A limited edition 48-page chapbook, with letterpress cover (PLUS digital album). Includes a full transcription of Thomas Merton's words from the album. Also includes an in-depth essay by Brian Harnetty, exploring his work with the Merton archives and his listening and compositional process.
ships out within 3 days
edition of 250
$20USDor more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Comes in a four-panel gatefold paper CD case. Includes full album, plus a bonus disk of instrumentals. Includes digital download.
Includes unlimited streaming of Words and Silences
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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.
Interdisciplinary artist using sound and listening to foster social change. Recordings on Winesap, Karl, Dust-to-Digital, Atavistic, and Scioto Records.
Rachel Grimes brings the same knack for gorgeous moodiness she developed in Rachel’s to this moving, beautiful score. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 26, 2018
