THE MUSIC OF BOB DYLAN AND THE MYSTICISM OF THOMAS MERTON
Connecting the music of Bob Dylan to the mysticism of Thomas Merton
Like many of the most interesting famous people, Catholic monk, poet and social activist Thomas Merton is one of those about whom informed readers might easily think there is nothing new to say. In “The Monk’s Record Player: Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966,” Robert Hudson, a poet and spiritual writer himself, has given us a truly new exploration of Merton with fascinating material that no scholar has yet uncovered.
Many Pittsburghers have an affinity for the colorful monk who zoomedto fame in the 1950s when he converted to Catholicism, leaving a life of literary fame and fortune to become a secluded Trappist. “The Seven Story Mountain,” the literary memoir tracing his faith journey, was a sensation and remained on the best-seller list for years.
In a development that Mr. Hudson explains beautifully, Thomas Merton’s mysticism deepened along with his sense of solidarity with the world at large. This, in turn, drew him into significant ruminations on God’s concern for the poor, global justice and peacemaking, especially given the dangers of the nuclear age.
Censored by his abbott — their order valued silence and solitude — Merton’s anonymous letters made their way to an extraordinary cast of characters, from Ethel Kennedy to Martin Luther King Jr., to Dorothy Day and not a few religious in the Steel City.
Thousands of us have come to care about the mystic who related prayer and progressive politics, who conjured connections between the deepest things of the human heart and the biggest questions of public policy. In fact, The Thomas Merton Center was started in Pittsburgh in 1972 to explore how Catholic social ethics can be lived out more dramatically; their founders were, in fact, deeply involved with people who were in touch with ThomasMerton.
Robert Hudson is an eloquent and vivid writer, luminous at times in describing episodes drawn often from Thomas Merton’s voluminous personal journals. Few Merton biographers have done such detailed research and yet written so nicely. As an intro to Merton, including portrayals of his many difficulties, “The Monk’s Record Player” is a gem.
To borrow a phrase often said about the other central character in the book, Thomas Merton “went electric” in the fourth chapter set in 1966 after a few lovely chapters about his early monastic years. Merton discovered Bob Dylan and fell in love with the infamously rocking first side of Dylan’s “Bringing It All Back Home” and was awestruck by “Highway 61 Revisited.” The connections were deep and soon Thomas Merton invited Dylan to Gethsemani, his rural Kentucky monastery, but there’s no evidence they ever met.
Mr. Hudson reveals that both men were deeply moved by the folk tunes of Joan Baez and her Quaker spirituality as well as early American blues and lamentation music from the black American experience. Both were reading Camus — each surely saw himself as an “absurd man” — and both were deeply interested in beat poetry and existential philosophy.
Merton and Dylan embraced a fairly standard ethical critique of racism and poverty but grew toward a wild and woolly critique of establishment culture, technology and, of course, the military industrial complex. Both men deepened their writing, adopting extraordinary cadence and clever wordplay to stylistically express a critique of the fragmented worldview of mass culture.
No other Merton scholars have connected the dots between these two, arguably the two most prolific and influential figures of the ’60s counterculture. Their restlessness, their discernment about the spirit of the times and their prophetic poems that connected them with the anti-war movement were, in Mr. Hudson’s telling, remarkably similar.
And yet, they were drawn to different work, called to different vocations, different ways of being in the world. This “parallel biography” shows particularly well how the monk was influenced by the music.
The last chapters of “The Monk’s Record Player” studies the years from July 1966 to October 1968 when Thomas Merton died an accidental death by electrocution in Thailand. That was the year Dylan released “John Wesley Harding,” a record Mr. Hudson says the musician relished “most likely because it was his most self-consciously mystical album.” It was also the year Merton purchased “Ascension,” the free-jazz classic by John Coltrane that he described as “shattering” and “prophetic.”
That spring, MLK was assassinated in Memphis. Merton’s friends Daniel and Philip Berrigan burned draft files in Catonsville, Md,, as Merton was visiting Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti at his famous City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. In June, Robert F. Kennedy wasassassinated. Merton turned up the records, and they “shook the windows and rattled the walls.” The times,indeed, were a -changin’.
“The Monk’s Record Player” is a beautiful, fascinating book about some of those changes. A foreward by Rolling Stone founding editor David Dalton makes it that much better.
“THE MONK’S RECORD PLAYER: THOMAS MERTON, BOB DYLAN, AND THE PERILOUS SUMMER OF 1966 By Robert Hudson Eerdmans $23.99