A Map of Mexico City Blues: Jack Kerouac as Poet

6. Kerouac's Religion(s)

6 Kerouac's Religion(s) Buddhism, which only a mere dabbler in religious research would compare with Christianity, is hardly reproducible in the words ofthe Western languages. gNear the end ofDesolation Angels, Kerouac, describing his _ attempt to make a home for himself and his mother in the Berkeley Hills, attributes the following remark to her: "You and your Buddhists! Why don't you stick to your own religion?" (351). If it was an appropriate question for the mother to ask her son in the 1950s, it is an even more appropriate question for the literary critic to ask the text today. Why did a writer nurtured on French-Canadian Catholicism go to a profoundly Catholic country like Mexico to practice his understanding of Buddhism in the blues form of his poetry? Biographer Tom Clark says that Kemuac began to study Buddhism in Asvaghosa'sActs ofthe Buddha while he was living in Richmond Hill in the winter of 1953-1954 (131), although he had certainly become acquainted with it much earlier through his reading of Thoreau and Spengler, and later, in the spring of 1953, through Allen Ginsberg's study of Oriental art. After the war, a 102 Kerouac's ReJigion(s) general interest in things Oriental pervaded American society, and books like Dwight Goddard's Buddhist Bible, reprinted in 1952, became more readily available. As a literaty phenomenon, of course, Orientalism was nothing new in America, but in the 1950s it quickly reached the proportions of a subculture, one that still flourishes today. Kerouac was among those who rode the crest of a wave that swept over the materialism of that decade. When Kerouac arrived at the Cassadys' home in California in February 1954, he discovered that Neal and Carolyn were doing two things that greatly annoyed him: first, they were planning to buy a new house with the proceeds of a personal injury suit Neal had filed against the railroad; and second, they had become followers of Edgar Cayce (Nicosia 457). Since Kerouac had already begun to read Buddhist texts, it is fair to assume that his interest satisfied some positive need for spiritual guidance, but it is equally fair to say that among his motives for continuing to read the Eastern scriptures was a newfound need for arguments with which to counter the Cassadys' Cayceism. The value of Buddhism as apologetics can be felt in Mexico City Blues as the severely diminished presence of Cassady-who was the model for Dean in On the Road and the inspiration for Visions ofCody-as either a character or an influence. At the very moment Allen Ginsberg was addressing their old friend Cassady as the "secret hero" of "Howl," Kerouac was at pains to obliterate him from Mexico City Blues. One of the most poignant chomses in the poem, however, comes in the form of a letter possibly addressed to Cassady. The tone of the "U4th Chorus" is both wistful and conciliatory, as though Kerouac sensed that his association with Cassady had come to an end and he wanted to part on good terms. The first stanza recounts a coincidence that the singer has detected in an exchange of letters: perhaps Kerouac and Cassady had discussed the same topic in letters that crossed in the mail. Next, the singer explains that all their troubles are past. At first, this seems to be a way of saying that his Buddhist studies will make him a better friend in the future, but the tone gives these lines an ominous implication as well. Kerouac senses that he will not be spending much time with his old friend in the future. Then he generalizes 103 A Map ofMexico City Blues by alluding to one of Cassady's favorite musicians, Lester Young: ''The sweetest angelic tenor of man." He identifies himself with the tenorman by placing him in the context of the epigraph, which is rephrased here in the third stanza. The chorus concludes with a compliment to Cassady and a metaphysical twist: "I've gone inside myself / And there to find you." My sense of this chorus is that Kerouac, who once made Neal his hero, has now assimilated him into his Buddhist practice, specifically his quest for anatta, release from selfhood. On the other hand, in a more positive light, Buddhism seems to have served as the dynamo that powered Kerouac's poetic impulse. The first book he wrote after beginning...