One of the bright spots for me during the COVID-19 summer of 2020 was the unexpected release of a new Bob Dylan album in June. The album, entitled "Rough and Rowdy Ways" was announced via social media after Dylan released two of its tracks earlier during the pandemic.
Being an obsessive Dylan fan, I very much looked forward to what the Nobel Prize laureate had to offer the world during this unprecedented time.
Dylan's last album of original material was in 2012 with the release of "Tempest." (In fact, the first track that was released from the new album, "Murder Most Foul," was most likely an outtake from that album.)
Once again, the singer-songwriter does not disappoint, and even as he approaches his 80th birthday, he is still able to reinvent himself and surprise even his most loyal fans. The dark sound and lyrics of the album initially suggest Dylan's personal wrestle with mortality, yet I find that this record is not a "swan song" or the musings of an old man who is waiting to die. "Rough and Rowdy Ways" highlights an ongoing death to self, which every person must choose to embrace.
In 2018, author Robert Hudson released an engaging book entitled The Monk's Record Player: Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966. The book highlights the famed monk's profound interest in the music and lyrics of Dylan. The image of Merton cranking up "Bringing It All Back Home" on vinyl in his hermitage with visitors, who included the 83-year-old French philosopher Jacques Maritain, is amusing to say the least! Yet, what Merton recognized in Dylan's earlier records can be equally applied to what Dylan unknowingly recognizes now in Merton's writings.
In the early pages of New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton writes that "contemplation is always beyond our own knowledge, beyond our own light, beyond systems, beyond explanations, beyond discourse, beyond dialogue, beyond our own self. To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being" (emphasis mine).
