Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
Substack latest. Excerpt:
One of the worst features of some New Age types is their conceit that they are beyond duality when they are firmly enmired in it. Perhaps the truly enlightened are beyond moral dualism and can live free of moral injunctions and prohibitions. But what often happens in practice is that spiritual aspirants and gurus fall into ordinary immorality while pretending to have transcended it.
Thomas Merton, though 51 years old in 1966, was wide open to the '60s Zeitgeist – all of it. The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Six, p. 93, entry of 10 July 1966:
Borrowed a record player and played Joan Baez over again — and now really know "Silver Dagger" (before I had the melody confused with "East Virginia"). One record I like more and more is Bob Dylan's Highway 61 [Revisited].
On p. 324, Merton references Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man. YouTuber comment:
One of the greatest songs ever written. I just love it. It describes so accurately the feelings we had back in the 60s. Everything was strange and new and brilliant. Music was everywhere, all with different sounds and lyrics. Dylan was right in the middle of it. There are so many good songs on his albums. If you aren't familiar with him you should listen to some of his stuff.
In the same volume of Merton's journal we find "A Midsummer Diary for M" and on p. 305:
All the love and death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez's song, "Silver Dagger." I can't get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.
Ry Cooder, He'll Have to Go. The old 1960 Jim Reeves country crossover hit.
Ry Cooder, Good Night Irene. Leadbelly. Eric Clapton's rendition at a 1982 English Christmas party.
Ry Cooder, Yellow Roses. The old Hank Snow tune.
Ry Cooder, Maria Elena. An old standard from circa 1932.
Ry Cooder, Paris, Texas. Excellent evocative video. Great YouTuber comment:
Man I have been gone way too long. I miss America, the open road, the wild west. I remember staying in hotels with just a dozen rooms or so, and only maybe four of them in operation. Twenty seven bucks and bed springs so squeaky we had to make love on the floor. Walking out to the pay phone, a billion stars in the sky, I need to try and find my way back again.
This just over the transom from Karl White:
Hope you're well. May be of interest.
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July 30, 2018 Dearest Robert, I feel about [Henri Nouwen] as I do about Thomas Merton. There is much self-deception and muddle in their lives; and yet there is an unwavering concentration on God.
|
I can easily see
How Merton lost his way
By exposing himself
To events of the day.
We'll start with murder. David Dalton (Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion 2012, pp. 28-29, hyperlinks added!):
Most folk songs had grim, murderous content (and subtext). In Pretty Polly a man lures a young girl from her home with the promise of marriage,and then leads the pregnant girl to an already-dug grave and murders her. In Love Henry, a woman poisons her unfaithful lover, observed by an alarmed parrot that she also tries to kill. So it was a bit bizarre that these songs should become part of the sweetened, homogenized new pop music.
[. . .]
The original folk songs were potent, possessed stuff, but the folk trios had figured out how to make this grisly stuff palatable, which only proved that practically anything could be homogenized. Clean-cut guys and girls in crinolines, dressed as if for prom night, sang ancient curse-and-doom tales. Their songs had sweet little melodies, but as in nursery rhymes, there was a dark gothic undercurrent to them — like Ring Around the Rosies, which happens to be a charming little plague song.
The most famous of these folk songs was the 1958 hit Tom Dooley, a track off a Kingston Trio album which set off the second folk revival [the first was in the early '40s with groups like the Weavers] and was Dylan's initial inspiration for getting involved in folk music. [I prefer Doc Watson's version.] And it was the very success of the syrupy folk trios that inspired Dylan's future manager to assemble one himself: Peter, Paul and Mary. They would make Dylan, the prophet of the folk protest movement, a star and lead to consequences that even he did not foresee. Their version of Blowin' in the Wind would become so successful that it would sound the death knell for the folk protest movement. Ultimately there would be more than sixty versions of it, "all performing the same function," as Michael Gray says, of "anesthetizing Dylan's message."
Be that as it may, it is a great song, one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement. Its power in no small measure is due to the allusiveness of its lyrics which deliver the protest message without tying it to particular events. It's topical without being topical and marks a difference between Dylan, and say, Phil Ochs.
And now for some love songs.
Gloria Lynne, I Wish You Love. A great version from 1964. Lynne died at 83 in 2013. Here's what Marlene Dietrich does with it.
Ketty Lester, Love Letters. Another great old tune in a 1962 version. The best to my taste.
Three for my wife. An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, and my favorite from the Seekers.
Addenda:
1. Keith Burgess-Jackson quotes Jamie Glazov on the hatred of Islamists and leftists for St. Valentine's Day. Another very interesting similarity between these two totalitarian movements. Recalling past inamorata while listening to sentimental songs — is this not the height of bourgeois self-indulgence when you should be plotting ways to blow up the infidel or bring down capitalism? But we who defend the private life against totalitarian scum must be careful not to retreat too far into the private life. A certain amount of activism and engagement is necessary to keep the totalitarians in check.
2. On Thomas Merton: “All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s ‘Silver Dagger,’” the man wrote to his lady love in 1966. “I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.”
Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother
She's sleeping here right by my side
And in her right hand a silver dagger,
She says that I can't be your bride.All men are false, says my mother,
They'll tell you wicked, lovin' lies.
The very next evening, they'll court another,
Leave you alone to pine and sigh.My daddy is a handsome devil
He's got a chain five miles long,
And on every link a heart does dangle
Of another maid he's loved and wronged.Go court another tender maiden,
And hope that she will be your wife,
For I've been warned, and I've decided
To sleep alone all of my life.
Beatific October, Kerouac month hereabouts, is at its sad redbrick end once again, but I can't let her slip away without one more substantial Kerouac entry. So raise your glass with me on this eve of All Saint's Day as I say a prayer for Jack's soul which, I fear, is still in need of purgation before it is ready for the ultimate beat vision, the visio beata. We rest at the end of the road, but don't assume that the road ends with death.
……………………..
The Kerouac and Friends industry churns on, a recent product being Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats by Robert Inchausti, Shambhala (January 30, 2018), 208 pages.
From Scott Beauchamp's review:
The real tragedy of Kerouac’s reception was that the people who should have known better took the en vogue hedonist reading at face value, writing him off as a word-vomiting miscreant. But that’s a caricature of Kerouac that over-emphasizes the most obvious personal flaws of an intensely spiritual writer. It’s an oversimplification by way of calling someone a simpleton. The truth is more complex and so much more interesting: Kerouac was one of the most humble and devoted American religious writers of the 20th century. Robert Inchausti’s recently published Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats makes an attempt at recognizing the heterodox spiritual focus of the entire Beat oeuvre, but it only points the reader in the right direction. Its simple and hodgepodge construction suggests the vast amount of analysis, particularly of Kerouac’s work, which remains to be done in order to change his reputation in the popular imagination.
I'm a Kerouac aficionado from way back. I love the guy and the rush and gush of his hyper-romantic and heart-felt wordage.* He brings tears to my eyes every October. His tapes and CDs accompany me on every road trip. He was a writer who was religious, but a "religious writer"? It's an exaggeration, like calling Thomas Merton, who was a religious writer, a spiritual master. I love him too, especially the Merton of the journals, all seven of which I have read and re-read, but he was no more a spiritual master than I am. And then there is Bob Dylan, the greatest American writer of popular songs, who added so much to our lives, but deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature? We live in an age of exaggeration. I submit that Flannery O'Connor is closer to the truth about Kerouac & Co.
Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), pp. 336-337, in a letter to Dr. T. R. Spivey dated 21 June 1959:
I haven't read the article in PR [Paris Review?] or the beat writers themselves. That seems about the most appalling thing you could set yourself to do — read them. But reading about them and reading what they have to say about themselves makes me think that there is a lot of ill-directed good in them. Certainly some revolt against our exaggerated materialism is long overdue. They seem to know a good many of the right things to run away from, but to lack any necessary discipline. They call themselves holy but holiness costs and so far as I can see they pay nothing. It's true that grace is the free gift of God but to put yourself in the way of being receptive to it you have to practice self-denial. I observe that Baron von Hügel's most used words are derivatives of the word cost. As long as the beat people abandon themselves to all sensual satisfactions, on principle, you can't take them for anything but false mystics. A good look at St. John of the Cross makes them all look sick.
You can't trust them as poets either because they are too busy acting like poets. The true poet is anonymous, as to his habits, but these boys have to look, act, and apparently smell like poets.This is the only reference to the Beats that I found in The Habit of Being apart from the sentence, "That boy is on the road more than Kerouac, though in a more elegant manner." (p. 373)
Although O'Connor did not read the Beat authors she correctly sensed their appalling side (William Burroughs, for one example) and zeroed in accurately on their lack of discipline and adolescent posturing as 'holy' when they refused to satisfy the elementary requirements of becoming such. But in fairness to Kerouac one should point out that he really did at one time make a very serious effort at reforming his life. See Resolutions Made and Broken, No More Booze, Publishing, or Seminal Emission, Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac.
And I wonder what Miss O'Connor would say had she lived long enough to read that book by the Holy Goof, Neal Cassady, entitled Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison 1958-1960? (Blast Books, 1993) Grace Beats Karma: what a wonderful title, apt, witty, and pithy!
Arguably, the central figure of the Beat movement was not Kerouac (OTR's Sal Paradise) but Neal Cassady (OTR's Dean Moriarty).
Lucky me, to have been both in and of the '60s. And to have survived.
_____________________
*'Wordage' to my ear embodies a sense between the pejorative 'verbiage' and the commendatory 'writing.' I am reminded of Truman Capote's anti-Kerouac jab, "That's not writing; it's typewriting!"
Addendum. Vito Caiati writes,
I read with interest your post “Jack Kerouac, Religious Writer?” and it struck me that, with a bit of editing, Flannery O’Connor’s remark on “the true poet” might be applied to the too worldly Merton: “The true monk is anonymous, as to his habits, but this boy has to look, act, and apparently smell like a monk” I feel that Merton’s superiors, who failed to check his wanderings of one kind or another, harmed his rich spiritual potential, which is most evident in the early journals. As the protagonist of Georges Bernanos’ Journal de un cure de la campagne observes, when speaking of monks extra muros, “Les moines sont d’incomparables maitres de la vie intérieur, . . . mais il en est de la plupart of ces fameux ‘traits’ comme des vins de terroir, qui doivent se consommer sur place. Ils ne supportent pas le voyage. ” Monks are incomparable masters of the interior life, . . . but most of these famous ‘traits’ [that they possess] like the terroir wines, must be consumed in place, They do not support the trip.”Vito,Very good observation.While deeply appreciative of monasticism with its contemptus mundi, Merton, desirous of name and fame, was wide open to the siren song of the world, which became irresistibly loud when the '60s came along. Had he been our age, would he have become a monk at all? Had he lived beyond the age of 53, would he have remained a monk?I love his Journals. That is where you will find the real Merton. As in Kerouac, a deep sincerity of the heart to break the heart.I am familiar with Bernanos' The Diary of a Country Priest, which is both theologically penetrating and of high literary value. (I would not say that Kerouac's novels are of high literary value, but on the other hand, they are not trash like those of Bukowski.)There are superb passages on prayer, sin, lust, and confession in Bernanos which I may post.But I haven't found the passage you cite. Where is it roughly? Near the beginning, middle, end? I don't imagine you have an English trans.It is always good to hear from you.
During his years of unsuccess, when he was actually at his purest and best, an "unpublished freak," as he describes himself in a late summer 1954 letter to Robert Giroux, living for his art alone, Kerouac contemplated entering a monastery: "I've become extremely religious and may go to a monastery before even before you do." [. . .] "I've recently made friends in a way with Bob Lax and I find him sweet — tho I think his metaphysics are pure faith. Okay, that's what it's supposed to be." (Selected Letters 1940-1956, ed. Charters, Penguin 1995, p. 444.)
And then on pp. 446-448 we find an amazing 26 October [sic!] 1954 letter to Robert Lax packed with etymology and scholarly detail which ends:
I'm no saint, I'm sensual, I cant resist wine, am liable to sneers & secret wraths & attachment to imaginary lures before my eyes — but I intend to ascend by stages & self-control to the Vow to help all sentient beings find enlightenment and holy escape from sin and stain of life-body itself [. . .] but thank God I'm a lazy bum because of that repose will come, in repose the secret, and in the secret: Ceaseless Ecstasy.
"Nirvana, as when the rain puts out a little fire."
See you in the world,
Jack K.
For information on the enigmatic hermit Robert Lax (1915-2000) , see here
Robert Lax: A Life Slowly Lived is especially good. Excerpts:
One of the touchstone words in Lax’s spiritual vocabulary was “waiting”. By this he meant being still, standing one’s ground, knowing one’s ground, but never quite knowing the reality of what was awaited, longed for. In his volume 33 Poems, recently reissued by New Directions, he puts it this way:
Wake up & wait. Lie down & wait. Sit up again & wait. All in the dark now. No way of telling day from night. Do I expect to hear a voice? See a light? A dim one? A bright one? See a face? I sit up. I’m alert. Do I know what to expect? [2]
“What you see,” said Paul Spaeth, keeper of the Lax archive at St Bonaventure, “is the opposite of what can be called social action. What you see is a slowing down and waiting on God. Very much in keeping with the monastic tradition. Also very similar to the Buddhist tradition of moment to moment mindfulness.”
Robert Lax with his two close friends: Thomas Merton (middle) and the abstract painter, Ad Reinhardt (left). Photograph courtesy of the Thomas Merton Center © Bellarmine University
Unlike his friend Thomas Merton, the Trappist poet and author who shared Lax’s interest in Buddhism and brought his name to the world in The Seven Storey Mountain, [3] Lax never lived a life of structured monasticism. A Jewish convert to Catholicism, he built for himself an interior monastery, within which he wrote, prayed, contemplated, and received many visitors: poets, painters, writers (he’d been friends with the legendary abstract artist, Ad Reinhardt, and with Jack Kerouac), and spiritual seekers. “Lax can be thought of as a mystic,” said his biographer Michael N. McGregor, who nevertheless refrained from using that word in his book Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax. [4] He shared his subject’s aversion to the superficiality of labels. He wanted readers to come to their own conclusions about who he was, what he was.
Steve Georgiou, a seeker from California and author of The Way of the Dreamcatcher, a book of dialogues with Lax, remembers their walks down to Skala, the Patmos harbour. “He would walk with a slow roll like the roll of a boat. He would take his meditative steps, encouraging you to slow down yourself and feel the actual experience of walking”. [5]
For Lax, there was no seam between walking, praying, writing. All experiences were to be fully absorbed, integrated into a life fully lived. Once Georgiou saw his friend writing a single word – “river” – over and over. He asked him why. “I want to live with the word for a while,” Lax said.
one word at a time.
I believe
I believe
that all people
should stop their fight;
I believe that one should
blow a whistle or
sing or play
on the
lute [6]
Or is death just a natural event like any other? Merton the monk triggers a Maverick meditatio mori.
Thomas Merton, Journals, vol. III, p. 251, from the entry of 25 January 1959:
He entered the monastery on somebody else's faith and lived there on somebody else's faith and when finally he had to face the fact that what was required was his own faith he collapsed.
An activist judge wants to play the legislator. An activist monk wants to play the worldling. Neither quite understands the nature of his 'job.'
I have long been fascinated by the conflicted man revealed in Thomas Merton's Journals, all seven volumes of which I have read and regularly re-read. He was a spiritual seeker uncomfortably perched between the contemptus mundi of old-time monasticism and 1960's social engagement and 'relevance,' to use one of the buzz words of the day. He was hip to the '60s, its music and its politics, surprisingly appreciative of Dylan and Baez, and this despite being 50 years old in '65 when Dylan was 24.
I recently came across a journal entry in which Merton praises Walker Percy's 1962 novel, The Moviegoer. Then I recalled that the philosopher and surfer Tim Mosteller who visited me a year or so ago, and acquitted himself well on a memorable hike in the Superstitions, had mentioned some work by Percy, whom I have never read, but will. A search turns up he following articles of interest to Merton aficionados:
An Interview with Walker Percy about Thomas Merton
Existentialism, Semiotics and Iced Tea (Roger Kimball)
The Myth of the Fall from Paradise: Thomas Merton and Walker Percy
ADDENDUM (5/25)
Tim Mosteller writes,
I haven't read all of Percy's work, but I have enjoyed a lot of what I have read of him.I simply can't recall which work of his I mentioned when I last saw you.Here's his fiction that I have read:The MoviegoerThe Last GentlemanLove in the RuinsLancelotThe Thanatos SyndromeI think that I looked over, but didn't really study his collection of philosophical essays, some of them quite good on C. S. Peirce and semiotics which were published in top-ranked philosophy journals.Those essays are collected in The Message in the Bottle.Peter Kreeft is quite fond of Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. I think I've looked this one over too, but haven't read it. Kreeft has an essay on this book in his C. S. Lewis for the Third Millenium, and I recall enjoying the essay. In fact, I think that was how I got introduced to Percy.I've enjoyed everything I've read by Percy. It's rare to have a Christian writer who is a first rate philosopher (who was also a medical man) and a first rate novelist. Some of his novels are quite graphic and disturbing, which as a rule I don't enjoy reading, but they are not gratuitous.Percy is too heavily influenced by Kierkegaard and C. S. Peirce, but his story-telling makes of for some of the things I disagree with from these thinkers.Here is a great video lecture which Percy gave which captures a lot of his views: "Walker Percy The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve1f83mxE7kHope this helps!
Journals, vol. 4, p. 235, 8 August 1962:
Thoreau's idleness was an incomparable gift and its fruits were blessings that America has unfortunately never learned to appreciate. Yet he made his gift, though it was not asked for. And he went his way. If he had followed the advice of his neighbors in Concord, America would have been much poorer, even though he might have sweated a good deal. He took the fork in the road.
Old Henry David has meant a lot to me too. My mind drifts back to Wayne Monroe, high school history teacher, a grotesquely obese and superficial man who mocked Thoreau as a hippy who didn't want to work. "Freight Train Wayne," as we called him, drove a 1964 Pontiac Catalina. When he got in the vehicle it would list pronouncedly to the port side. We observing wits would typically make a crack about his Monro-matic schock absorbers.
That Merton was drawn to Thoreau has something to do with my being drawn to both of them. Thank you, gentlemen, for living your lives in your way and writing it all down for men like me to savor. Hats off, glasses raised, your memory will be preserved by the like-minded and discerning.
Thoreau was a great aphorist. My favorite: "A man sits as many risks as he runs." In those ten syllables, the sage of Walden Pond achieves aphoristic perfection. Study it if you would learn the art.
America may not have appreciated him, but the greatness of America is that it allows his like to flourish.
Success is living your own life in your own way.
The world is full of hustlers and charlatans who prey upon spiritual seekers. One ought to be suspicious of anyone who claims enlightenment or special powers. The acid test, perhaps, is whether they demand money or sex for their services. If they do, run away while holding onto your wallet. 'Bhagwan Shree' Rajneesh is a good example from the '80s.
Recoiling from the mountebanks, some go to the opposite extreme, holding as fraudulent all spiritual teachers.
Some people are gullible and credulous, without a skeptical bone in their bodies. Others are skepticism incarnate, unable to believe anything or admire anything. A strange case of the latter is U. G. Krishnamurti, the anti-guru and 'anti-charlatan.' Please don't confuse him with the much better known J. Krishnamurti.
An obsessive doubter and debunker, U. G. Krishnamurti is a bit like the atheist who can't leave God alone, but must constantly be disproving him. U.G. can't leave the enlightenment quest and 'spirituality' alone. It's all buncombe, he thinks, but he can't be done with it.
Buddha, Jesus, and the rest were all just kidding themselves and misleading others. But U. G. can't just arrive at this conclusion and move on to something he deems worthwhile. For he is an 'anti-quester' tied to what he opposes by his self-defining opposition to it. Curiously perverse, but fascinating. He is a little like the later Wittgenstein who, though convinced that the problems of philosophy arose from linguistic bewitchment, couldn't move on to something worth doing, but instead obsessively scribbled on in any attempt to show a nonexistent fly the way out of a nonexistent fly-bottle.
U. G. can't seem to take seriously any experience. Each is just an experience. None is revelatory or finally veridical. Religious and mystical experiences are no different than sexual or drug experiences. Before any experience can put him in contact with any reality, his skepticism dissolves it.
"Just an experience! What do I need more experiences for!"
Related:
Thomas Merton on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
The gullible Merton appears to have been taken in by Trungpa.