Solstice 2009

In Nov., around the middle of Scorpio, I gave a reading of St. John’s Rose Slumber as a gift for the dead. Then the semester got busy, and I am just now getting my breath back and stirring on the shore. Still, throughout this time, I was developing some thoughts about religion. I teach in religious studies and spend a lot of time trying to get at what the topic is.

After the reading and as part of trying to understand differences I find I have with other writers and my time, I began to think about my comfort with the context of religion in relation to what is almost a prohibition on speaking in religious terms or about what I’d call a “good in being”, a prohibition on valuing anything that is enacted by relentless recursive reflexivity.

In this post for Solstice 09, I reflect on this. Over in O Pure Contradition and The Anderson Sisters, I offer my journal notes and drafts towards a new piece “The Star of Araby” that weaves together sense I have of being a girl, Kabbalah notion of the Shekinah as daughter of God, memories I have of WW II and of childhood and thus of being in some larger story or process I catch sight of now and then.

“A Good in Being” and “A Problem Given in Being”

When you teach religion, you run up against the problem of 1) intuiting patterns across religions, 2) looking for a language in which to talk about those patterns. A common strategy is to adopt a Universalist perspective that assumes an actual commonality, and thus to use words like “the sacred” etc as a way of referring to some common truth. This, however, is already to have assumed too much. That is, it assumes the patterns are proof of an actual common term or structure. It assumes something about precisely what is at stake—what our relation to any sacred might be.

I use the language “Good” for a number of reasons. I like that the semantic field of the term allows slippage into, for instance, 1) “merchandise” and thus, more generally, value, 2) the thought that it it indicates our desire/erotic natures have some bearing in the relation, 3) some awareness of a difference and relation between putative “secular” and sacred topoi (Good to God), and 4) we are aware it is somehow plural.

Hence, when I introduce a term to suggest this pole of a religious relation, I speak of “a good in being” and then quickly gloss this as somehow “radical”. I am not merely positing a space holder. I am saying some things about the phenomena of the relations posed in religious discourse.

Now, when I speak in these terms, some folks are quick to complain that I am using evaluative language (good versus bad). I get this from people who understand Buddhism to propose an ethical neutrality and from people who have inherited an Enlightenment suspicion with religion/ethics and notions of authority. I know that this is a room you can live in a long time—seeing things this way—but for me its not an adequate posture. As a position, it requires I render out of myself any actual love I have in and for being. I have to suppress an actual interest, and I have decided I am more loyal to the interest than to its negation.

I sometimes feel that this idea of neutrality or equanimity—when used to suppress actual interest—actual does a violence to our ability to love and relate. The counter is that it gives freedom, but I think it can only be an imagined or hoped for freedom, an ethereal freedom, since I believe, given our sense bodies and mode of being we are, in fact—and I mean in fact—limited and at stake.

When I speak of “a problem given in being”, I mean we have multiple interests in relation to objects—a desire for mastery, freedom, a desire to care, and interest in sharing, a desire to be concordant. The tendency in Western thought has been to simplify desire. For instance, in economic theory, we are told people simply want to win/have more. All desire boils down to this, etc. I think a better case can be made that the problem is that we have multiple and at times competing desires. So I am more in line with Freud’s basic intuition here that we are conflicted or split in being.

People tend to manage the conflict given in being by a bifurcation made possible by proposing some second, etheric ground of being—it could be mind, spirit, logos, Brahman, etc. In this move, being—experience—is rendered or inscribed or interpreted in terms of a new difference between an inanimate or dead body and an animate, lit-up other. Generally, this second ground is proposed in etheric terms—it is not sensible, lacks form, etc.

Whether or not there is a difference, what has happened here is that a resolution of conflict has been proposed as possible on this second ground (sometimes opened out by ritual, or a poem, or as a painting or story, etc).

In this analysis I am not saying there is not a difference (a difference in desires, a difference made possible by sense and language), but that that difference has been rendered or fixed (I first typed “foxed”) into a strong categorical difference between one term and another.

Hence, the point is not that the etheric is an illusion and that only dead body exists, but that neither the etheric nor the dead body exist as such. When that bifurcation is undone, we are still here breathing, still held, in our conflict and difference. There is no collapse back into.

***

A last note. Jehanne says that “in being” is the hard thing in all this. I am deliberately a little allusive here. I use a small “b” because I am not proposing some second or given Heideggarian ground. When students ask I say I mean “being here” or “being alive” as a rough way of locating a ground that is otherwise contested. That is, I accept an existential premise that our gestures into relation and our sense of self and world have a location whose limits and status has yet to be determined.
***

In general, the Enlightenment suspicion of religion and posture that we shouldn’t make value statements (a strange posture by the way in an era where we are subordinate to commodity value) are aimed at protecting a person from authoritarian violence (and, in a sense, accepting a personal discipline so as to avoid responsibility for one’s own authorial violence). But, my sense is that there is no way not to impinge, a counter thought visible as early as the Bhagavadgita critique of the renunciate ethic. The latter text points out what the sharpest students always point out which is that non-action is still an action. Less obvious is a correlate, which is that thinking is not a different mode of being. We don’t escape being at stake in, being in relation to form, by imagining we have a relation determined by knowing instead of action. That contrast falsely characterizes both knowing and action.

In the same way, relativism or tolerance or a posture that takes no evaluative stance is still a stance, and one cannot escape impinging on another in this way. Rather, such a mode of thought, as many ideologies do, simply displaces the violence, the being at stake, the spectre of authorial power, onto the other.

***

Finally, the posture that one should not hold notions of good and bad and so on is different from an appreciation or interest in being that takes on both good and bad tastes. These are not the same. The first assigns an equality to terms and effaces a felt difference (or warrant), the latter involves a decision to care for more than what one prefers. Most people who say they don’t believe in making value statements are not actually choosing to do the latter. They are often insisting on a total freedom to only do what they prefer.

***

I discuss the issue of equanimity and relativism in notes I have posted at “O Pure Contradiction” when I talk about why I find a good in being. I’ll end here with a brief heuristic note about why I find negation an unsatisfactory posture in the end.

In a story I read in that Vine DeLoria edited collection of Native American writing, there is this story of “Singing Stone” who travels in the four directions looking for power/duration/a home. When he goes West, he goes down into a cave and keeps digging further and further back until he has no room, and he meets a little mouse who tells him he has to go back. The gloss on this is that its an allegory for this kind of thinking that circles back on itself until there is no space.

Another way of thinking of it is to think of the West as defined by the element Air (Libra) and thus when thought becomes cut off inside self and only has further reflexive moves because not otherwise moved by other forces.

There is a way in which one kind of modernism goes in this direction, at least for me.

This is a draft of a longer version; part three was published in the Golden Handcuffs Review. There is some lost formatting. I added dashes for spaces

Her(e) Shorelines Leakage
for Nathaniel Tarn

I. Dreams Writing the Myth

Several old western towns I was dreamed
chant light in bar bustle close shoulder
over there’s Jesus looks over his glass
I was turned away again work to do
at the bar

you think this mean I rejected my foot up
or drank or was forbid or
---------------why would I not rush across the bar to
crush his rose in oil?

I am sailing the same way
a dream he walks past me in the water
but goes ahead or later wind pushes me past
the same coast

that long kiss lip of scarp Dover or pine
sketch of my back as Draco
weveren North Star his eyes
tattoo--I already wear--his breath

you put your hand down into the dirt
they come up flowers
he walks the water out
that long reach

sideways

****

The differences among stations collect
you begin a June-cloud
aster meadow not yet bloomed

& birch sticks whisper you lay them out
catch-frame to stop wherever grass
and separate stars--

star-echo rose fades close
not desert or shore lean fence
in moon-shadowed--

thread more difficult to apply justice at this stop
what justice rose-scent signed we whisper
to staple desert makes an auger pleat, there

perhaps a thorn the doubled skirt
or name’s remembrance head lost
in air’s tousled “where”

body none-the-less is sheets of fields
and clover and darkness bed-laid
fallen under it---with last day’s leaves

****

A man gets laid out in grass stars by birch tassel
as first place of catch self
and pile-woven are the three strands

heart cavern and stone face and a windowed room Rilke calls
offen, or “far-gone” (other-
wise “open”) sisters;

then listed to the wind? Mast
before knot-effigy dawn you surprise as power,
dies was dead

scattering your lions
scattering the spat the say
spits back ash.

Or names of limbs? Divisions
of extended air, my quarters
among the discussant angels?

Since caught space is otherwise scant
but shelter the startled name makes folded
parch and bench and osier nostrum.

I say “Always stitch the willow-pattern
into the vice and wallpaper the ash-dark
unlit halls and window the world

in such uncertain filigree
as must sign
of the farther, the storm and murder

makes lit the waves makes hold
is loyal in the morning hours
is west and pool and most upward

melancholy shoulder.” Day not made
by birch or cross or caught
stirs itself---across this Strata answers.


II. Voices in the Grass//Loverman’s Answer

[we didn’t know why we had killed them, it
wasn’t to our advantage or because the river
had whispered, if anything it was because,
its secret breath was stopped in culverts &
no communion with the larger space was
offered; if it is difficult to explain what
angels do its at least a name for a marshal
hand; we like to say “my face ran away”
or “I stepped out of my body” but the body goes right
over to the door you’ve stayed behind
and we don’t know why we killed them
piled the pyre, its simply “the leaves shook”]

***

When we don’t understand, we like
to say “nature” is the cause—seals
swim in packs, and dogs,
so it’s a function, which means
a dwindling curve, points
towards that interstitial chordal lot
twixt in and ex

later, we get lost walking between
--was
a place where it had rained and
there were puddles and cricket mallow
but its difficult to keep the debutante
out of your step she keeps
catching up

mostly we’d like to slide into
something more comfortable and
gender is always the easiest
deception since we are, after
all beautiful
even though we kill we
don’t know why

we gather around the horse
in a field and quick
cut her throat and then flay
back her rib-flesh
and this is the beginning of governance
or it is hard to say
why we agree here, but a circle
is a start. Are the coals bright?
the fat bubbling?

as long as I can return home
I can pretend it was someone else
or a hunger or purpose
that gripped my stele
and set it in that field
around a fire.

*******

What begins Astarte later is city streets I am
still longing, arms broken, a torso—oh turned surface
head would confuse, that I forgot you make me your
eyes make men, make yours I am also, O, in what
film could that happen between? Could I break into
your hard seeing?

They thought words were like that, a fence medium,
I said “she can’t read the cards, that one you refer
to” but imagine & so a share of the sun painted
her shadow too, scrawl my brow, “but that’s
what you were thinking” when we find an unexpected
extra room in the house.

See I already make armatures, the second verse
a map, parcels, what I wanted to say
is what I call “her crease”, but’s the expand I felt
she would a long inbreath I’d have to wait for seasons
to flow across the sky before she’d speak; her crease
out of sight.

***

I press in lintels what words to cross your bow does not make
in this writing, I bend your fingers back

all things proceed Sabbath as Rockwell, our fierce license
makes dim light, irony tough, willows clatter

were you mine, the old agreements listen, were you mine
you would not bargain to step true, would

parse further, a shore discrepant, ‘till, among other,
what comes to hand, falls open

a day’s margins are married & all skies pass the night
all oak blossom, all winter seal, your hand’s prayer

old holiness has a damp smell of unwashed mold, masks
captured Cupid, “here we gathered among a dead language

and prospered”, bent tax to parasequence abyccus, kept count of
false liberty by snipped adjective, her worst

hunched on a shore awaited, hunched gazer seaward in eye’s majesty
Carnac and confident limits would hold, would the farthest say

“steerage” or “sails” as images for this canted world edge he
walked across or gunwale raised a finger pushed to heart

“I walk away from cultured fields, do not cast sails to skim
a sky reflected green dark semblance; at night, among reeds

or close to fire’s lesion, there’s the knee and all ambition fostered,
I can more perfectly say or better yet keep saying.”

***

and so,
I am place
and rivers of rooms run through me successive
and meadows
spurled with poppies and witch grass
I was, as if floating, as if Manhattan,
a lingering in the air

sight foremost and distance
whether the walls are bookshelves or prairies
winter’s edge and shelter
a carpet shifting
walled always walled or skied or directioned
always turning, always season
what passes through me

her heels at the door approaching
and departing

Whitman’s American Eye
and the hour of my day a Book
of Hours since prayer is place
the curtain moves and pulls
against

(each eyeful, neither talking)


III. Desert Aster

Stars flare//if it had to do with word’s sense
slough of cels from//it’ll be a wound

menstrual hair erupts//like grass between
cracks//in children’s fists

bladder floor of warehouse not wellspring
collapse, lea, marsh, bog gutteral

flicks stream from his side Saturday blue
reflect clouds also orison cigar mash//lettuce cornflower scrap

desert skin or window slice shreds two
reflections//yours and mine//or stars

Rebel Without a Cause floods menstrual ore
skin weeps at bruise//breaks//he leaks at night

fecund wound I kiss lick—his cunt the spear
will make, already nocturnal

the way to sew a future into the ground
makes thought spill: a crossed road lines

you make me leap baby all porpoise, thanks
few considerations are different

me borrowing your bike a minute, burrowing
what you saw in me: a scarf

he was still sleeping and you were feeding
off my double, not serious or anything

a nice Sunday hat or style as compliments flatter
I was more conditional//your ticket

when God talks//cusp sliver in your side
not my angel//I wish//who tucked it

dark sleeps darker not lit a lion, listen
to heart stops//I would try to make you

but can’t throw up or am otherwise dislodged
a social tool, but am responsible black

asleep the movies flowed off across desert sand
all doubled things were similar

earth and stories: she was reflected and reflected
was actually my eyes I suppose

disappeared behind them, stacoma eclipsed
or parsed by stage curtain//silly boy

falling in love with his own eyes
that way her arm was.

****

outside the sky flattened a prairie sky and horizon with dawn or red line of night I mean the shore it was at the edge, a road traveled, he was lying in sand and wounded a wound a bear opened his mouth his side split it was that kind of thing a fairy tale I told it split open and water or hair all grey and wet splayed in her fingers over a white basin I mean a beard spilled out her transgression was his blood it was all over his side, Judy Garland and bent Cary in flickering stills all fingered desire all desire ran out of his side in a gasp oh so love struck mistaken she lived nearby I mean the night fell I am trying to say what both sides of a window any word does it but can I make you feel? does the curtain billow in or out and what is your tongue doing licking the edge open, I mean flaying it back all corpuscle all twelve moon blood stain spatter

I’d fold that back he was naked under the stars anyway a blanket and when I say blanket I mean the whole color dipped in so dipped, stars flung out over or the brocade was a story threads out that we have a place by the river… it’s a horizon or a shore I mean a line you can draw in the sand what I’m saying is a fold you can say I mean whichever way the wind blows it starts with a fold and broods over it I mean brows oh, don’t slip away

stories slipped out of his wound mouth edge horizon like blood but bloomed in a desert ground beside rocks and lions watched

many colors all shepherd show and Joseph or Rousseau we were emblemate of this like paper flowers and stocked the stage//what reflection rips don’t trace//its already written

they all hushed nearby he was sleeping this dream horizon ocean shore thing spelt wound which blossomed, stacked up like winter wood. sleeping this spill wound this lotus wand this roar since all lines, all the written lines, the blue pole’s satisfactions and police, all the structure making and missive and kiss that kiss makes possible I mean makes kiss her lips that spell the ocean falls through

the lines give way not connected into tidal the dawn drifts a wound be your heart I mean listen to it be an ear was an ear suddenly lifted and not dawn, was perked, not shelter, not written and between the lips that were not lips but sky and sky a tongue and taste and before it split

the sky will split but not along the egg’s edge I mean I was thinking of his wound under the stars and the desert sand receiving his story blood and the film cels receding away like rivers across the sand and all Judy garland and romance and Saturday kid stuff sex and high school made passion like Springsteen his most sexy press all made into grass and other fecund oh baby cottonwood

what was not supported and fell what the bear’d been waiting what came out of the wound not night her edge I was saying and making analog all these differences sketched so seam-like through

but what the sea wakes

all tidal between saints and points

I made her tree her lifted tree a place I spun the night into an ear over his body slept what death or depth disturbs

what my eyes cannot trace nor horizon limn nor shore divide nor essay dawn a saying, what was not bird’s wheeling arc or sketch or lifted skeletal scaffold night or poem written “horse sacrifice” or burnt man

whether bled out as flowers or let in like guests, the curtain billows

I mean I sat there and it was day and night perhaps prairies stretched or some other asphalt or wall paper I’d designed or yours I let get written into me

written into me billowed out still had a spine, a fingernail edge half moon piled eggs breakfast edge

I was worried at it all chewed was worried at dawn gnaw and by now the temple was frescoed with shadows

we were still in a room outside was bleeding into a sea; what tidal disturbs

no figural scribes


****

just having to say two a boat capsized but
it was truth, not a story, it echoed right
(they say “rang”) at the eye’s hinge, but
capsized was dramatic and overstated

two was true it was split or spilt both happened
like a cat’s eyes and saucer’d milk
an upstairs neighbor’s wash bowl breaks
a leaking ceiling means menstrual you feel it

two gets hard to say since image postures suggest
a space between the hands, a frame you can decide
stops//marble, agean, agonate autumnal park
leaves, all wet—whole trains of them in Metro Arte

and all the pretty eyes loved images so swoon
were preferred and addict I mean added like swallows
inked into imagesky all the pretty eyes forgot
closed, leaked, lids in place cement

it was her arm he said I’d never give up my eye
I was all possessed it, a pornographic, a different
scaffold, never what I loved that forget her arm said
its artificial womb casement, its columnar, second turn

she was double said don’t mind it, scarves and silk
all the pretty rapture is always twice and distance
happens anyway you think image forget any space
you want—lack is your fault a muse

nothing to dig turns yellow anyway and image space
is your eye not mine make it mine oh baby
see it? that’s what you promised talking ballestrades
and Emily//weren’t you?

all two you can’t have is not lack but being split
in physical astered orders writ nature from birth
all frank astir, all as tooth//serpent was tongue so
who would not lisp form as star done doughy

keep walking into my ear she said, winter it somehow
is still veiled; she vanished at the alley’s mouth
turned to paper, a gap of buildings, then
pulp mouth and other delta confusions

it was two it was apart being, that’s frank
silence works anyway despite eye work and
espleinade, before works, but it’s a third or
fourth uneven.



IV. Offshore St. Mark

they will cast out devils and lift up snakes in their hands

trance equal to shape, I suppose a shoreline
alongside net lines we gather fish or blood
brain boundary of thought we splash across
gull track or tern to a sparse horizon

what’s clever is a knot of these, a posey of
borders clenched in offering or love
you follow that density, a whale or hollow
drifted bank, of your throat’s yellow

aspect a trace, a name ashore, thick
plum tangles bent by list,
when I can’t speak I return there forget
my body is an ear

your difference a spar that breaks across
a sound, feet splush, in true Zion
made noun a blood, cracked open as
unfooted; don’t fret your boat

floats by my window, fourteenth floor,
a castled without plumb, I walk past
to make blindness pearl back—
what you fish for

Jack’s a pons said a pose Merrimac saint a
snake spell—he called a big one, snook
on his hook a thorns a thieves
all flood a tilt; writ roses in an air

perhaps spelled you, your child
pulled all daisy out of Lowell heights.
“Call snakes a staff you, a sigil”
all writ warning.

Soft you heard it, your cast too
brain sedimented in hours like
piano keys, a call a snake up up up
out a ‘em water, a pons your worst mare

makes a rattle. So no I walk past but
your boat a vectored at, wound agape,
releasing knots, walk past
boundaries apart and lines

ascry.

A lyrics of light wood also shape shifts

A lyrics of light wood also shape shifts

Image is arrived at or somehow participated in, not static, but a vector we endure and are stake in—had to look at. Hence also energetic or what Olsen calls “field”. Hence a question of orders—energy produced or focused by what constraints makes special a place to be visible. Are all first moves then of constraint? (Isn’t that the bed? I am already thrown across you I just entered the room.) Hence at the beginning some foot dragging to alter. What’s meant is how to operate necessary as already gloved.

He said “Let there be light”. As constraint? Oh ho a Ha. First rug of my heart, this so lit mid maid maiden (what’s called meadow or midden) [fox tail so turns in the wind where I hung it sallow so low oh valley be low]

Hence light as a possible lyric pole (all lyric based on bent between birch twins established by falling or leaning or pulling down your own weights against it) one twin named light is so named and keeps rising against, pole star of witness, keeps arising.

As other twin that girl-split was gyrate—the large back—all open spaces that fold. I said shifted to sand and sedge to spit, shore places among tides, ache of witness says cover me back or “restrain me”.

Totem our way back. Hold crosses blue to starling sky. Graphic become salt she oh sea gathers my eyes dried by aspect.

Antler which knows were knots later as stone to cross step the careful, divergent flood—water specific as balance note we are after to have to say.

Note knot string it prayer up. I tie down the sky. Into its specific promise I am partner of.

Mark it at the edge. Here and here.

The first curtain is almost made.

Rethinking Kerouac’s Contributions to American Buddhism: A Prolegomenon

Abstract: Rethinking Kerouac’s Contributions to American Buddhism: A Prolegomenon

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) is an important figure in the popularization of Buddhism in America in the 1950’s and 1960’s. He is generally associated with other Beat Generation writers and artists under the umbrella category “Beat Zen” differentiated at the time from more normative “Square Zen”. Kerouac’s engagement with Buddhism has been misunderstood, partly because he developed a Buddhist-Christian synthesis, but also because he was self-taught and unable to observe traditional discipline. Buddhist contributions to his experimental, modernist practice of spontaneous writing have also been misunderstood. This paper outlines the keys to the world-view of Kerouac’s texts, explores the ways in which Buddhist thought allowed Kerouac to critique American ideological tropes of freedom and the vast, details the extent to which Buddhist practice influenced the ways Kerouac constrained spontaneous writing, and points to ways Kerouac’s transformation of Buddhist norms might actual present a good model of Mahayana practice.
Rethinking Kerouac’s Contributions to American Buddhism: A Prolegomenon

Introduction

In his 1979 overview of Buddhism in America, Charles Prebish wrote the following about Beat Buddhism and Jack Kerouac (1922-1969):
Had [the Beats} only understood more thoroughly the Zen tradition they associated with, and incorporated an authentic Zen lineage into their tradition, genuine success might have been achieved. Of the lot, it was only Gary Snyder who had any acumen in properly understanding the meaning of Zen.
and:
Whatever understanding Ginsberg may have attained seems to have come much later, and it is just not clear that Kerouac ever understood Buddhism very well, despite the fact that several of his novels (for example On the Road or The Dharma Bums) were clearly Buddhist inspired.
While other studies of Buddhism in America are more sanguine or politic about Kerouac’s encounter with Buddhism, Prebish’s position remains widely accepted, despite the absence of any rigorous study of Kerouac’s engagement with Buddhism.

Kerouac has presented Buddhist Studies with two kinds of problems. First, Kerouac’s engagement with Buddhism occurred outside institutional settings. He was largely self-taught and, from the first, read Buddhism through a set of lenses idiosyncratically assembled from his French Canadian Catholic Background and from his study of Oswald Spengler’s speculative history of religions in Decline of the West. In addition, Kerouac was famously dissolute. He failed almost completely in his efforts to observe lay disciplines and, far from achieving a life that demonstrated control, descended into alcoholic misery. Over the last forty years, both nascent American Buddhist institutions and scholars in the academy have had an interest in delineating Buddhist culture as if it could be understood as a distinctive, closed, constructive cultural topos. Kerouac’s example transgressed or blurred exactly those normative boundaries, and thus was a cautionary case at best.

Secondly, Kerouac’s encounter with Buddhist is largely available to us through his expressive writing. While this includes correspondence with friends, in the main, Kerouac presents Buddhism in aesthetic rather than didactic terms. Buddhist Studies scholars have been slow to approach Buddhist texts with the tools of contemporary critical theory; hence there are inadequate frameworks for working with Kerouac’s texts. There have been some good studies of the spiritual dimensions of Kerouac’s work; however, these have been done outside a Buddhist Studies context and, in some cases, lack a rigorous understanding of Buddhist cultures.

This paper is part of a larger project in which I have been considering Kerouac’s engagement with Buddhism with a mind to reconsidering his example. Historically, Buddhist influence on a particular culture occurs both through the creation of a distinctive Buddhist topos, but also through a process of adaptation and synthesis. When Buddhism reached China, for instance, there were various stages of reception and interpretation, and, key features of what we might call indigenous or cultural versions of Buddhism occurred not just with the reproduction of an extant Indic or Buddhist norm, but with some integration of Buddhist and local ideology. Kerouac’s importance for Buddhist Studies is that his engagement with Buddhism grows out of and alongside efforts to reconcile inherited conflicts in American ideology related to freedom, sin, and a new public secularism. His case may offer us a lens for understanding the terms in which new American and Buddhist-Christian forms of Buddhist culture may emerge.

As a first step in a prolegomenon for a larger study on Kerouac, this paper focuses on delineating the key features of the world-views of Kerouac’s texts and an assessment of Buddhist influence on Kerouac’s work. I then end by taking up the way in which the emphasis Kerouac places on radical kindness affects the Buddhist narratives he produces. There are many good accounts of the biographical details of Kerouac’s life; hence, I have not given an overview of this. Many issues, including Kerouac’s Buddhist-Christian syncretism, the modernist roots for his experimental writing practices, and a deeper account of Kerouac’s place in American letters are mentioned, but not developed in detail.

Finally, I have developed some specific vocabulary for discussing moral problems in comparative contexts that I use in this paper. These terms are place-holders of a kind for issues about which there is obviously a good deal to say. Hence, without making an essay about any actual grounds or systematics, I use “being” to refer to the basic circumstances of desire, object relations, duration and so on that we address in our language and action. When I speak of problems given in being, I am referring to relations we wish in some way to solve. These become moral problems when we try to solve them in accordance with some inherited or otherwise determined principle of the good. With respect to this, I have elsewhere argued that a key moral problem exists in the violence attendant to being—our need to eat, but also the violence of agency, the violence that occurs in our object relations and so on. Hence, I sometimes gloss “a problem given in being” with “the violence given in being”. Further, in this context, I have suggested that at least one thing a metaphysics does is suggest a ground where we are free of that violence.

As will be seen, one of my approaches to Kerouac is to consider his writing as a search for a ground or term for resolving violence in being. Kerouac was, first and foremost, an experimental modernist writer who grew up in a working-class, French speaking Catholic community and was educated at Columbia in the 1940’s. Making sense of Kerouac’s thought requires that we understand that he explored moral problems through narrative, figuration and episodic scenario. By the time Kerouac encountered Buddhism he had largely abandoned plot, but he was still using figuration and episode as his primary means of making sense of moral problems given in being. In the end, Kerouac’s interest in Buddhism did not supplant his commitment to writing and, if anything, it reinforced his sense of artistic mission.



Friday Afternoon in the Universe

The world-view of Kerouac’s texts is structured by three basic intuitions: a sense of radical human sinfulness and concomitant suffering, a sensuous intuition of the existence of a good in being, and an insistent emphasis on mercy and care as an ultimate ethic in being. His texts are confessional with respect to the first. The documentary approach of that diction leads him to include fair witness of the second as a basis for hope. The emphasis on mercy and kindness is a consequence of Kerouac’s sense of universal sin and a sign of his refusal to accept any fantasy of freedom beyond that given in being.

To delineate the scope of Keroauc’s self-concept as sinner , it is useful to briefly consider a series of letters written by Kerouac to Neal Cassady in the weeks after Christmas 1950. These letters followed a now lost, stream-of-consciousness letter by Cassady describing a sexual escapade. Cassady’s letter triggered some 60 pages of letters from Kerouac in which, for the first time, he began to explore the spontaneous, confessional praxis he would pursue in different ways for the rest of his life.

Beginning with his birth in “the strange red afternoon light” of a February thaw, Kerouac relates a series of episodes—the death of his brother Gerard, a vision Kerouac has in San Francisco of having been a woman’s bad son in a prior life in Dickensian London, a visit to St Patrick’s in New York City the week Neil’s letter arrived, and a late adolescent sexual escapade—central to a “full confession of my life”. The first of these is the most extensive. Loosely sifting through memories, Kerouac exposes a series of key scenes and impressions that include his brothers tremendous kindness towards small animals, Gerard’s prescient awareness of his impending death, Kerouac’s own childish selfishness and careless desire, and Gerard’s admonition and insistence that Kerouac be kind and care. These are presented as if a charge had been laid on Kerouac, an awareness of the casual human cruelty characteristic even of children and of the certainty of death.

As the series of stories shifts to adult incidents and memories, Kerouac shifts to focus on sexuality and relationships with women as the fundamental context for sin. The vision in San Francisco, comes towards the last of the riotous cross-country escapades Kerouac would recount in On the Road. Walking away from a confusing amorous tryst, Kerouac suddenly saw himself as an English hoodlum making impossible demands on the women around him. At the heart of his vision in St. Patrick’s is his memory of the workman-like humility of the priests and a statue of the Virgin Mary, he believed to have been newly consecrated in honor of the Pope’s recent decree of her incarnate ascension. This led him to an insight that reflects the profoundly sexist ideas he and Neal shared, saying with surprise that “girls want to be pure souls too”, a thought which leads to a prayer that the church be a “refuge for the pure, the humiliated, and the suffering” so that someday “we could all become pure souls”. The sequence of letters ends with the next day’s letter in which a rather coarse and detailed account of an afternoon sexual escapade is given. In the overall sequence of letters, the tack Kerouac takes here reintroduces the base-note of confession, and re-establishes the extent to which Kerouac understood himself to be thoughtlessly violent when having sex and yet culpable in being.

Sexuality would haunt Kerouac’s engagement with Buddhism in several ways. The years leading up to his discovery of Buddhist tropes in late 1953 were marked by a series of relationship disasters. He had essentially gone into hiding for several years in an effort to avoid child-support demands from a failed marriage in 1951, and, in the fall of 1953, he was coming off the failure of a relationship documented in The Subterraneans. Reading a copy of Ashavaghosa’s Life of the Buddha, Kerouac was particularly taken by the renunciation scene in which the Buddha looks into his wife’s chamber and sees his wife and her friends unattractive and abandoned in sleep. It seems fair to say that, at this point in his life, he was particularly susceptible to Buddhist critiques of desire, and, despite the fact that he would never actually be able to be chaste, chastity is the main discipline he makes witness to in his accounts of his subsequent efforts to practice.

While Kerouac’s ideas about sin would shift, in general, and, significantly, throughout his engagement with Buddhism, sin was understood to be inescapable and a sign of a radical limit in being. That the letter sequence to Cassady ends with a return to confessional voice bears witness to the depth to which Kerouac took this to be true. To use the language of the First Noble Truth, we could say Kerouac held that at least he, if not all being, was thoroughly marked as sinful. Kerouac’s writing suggests that, increasingly, he held the view that sin and concomitant suffering would not be redeemed in life and thus that to live was to sin and suffer. If anything, his reading of Buddhist texts reinforced this sense.

In Kerouac’s writing, confession of sinful nature is leavened by intimations of a radical good in being. He would express this in a variety of ways, perhaps the earliest being an evocation of the red glow of an afternoon sun in a playroom. Later variants of such suspended, timeless duration include both the vision which occurs at sunset in Des Moines in On the Road, the Good Friday “Friday Afternoon In the Universe” of Old Angel Midnight, and a post-meditation vision of “Golden Eternity” celebrated in The Scripture of Golden Eternity. These experiences served as a sensuous proof of a timeless peace Kerouac would variously refer to in American mythic idiom or, mixing Christian and Buddhist terms at will, as God, Heaven, the basic nature of mind, and so on.

The two intuitions about being—of radical sin and of eternal safety—are essentially contradictory, and Kerouac wrestled with the relationship between them throughout his life. In terms of practice, Kerouac’s approach was to adopt a series of cultural resolutions of the contradiction he then tested in writing. This was true whether adopting the hope of a possible heroic stance, or taking on a particular philosophical or theological perspective. For the purposes of this paper I will briefly outline the range of possibilities considered.

Kerouac’s early writing (1951-53) explores several possible heroic stances imagined as possible good positions to take in being. The first is that of the American trickster hero taken up in On the Road and then dissected in Visions of Cody. The second is the Faustian superman of Dr. Sax, secular, who attempts to will good. Neither posture holds. On the Road ends with Kerouac’s disillusioning awareness that Cassady is trapped in a cycle of destructive behavior, and Dr. Sax ends, much the way Faust does, with Sax’s discovery that “the Universe disposes of its own evil”. The possibilities of a third culture stance—finding peace in romantic love—is explored in Maggie Cassidy and The Subterraneans; these, of course, report Kerouac’s inability to find this for himself.

The philosophical and theological perspectives Kerouac used to frame his thoughts about sin and peace include a Catholic dualism, Oswald Spengler’s Kantian inflected notion of an invisible perennial being writ though history, and Mahayana Buddhist presentations of form and emptiness and the nature of mind. His position on the radical nature of sin required that he understand appearing form as in some way thoroughly marked—as created, as life, as illusory—over against an impossible openness in being thought of as God, Heaven, the Void, the non-positional essence of mind, Golden Eternity, and so on.

While Prebish has suggested Kerouac did not fully understand Buddhist thought, in his account of a retreat on Desolation Peak in the summer of 1956, Kerouac at least came to understand the problems of reifying emptiness and, more generally, the limits of language. Moreover, the stubbornness with which he remained loyal to some account of appearing form—if only by never giving up a sense that life was thoroughly marked as sinful—suggest a stronger rather than weaker grasp of the implications of the Perfection of Wisdom. In any case, his commitment was to both intuitions about being which led him in the end towards a Buddhist-Christian synthesis and away from Spengler’s monism.

In any case, from the very beginning, Kerouac’s texts reveal the third intuition that kindness and confessional humility constitute the basis of any satisfactory ethic in being. Whatever the origin of this fundamental value, in the reading that concludes this paper, I show it to be the standard used to test other possible ethics, and the ethic that is ultimately justified in his writing. It determines the way he reads and forms allegiances to texts and figures, and determines his subsequent loyalties and dissent. From his perspective, it was an ethic equally extant in Buddhism and Christianity, a beatific “beat” path of humility and kindness, whatever its name.


Twin Tree Grove: The Influence of Buddhism on Kerouac (1954-1958)

Jack Kerouac’s interest in and engagement with Buddhism began in Nov. or Dec. 1953 and was most intense during the years 1954-58. He was largely self-taught, and his understanding of Buddhism was based primarily on Mahayana sutra literature compiled in Dwight Godard’s A Buddhist Bible. After 1958, Kerouac would continue to use Buddhist tropes and, at times, present himself as a Buddhist, but always within a broader, synthetic religious perspective. These same dates cover a period of intense personal and social transformation. In 1954, Kerouac was a largely unknown iterant writer, living with family and friends or abroad to avoid child support payment. In the fall of 1955, the Gallery Six reading in San Francisco (where Alan Ginsberg debuted “howl”) put his “Beat Generation” in the public eye, and in the summer of 1957, On the Road would be published, catapulting Kerouac onto the public stage as that generation’s King. Largely at his publisher’s request for a fast read, Kerouac would dash off Dharma Bums in the fall of 1957. The book would come out in the spring of 1958, but, by October, Kerouac would have the first of a series of spiritual crises culminating in visions of Mary and the Cross that would shape the last decade of his life.

Many of the elements that marked Kerouac’s world-view and experimental practice were in place prior to his exposure to Buddhist thought. In the following I show that Kerouac’s engagement with Buddhism gave new life to and an alternate language for these. Even though he became critical of extant Buddhist institutions in the last decade of his life, his work with Buddhist argument and trope served as a crucible in which his world-view and practice was clarified. In the following, I discuss two aspects of this: the influence on his writing of Buddhist presentations and critiques of scale or scope, and the extent to which this was reflected in his experimental practice.

The Fictive Nature of the Vast

The issue of scale or scope is of note in this context because of scale or scope is one of the key tropes by which violence in being is offset in American discourse. Throughout American history, occasional, colonial, and capitalist violence appears to be annulled in the face of larger-than-life landscapes (or figures like Paul Bunyan or John Wayne) and, despite counter-histories that more thoroughly count the relentless violence of American cultural expansion, this mythic scope continues to have the force of promise. The tropes of vast expanse and larger-than-life figure sustain a culturally legitimating sense of liberative possibility and freedom.

It is relevant for this context that the notion of the vast appears to secure freedom whether the vast is thought of as replete or empty. That is, the key to the American promise and to the ideal of freedom is that these are predicated on the idea that there are no limits, whether to empty space or land, or to the goods we can find.

One of the functions of an artist is to consider the coherence of ideological motif or system, testing it by the lens of narrative or figuration. Representational work often legitimates ideology by essaying the imagined gesture, but often mimetic gesture reveals flaw and contradiction as well, and, in this sense, tells the truth that ideology otherwise veils. To this end, Kerouac’s early writing—On the Road (1951) and Dr. Sax (1952)—explored a series of extant frameworks for understanding American tropes of scale in terms of modernity. In both, Kerouac’s findings found limits—to the road, to Sax’s will—that raised questions about the extent to which a notion of the vast could secure real freedom.

Beginning with the 1951 letters to Neil Cassidy, Kerouac began to the possibility that the vast could be found in text and language. Inspired by the examples of be bop and abstract expressionist painting, Kerouac experimented with the expressionist dimensions of written language, eventually settling on an effort to transcribe experience. Kerouac soon was interrogating and recording different kinds of experience—daily musing, drunken reverie and adrenalin rush, sexual interlude, intuitive pop or flash, dream—and considering, more generally, an epic conceit of creating a written record of a life in terms of the impressions, dreams, episodes, modes of interior dwelling and feeling that constituted it. He would call this project “The Legend of Dulouz”, the large frame for the whole of his work.

Because this project was a mimetic project—Kerouac’s intent was direct transcription of experiential process—it necessarily led to questions and insights concerning the structure of experience and being, the place of self in relation to sense and language, issues of inheritance and freedom, and became a mechanism for Kerouac to consider issues otherwise negotiated in the language of myth or narrative. One of the key issues must have been an awareness that expressive acts both figured and veiled experience, that the mark or voiced call not only recorded but transfigured. In relation to this, Kerouac’s instinct was to take this as a sign that experience as such was essentially aestheticized—already extent only in illusory, figural terms—a thought he would realize in his famous description of watching a film crew work on a scene with Joan Crawford in the spring of 1951. It was a short jump from these thoughts to Mahayana notions that appearing form is illusory display.

Kerouac’s encounter with Mahayana wisdom literature allowed Kerouac to make connections between the ideas he had for the Legend of Dulouz and Mahayana notions of mind as frame for being. In this sense, Mahayana literature gave Kerouac new versions of vastness at a time when his confidence himself and in American notions of the vast was wavering. Buddhist motifs gave him a new way to sustain the ideal of freedom he’d explored in terms of Cassady, the road, and Dr. Sax.

Still, there was a bit of the carrot and stick in Mahayana presentations of the view. While a person may be attracted at first because it allows one to imagine the strong freedom that “anything goes”, if one persists with the logic there is, in the end, no place that holds. Visions of a good in being are, finally, illusory visions—mere words—the good located impossibly in relation to one and seemingly unsayable. Kerouac’s confessional nature—his desire to be a faithful witness—made it difficult for him to ignore these deeper entailments.

To this end, Kerouac’s encounter with Buddhism sharpened the tensions he had scored in being by drawing the status of illusory ideal images into question. His confessional streak forced him to honestly reckon that Mahayana texts undermined previous notions both of what could be accomplished in writing and of that golden afternoon ideal in being—points that appear to have been decisively considered during the crises of the Desolation retreat in late summer 1956. From this point on, the categories of sin and peace were more categorically framed in antipodal terms such as word/sea and silence, life and heaven, becoming and emptiness—and Kerouac’s unswerving fidelity to the reality of the former, however illusory, left him abject.

Taken seriously, Kerouac’s realization of the fictive nature of the vast is a final, thorough critique of this trope in American culture, and, thus, there is a devastating irony that he was read as an icon of freedom. His subsequent critique of the violently transgressive youth movements of the 1960’s, far from being regressive, is actually consistent with a thorough critique of the trope of freedom. And, since Buddhist institutions may have been prospering precisely because they appeared to give a warrant to the vast, it is no wonder his example has been marginalized and problematic.

Measure and Form

Buddhist critiques of appearing form also had an influence on Kerouac’s experimental practice that is often misunderstood. While Buddhist thought lent a framework for Kerouac’s spontaneous practice, that practice was already largely in place, derived from modernist exploration in music and painting. The difference between his spontaneous work prior to engaging Buddhist thought and his subsequent experiments is the adoption of various kinds of regular, externally derived measure.

For instance, in his blues form—derived after his encounter with Buddhism—Kerouac used the arbitrary limit of a single page. A chorus poem was a product of spontaneous expression, but expression ended or resolved where the page ended. He accepted similar externally imposed constraints in his adaptation of Haiku form. Kerouac also began to use a more rigorous episodic structure in his prose work, often using arbitrary measures such as the length of time it would take a candle to burn to establish sequential pulse. Finally, although both of the vision texts written during this time—Tristessa and Visions of Gerard—belong to the Dulouz Legend, they are distinctively anti-epic and stele-like in scope.

Kerouac might have come to the imposition of arbitrary measure on his own, without Buddhist influence. However, implicit in Buddhist ideas of emptiness and mind is the notion of arbitrary episode, however, fleeting, however impossibly established. That is, in so far as a thing appears, it appears without final cause, against a limit that is not no limit and so on, like a flower abloom in the sky. While other Buddhist influenced artists like Cage and Ginsberg would pose figuration against an actual absence/emptiness, Kerouac used arbitrary measure as a way of marking figuration. His preference reflects the thought that Buddhist teachings on emptiness do not imply an actual, established emptiness from which appearance blooms but, rather, indicate that a term’s ground or limits are arbitrary.

A second possible Buddhist derived basis for establishing arbitrary measure may be given in meditation practice itself. Kerouac was already aware of using breath as measure from his exposure to jazz gesture. It is unclear how disciplined Kerouac was in efforts to achieve calm-abiding using breath as an object, but his instructions to others indicate an awareness that meditation involves an interruption of mental elaboration through a discipline of regularly returning attention to an arbitrary term. Hence, it may be that, however, irregular, Kerouac efforts to meditate led him to see arbitrary episode as a basic formal measure given in being.

Sin, Appearing Form, and Mercy

These examples suggest that the main influence of Buddhist thought on Kerouac’s work and world-view was to intensify his fidelity to appearing form as a measure, however fictive or illusory. Mahayana Buddhist teachings lent decided weight to his intuition that being was thoroughly marked by sin—he could as easily say suffering—by critiquing possible grounds in being for any freedom beyond such. In relation to language, Buddhist thought appears to his reinforced Kerouac’s sense that there was no “outside” as such beyond language, and that, given this, there was no way not to be at stake in his expressive choices. However arbitrary, the measures he applied admitted an end to which he submitted.

Conclusion

Although, in the end, Kerouac held a syncretic world-view, his influence on the development of Buddhism in America is considerable and worth new attention. Even in general cultural terms, Kerouac was an enormously influential writer simply because he considered issues related to identity and desire according to a range of idioms, including American folk and pulp iconography, American and European literature, Buddhist narrative and argument, Be-bop and Abstract Expressionism, and so on. His work as a whole brought these diverse voices and discursive contexts into relation, without subordinating one mode of discourse to another. While he may not have reproduced Buddhist norms faithfully, he did lend Buddhist thought legitimacy in American terms, and he bore popular witness to connections between Asian Buddhist cultures and a range of American sub-cultures. Kerouac’s work has been, for many people, the first door they opened onto Buddhist thought, whatever they may have been seeking.

Kerouac might also be an example of new dimensions in Buddhist culture in at least two ways. The first of these lies in the relentlessly confessional nature of his diction. In Buddhist contexts, confession is primarily tied to renunciation and the reassertion of vows. Some Buddhist writers use self-disclosure effectively, but, in general, norms tend towards a performance of self-mastery. What is critical is the re-adoption of resolve; one does not dwell in abjection. Kerouac makes an extended example of abjection and, in the end, largely determines himself in abject terms. If Kerouac’s texts allow us different kinds of access to a central theme, then the theme is confession and renunciation—admission of violence in being and sin, and a desire for change—writ first in American and then Buddhist terms.

The second difference Kerouac evinces lies where he places a higher value on kindness than wisdom. Except for Wake Up which is largely a reworking of extant Buddhist texts, the trajectory of his Buddhist narratives is towards grateful, merciful, patient being in the world and not accomplishment of insight or wisdom. The Dharma Bums, for instance, offers an accessible account of Kerouac’s reflections at the end of the Desolation Retreat. There, he describes a brief vision of his Gary Snyder as Han Shan yelling down the mountain side; this segues into the thought that “now comes the sadness of coming back to cities”. The passage concludes “Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said “God, I love you” and looked up to the sky and really meant it. “I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other.” He then gets down on his knees to make a little prayer of gratitude to the camp, gets up and “went on down the trail back to this world”.

It is true that, in Zen Buddhism, one finds just this notion of a return to “carrying water, chopping wood”, but, in the preceding account of the retreat, Kerouac uses the language of realization twice. The first is at the very beginning of the retreat, where he says he “realized I was truly alone and had nothing to do but feed myself and rest and amuse myself, and nobody could criticize”. The second occurs after a description of a dramatic change of weather in early August. Kerouac writes, “Poor gentle fish,” I realized, “there is no answer.” I didn’t know anything any more and I didn’t care, and it didn’t matter, and I felt suddenly free”.

The note struck at the end is actually an echo of the note struck at the conclusion of one of the best known passages of the book, Kerouac’s description of climbing a mountain with Snyder and a friend. In this section, Kerouac is unable to climb the peak and, instead leg-sore and perhaps out of shape, he stops at a ledge short of the summit. Sitting there he thinks of a Zen admonition to always keep climbing and then records the following: “Well, this old philosopher is staying right here,” and I closed my eyes. “Besides,” I thought, “rest and be kind, you don’t have to prove anything”. Sitting there he hears Snyder yodel when he reaches the peak and watches their friend at the camp below, laying in the sun. The section concludes:
Now, there’s the karma of these three men here: Japhy Ryder gets to his triumphant mountain top and makes it. I almost make is and have to give up and huddle in a bloody cave, but the smartest of them all in the poet’s poet lyin down there with his knees crossed to the sky chewing on a flower dreaming by a gurgling plage, goddammit they’ll never get me up here again.
If there is insight here, it is insight into how to be kind to self and an adoption of an ethos of humble patience. Insight is not mastery and is not characterized in terms of achievement or knowledge, but rather in terms of rest, kindness, and simple patience.

____

Prebish 1979, p.24. Other discussions of Kerouac and what was called Beat Buddhism include: Layman 1976, p. 70; Fields, 1992, pp 210-216; Coleman 2001, p. 62; Morgan 2004, pp. 142-144; Prebish 1999, pp. 12-13; and Sutin 2006, pp. 301-305.
Prebish 1979. p.25. Prebish is incorrect, though, about Buddhist influence in On the Road, as it was written in 1951 some three years before Kerouac’s engagement with Buddhism.
Spengler 1950. Spengler’s influence on Kerouac is worth an article in itself; suffice to say here that his effort to map a cyclical theory of civilization on known intellectual histories of Europe and Asia was extraordinarily influential among Kerouac’s friends at Columbia in the 1940’s, supplying them with a way of understanding their depression childhoods and the cataclysmic violence of the Second World War. Influenced by German Idealism, but also attempting to work out Nietzsche’s theories of cyclical return, Spengler predicted European “Faustian” Civilization was in decline. Such periods of decline were also periods in which a perennial wisdom tradition would become visible, serving as a bridge to the next epoch of civilization—in his account of the decline of Vedic Culture, Spengler treats Buddhism as just such a tradition.
See, for instance, Nancy M. Grace 2007 and John Lardas 2001.
Other pieces of this project include are given in the Bibliography.
Kerouac has been a popular subject for biographers, and there are many biographies to choose from. The best critical biography is probably Nicosia 1983. For the specific period of his engagement with Buddhism, see also, Suiter, 2002.
For my discussion of these terms, see Need 2004, pp. 5-18.
Kerouac, 1995a, pp. 246-306. The letters are dated from Dec. 28th 1950 to Jan. 10th 1951.
Ibid. p. 249
Ibid. p. 246.
Ibid. p. 292.
Ibid. p. 268.
Kerouac 1993, p. 1. Old Angel Midnight is an experimental prose work written the same month as The Scripture of Golden Eternity and set on a Good Friday afternoon. For an interesting discussion of sunset imagery in American letters—particularly in Whitman’s “Brooklyn Bridge”, see Stanley Plumly 2007, p 31-35. Plumly writes (Ibid. p. 35):
We are all, I suppose, sunset poets and, being American, we like the sun right at the edge, the bloodaxe edge behind winter trees. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, and step by step, its night. Whitman, in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” sees “the sun half an hour high” and holds it there for a hundred and thirty-two long lines, holds it forever into the infinite future.
Kerouac 1959, p. 245. Although published in 1959, Dr. Sax was written for the most part in the bathroom of Bill Burrough’s Mexico City flat in 1952.
Kerouac 1965, pp. 4-7 & 56-61.
During Kerouac’s brief period of fame (1958-1961), he repeatedly critiqued the idea he led a “beat” generation of rebels and scofflaws, instead emphasizing he was pointing towards an ethic of kindness and humility. It is hard to imagine a public figure now making public witness of a Buddhist-Christian sensibility or one who would admit to seeing miracles or encounters with grace. Many of these interviews have been collected in Maher Jr. 2005. For Kerouac’s magazine articles and essays on the Beat Generation, see Kerouac 1995b, pp. 551-580.
My subtitle here refers to the name Kerouac gave a small grove of trees in Big Easonburg Woods in Rocky Mount, NC. During the winter and spring of both 1954-5 and 1955-6 Kerouac lived with his sister in Rocky Mount. His most extended daily meditation practices took place during these seasons, the second of which spent mostly at Twin Tree grove, named “because of the two trunks I leaned against, that wound around each other…”. [Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, (New York: Viking Press, 1958), p. 132 as cited in Dorfner 1991, p. 30.]
Goddard, 1970; 1st published 1938. The main body of the compilation are two sections: a collection of texts “From Sanskrit Sources” including Perfection of Wisdom Sutras, portions of two later Mahayana Sutras, and Ashvaghosa’s “The Awakening of Faith”, and a collection of “Selections from Chinese Sources” that includes translations of Lao’s Tzu’s Dao de Ching, a text on Dhyana by the T’ien Tai founder Chih-I and the “Sutra Spoken by the Sixth Patriarch”. The collection is rounded out by two Tibetan texts translated by Evans-Wentz, “The Life and Hymns of Milarepa” and “The Supreme Path”. Contemporary students of Buddhism will quickly see that Goddard’s selection largely presents a range of Chinese Buddhist materials with a preference for texts popular within Ch’an Buddhism. All of the texts said to be from Sanskrit sources are in fact based on Chinese translations, and many of these lack Sanskrit originals or, like the “Surangama Sutra” and “The Awakening of Faith”, are currently judged to be apocryphal. While the collection includes nods to then-established figures such as Rhys-Davids, Even-Wentz and D.T. Suzuki, much of the translation work—including the texts that were key for Kerouac—were the work of Goddard and a Chinese monk, Wai-tao
Kerouac’s encounter with Buddhism is documented in a range of texts and letters written during these years. In addition to Dharma Bums, published materials include:
1) a working journal covering the years 1954 to the spring of 1956 now published as Some of the Dharma,
2) two short novels—Tristessa and Visions of Gerard—and significant portions of a third, Desolation Angels,
3) blues sequences and haikus, including Mexico City Blues,
4) a version of the Buddha’s life, now published as Wake Up,
5) a sutra, The Scripture of Golden Eternity, written at Gary Snyder’s suggestion,
6) correspondence, including several letters detailing meditation instructions and a basic account of the view, and
7) an experimental visionary text, Old Angel Midnight, based partly on Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and written along side The Scripture of Golden Eternity.
He also complied much a Book of Dreams during these years. Among unpublished papers in the Berg Collection are his notebooks from his fire retreat on Mt. Desolation (July-Sept 1956) and several scrolls on which Kerouac wrote out versions of the Diamond Sutra, including one which uses Western theological language to translate Buddhist terms. These last date to the early 1960’s and are further evidence of the important of the Diamond Sutra in Kerouac’s personal religiosity. Kerouac’s letters and materials lend weight to the biographical detail that had adopted a practice of reciting the Diamond Sutra in such a way that he could read the whole of the text in a week. This weekly schedule is attached to one of the scroll versions he typed up, and he reproduced the text several times, no doubt in keeping with the text’s prescription to do so. His journals suggest that later in his life he began to recite texts and prayers from the Christian tradition, but at least one of the scrolls was made during this period, and the practice itself, seems to have been laid down on the habit established in reciting the Diamond Sutra.
His friend, William Burroughs was quick to see this, warning Kerouac that he was just trying to avoid love and real relationship. I suspect Burroughs did not appreciate how intense Kerouac’s sense of sin was and thus the importance, for Kerouac, of some mediating ideal. See Kerouac 1965, p. xv.
Kerouac 2007, p. 460.
Ibid. p. 460
Ibid. p. 461.
Ibid. p. 454.
Ibid. p. 458. The only other experience of note is a brief description of the Avalokitesvara dream in which Kerouac was told, “You are empowered to remind people they are utterly free”. Ibid. p. 341. A fuller version of this vision is given in Tonkinson 1995, pp 367-369. She does not cite her manuscript, and I did not find it among the Berg Collection Papers. The one text which was likely her source was missing at the time of my visit in 2008. The passage is a favorite and worth citing. After Kerouac is told he can choose to go off with Avalokitesvara forever or stay and help the world, the conversation continues (Ibid. p. 368-9):
—Well, can I try to help?
—Yes.
—Will you help me help?
—Yes. (Smiling) But it won’t do any good or do any harm.
—I want to try it.
—All good souls want to try it, all souls are seen—all have made their original vows—I expected you to ask.
—Where do we go first?
—Its up to you. Do you remember what you wanted to do?
—Well I wanted to reassure everybody that everything is alright, forever & forever & forever.
—Think they don’t know it?
—They don’t act like it!
—Acts are nothing, its what they are, where it is, shining empty and awake and shot through with eternal bliss.
—But can we make them feel it?
—Sensation is unreal.
—Oh let’s try.
—Go ahead.
Ibid. p. 341.
Ibid. pp. 341-2.


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Louisville Paper on Keroauc et al

The Measure of the Beat: Spontaneous Aesthetics and the Problem of the Open in Kerouac, Olsen, Cage, and Ginsberg.
by David Need

Introduction

This paper is related to a larger project on Jack Kerouac’s religious views and aesthetics, and it is an early version of a chapter for “The Beat Generation and Philosophy”. In earlier pieces of this project, I’ve dug into Kerouac’s engagement with and critique of Buddhism. I am a one-time Buddhist practitioner and my degree work was on Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. That work has alerted me to ways that Buddhist tropes of emptiness, spontaneity, and freedom have been uncritically imported into and continue to haunt our reception of several loosely connected arts and letters movements in the 1950’s. Here I will be looking at Kerouac, Charles Olsen and his Black Mountain colleague John Cage, and the iteration of these influences by Alan Ginsberg at Naropa Institute in the 1970’s under the glossy rubric “First Thought, Best Thought”.

The thread I want to pull here is presaged by similar movements in painting and in music and inflected by post-War encounters with different Buddhisms. Its my thought that too often representations of this period blur actual differences between key advocate practitioners and that this blurring produces a fictive, utopian mask—at times underpinned by the authority of Buddhism—that makes it difficult for us to see this era and its stakes.

At the heart of the issue is a space—be it a measure or a thick duration—within which a spontaneous gesture or figuration or free play occurs. Kerouac speaks of this in terms of musical measure—the bars of a chorus—as sentence, and, because its based on a jazz horn blow, as breath. Olsen, under the influence of Whitehead’s metaphysics, thinks of it as the field of energetic relations a poem actualizes. For Cage it’s the silence between notes. Ginsberg, subordinating these ideas to Buddhist schemas, takes it as an instant of thought, mind’s episodic digression, caught in its duration by meditation on one’s breath.

It’s my contention 1) that a key difference exists between the field or measure proposed—albeit differently—by Kerouac and Olsen, and the empty, silent, open space proposed by Cage and Ginsberg, and 2) that the difference partly hinges on the ways the latter two understood or perhaps misunderstood a Buddhist assertion of a radical or fundamental emptiness in mind and being. This difference is not casual and any tendency to read the former by way of the latter masks the stakes of “freedom” and tends to erroneously foreground tropes of emptiness and formlessness in our imagination of the scenarios they direct us towards.

In what follows, I am primarily interested in theories and suggested metaphysics offered by the artists and less in whether or not their work is consistent with or even whether or not they always held the views asserted. I am, however, interested in what a theory says about the relationship between idea/word and world and in the difference between what’s wanted and what is said.

For the sake of space, in commenting on this I restrict my discussion of each artist to the matter at hand. Good efforts to schematize and critically position their projects exist, and I refer those interested to this material.

Keroauc: Measure and Memory’s Melody

It is fairly well-known 1) that Kerouac developed his principles of spontaneous prose prior to encountering Buddhist thought, and 2) that jazz and bebop served as his primary source for schematizing spontaneous practice. In a draft of a proposed article from the mid-sixties, Kerouac complains, as he often did by then, that Ginsberg had misrepresented his approach to spontaneous writing, specifically speaking of the jazz roots, and making the point that improvisation is a gesture within the bars (stanzas, frames) of a melody and not simply putting down whatever you want.

From a structural point of view, what is implied is that improvisation is not the free display of something out of or against the ground of a prior nothingness; it is rather a play with an already extant formal texture and limit. Gesture across the bar explores a familiar arrangement, pushes at it, in search of a possible relation (a figure). Freedom is found within what is otherwise bound.

In this method, there are two limns—the closure or boundaries established by the measuring bar, and a figure (a melody or set of chords). In this sense, although Kerouac explores the idea of extending a measure and may be aware that in the abstract such extension could be infinite (as, for instance, Duncan suggests), in practice, he works within a bar defined by sentence or breath, a reach across, and this commitment to the shaped and repeating episode remains consistent throughout his work. What is outsized in his writing is not measure, but figure. Kerouac attempts to measure two large forms—his life and America—by this method, but figure can never be open; however large we die, however large, there’s an edge or shore.

Put a different way, one could read Kerouac’s oevre as a serial exploration of and search for a radically open figure, whether its Cassidy, a doubled anima, his dead brother, his mind. It’s a search that ends much where it begins, at one of the classic open figures, the sea. The sea is the site both of an early poem “My Brother, the Sea” and his famous breakdown chronicled in Big Sur. In journals from his time on Mt. Desolation forward, Kerouac speaks of a tension between imagination/words/thought/writing and God/the Buddha/the Golden Eternity/Heaven, where the latter is characterized by a radical cessation (a silence) of the constant flow of thought and word. In these journals, Kerouac speculatively refers to the flow of thought and word as the sea and as Holy Ghost, and, in different ways—whether by the cross seen lifted from the waves at Big Sur, or in a prayer to Stella Maris that she lift us from the sea —comes to see release or freedom as grace and not expression.


Olsen: Figuring Concresence

I’ve seen little convincing evidence that Kerouac read A.N. Whitehead, Charles Olsen’s chief guide to thinking about the frame of a poem, or that Olsen was much guided by Kerouac’s example. Nevertheless, there is a curious similarity between the basic structure or unit considered and both writers open towards the idea of a LARGE figure and end up at the sea’s edge.

Put briefly, Olsen’s notion of the projective is taken from Whitehead’s theory of concresence, the process by which a moment of experience “hardens” into being. For Whitehead, this process is both an all-at-once and a triadic process involving 1) physical prehension or inheritance by which a subject open to being (the actualities formed in past or prior moments of concresence) mimetically prehends a pattern which produces a secondary, subjective evaluation, 2) a responsive phase of mental prehension, also mimetic in basic structure, which is based on not on actualities but eternal forms, and 3) the integration of these as figure and ground. In this structure, what “stands up” as it were, is some figuration that proposes a relation between the eternal forms of the mind and sensed forms.

In Whitehead’s theory, two fields—the infinitely bound together relations of all actualized phenomena as a prior world and a field of abstract potential—are woven together as an experience hardens into a shape. This fabric, however, only comes about because of an edge that “becomes” or irrupts; what matters (and this may be the difference between Olsen and Williams) occurs between contiguous things. Thus the line touches, and continues to touch, the shore drifts, figuring an always further open.

In relation to this, Olsen’s critique of the lyrical interference of the individual ego—one among many issued in the 1950’s—reflects a discomfort with the way forms produced under such a rule deny or fail to signal our actual situation or being at stake in world. This is less a notion of freedom—Olsen was a Melville scholar after all—than an intensification of a feeling of possibility that touches being, is at stake in being.

It might seem that Olsen’s attempt to think towards an open figure (in so far as he works with a theory that sees figure as process) differs from Kerouac in so far as it appears to lack a measuring bar and is, thus, just reach. I would argue that the lintels of the measure persist in two ways, 1) as the difference that is woven, that measure occurs as figuration, and 2) as an effect of the intensification of focus thinking in terms of process produces. And, although he does not thematize this in his theory, the epistolary conceit punctuates Olsen’s process and produces a similar episodic pulsation. Further, Olsen’s process is always defined and haunted by, limned by an actual past, and while he is interested in a creative relation to that past, gesture is anchored by and woven out of a freighted past.

Cage and Ginsberg: No Edges to the Sky

For me, the significant difference between Kerouac and Olsen and the spontaneous, free play explored by Cage and, at least, theorized by Ginsberg is that the latter figures under the influence of Buddhism conceive of the field in which a gesture occurs as, in some way, boundless or empty.

The key conceptual move in Cage’s work came from his attention to and thematization of the silences that occur between notes. His thought here was first influenced by Yogic ideas that propose that Being is, in its essence, profound silence out of which sound is struck. These thoughts were further influenced by Cage’s study with D.T, Suzuki, a Zen Buddhist teacher. In his presentation of Buddhism to the West, Suzuki tended to stress the notion of a radically open or free awareness characterized by a mind no longer constrained by concepts and freedom as a mode of being from such awareness. That is free shapes (being from) occur out of such a ground. These ideas coalesced for Cage in his dictum that silence=absence of intention, that is, silence as an absence of intention from which play occurs.

In the terms I’ve used here, Cage has rethought the measure as a space framed not by strophe or reach or lintel, but by an initial and concluding absence that he reads metaphorically. That is, the occasional silence between notes is writ large as silent ground, by which silence is thought of as a space within which occurs free play. The metaphor that makes this thought possible is borrowed from Yogic thought and Buddhism—the idea of a deep, fathomless being best characterized in negative terms like silence and emptiness.

Ginsberg’s adaptation of Kerouac’s spontaneous method as “first thought, best thought” similarly proposes that we think of gesture as a movement framed ultimately by an openness he is able to imagine because of Buddhist thought. Ginsberg’s teacher, Chogyam Trungpa teaches within a Tibetan system that stresses that mind and being are ultimately empty and open, sky-like, and, in Ginsberg’s lecture he stresses that breath (gesture) always flows into that openness. In this sense, figure simply occurs in boundless space instead of as a function of measure or measuring concresence.

Concluding Thoughts

In both cases, it seems to me that an openness that is, in the end, always potential for both Kerouac and Olsen is essentialized by Cage and Ginsberg as field. Neither Kerouac nor Olsen think of the field of the poem (the field in which poem/gesture occurs) as empty or as framed by an emptiness—there is always form and relation—and these produce real limits and edges (shorelines).

Indeed, the point I am making is that what is hope for Kerouac and Olsen becomes ideology for Cage and Ginsberg and that, with this shift, we turn to projects and perhaps poetics in which content (melody, chord, the past) no longer matters, no longer applies.

In each case, a duration—whether inscribed by measure or as the thickness in time taken in concresence—but what is different is that Kerouac and Olsen admit being at stake in duration, while Cage and Ginsberg instead propose we are nowhere at stake, occur without a stake. This shift is critically important in terms of the dignity or weight given to content and thus to any referred to, realized world.

I want to place this difference against the near horizon of WWII and as a shift that reflects the post-war gamble on consumption as a possible utopian posture in being. When I read Hrebeniak conclude that Kerouac’s method compresses the gap between memory and composition (admittedly through repetition) or consider the intense focus on instance Olsen brings to bear from Whitehead’s metaphysics, I wonder if I am not witnessing the effort to suture the quite radical rupture WWII effected in culture. And I wonder, if the move to ideology I’ve posited via Cage and Ginsberg is not part of a more radical effort to repress the violence in being writ large by the war, a repression perhaps necessary, that nevertheless, like all repression, writes that rupture large.

Its hard for me at this point not to think of Adorno here and to wonder if the critique Buddhism issues of form and self has not found a strange bedfellow with a consumer culture which would prefer both that we think of ourselves in terms of lack within a larger set of fungible product entities. It would not be the first time that Buddhist thought lent its critique of self as a vehicle for abstract arrangements of power, but it should give us pause, precisely because of the ways in which this ideology makes the space of the poem an “always-the-same” and thus robs us of one of our first tools for shaping the world.


Notes:



Recent work on Kerouac’s spontaneous method include Michale Hrebeniak, Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006) andRegina Weinreich, The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac: A Study of the Fiction, (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987). Perhaps the best study is Clark Coolidge, Now Its Jazz: Writings on Kerouac and the Sounds. (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1999). My sources for Olsen’s use of Whitehead include Thomas Hosinski, Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance: An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1993) and Rosemarie Waldrop, “Charles Olsen: Process and Relationship” in JSTOR: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Dec., 1977), pp. 467-486. For Cage, see Christopher Shultis, Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition, (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998) and Richard Kostelanetz, editor, Writings About John Cage, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
Get the Cite David
Kerouac’s comments here suggest a continued fidelity to bop riff-based improvisation as opposed to more the free form improvisation beginning to be heard in the early 1960’s. In Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form, Michael Hrebeniak stretches to read Kerouac’s prose in relation to free form jazz [see Michael Hrebeniak, Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), pp. 216-224]. I would argue that Hrebeniak pushes this too far. As an improvisational artist, Kerouac might consider working within a free range and/or be able to celebrate someone who stretches a form in a review, but his method remains more closely that of the bop refrain.
From “The Blessedness Surely to be Believed”: (Berg Collection 51.1); Dec 27th 1955

“All things take place + act out their coming = going as atomic forms in the same bright sea of the mysterious stuff. All is the ecstasy of form, this ‘stuff’ the world is made of mind, Some call the Mind of God, some call God, some call the Body of the Law or Truth. All appears magically as in a tree-dimensional movie in a crystal bowl, and has no more substantiality than a movie or a dream, being but images + imageness made of empty atoms… We all have our mortal mind which is like ripples, and the immortal mind, which is like the sea, upon which the ripples appear + disappear.

The prayer appears in a journal from Nov 21 1960 in which Kerouac writes

God manifests imagination & imagination manifests this horrible birth-death business…
So my relationship to God cannot be established in any form of imagining and that is why it is truly the “Cloud of Unknowing”. The prayer to Stella Maria comes after the following Blues Prayer:

Six Toasts Jubilee Blues

Holy St. Theresa, here’s to you,
my lovely, my lovely daughter
or blessless hoax.

Virgin Mary, sunbreaker
of chains, reign forever!

Darling Child in the Cart
pulled by the skinny lamb
of the slab[?], watched
by angels, burn the empty
sky!

Then toasts to God and St. Benedict

And to the holy crosslike
dogwood which in Autumn
burns six buns of bud
while Brothers struggle
to form the mystical number
Three—

To Holy Ghost!
The Sixth + Second
Ghost!
Amen the Invisible Dreams!

O Holy Ghost, pull
the atoms apart
+ let us see that
Holy Sea!

The softness of the bellies
of kittens or sweet ladies
in white hours in
Heaven. O Holy
Ghost, Our Joy is
Endless—

Kerouac then writes to “Stella Maris” asking that she lift us from the Sea.
says, “Stella Maris, white cross/in the sea, words in the sea, white words on the waves…

“O Stella Maris, blue
angel, white angel,
blue sea, black sea,
O sherihiar (??) Muhammad
sailors also drowned

Aug 3rd 1960 at Big Sur (“Sea”: 40.6) a version of “Sea” poem ends:

“The sea drove me away + yelled ‘Go to your desire!’ As I hurried up the valley it added one last yell, “And laugh!”

and, in #8

“For me, for us, The Sea, the murderer of time by eating lusty cracks of sandy artistry till nothings left but old [] remembering primordial pain of sitting by the unborn bird of roses yet undone—”.

And, from Big Sur, “But I remember seeing a mess of leaves suddenly go skittering in the wind and into the creek, then floating rapidly down the creek towards the sea, making me feel a nameless horror even then of ‘Oh my God, we’re all being swept to sea no matter what we say or do”—And a bird who is on a crooked branch is suddenly gone without my ever hearing him.” As cited in Carole Tonkinson, ed., Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation, p. 85.
For this summary, see Hosinski’s thorough discussion. Hosinski, Ch 2 &3.
Yet another connection for me lies in the extent to which both approaches to the space of a poem stress an initial or fundamental vertical action. In Whitehead’s metaphysics this is the irruption of prehension which may, for Olsen, be giant swagger. Coolidge, in his notes on Bop describes the critical importance of the initial impact, “the one of that ever first beat tends very soon to lose it’s ‘e”” and “Awareness of all the room that exists in a single beat” (Cooldige, p. 93) so relevant to Kerouac. I find myself sliding into the past to Rilke who speaks of a poetic gesture as “lifted tree” and “tall tree in the ear”. Thus in sonic terms, the space or tent lifted by the bloom of the poem’s sound as echoed in ear.
The scope of this paper does not allow me to go into depth about Mahayana Buddhist assertions of emptiness or to explore the extent to which Buddhist rhetoric masks and silences critique. Steven Collins and George Dreyfus have both done work edging towards such an analysis. Here it suffices to say that the meaning of the Mahayana assertion that all things are empty is extensively debated in Buddhist philosophy and that, in general, there is struggle with the tendency to essentialize emptiness at some point that may distort one’s view. Within Buddhist thought its held that such distortions may be necessary misapprehensions without which one could not approach the view, but this is not entirely satisfying in critical terms as it is difficult to assess the principle by which this would be evaluated. (In theory the principle is “care”, but, as I have written elsewhere, there is a tension between Buddhism’s wisdom orientation and its concern for care). At stake in all these debates is the value to be given apparitional, illusory form. The Heart Sutra states: Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form, and very often this is read as an assertion of how an empty ground holds form rather than an indication that illusory formal appearance is all that exists.

Daymuses

Wouldn’t it be to be, just once, a tragic heroine, to have a falling feeling be so visible anyone with stories to see would want to rescue even if it couldn’t be? At last night’s party she was going down down down and the music was playing and it was like a depressive’s afternoon, just a bite of disappointment that had suggested there was something to consider, but the doors were all falling open in cascade. But myth is not allotted fair or in correspondence to talent. As usual she was the stork in a Russian fairy tale about death or, to speak for myself, I know it to be unlikely that either an amphibious beak-eyed turtle or GREAT SNARL BEAR in slim girl disguise would ever be actually seen—in mythic terms at least—as falling like Anna K. across the train-tracks. This is the difference between the sky that actually drowns us carries us, spider clinging to web trail, and the stories we insist on saying.

This silent commerce, when life is no longer willing
to endure one of our kind, when it seizes him in its grip.
avenges itself, kills. For the fact that its strength *can* kill
was palin to us all from its delicacy and restraint
and from the curious power that transforms us from living
beings
into survivors. Non being. Do you remember how often
a blind command would carry us through the icy
waiting room of new birth?... Us?--a body of eyes
under numberless lids, refusing? Carried the down-
thrown heart in our breast, the heart of a whole generation.

From "Elegy to Marina Tsvetayeva-Efron by Rilke, Mitchell trans.