“upsidedown like fools”: Jack Kerouac’s “Desolation Blues” and the Struggle for Enlightenment

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

—“The Knapsack Notebook” of Matsuo Bahso

Although what might be termed Jack Kerouac’s most concentrated Buddhist period (roughly 1953 to 1958)¹ has been well documented in numerous biographies,² there has yet to be a systematic critical exploration of the influence of Buddhism on his oeuvre, such as Tony Trigilio’s recent book-length Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics (2007). The closest thing Kerouac studies has to a comprehensive discussion of his Buddhist poetics is James T. Jones’s groundbreaking A Map of Mexico City Blues: Jack Kerouac as Poet (1992), a book that has gone a long way in further “legitimizing” Kerouac’s poetry by providing theoretically and historically astute close readings of the work itself, readings that do not simply compare the content of the work to the life.³ With Jones’s study of Mexico City Blues⁴ in mind, I would suggest that the poetic series which most succinctly captures the internal struggles of Kerouac’s quest for enlightenment are the twelve choruses written atop Desolation Peak during the summer of 1956, aptly titled “Desolation Blues.” Jones is indeed correct in suggesting that Mexico City Blues is “the fulfillment of Kerouac’s spontaneous poetics” (12), combining the poet’s Buddhist and poetic practices in such a way that Kerouac tells “his own story as a parable of enlightenment.” “He has become a bodhisattva,” Jones argues, “rendering his service to humankind before attaining parinirvana, the stage at which he will finally escape the cycle of rebirths entirely” (119).⁵ What is particularly interesting about “Desolation Blues” in this regard is that “The wheel of the quivering meat / conception” (MCB “211th Chorus”), which Kerouac seems to be on the verge of escaping as he “awake[s] to Universal Mind / And realize[s] that there is nothing / Whatever to be attained” (MCB “183rd Chorus”) “in this Karma earth” (MCB “229th Chorus”), is once again brought to the fore a year later as the poet comes face to face with “ole Hateful Dulouz Me” during his much-anticipated solitude as a fire lookout in the North Cascades in 1956 (Desolation Angels 4). Indeed, it is the raw immediacy of Kerouac’s internal (and poetic) tension that makes “Desolation Blues” so interesting, and, at times, so emotionally difficult to read. Difficult, not in the sense that one has in reading Mexico City Blues (complexity and confusion overshadowed by seeming simplicity); difficult, rather, because these poems so accurately depict the artist’s spiritual struggles as he lived in solitude on Desolation Peak for two months, grappling with issues of reality, impermanence, (no)self, and suffering.

Though Kerouac never formalized his Buddhist practice, as did Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen, he did immerse himself in primary Buddhist texts, meditated regularly, and found teachers in the form of gondola-riding hoboes and his new friends on the West Coast. The imagery, language, and complex hierarchies of Mahāyāna Buddhism⁶ were inspirational to both his life and writing, allowing him to experiment more freely with language and providing him with a new vocabulary enabling him to turn his attention away from the material world, particularly his inability in the mid-1950s to find a publisher for his numerous manuscripts. The newfound improvisatory freedom inherent in Buddhism (first thought best thought) helped him fashion a poetics of spontaneity commensurate with his earlier pre-Buddhist prose experiments such as On the Road and Visions of Cody.⁷

The twelve choruses comprising “Desolation Blues” lack the freeflowing spontaneous bebop quality of the most accomplished poems in Mexico City Blues due, perhaps, to the fact that on Desolation Peak there was “no liquor, no drugs, no chance of faking it” (Desolation Angels 4). Nor are these poems as “successfully” Buddhist in the sense that the earlier sequence so aptly synthesizes poetic...