7 posts tagged “kerouac”
Believe that the world is an ethereal flower, and ye live. (137)
All living and dying things like these dogs and me coming and going without any duration or self substance, O God, and therfore we can't possibly exist. How strange, how worthy, how good for us! What a horror it would have been if the world was real, because if the world was real, it would be immortal. (134-5)
There were a lot of passages from Dharma Bums that really appealed to me today, and this was one of them. It's so true - if any of this were real it would be a tragedy. Good thing the universe is just smoke! I may have just read the Dharma Bums but that memory is smoke drifting off in the sky as I write this; time to burn more experience! Brad was telling me how he has this fantasy of being an old man in retreat in the mountains, and meandering down to some mountain town once a month for supplies and to meet up with like-minded mountain-dwellers for revelry before returning to the meditative seclusion. I was thinking how it's all about freedom - we spend our whole life building imaginary cages that keep us from such a care-free life. There are all those people would think I was wasting all my higher education to drop out and take to the mountains in spiritual pursuit, while I would think I had finally stopped wasting time. This thought brings to mind my writing; Buddhism is all I ever want to write about. It's so exiting for me and coming to a deaf audience sometimes. Kerouac describes the same sentiments: "the feeling I always got when I tried to explain the Dharma to people, Alvah, my mother, my relatives, girl friends, everybody, they never listened, they always wanted me to listen to them, they knew, I didn't know anything, I was just a dumb young kid and impractical fool who didn't understand the serious significance of this very important, very real world" (110-1). Seriously significant, very important, very real world my ass. *grins*
It's South Park night so I'm off to Bradford's to watch the boys ridicule homeless people!
I noticed something interesting when reading Dharma Bums this week. Japhy is explaining yabyum, but either he or Kerouac has a misunderstanding about the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum. He is associating this mantra with yabyum, but that mantra is the mantra of the Bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteshvara. "This is what they do in the temples of Tibet. It's a holy ceremony, it's done just like this in front of chanting priests. People pray and recite Om Mani Pahdme Hum, which means Amen the Thuderbolt in the Dark Void. I'm the thunderbolt and Princess is the dark void, you see" (28-9). Om Mani Padme Hum actually means 'the jewel in the lotus'.
"The middle part of the mantra, maṇi padme, is often interpreted as 'jewel in the lotus,' Sanskrit maṇí 'jewel, gem' and the locative of padma 'lotus', but according to Donald Lopez it is much more likely that Maṇipadme is in fact a vocative, not a locative, addressing a bodhisattva called Maṇipadma, 'Jewel-Lotus'. The oṃ is straightforward as the sacred syllable prefixed to many mantras, and the hūṃ is an exclamation or interjection, the like of which are also frequently found in mantras" (Wikipedia.org).
The lotus flower is an important part of Buddhist symbolism. As a river flower, the lotus grows up out of the mud and the murky water towards the sky and glowing sun. This is like a mind that overcomes the "mud and murky water" of ignorance and misconception, and thereby reaches the infinite-clear sky of enlightenment. Once it overcomes the mud and murky water, it blossoms, and the jewel in the lotus is Bodhicitta (roughly translated as the attitude of compassion or altruism). Yabyum is the symbolic joining of wisdom and compassion, though as far as I know Avalokiteshvara isn't usually/ever the deity depicted as the deity representing compassion in yabyum imagery.
I feel like Kerouac would know this
since he mentions elsewhere in the book that he ascribes to the
Mahayana/Tibetan Buddhism tradition, and that Avalokiteshvara is his
"favorite Buddhist saint" (12).
Works Cited:
I've been heading down the rail trail to this old rusted out bridge over the Mascoma river. The river is especially high this time of year because of all the thawing snow, but there are still some rocks above the surface under there. I climb down, take a seat, and read the Dharma Bums.
I've really been enjoying this book, which really reflects Kerouac's later (later than On the Road) appreciation for Buddhist philosophy and... bums. I think the idea of the 'dharma bum' is incredibly romantic and entirely too appealing to me. I have a rucksack too! Maybe it's time to bum around the country and take a bite out of life. I jest, of course... at least I have this wonderfully escapist literature, and I nice place to escape to and read it.
(Kerouac, John (aka Jack) - On the Road: Chapters 1-10)
If the title of this post was particularly confusing to anyone, I apologize. As it turns out "Part II" starts on page 109, and with fresh chapter numerals - so I read to the end of "Part I" and the first chapter of II. Above you'll find a link to my post about the first ten chapters.
The big surprise in this part of the book, for me at least, was the strange affair Sal has with this Mexican girl "Terry". He just falls into it with this girl, and puts all his energy towards making it work until he finally realizes it just won't, and he returns, broken, to the East and his family. The strange part for me was the way Kerouac tends to avoid talking about the emotions of his narrator. Instead he talkes about how lovely she is, how much he loves her, but never about why he is so dedicated to her and the idea of hitching back to New York with her on his arm. Sal seems very impulsive to me, yet at the same time hesitant. He is full of dreams and ambition, and occasionally spurts of energy that drive him towards his goals, but at the same time he seems rutted - and determined to free himself of that rut as soon as possible. He sees in Dean a man without ruts and that is the real attraction for him. Life on the road is freedom, even if it is also hardship.
There were a few passages in this section I found significant, or particularly well written:
"Next door to Remi lived a Negro called Mr. Snow whose laugh, I swear on the Bible, was positively and finally the one greatest laugh in all this world. This Mr. Snow began to laugh from his supper table when his old wife said something casual; he got up, apparently choking, leaned on the wall, looked up to heaven, and started; he staggered through the door, leaning on neighbors walls; he was drunk with it, he reeled throughout Mill City in the shadows, raising his whooping triumphant call to the demon god that must have prodded him to do it. I don't know if he ever finished supper" (63).
"Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of crushed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries. I stuck my head out the window and took deep breaths of the fragrant air. It was the most beautiful of all moments" (80-1).
"Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life" (106)
The ignorant view that places spiritualism side-by-side with all other futile and wasteful pursuits has dragged our world through the mud and devastated the hope that once kept us motivated. The direction and conviction of a lost age fades into the backdrop of mechanical monotony, and suddenly this generation finds themselves all too aware of the need and all too ignorant of the reasons.
I wrote the above two days ago, and upon re-reading it now, perhaps because I'm knee deep in Kerouac's odyssey which shares a similar attitude, I feel like it's a sentiment worth musing on. One of the key ideas in the work I'm attempting is the idea of our lost free time, which I feel has a lot to do with society's movement away from spiritualism. The scary thing is some priest somewhere might sigh and agree with me. Spirit: the sullen victim of the fast-paced world - like Kerouac's locomotive of a book. Maybe the point is life is like that. No, reality is, just like that locomotive with no sign of slowing.
There were a few passages I thought significant so far, either because they appealed to me because of the language, or because they seemed to me to represent a significant part of Sal's journey:
"I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon" (15).
"I heard a great laugh, the greatest laugh in the world, and here came this rawhide oldtimer Nebraska farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner; you could hear his raspy cries clear across the plains, across the whole gray world of them that day. Everybody else laughed with him. He didn't have a care in the world and had the hugest regard for everybody. I said to myself, Wham, listen to that man laugh. That's the West, here I am in the West. He came booming into the diner, calling Maw's name, and she made the sweetest cherry pie in Nebraska, and I had some with a mountainous scoop of ice cream on the top. 'Maw, rustle me up some grub afore I have to start eatin myself raw or some damn silly idee like that.' And he threw himself on a stool and went hyaw hyaw hyaw hyaw. 'And thow some beans in it.' It was the spirit of the Wast sitting right next to me. I wished I knew his whole raw life and what the hell he'd been doing all these years besides laughing and yelling like that" (18-9).
"Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk - real strait talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious" (58).
