The Directors Have Engineered a Surprise
You Will Not Easily Discover
When Bob Hudson first told me about his idea for the book he was writing, I thought, Oh well, we all have our eccentricities, our odd hobbies—although some a little more odd than others. I’m all in favor of writing a book about any wild thing under the sun, bringing in whatever quirky thing floats through your mind (that’s what books are). But then Bob asked if I would write the foreword. At first I thought, Why me? Aren’t we friends? Didn’t we bond through our mutual obsession with the hipster saint Bob (Dylan)? I would do anything for him—I wouldn’t have been able to write my Dylan biography without him. But, I ask you, do real friends ask friends to corroborate their nutty theories?
You may think, as I at first did, that pairing a Utopian hermit monk and a demon-haunted rock star is just plain perverse or at the very least willfully paradoxical. But there you’d be dead wrong. Paradox, as Kierkegaard pointed out, is simply a great idea in embryo—and that’s what The Monk’s Record Player is, a profound meditation on apparent contradictions. With a deft, witty, and philosophical hand, Hudson shows us that Bob Dylan and Thomas Merton were at a certain point in time almost interchangeable. Well, as writers anyway, thinkers and diviners of strange truths. It’s a little like String Theory—it takes a while to get used to.
I now saw the light: Thomas Merton and Bob Dylan were Siamese twins joined at the hippocampus. One an orphan (Merton), the other (liar-liar-pants-on-fire Dylan) claiming to be one—as well as a number of other unlikely things: a foundling, the son of an Egyptian king, a boy adopted by the Oglala Sioux, a tent-show kid looking after the bearded lady, etc.
After all, why wouldn’t two people as inventive, desperate, supernaturally talented, and aghast at the temper of the times have a lot in common? Well, that’s why you’re reading this book.
It’s too bad they never met, but we could easily arrange it at, say, the Existential Café. Dylan is perusing the menu. “What are you gonna have, Father?” Bob asks. “Tom,” Merton tells him. “Please call me Tom.” On another occasion Merton might have said, “Two cheeseburgers, a chocolate milkshake, and a large order of fries,” because he’s a true devotee of Zen masters and junk food. But these are two poets talking, and poets, as we know, talk in metaphors.
“So Tom, what’s your favorite dish?” “Let me see . . . ,” Merton says. “Broiled René Char, café noir à la André Breton, a taste of Rubén Darío, Miguel Hernández, Edwin Muir, and a couple of Desert Fathers on the side. And you, Bob, what do you fancy?” “Oh, the usual. A couple of French Symbolists, marinated in Rimbaud’s Seasoned in Hell sauce, and the Comte de Lautréamont’s signature dish, Spleen de Maldoror, hard-boiled and raving.”
In 1966 Merton declared his intention to write “a new book now, in a new way, in a new language too.” Rimbaud, the high priest of Symbolist alchemy of the word, had decreed, “Inventing the unknown demands new forms.” So it was just a matter of finding the language for what he was setting out to do. Dylan had already kicked open that door for him, and Merton caught on to the new meta-lingo fast.
Cables to the Ace: Or, Familiar Liturgies of Misunderstanding, written in 1966, is the book, as Hudson points out, where Merton goes electric. “With the unending vroom vroom vroom of guitars,” Merton insists, “we will all learn a new kind of obstinacy, together with massive lessons of irony and refusal. . . .”
Some sort of vinyl virus has got ahold of Thomas Merton; he’s burning up. He’s got a bad case of Dylanosis. Worse, he’s deliberately infected himself with the wild mercury fever. Where did he catch it? Where else would you get Dadaist dissociation on vinyl? Dylan’s liner notes to Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61. Merton’s bogged down amid “tree frogs and rain,” his healer-lover can only revive him through her “distant radio-electric loving glance” (phone calls), and in section 70 of Cables he’s really rolling down the track as he summarizes the plot of a TV show this way: “Riot woman transformed into savings bonds is traced to unforgettable swans for the entire ruin of one season.” (Now that’s a show I’d like to see!)
When characters with bizarre names—“Polo King,” “Uncle Sled,” “Jack Sound,” “Miss Daisy,” the “subliminal engineer,” “Pocahontas a jungle nun”—start showing up in Merton’s poetry, you’re not sure whether they’re playing cards, comic-book characters, or names out of the Bob Dylan telephone directory. He sees “Little Red Riding Hood in chains,” “Coleridge . . . swimming in Walden Pond,” and “The midnight express / Bringing Plato, Prophets, Milton, Blake.” Well, if I can find the schedule, you’ll find me on the platform waiting for that train.
In Cables to the Ace, Merton is someplace else entirely from his earlier poetry. Once you sign the register, you’ve checked into the Merton Motel, where they have daily, weekly, and special rates for eternity. “The realm of the spirit is two doors down the hall,” the night clerk tells you. “There you can obtain more soul than you are ready to cope with, Buster.” When a midget pops out of room 27 and madly cries “Hats off! Hats off to the human condition!,” you don’t know whether to rejoice or run.
The parallel trajectories of Merton and Dylan probably had nothing to do with angels or time spirits, and a lot more to do with the temper of the times. If you want to know what it was like to be alive in 1966, it’s right there in the grooves of Dylan’s LPs and on the pages of Merton’s Cables to the Ace. They were creatures of the Zeitgeist, operating on high-tension power lines tuned in to the same oscillating wavelength. You can hear their words and phrases humming on the page, in the tracks. They were on the beam, in the moment—behind every thought there’s the word NOW!
Bob Hudson’s obsession with these two maniacs and his rash insistence on putting them together often made me wonder about him. How the hell is he going to pull this off? What exactly did they have in common? Okay, we’ll make a rough list: transcendental yearnings, overamped libidos, a fascination with drugs and strange gods, and a pervert’s molestation of the English language. One a hermit by disposition (you can imagine who I’m referring to), the other a hermit by profession (of faith). One of them climbed a mystical seven-storeyed mountain; the other created three albums so existentially evangelical they’re often referred to as the Holy Trinity. Both were members of a perverse order of nobility. Using hieroglyphic language, they simultaneously hit upon a way of dealing with their own psychological derangements while straightening out the universe—verbally, at least. Both were willful sinners, antiheroes of mysterious virtue and reluctant saints involved in issues of street-legal theology, Symbolist poetry, radical politics, morbid psychology, women (why leave them out?), the imminent spiritual crisis, and Doom—eschatology, to use theological terminology.
Thomas Merton knew of Dylan, of course, became obsessed with him, but only after—and because—he had already found the core in himself that now needed a new lens with which to look at the world. And he found it in Dylan.
I could have warned Merton of the dangers of getting into a car with Bob Dylan, but Merton wasn’t a dabbler, and when he became obsessed with something, he dived in headfirst. He knew that “one does not get ‘curious’ about Dylan. You are either all in it or all out of it. I am in his new stuff.” Merton’s an impulsive character, a devotee of satori—sudden enlightenment—and he jumps right in that car and he’s off.
Merton and Dylan are both numinous writers—and x-ray vision was granted to both of them. They were outraged when confronted with boxes of Cheez Doodles, cigarette-smoking billboards, satanic cereal, flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark—a “tidal wave of trademarks, political party buttons, advertising and propaganda slogans, and all the rest,” as Merton described it. “An age of mass psychosis. . . . That is why some of the best poets of our time are running wild among the tombs in the moonlit cemeteries of surrealism.” Given their like-minded scavenging habits, it’s a wonder Tom and Bob didn’t run into each other nightly.
It was a culture mired in hypocrisy, greed, and corruption on an industrial scale. Things were bad, very bad. The world’s far worse off now than it was in 1966, the difference being that back then we at least thought we could do something about it. In this wasteland, Merton saw his antipoetry as performing a prophetic and cathartic function using phantasmagoric language—what Russian futurists called zaum, a parasitical language of transmutation, perversion, and verbal contortion. That was the only way to talk about an absurd world. Fired by this new word drug, pictures infused with infrared colors flooded their brains and flew out of their heads like Pentecostal postcards.
Experimental poetry here overlaps effortlessly with prophetic visions. High modernism and visionaries all share the same mantra: Credo quia absurdum—I believe because it’s absurd. The intoxicated, promiscuous minds of saints and Symbolists are rag-pickers, scooping up images, words, disconnected ideas. There’s no time to lose. Snatch anything you see, scavenger style. Grab a headline from a newspaper, snag an advertising jingle, predict nonsense, speak French and Dada.
Hudson’s search for correspondences between Dylan and Merton—their “elective affinities,” to use Goethe’s phrase—is ingenious. You have to take risks when you’re dealing with stuff as far-out as this. The quest has to be wildly speculative to yield any interesting results at all. It requires a nimble intelligence to see the invisible threads. This can’t be achieved solely by analogy. In the end you have to rely on your intuition and cosmic coincidences.
The basic idea of The Monk’s Record Player is to throw two eccentric characters possessed of genius in the same life raft along with himself. So now you have three men in the drunken boat. It’s a sort of Mad Hatter’s tea party, except instead of riddles, nonsense poetry, and a dormouse, Hudson’s book mulls over a wide range of ideas, theories, and philosophies, and he obviously doesn’t have any qualms about putting them all into the mix. You soon forget about specifics because Hudson’s subtle observations encourage your mind to run on unexpected tracks. When you discover what Merton’s run-in with Dylan’s albums did for his poetry, you might begin thinking strange thoughts, like what St. Augustine could have done if he’d had a Stratocaster.
But in the end it’s Bob Hudson’s love for Thomas Merton and Bob Dylan that’s the alchemical fire that makes it work. As curious as this cockamamie pairing is, The Monk’s Record Player is a meditation on inspiration, contact highs, and the unknowable workings of the cosmos.
Listen, as long as you’re up, put on Cables to the Ace. I want to hear a couple of tracks on the first side again.
DAVID DALTON