold age of lake and loom
And split skin scars goes Ivy boy at last to the arc, light, and a true teacher to tell his split second lie
Further notes:
Sign on the dome
Expect thy next tread
Don’t tread on a marine
Spinners, fire cleaners, torching it up until they drop from third floor windows
Essence travels red skin splash, all over a city block
Spinners, spillers, fire take over
Rajah spillway, sense of flame floods manic thermal building place
Spanners, winners
Come red-eyed cleaners, wet-skinned gunners, and rapid-engine waterman fillers
You wishful armed, you soft black-eyed think, you gentle little barrel, I wish you, glasses and all
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Strange Things You Sometimes Find
Merton Archive Tape 213-02
Sadness has filled your heart
Strange things you sometimes find
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Thinking Out Loud in a Hermitage
Merton Archive Tape 213-07
It’s Monday morning, April 24th. Some ideas about the use of tape, something that just occurred to me. Tape can be used to speak on in such a way that you say nothing and hide everything, or it can be used in such a way that something is revealed. What is the point of using tape in the hermitage so that something is revealed? There’s no point using tape here in such a way that everything is hidden. That is to say simply saying things for the sake of saying them. But what is revealed?
But what should be manifested in thinking out loud in a hermitage, is not simply the mechanical operation of the mind itself, mechanically recorded on another machine -- two machines recording each other -- but a speaking, which will somehow bring to the surface this metaphysical perplexity of man in the presence in his own being, or being in the presence of other beings, in such a way that the unity is manifest of the one and the many.
The purpose of the solitary life is to be totally free and spontaneous and manifesting God with the inmost grain of one’s own being and not to live against the divine grain, so to speak. Hence, the danger of simply speaking as if one knew. And when the tape is moving you have to keep talking and you have to keep saying something and you have to keep pretending that you know something. In which case, you hide the fact that you don’t know. You get away from the perplexity, and perhaps the danger of tape is that it takes you away from the inner mulling over of what is not yet formulated. To let the inner word really grow and develop and expand in you before it is uttered. In other words, the danger of speaking constantly from the top of one’s head instead of from the heart.
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Breath Water Silence
05:53
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Breath, Water, Silence
Merton Archive Tape 213-09
Sunday morning, April 30th. The bells ringing down in the monastery for lauds. It’s a dark, grey morning. It may rain later. I want to record some thoughs, again from Ibn al Arabi on Islam, and on the elation of the Lord to creatures, and the relation of the Lord to nature.
Nature is described by Ibn al Arabi 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. Um, for Ibn al Arabi, 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, is 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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A Hawk Flew Fast Away
02:22
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A Hawk Flew Fast Away
Merton Archive Tape 214-06
[Thunder] It is the morning of Pentecost Sunday, May the 14th, 1967. Perhaps on this tape, I might do various things from a journal. In any case, I thought perhaps I would give this, which was written this morning: “lightning, thunder, and rain on and off all night, and now at dawn there is still more of it. The lovely grey-green valley, misty clouds, sweeping low over the hills and the forest out there in the south. Iron dark clouds heavy above them. The rainy gloom full of pale yellow iris, and the cloudy white blossoming green massing of the road hedge. I went out a while ago and a hawk flew fast away [Thunder]. It has been waiting on the cross or in the big poplar tree.”
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Let There Be a Moving Mosaic of This Rich Material
Merton Archive Tape 214-08
May 19th. Uh, to my mind one of the most important books I’ve read this year, or have been reading this year, is the Foucault book, Michel Foucault on Madness and Civilization. A most rich book, as far as material is concerned. But also important for many other reasons. First of all because it nowhere preaches anything. Rather, [it] lets the material speak for itself.
The salutary effect on me is to see suddenly how partial and how limited my own preachments are, my own temptations to say that such and such a thing is the cause of such and such a phenomenon, and this is right and this is wrong, and so forth. It is polarizing. It’s a very limited, a very weak approach to reality. And it’s much better, instead of polarizing, to make mosaics of all the material that is there, to take the material as it is. Natural and social.
But anyway, polarizing nature against the city, the woods against the city, the contemplative life against the active life, and so forth. All this can be, it has its partial truth but only partial, and there is no point in getting limited to the partial. It’s better to be free and range around, and take your material where you find it. Not pass final judgement on it, not try to stabilize. Let there be a moving mosaic of this rich material. And perhaps tape can help to do this. To uh, renounce more and more the temptation to give definite answers and to be more and more humble and honest in the search for the relevant material, which may suggest here and there good ideas or possibilities of new approaches. To be able to throw things together and look at them and then let the picture dissolve and let other elements come together.
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New Year’s Eve Party Of One
Merton Archive Tape 12-31-1967
This will be a sort of a New Year’s Eve party I guess from now on. I’m up late. It’s Seven O’Clock, and instead of going to bed I’m going to sit around and play some records. And uh, so you are invited to participate in this New Year’s Eve party of one, or rather two: me and my girlfriend Mary Lou Williams, but Mary Lou Williams is on a record. She is a Kansas City pianist, and uh, I don’t know how this music sounds to other people, but it’s something that I myself dearly love, and it’s the kind of music that strikes all kinds of responses in my own heart. And so I thought perhaps I would just finish off this tape by sitting and playing and enjoying some of the things that I like. And if you like ‘em, fine. And if you don’t, well, You don’t have to play them. [laughs] But, uh, I thought I would uh, make use of the remaining tape in this particular way.
Well, I’m going to conclude this New Year’s Eve party. I suppose it isn’t quite legitimate to be playing other people’s records on my own tape, but still it’s the kind of stuff I like and I suppose it’s relevant for something. This music has a kind of paradise character and a certain purity of its own. And I guess that’s why it’s so attractive and so peaceful and so pleasant up here in the solitude of the woods.
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One Plus One Equals One
04:44
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One Plus One Equals One
Merton Archive Tape 213-05
I’ll just read what he says. Or, rather, this is Kashani, who is commenting on Arabi about the idea of the one and the many, which is more familiar:
“When one manifests itself in a different form it is called two. But two is nothing other than one and one put together while one itself is not a number. It is to be remarked that the structure of this putting together of two ones is one. And the product of this putting together which is called two is also one number. So that the essential form here is one, the matter is one, and the two ones put together are also one, i.e. one, manifesting itself in the form of the many. Thus, one produces the number two by manifesting itself in two different forms. The same is true of three, for example, which is one and one and one. And the nature and structure of its oneness is exactly the same as in the case of two.”
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Brian Harnetty Columbus, Ohio
Interdisciplinary artist using sound and listening to foster social change. Recordings on Winesap, Karl, Dust-to-Digital, Atavistic, and Scioto Records.
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