Canto Libre by Victor Jara

 Twenty years or so ago, I, weary of thinking too much, for the most part quit listening to contemporary music, at least in English.  I wanted to get out of my head. I first ventured into Baroque, orchestral, or instrumental music, what might be called "world music," and eventually started to discover the folk music of South America.  It's been a rich and rewarding aural journey.  

With the war in the Ukraine weighing heavily on all our hearts, I found myself thinking of this masterful cover by Francesca Ancarola of the great Chilean artist Victor Jara's song, Canto Libre, or "Song of Freedom."  A rough English translation is provided below the video.

Free Song

Poetry is a dove

that seeks a nesting place.

It bursts and opens its wings

to fly and fly.

 

My song is a free song

that wants to give itself

to whoever holds out their hand,

to whoever wants to fire.

 

My song is a chain

with no start or end

and in each link there is11

the song of the others.

 

Let us keep singing together

to all humanity.

Song is a dove

that flies to discover.

It bursts and opens its wings

to fly and fly.

My song is a free song.

The Scripture of the Golden Eternity

According to Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder said to him one day, "Okay, Kerouac, it's about time for you to write sutra."  That was in the spring of 1956 when they were cohabiting a shack owned by Locke McCorkle, in Marin county.  This particular season was perhaps the pinnacle of Jack Kerouac's Buddhist insight, understanding, and practice.

The word "sutra" comes from the Sanskrit root "siv" and refers to sewing with thread or yarn.  There's also the implication of the intersection between the student's understanding versus the Buddha's explanations in dialogue with his own disciples.  Strictly speaking, a sutra was only written after deep and prolonged meditation and study upon a particular teaching or theme.  At this point, Kerouac had been studying Buddhism and meditating for about two and a half years.  You might call it presumptuous to write a sutra after a mere few years of study, but then, that's the weakness of the West -- we're so anxious to rush headlong into everything, often before we're ready and certainly without real understanding of any depth.  I suppose I'm a case in point, in trying to write about such subject matter.

Kerouac brought this sutra or scripture down to McCorkle one morning and said, "Last night I had it, Locke -- and this morning I can't make head nor tails of it."  Most writers have had this experience, where something is written in a rush of inspiration and makes perfect sense in the flow of creativity.  But once you look at it with your everyday, logical mind, you're apt to say, "What the hell....?"  Actually, I've had just the opposite experience, where a poem comes so fast, I'm merely taking dictation and then am stunned later when I see meanings I hadn't grasped, or an internal rhyme structure that was not apparent in the writing.

Which is all to say, to some extent this piece comes from Kerouac's "higher mind," his aspirations to be "hip" notwithstanding.  Hipsterism has some shucksterism in it, after all.

But there exists in the East the tradition of "sandhyabasha," or trickster speech.  This is partly because spiritual experience doesn't equate to logical explication.  That's not so hard to understand.  If you think about your subjective thought process while you're going to sleep, for a brief span your mind slips back and forth between the logic of the dreamtime mind and that of the daytime mind, and they are two disparate and distinct forms of consciousness.  If you notice, what made perfect sense in your dreamtime mind, escapes encapsulation or articulation once your mind slips back into your regular daytime mode.  This doesn't mean the dreamtime mind is nonsense.  It means that these are two distinct forms of consciousness that don't necessarily translate into one another.  It's like that with mystical experience as well.  It's felt, it's understood viscerally, but it is not translatable into everyday language and thought.  Which does not mean that it is unreal.  It just means that it's a different and perhaps more rare form of reality.

On the other hand, sometimes people just indulge in nonsense and try to pass it off as wisdom.  I have to admit that in reading this work, I sometimes have the feeling that this is what Kerouac is doing.  That's the problem with the hubris of a mere human being trying to write a "scripture."  Kerouac did avow in his Forties journals that he wanted to be an "earthly prophet."  It's not unlike Walt Whitman's aspirations with his original version of "Leaves of Grass."  He also wanted his work to be a new bible or scripture.  It's that line that gets blurred between the Muse of artistic inspiration, and genuine spiritual insight.  I would say artistic inspiration is momentary, whereas spiritual insight is earned and thereby permanent.  This confuses the neophyte, and spiritually speaking, we're all neophytes.  Spiritually mature people are extremely rare in this world.

Kerouac had a semi-mystical strain in his character, but he was also deeply sensual and addictive.  He loved altered states of consciousness and used that "love" to justify his own alcoholism.  He sought intoxication.  That's not a Buddhist path.  Strangely enough, in the East a path does exist that involves overwhelming mental states of intoxication, the path of Masti, but it's not something you choose.  It chooses you.  I don't know how you get on that path, but those that try probably only get more deeply entangled in life, when presumably they're trying to free themselves.  I'm thinking of Tantrics and maybe Shaivites here.  Jack was neither.  

As Eric Mottram said, in a very insightful introduction to this work, written rather remarkably way back in 1970, "...(Kerouac)...lived the traditional life of the underground, of those who live out the double promises of Demeter and Persephone: you shall have both ecstasy and despair, and you will be reborn."  Kerouac, of course, didn't want to be reborn; he was Catholic in the sense that he simply wanted to escape this world and its suffering.  You'd be surprised how many of my friends have said to me, "This is my last life."  And my response is, "Yeah, good luck with that."  It's not so easy to escape the web of Existence, nor do many really want to try.

In Gary Snyder's "Notes on Poetry as an Ecological Survival Technique," he states that poetry can be "the skilled and inspired use of the voice and language to embody rare and powerful states of mind that are in immediate origin personal to the (writer), but at deep levels common to all who listen."

I think that is perhaps an accurate description of what Kerouac was attempting to do, at his best.  He was attempting to give voice to the Voice within us all, and that was part of his not wanting to edit or overthink what he wrote: spontaneous prose, or as he also put it, "first thought, best thought."  That's not always true in writing, but it is sometimes true in an inspired passage of writing.

To get into some of the text itself, in the opening stanza (they are numbered, 1 through 66) Kerouac says, "There are not two of us here, reader and writer, but one, one golden eternity."  It's a Whitmanesque expression.  But Kerouac gets lost in the solipsism of words.  It's easy to do.  In Vedanta, there's the assertion, "I am That," or even, "I am God," which is a ridiculous avowal to any ordinary human being.  But the fatal flaw of these assertions is this: they're intellectual statements.  They are simply statements of thought, not expressions of lived or real experience.  In that sense, they are meaningless.

Jack gets caught in that conundrum.  Although he tried to absorb the doctrine of Sunyata, or "emptiness," in Kerouac it became a kind of fatalism, nihilistic.  He really didn't identify with the Buddhist ideal of Nirvana as "extinction."  Instead, he called his idea of spiritual perfection "the Golden Eternity."  And thus said, "I am Mortal Golden Eternity," and "I am the golden eternity in mortal animate form," or perhaps most charmingly, "I call it the golden eternity -- what do you call it, brother?"

Phillip Whalen, an old friend of Gary Snyder's who was both an accomplished poet and an experienced Zen practitioner, complained that Kerouac's Buddhism was merely intellectual or literary.

I think he was right in the sense that Jack mistook intellectual insight for mystical insight.  As I understand it, the general idea of the many forms of Buddhist meditation is to dis-identify with the mind and one's own thoughts.  But Jack's was a life of the mind.  He was most interested in his own thoughts.  His "meditations" were wild and unmoored excursions of thought.  It's that old dichotomy between intellectual insight, mere thought, and the visceral, felt experience of insight, when one has a moment of gestalt and experiences, say, a sudden insight about a relationship one has.  If you see it truly, your insight is genuine and felt; it changes forever the way you see something.  For instance, if you suddenly see a hidden dynamic in your relationship with another person, if it is real, it will forever change the way you view that relationship or person.  

Jack made the mistake of thinking that his abstracted, spiritually-motivated insights were moments of satori or enlightenment. If they had been, they would have changed Jack, permanently.  But they didn't.  And in the end, what he had to say about Buddhism was, "It's all just words."  That's a statement that doesn't tell us the truth about Buddhism per se, but it does tell us the truth about Jack Kerouac's version of Buddhism.

I don't want to pick this apart further.  That, in itself, would only be yet another intellectual excursion, like piling sand upon sand.  Perhaps I will leave this little post with one more quote from Eric Mottram's introduction, which I like so much.  He says, "...the Scripture is a statement of what we have come to know as a necessity: a joyful modesty as the condition of living in the universe without a restless urge to conquest, moral dogmatism and hierarchy."

Perhaps.  I say it is another example of one man's attempt to come to terms with his life.  And we read him, I think, in order to try to come to terms with our own.

 

Angeles

A moody piece I love, by a Chilean group called Concepcion 14.

 

Dulce Muchacha Triste

A song by Spanish artist, Pablo Guerrero.  22 years and counting....

 

Meadow of the Wolf

Another video from our friend, Martijn.  He's continuing to build his own design of a wooden crane with which to lift the heavy stones off his buildings in order to do structural repair and replacement of some beams in the ceiling, to better bear the weight of the stone roof.  He's working first on the structure in which he's residing. When he's done, he'll place the stones back on top.

But there is one misty moonlit night when, incredibly, he hears a wolf or wolves howling on the next mountain over.  It's eerie, but quite eerily beautiful.  The following morning when talking with his neighbor, Brother Johannes, he learns the legend behind the Italian name for his own particular locale, the "Meadow of the Wolf." 

This fellow is living his own scaled-down version of a simple, zen-like existence, in an unassuming, free-of-intent way.  Chop wood, carry water.

You Don't Have To Cry

A Stephen Stills composition sung by East Coast artist (Carolina, Virginia and thereabouts) Kipyn Martin. I'm a fan but I've never seen her stray from the other side of the country for a gig. Maybe I'll have to produce a show for her. This version actually has more energy than the one recorded by CSN, if you subtract Stills' amazing acoustic guitar work on that original cut. A little more of that sage hippie ethos. I like the way she makes it her own.  Tough to do with a song so well-known.

 

Jack Kerouac's Centennial

Jack Kerouac would have turned 100 today had he not drank himself right out of this world at the age of 47.  Had Jack and mutual friends Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs not hunkered down in an apartment around Columbia University in NYC during and after WWII, and gotten into all manner of trouble, we'd all probably still be living two dimensional black and white lives with our three tv channels (all there used to be when I was a kid) and skinny ties.  Think of the movie "Pleasantville" with no discovery of color.  Inauthentic, in other words.  (It's no accident that Jackson Pollock was of the same generation.)

I was never a fan of the Beats growing up.  They were before my time.  I rode upon the coattails of older siblings and managed to navigate the Sixties, escaping relatively unscathed.  What touched me about that decade was an instinctive recognition of the desire for honesty and authenticity of feeling.  It just got buried under drugs and an excess of toxic behavior disguised as "freedom."  I didn't understand the genesis of these feelings, this deeply unexpressed longing.  I didn't know where these new values had come from, from what cultural milieu they'd been culled, simmering in a pot of boiling herbs and given psychedelic wings upon which to fly.

It had escaped me that everyone who was anyone in the Sixties had read On The Road or The Dharma Bums or both.  And had read them years before.  These seeds lay smoldering beneath the facile surface of American life in the late Fifties and early Sixties, fermenting, awaiting just the right hothouse temperatures to fire themselves into voluptuous bloom.

33 years ago, in the summer of 1989, I met a fellow named Locke McCorkle.  Turns out he was a character in The Dharma Bums, Sean Monahan, who owned the house in Marin which had the hillside horse pasture up above it, with the shack where Gary Snyder ("Japhy Ryder" in the Bums) and Jack Kerouac holed up together in the spring of 1956.  Locke mentioned knowing Kerouac and Snyder.  I had seen Gary Snyder read a couple of times down in Seattle's Pioneer Square, clad in his wool shirt, jeans, and work boots.  On another author such garb might have smacked of proletarian affectation.  But Gary always struck me as the real deal.

Locke told me that Gary and Jack had spent time as fire lookouts up in the North Cascades.  I'd heard as much.  Although a dim recollection of the cultural mythopoeia, the fact had never really grabbed my attention.  Locke told me a little about Gary, Jack, and Buddhism.  I was able to pull a quote out of the air from one of Gary's readings that I'd attended.  Someone had asked Gary if Kerouac was really a Buddhist and Snyder said, " Jack was a Buddhist as long as you kept him out of a city."  Locke laughed.  A few years later, I read that Locke had died of cancer.  I was sad; he seemed an affable soul.  He wrote a nice little book about the sanctity of making love.

Years later, while working at a public library, I stumbled upon the wonderful book, Poets on the Peaks, which was about the meeting of Phillip Whalen, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac in the fall of 1955 in San Francisco.  This time the injection took: I became fascinated by Kerouac.

You could call Jack a cautionary tale.  In fact, you could say "What would Jack do?" and then if you just did the opposite, you'd probably end up safe and sound.  He often wrote under the influence of one drug or another, and if he wasn't summoning the muse this way, then he was probably drinking.  I'd always discounted an artist who used drugs to conjure their art.  Wasn't that cheating?  It's like the people who dope or drug to win at the Olympics.  Wouldn't you want to just see what you could dig out of yourself, au naturale?  

I'm not really a fan of Kerouac's novels, Dharma Bums notwithstanding.  That one work, I do find inspiring.  It makes me want to commit more simply and sincerely to my own life, my own spirituality, and it has similarly affected thousands of other people in the same way.  I don't think it could truly inspire people had Jack not touched upon something real, not authentically attained something internally, spiritually, something hidden -- and perhaps even hidden from himself.  

But what I really love are Kerouac's journals, say, Windblown World (kept in the late forties when he was writing his first novel) or Some of the Dharma, the journal in which Kerouac  -- ever the autodidact -- taught himself Buddhism in the mid-Fifties.  What Kerouac wrote for publication was a kind of act -- he was performing in a literary sense.  In his own journals, Jack spoke to himself in a natural, unaffected voice.  I've always felt that Jack Kerouac talking to himself was far more interesting than Jack Kerouac talking to anybody else.

What attracts many is the romantic celebrity of Kerouac's good looks, his athletic football past (a college scholarship to Columbia University, where he broke his leg and decided to become a writer rather than a football player), his infamous debaucheries, his spontaneity, the road trips with Neal Cassady, the verbal sparring with Allen Ginsberg, typing up William Burroughs' books or suggesting titles for his friends -- "Naked Lunch" for Burroughs, or "Howl" for Ginsberg's famous poem.  And the chronic mythologizing of his own experience.  But really, so what?  Who cares?

What really grabbed me about Jack was his failed spiritual quest.  His three year immersion in Buddhism when nobody in America knew diddly squat about it.  

Why does that matter?  Well, because he tried -- he really tried.  And he was alone.  It's hard to say whether anyone can really follow the spiritual path entirely alone.  But I admire Kerouac's sincerity, his visceral wrestling with the demons of his own lower nature, the almost total commitment he gave it, the fact that he went for broke upon a mountaintop -- and lost.  I admire that.  To go for it and lose is not really a failure.  It may look like that to others, but none of this is for any one life -- that's just the obsessively neurotic psychopathology of the West.  What the "F" do we know?  Nothing, that's what.

Kerouac cloistered himself away on a mountain with the fated name of Desolation, eschewing drugs, alcohol, and sex -- all those easy ways to alter consciousness -- for 63 days and nights in extreme wilderness -- and lost.  He faced down the Void and found only the void within himself.

But I think Jack probably earned something secret and hidden in the process.  And perhaps learned some lessons for future lives.  Jack glimpsed something but couldn't quite reach it.  How many of us have glimpsed nothing at all in our lives, much less attempted to reach those nebulous, seemingly illusory ivory towers?  Jack gambled everything and came away with nothing but the emptiness of fame.  In the end, there was nothing for him to do but drink himself into oblivion.  Makes perfect sense to me.

So, thank you, Jack Kerouac.  Thank you for your guts, your courage, your intellect, your heart, your own peculiar purity, and yes, for your all-too-human failings as well.  Who can't identify with those?  You left a record of where, and how, not to travel.  I intend to take the advice not given and learn from your own mistakes.

And I hope to see you somewhere down the Road.

Suffering

 

PEOPLE REALLY SUFFER ALL THE TIME

Meher Baba

 
Ninety-nine percent of human suffering is not necessary. Through obstinate ignorance people inflict suffering upon themselves and their fellowmen, and then, strangely enough, they ask, "Why should we suffer?" Suffering is generally symbolised by scenes of war: devastated houses, broken and bleeding limbs, the agonies of torture and death; but war does not embody any special suffering.

People really suffer all the time. They suffer because they are not satisfied — they want more and more. War is more an outcome of the universal suffering of dissatisfaction than an embodiment of representative suffering. Through his greed, vanity and cruelty, man brings untold suffering upon himself and others.

Man is not content to create suffering only for himself, but he is relentlessly zealous in creating suffering for his fellowmen. Man seeks his own happiness even at the cost of the happiness of others, thus giving rise to cruelty and unending wars. As long as he thinks only of his own happiness he does not find it. In the pursuit of his own individual happiness the limited self of man becomes accentuated and burdensome.

When man is merely selfish he can, in the false pursuit of separate and exclusive happiness, become utterly callous and cruel to others, but this recoils upon him by poisoning the very spring of his life. Loveless life is most unlovely. Only a life of love is worth living.

 

Song Bird

Hidden in the breast of the tree 

behind a fan of leaves, 

a small bird serenades 

the first star.  

Sweet song stirs 

the quiet air 

with a 

solo ripple. 

The Alps

The only man I envy.  I'd love to have his skill set.  And it's such a beautiful locale.  His description of the silence of place in the beginning was quite poetic.  So, yeah, he really does have the soul of a poet.  Small wonder.

 

"On The Road"

Since Jack Kerouac's centennial is coming up -- it's March 12 -- I've been trying to read his breakthrough novel, "On The Road."  It's been a losing proposition.  I've never particularly liked the book.  It's kind of a closet intellectual's lowbrow slum run.  Drugs, drink, and paid sex.  People used to call that the "high life."  What a conundrum.  You couldn't get any lower if you tried.  Self-abasement as an art form.  The "license" of the artist.  I'm not buying it.  He (or she) who tastes for the sake of tasting gets caught like a fly in the honey pot.  You'd think people would know better.  It's hard to watch stupidity in action.  The people who think they can have their cake and eat it too end up doing a faceplant in that cake. But that's life, folks.  Learn the hard way if you must.

In a way, it isn't anybody's fault.  It was an inevitable reaction within American culture.  It just so happens that it was Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and a motley collection of like-minded fools who broke through the impassive, moralistic constraints of mid-20th century America, destroying walls, breaking through boundaries, ignoring strictures, burning all their bridges and themselves in the process.  

There's always been a paradoxical flavor to the brew of American opposites.  Despite the religiosity of the people who moved to this continent from Europe, way back in 1832 Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, while touring the country, that he'd never seen a people who drank so much or so hard.  This hardcore bohemian underbelly has always existed and, of course, is naturally constellated by the innate repression of religious moralism.  

So when Jack Kerouac and buddies began searching in the early Forties in New York City for a more authentic life, it was natural that their assumption was that liberation came from doing whatever you wanted, i.e, instead of repressing all your desires, simply indulge them all.  These guys were the seedbed for what followed in the Sixties.  One would think that someday the pendulum would find the middle ground, but so far, it still seems to be swinging between the extremes of repression and indulgence, as it ever has.

Anyway, reading about Kerouac's relentless pursuit of pleasure, kicks, and cheap thrills gets a bit old after a while.  I always bog down about midway through the book and have a hard time finishing it.  What Kerouac did do, and what was long overlooked due to the sensationalism of the subject matter, was to liberate a kind of stream of consciousness wordplay and thought process.  Much art that has followed would not have existed had he not had the courage to find that voice within himself.

For me, the most interesting part of the book is his first experience of Mexico. I even bought a companion biography by a Mexican poet and journalist, Jorge Garcia-Robles, entitled -- aptly -- "Jack Kerouac In Mexico."  Nice to get an insider's take on Jack's take of the country south of our border.  This guy, like almost everyone who reads Kerouac, feels like he really "gets" Jack, so there's that perspective to overcome.  But it was nice to also see the author's recognition of when Jack got it right.  

There's a long passage that Garcia-Robles quotes in its entirety, from late in the novel, when Jack, Neal, and some other lost soul are driving down the Pan American highway towards their arbitrarily chosen destination, Mexico City.  Along the way, the other two characters fell alseep in the car while Jack drove on alone.  I too want to quote this long passage of Jack's ruminations upon the land as he drove through it, both because it's a perfect example of that stream of consciousness voice and it's also unexpectedly insightful.

"I took the wheel and drove among reveries of my own, through Linares, through hot, flat swamp country, across the steaming Rio Soto la Marina near Hidalgo, and on.  A great verdant jungle valley with long fields of green crops opened before me.  Groups of men watched us pass from a narrow old-fashioned bridge.  The hot river flowed.  Then we rose in altitude till a kind of desert country began reappearing.  The city of Gregoria was ahead.  The boys were sleeping, and I was alone in my eternity at the wheel, and the road ran straight as an arrow.  Not like driving across Carolina, or Texas, or Arizona, or Illinois; but like driving across the world and into places where we would finally learn ourselves among the Fellahin Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world from Malaya (the long fingernail of China) to India the great subcontinent to Arabia to Morocco to the selfsame deserts and jungles of Mexico and over the waves to Polynesia to mystic Siam of the Yellow Robe and on around, on around, so that you hear the same mournful wail by the rotted walls of Cadiz, Spain, that you hear 12,000 miles around in the depths of Benares the Capital of the World.  These people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos of silly civilized American lore -- they had high cheekbones and slanted eyes, and soft ways; they were not fools, they were not clowns; they were the great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it.  The waves are Chinese, but the earth is an Indian thing.  As essential as rocks in the desert are they in the desert of "history."  And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land; they knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment.  For when destruction comes to the world of "history" and the Apocalypse of the Fellahin returns once more as so many times before, people will stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico as well as from the caves of Bali, where it all began and where Adam was suckled and taught to know.  These were my growing thoughts as I drove the car into the hot, sunbaked town of Gregoria."

I find that entire passage amazing and a prescient sensing on Kerouac's part of the re-emergence of the indigenous peoples throughout the world, and the final acknowledgement that they understood themselves and the earth far better than do we.  Such are my own conclusions.  Trust me, nobody else in the twentieth century saw Mexico or this truth quite so clearly.  The only disappointment is that Kerouac wasn't able to integrate that massive insight into his own life and re-ensoul himself thereby.  "...the earth is an Indian thing."  I love that.

After whoring in Gregoria, the threesome staggers into Mexico City, Jack gets dysentery, Cassady leaves, and the novel collapses into a kind of meaningless denouement in its final pages.  As Jack intended.  In his private journals of 1947, ten years before the publication of "On The Road," Jack mentions a new story idea he has of two guys hitchhiking across America in search of something that they never quite find.  As it turns out, he lived that story line out in his own life.

But it's all learning, right?  Next life, Jack won't have to do all that gallivanting about.  Been there, done that.  IF the lesson was learned.  People mightily resist learning the lessons that life is trying to teach them.

So this week I'm going to read my favorite of Kerouac's novels, "Dharma Bums," plus the swaggering sutra, "The Scripture of the Golden Eternity."  I'll report on both for Jack's centennial next weekend.  Till then.