3 posts tagged “the beats”
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:
In this last weeks reading I was especially intrigued by Norman Mailer's essay The White Negro. He gives us a unique and poetic description of what he considers the source of "the American existentialist - the hipster" (584): a psychopathic philosopher and a mystic, but most importantly a figure pushed to the fringes of society and rebellion. Mailer describes a sort-of cultural marriage between the white bohemian and the Negro, from which society has gained the better parts of the exchange. "The hipster has absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro. To be an existentialist, one must be able to feel oneself - one must know one's desires, one's rages, one's anguish, one must be aware of the character of one's frustration and know what would satisfy it" (587). One of my favorite passages is his description of this cultural matrimony:
The bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the
hipster was a fact in American life. If marijuana was the wedding ring, the child was the
language of Hip for its argot gave expression to abstract states of feeling which all could
share, at least all who were Hip. And in this wedding of the white and the black it was
the Negro who brought the cultural dowry. (586)
Mailer's philosophy seems to center around the idea that we, being aware of our own existence and the transient nature of life, should embrace an existential existence with our focus firmly rooted in the now - what he calls the "enormous present". A philosophy centered around the certainty of death - something heavy on the mind of a generation exposed to "the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind" (583). People, especially the youth still trying to come to terms with life and his place in this "contradictory popular culture" (588), in the face of wholesale death must accept the possibility of sudden and meaningless obliteration. "A death that could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death by deus ex machina in a gas chamber or radioactive city" (583). Instead of letting courage fail us in the face of this frightening reality, Mailer claims
The only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as
immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on
that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. [... ] To encourage the
psychopath in oneself, to explore the domain of experience where security is boredom
and therefore sickness, and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is
without past or future, [...] the life where a man must go until he is beat. (584)
To Mailer, this was the creed of the 'beat' generation. It was the inner understanding that beat them down and out to the fringes of a society hostile to the lifestyle such an understanding demanded. If we must accept the constant possibility of death then the only possible course is to embrace it, because otherwise we are left stagnant and afraid. The hipster is the American, the existentialist, who has realized this truth. "His inner experience of the possibilities within death is his logic. So, too, for the existentialist. And the psychopath. And the saint and the bullfighter and the lover. The common denominator for all of them is their burning consciousness of the present, exactly that incandescent consciousness which the possibilities within death has opened for them" (588).
Most significant I think is the fact that this is no temporary phenomenon, but a change in the world, in the minds of humanity, because the infectious philosophy of the white Negro is founded on an "inner certainty that his rebellion is just, a radical vision of the universe which thus separates him from the general ignorance" (589). That sort of conviction, the heartfelt conviction of the rebel - religious conviction - cannot be easily dismissed.
In this selection I also especially appreciated Mailer's description of Jazz as the music of orgasm. This reminded me of Neil's enthusiastic reaction to some of the musicians that is described in On the Road. He feels as though they have some grasp on "it", on the now, on the whole reality of their moment in existence. Mailer says of the Negro, "in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm. For jazz is orgasm, it is the music of orgasm, good orgasm and bad, and so it spoke across a nation" (586). Orgasm is like the zenith of personal experience, a culminating moment of ecstasy that can only be expressed in the enormous present. Although the piece tended towards stereotype and sometimes seemed weakly argued, some of the passages from The White Negro are both poetic and ripe with some sort of undeniable truth about the consciousness of post-war America. All-in-all an excellent work that I genuinely enjoyed reading, and a revealing essay about the beat generation.
I've enjoyed many of the women we've read in A Different Beat, but a couple of the writers we read for Monday I especially liked - Diane di Prima and Carol Bergé. Bergé's style of poetry is especially appealing to me because of how she seems to write the way the mind thinks. The chaos of her words is in my mind just pre-formed speech, unorganized thought, the raw oft-unarticulated ideas. Prima on the other hand is a great narrative writer - great at conveying action and event. Bergé's writing has a more philosophical-introspective bent. My favorite of her poems, despite belonging to the other half, is Chant for Half the World. Some of the lines in this are just genius in their power.
First girlchild becomes servile
Second loses its birthright escutcheon
Third girl has no face fourth is shadow
first girlchild leads schools
second becomes maker of delicate symbols
third creates old specific buttons
fourth is the voiceless farmer's wife (18)
I love this sequence because there is a sense of a woman's life, or at least how Bergé views a womans life. The "voiceless" wife, a mere "shadow" - an image of the woman who fades into the background. Perhaps a telling testament to the women beat-generation writers who lived in the shadow of their male counterparts.
Another passage I especially liked uses a lot of imagery and jumbled ideas that in my mind conveys negativity related to marriage and specifically birth/birthing.
The women breast to breast across empty
across lava-strewn bitter plains
facing lidless eyes of the majestic surgeons
who demand they empty their wombs
of the quintuplet dolls shaped like "husband" (18)
Her writing is very visceral, and really bites into my brain. It is as if Bergé finds the role of women as the mothers of the world to be closely related to their subservience.
The poem as a whole says a lot about women, but more than anything I feel it paints a picture of strength through oppression. The poem ends with
The rich women of animalskins
waists slanted in memory of wellsprings
stained with sun with come with breastmilk
The women coppered and grafted into love [...]
The women walking as memory of man (20)
This makes me imagine so-called "primitive" cultures with animal skin clothing and hard labor in the sun. I think perhaps Bergé considers the women of such cultures to have a special wealth ("rich women") beyond those of more "civilized" society by existing an integral part of the survival lifestyle. The last line of the poem seems rife with meaning that I just can't seem to extract. The words "walking as memory of man" could mean many different things, but it seems again to oppose the feminine mode of existence with the masculine. All in all I enjoyed her work thoroughly.
