Visiting Thomas Merton's Hermitage

A few days ago, I went with my friend Kevin Davison to Thomas Merton’s hermitage at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. We spent two days there, filming and recording.

Brother Paul Quenon met us at the Abbey, and we drove together to the hermitage. He was wearing the traditional robes of a Cistercian monk, plus gray sneakers (no socks). Kevin and I felt like Keystone Cops as we scrambled to move our mountain of equipment to make space for Paul. The entire drive up I was worried a pinned box of cameras would come crashing down on his head (it didn’t).

Brother Paul was direct, quick, alert, and funny. He played my piano while we set up. He was nice to talk with. He never let a conversation go on too long. (His poetry is beautiful — read some here — and often describes the sonic world around him.) He was also not afraid to help us. In his 80s, he insisted on carrying equipment into the hermitage. “I work,” he said happily. When we thanked him for being with us and for the permission to be there, he said, “Well, it was something new.” Very matter-of-fact.

The hermitage is bigger than I thought it would be. Brother Paul said this was so Merton could have guests and conferences there — “poets and writers,” he said. The porch is as big as the main room. I felt totally, surprisingly comfortable there. It was familiar; perhaps seeing earlier photos from Ralph Eugene Meatyard prepared me for the experience — photos of the building and woods, picnics, empty fields.

I performed for Brother Paul, playing three pieces — alongside recordings of Merton speaking on Samuel Beckett, Michel Foucault, and the Sufi mystic, Ibn al-‘Arabî. After that, he allowed us to stay and work on our own. He said that he may not see us the next day, but encouraged us to just go about our business. “There’s more work to do,” he said, and took his leave.

The landscape is all that I imagined — remote, quiet, wooded. But it is also more dense and hillier than I had expected. Humid, too, and teeming with insects. Sonically, it was lovely. I heard the bells down the hill, the wind in the trees and grasses, birdsong, and an occasional car on distant roads. The sounds were welcoming, quiet, active.

The experience felt a bit like a pilgrimage. Something akin to Patti Smith’s travels in M Train, (thanks for the reminder, Ryan), or even the obsessed fictional characters in A.S. Byatt’s Possession: visiting places of writers, sensing the landscape and soundscape they wrote in, and how these places influenced their words. But I am also now an uncertain, skeptical pilgrim, carefully trying to not get lost in reverie or nostalgia, wary of placing Merton on a pedestal. It felt good to just be there, to take it in, and to simply get on with our tasks.

I performed alone both inside and on the porch of the hermitage, for no one. My audience was an empty field, mature Poplar trees, an occasional wild turkey, a pair of skittish deer, many birds, and a million mosquitos. In one of the Merton recordings, he states, “It’s a dark, gray morning. It may rain later.“ As I performed, a thunderstorm came in. It got progressively darker. The hermitage door slammed shut. The trees became a collective of white noise, steadily getting louder. It became pitch-black in the daytime. Just as I was playing the last notes, the rain began. I finished, and we scrambled to grab the cameras and microphones.

A time lapse of a thunderstorm rolling in while I played on the hermitage porch.

The storm was beautiful. After we retrieved the equipment, we continued to film and record. The rain was gentle, steady, substantial, cooling. Thunder echoed from either side of the hermitage. We stayed quiet — no need to talk — and listened, watched, and kept working.

Listening to and watching the thunderstorm from the hermitage's porch.

There’s a new release date for Words and Silences: October 7, 2022. I’ll be sharing some of this footage at the hermitage then. We’ll be premiering the project with my chamber ensemble at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, on November 10, with additional performances in Cincinnati and Louisville.

There’s more news to come, but for now, thank you again for experiencing this project along with me.

Happy listening,

Brian

Photos by Kevin Davison and Brian Harnetty.