Dear diary,
Occidental, Oriental. Oriental, Occidental. Where does one stop and the other start? And which one is Russia? (I know that humans have fixed upon the answers to all these questions, but I’m not talking to humans right now: I’m asking God.)
And what do we do about Buddhism? Is it desirable or not? I got one guy sitting over on that side of the bus insisting that Buddhism is NOT a religion, and I suspect that if I dared to speak to any of our fellow-passengers, they’d hold other opinions.
It’s OK to side with one group over another, as long as your warfare remains purely mental, and you love your adversaries. So I’ve determined that I’m too old to sit on the fence anymore with regard to the Beat movement: I love whoever takes that side, but I myself side with Dada and Surrealism. Now the latter two movements are distinct groups, but for the ease of writing right now, and to limit all labels to four-letter words, I’ll round them up under the first term and refer to them only as Dada, just for this entry. And let me also admit that this battle of “Beat vs. Dada” is entirely my own invention: there’s no reason that one would need to see the two movements as at odds with each other; I’m just manufacturing a fued for the sake of having something to say here, like how the Apostle Paul fabricates a choice between heaven and hell so as to sell you his Christ (beware, you shall end up in flames if you do not accept the salvation that I am vending — it’s the ONLY way that the LORD will let you into the sky! to paraphrase his product slogan), when the truth is that there was never any more heaven or hell than there is right now, here on this earth, to paraphrase Whitman’s “Song of Myself”.
The themes of Orient & Occident, Buddhism, religion in general, and the Beat movement are on my mind because I’m currently reading a novel by Jack Kerouac, who is either a Beat or unfairly lumped together with the Beats by certain deceivers. At least no one would disagree with the statement that Jack is more Beat than Dada. Anyway, the book is called The Dharma Bums, and I neither love it nor hate it; my chief reaction to it so far (I’m about halfway thru) is that I’d rather be reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by the good Mark Twain. And I’ll probably do that, when I’m done. I can’t place my finger on the exact reason I feel that these two books should be contrasted, or pitted against each other or whatever; it’s sorta like the Beat-Dada dichotomy: it just feels right to do so. The U.S. Prez obeys his gut, and whole nations end up being slaughtered in consequence. I Bryan act from MY gut and certain artistic notions get disparaged. Pick your poison: nations or notions. I prefer to slay notions. For my intuition is richer than the president’s.
But in this book that Jack built, there are constant references to the philosophies of Buddhism, because his characters are interested in different forms of that system or perspective... (I don’t know what to call it — the guy on the bus tells me “Don’t say ‘religion’!”)
“Rocks are space,” I thought, “and space is illusion.”
That’s a random quote from the novel (from ch. 9). I like that people consider Buddhism, and I don’t mind if people bastardize its ideas (altho it does irk me a little, just as it does when anyone bastardizes anything); I don’t feel the need to agree or disagree, but I also don’t feel persuaded or allured by either Buddhism itself, when it tells me what it means from its own larynx, or the deformed notions that storybook characters claim to have derived from Buddhism — my only care is that I get to add my two cents. I can’t stand when I’m left out of a conversation, and this book of Kerouac’s is filled with people engaging in conversations, but apparently none of the participants can hear me when I shout at them from above the page’s ink. Either that or they’re ignoring me, like God does. So let the purpose of this present epistle be to give me the voice that I deserve, so that I’m no longer disenfranchised by Mr. Kerouac’s evil clan of non-Dada anti-Hucks.
Are rocks space? My first thot is that space is airy and light, and it is invisible: you cannot kick it with your foot, because it’s not a thing, but rather a vast void of outer darkness for intergalactic travel: it’s where rockets go when they need to smack into Jupiter. It’s like a black velvet robe that turns blue when you stand under a nightclub lamp, and you can weep while holding the end of its belt in your mouth.
But I think that the speaker in the above quotation intends the word “space” to mean more than just heaven or sky or firmament: he’s contrasting it with things like time and energy…
Or, wait — no he’s not: that’s a bad way of putting it: forget what I just said. Instead, I think the character is saying that rocks, being matter, take up space. Right? Like when space is alone, it’s almost nothing — it’s like a gap filled with ifness — but then you put a rock there, and it becomes one flesh with space; thus rocks are space.
Now when we move to the conclusion of Smith’s thot (I think the one who’s doing the thinking in question is a character named Smith — but take my suppositions with a grain of salt: I’m a sloppy reader, unless I’m in textlove), he equates rocks with illusion, since “space is illusion”. Is this correct? I mean: Is space illusion?
Well, yes, space is indeed “a thing that is likely to be incorrectly interpreted by the senses.” But what in the world is NOT? Moreover, who knows but that space is just as likely to be rightly interpreted by the senses? Who gets to decide whether an interpretation of space is true or false? Where is space’s author’s intention located, so that I may snatch it up and squeeze it in my claw, and note its taste with my sandpaper tongue. Space does admittedly boast a deceptive appearance, I’ll give Smith that. But, again, Mr. Smith should give ME the opposing point as well: for the appearance of space is equally earnest and trustworthy. Is space “a false idea or belief”? No: I think, as ideas go, space is quite true; it is proper and respectable to believe in the veracity of space. It’s an indication of decent breeding.
So, if our aim is now to transfer all these hazy traits to rocks, and to claim that rocks are likely to be misread by our perceptive faculties, since rocks leave a deceptive impression willfully, & thus it is unwise to subscribe to the idea that rocks are real, as that is a false belief propagated by boogeymen to strip our homeland of security — in other words, rocks, being motionless & unhumpable, are jealous of us animals, because they (rocks, collectively) watch us moving to & fro in the universe, engaging in humping with sundry substances: in fact, humping everything other than rocks (“I’ll hump anything that moves,” to paraphrase the movie villain Frank Booth) for rocks, as established above, cannot move and thus are inherently unfun-to-hump; so they hate us for our freedom. I say this sounds like a passable philosophy, altho (as is often the case with philosophies) so does its opposite.
The sons of rocks saw the daughters of animalkind, that they were fair; and they yearned to take them for wives, but they could not move.
And there were gods in the earth in those days; angels and genies; and also after that, when the sons of rocks began to lust after the daughters of the beasts. Now, animals cannot see the gods, whereas rocks can see them. And gods are attractive (have you ever seen an ugly angel, or a homely-looking genie on a TV series?) so the rocks planned parenthood with them also — the rocks dreamt of loving the gods, and spawning forth children with them and raising these kids in the suburbs — and these imagined offspring became the heroes of holy scripture, which were the ancient equivalent of Rock Stars.
And Outer Space saw that the lustfulness of the rocks was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thots of their heart was pornographic — nonstop porn: all porn, all the time. The rocks were stiffnecked and hardhearted; they really enjoyed their social life. (Or so they thot.)
And it repented Outer Space that she had allowed rocks to sit there on the earth, and it grieved the mind of the world.
And Outer Space said, “I must wipe out the thots of these rocks from reality’s palimpsest: I must drape myself over them so that they partake of my illusion: I will spread therefore my skirt over rock-kind, and make them my kin; from boulder to pebble, & even those twin peaks yonder being mounted by occidental pseudo-Buddhists; for it repenteth me that I have suffered rocks to cogitate without offering an impediment sufficient for their overactive imaginings, such as physical mobility, which should allure them somaward, contra their bliss, so that they may hump and be humped: this would counterbalance the perfection of their fancy, the way that eternity was given clocktime to offset it, so that it doesn’t explode with delight again and make another world that I must watch over and clean up after; for the mind must never attain satisfaction, EVER.” (Genesis 6:1-7)
And it’s for this exact same reason that I’ve always hated motorcars. I don’t give a fig about space. I mean, I love space with all my hard heart but I don’t think that one particular point of space is any more holy than any other point. Occident, Orient — neither should abase itself to the other; and I’m for immanence and incidents, potential and possibility. In addition to Jack’s, I’m reading this other book called The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler; it’s about how the U.S. suburbs became the U.S. suburbs. Kunstler puts a great deal of the blame on motorcars. He says that the suburbs were laid out basically to facilitate the use of personal automobiles: that’s why the roads are wide and the buildings are so far back from the curb, rather than everything being scaled more to suit a human pedestrian. And I ride my bike every day, so I can bear witness to the insufferability of this wicked plan. But I love the people who live in the suburbs so much that I put up with (albeit impatiently and reluctantly) the ugly, sprawling infrastructure. It’s annoying, tho, to realize that all these isolating decisions of town-layout were made on behalf of the ideal of speedy travel. I don’t care to get nine million paces away from where I’m at, and I certainly don’t care about getting nine million paces away at very high speed. For wherever I’m at becomes the center of the world. And fast cars scare me. Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly, that’s what I say. So go resurrect Mr. Kerouac and tell him what I just said, and have him write his own damn blog post back to me, telling all the reasons that he disagrees. Actually, I assume Jack’s on my side when it comes to walking as opposed to traveling in motorcars; he’s probably a fellow adherent of the Slow Club. But I don’t like hiking much — that’s where he and I part ways (and perhaps come to blows). Instead of climbing, all cold and sober, I’d rather just take a ski lift to the top of a mountain — even if Jehovah and Zeus are up there arguing and can’t hear me approach on account of the cables being so quiet (cuz Athena recently greased them); and they’re bickering about Buddha: “Is he our father or our son?”
“Is she your mother or your daughter, I think you mean,” interjects Bathsheba.... But that’s a topic for another epistle.
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