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| A great cover: funny & poignant, like the book. |
I make this comparison, perhaps, because I am re-reading "The Dharma Bums." It is the first in my re-readings of my ur-texts. I plan on reading all the books on this list (as well as a few more, depending), and commenting on their place in my personal mythology. Thus far (I haven't finished my re-read), I love "The Dharma Bums" all over again. It reminds me of all the flaws and beauties inherent in the Beat/Zen/Hippie/Stoner outlook on life, and it reminds me of those things in ways that no self-consciously Beat/Zen/Hippie/Stoner writings can. Kerouac was writing early enough in his era that he was not yet a cliche, and the earnestness that comes from that position shines through in his writing. Consider:
"See the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures."
...which has great rhythm and pacing as well as great content; alongside a brief, hilarious gem like this:
"let's see, 'Lake below . . . the black holes the wells make,' no that's not a haiku goddammit, you can never be too careful about haiku."
It's that assured spirituality of the counterculture combined with that flippant and reverent need for beauty that really speak to me in this book.
Perhaps more to come as I finish this book, as well as a meditation on Wendell Berry's "Jayber Crow," the book with which I finished out my new reading before embarking on this ur-text project.
2 comments:
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I reread "Dharma Bums" this past summer, along with much of the rest of Kerouac's oeuvre, and just couldn't connect to it the way I could in high school, when I would have considered Kerouac a foundational figure in my own personal mythos. Perhaps a Swarthmore education permanently stained my enjoyment of the (white, heterosexual male) canon of American literature, but I found that Kerouac came across to me as a privileged, educated man who wanted to pretend to "slum it" on the frontier without actually sacrificing any of his privileges in order to live the life of a real frontiersman (or woman), which would entail doing hard work and living with the rhythms of the seasons. Maybe it's a bit harsh, but Kerouac seems like the sort of guy who, if alive today, would come back to an elite college in an affluent part of the United States after spending some time traveling through southeast Asia, and say that he's like, so changed, dude, by the experience, and how it has, like, so totally deepened his understanding of himself. Maybe that's harsh, but that's how he felt.
I also felt that Kerouac's understanding of Zen Buddhism was very skin-deep, sort of something he adopted as a signifier of a certain lifestyle without understanding its full implications, the way many suburban moms these days go to yoga classes but don't read the Hindu texts that underlie the practice. Still, maybe that's the point, and perhaps it's why Kerouac appealed to me so much more in high school, when I hadn't studied Buddhism in much detail. Perhaps he represents the perpetual adolescent in all of us, a longing for something deeper, without a full understanding of what this would entail. If so, perhaps we can expect a permanent audience for Kerouac, as more and more generations go through that stage in their lives. I wouldn't want to stay there forever, but nor would I want to have missed out on it.
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