in the world of nothingness

"The Dharma Bums", Jack Kerouac, 1958

You truly need to quiet your mind for this one, to piece together the wonders of Japhy Ryder (poet Gary Snyder) through the eyes of Raymond Smith (Jack Kerouac himself), to understand in a bit of a Buddhist nothingness not silence not noise not anything. At times, with all swirling in my brain these days--moving, staying in Phoenix, balancing finances, the hard-hit realization of being a full-fledged adult with credit and economy--I had times I felt shamefully noisy. But that's why it's good I hit a more romantic Kerouac with his "Dharma Bums" at this time, to remember the quiet and the joy and the OKness of many things. (Even if he was drunk and trying to get laid a lot of the time--).

Japhy Ryder is to "The Dharma Bums" what Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) is to "On the Road": the Chosen One Kerouac follows pseudonymed-up for another segment of his life--journey--adventure--learning. This time we go fewer places than "On the Road" before, but the visions of life are more wide-eyed. You can literally taste the coldness of the stream Kerouac sips from as they make their way up Matterhorn Mt., feel the exhilaration as Kerouac realizes you can't fall off of a mountain(!), and then, later, see the clouds swirling below you as the lookout on great Desolation Peak (a place not quite as romanticized in the more devastating "Desolation Angels"). Japhy takes Kerouac through all of this, showing him the purity in the quiet outdoors, steering clear of tourists and haggles, noise and human-inflicted pain. Even in the city they live in shacks and sit on haysacks meditating, doing nothing and everything. We even run into Allen Ginsberg who Kerouac portrays more crabby then ever due to his conflict with Kerouac's insane passion toward his BhuddiChristian beliefs (not hard to see why this was the Kerouac book he was the harshest towards, though honestly, I take him for a more objective intellectual then that). In turn for Japhy's guidance, Kerouac immortalizes him in his familiar rollicking prose, edited I'm sure with more tight punctuation, let loose enough to let the rhythm and spontaneity breathe through and sound authentically Kerouac. He is far warmer and more idolizing of him than the, at time caricature-like, Neal Cassady.

In the end, you see Kerouac as the mountain lookout, following in the shoes of this young man, Japhy, trying to understand his world, see how it fits him. In later books, we'd find out it didn't quite go as dreamily as he had wished or even chronicled in the last 30 or so pages of this book, but here, for the sake of this work of fiction, it was a blessing and a soothing peace gathering around this Raymond Smith, this man searching for something beyond the booze and women that plagued his life so, past the insane drama his so often inflicted upon himself and immediately returned to after his trip down the mountain. In many ways, perhaps, this was the silent climax in the hectic life of the fictional Sal Paradise, Raymond Smith, Jack Duluoz, as the one lurking in the shadows of the Duluoz Legend wanted us to see. Maybe. Or maybe that's my romantic interpretation of it all. Either way, I leave with a quote to fall with the popular interpretation of Kerouac as a brilliant chronicler of post-World War Americans searching for a place to be, with

"I recalled with a twinge of sadness how Japhy was always so dead serious about food, and I wished the whole world was dead serious about food instead of silly rockets and machines and explosives using everybody's food money to blow their heads off anyway."




PS: I've now read three of the 17 (as I count'um right now) "Graphic Classics" from penguin. This, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Candide, and Fairy Tales. I love the feel and the covers and all of the contextual intros and notes!

upside-down sadness imagery

"Fairy Tales", Hans Christian Andersen, stories between 1845 and 1872

I've had a hard time getting to writing this, primarily due to the fact I rarely wrote about Andersen's book while I was reading. Usually I'll take down a reaction, write something to keep my mind active and enhance the reading experience, but for these, I just read and laid back and enjoyed. These are dark, imaginative tales full of the most blessedly amazingly visual imagery you can come across, which respect children and provide intrigue for adults. And they are truly to be taken in, pondered, and enjoyed, and my own personal writing about them comes very secondary to digesting and feeling them.

In the Penguin Deluxe Classic, or the Graphic Classic, there is an extensive introduction plus a bevy of notes in the back which put these fairy tales into perfect context. Even if you're familiar with "The Ugly Duckling" or "Thumbelina" via other interpretations, movies, etc., this is the ultimate way to experience them -- from the author who perfected them with commentary that lets you understand why he went through the trouble. From his closeted homosexuality to his intense longing and self-mocking ways, you can feel the humanbeing in Andersen whereas before he's always been some mystical character full of magic and decidedly unreal.

The overriding themes of the collection tend to be alienation, the power of love (or art), and the appreciation for what one has. The imagery that accompanies these things, such as the mermaid of "The Little Mermaid" turning into suds on the water when she dies without her love the prince, or the tine soldier and ballerina being cooked and killed in the over of "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" (he melting into a heart, her going to ash), show the true anguish Andersen wished to express and drove his themes home and, at the same time, capture any reader of the past 150 years. Still, nothing beats the image of the ugly duckling alone, in wintertime, swimming circles in a pond that's slowly freezing around him, the hole he's swimming in getting smaller and smaller until he is frozen in it. That vision of loneliness and alienation in the face of unruly hate in the world is a timeless picture of the forever state of humanity.

So here are my five favorites of the collection with a quick word why I liked it so much:

"The Ice Maiden": The best of the longer writings, the wintry images along with the concept of death coming from under and grabbing you with no regard to your current life situation even vaguely hints at the absurdity of life through all the romantic visions and distinct chivalry.

"The Ugly Duckling": Who'd want to be a regular duck and have it that easy, when one can find out (s)he's a swan? Dumb mainstream society doesn't know what it has in us.

"The Little Mermaid": The mute girls can't express her love to the only one she wants, the power in the anguish here is unparalleled throughout the story and easily relateable to a sucker like me.

"The Fir Tree": Because we all get chopped up and burnt-up before we know it. Better enjoy our forest while we can!

"The Travelling Companion": For the love of Karma, treat people well! Shows Andersen's anguish toward the royal man he loved so but could not truly have, but that's not exactly why I love it. It's the queen getting beaten, the princess getting trounced! Wenches, pretentious wenches, take that! And all the death imagery is harrowing wonderful. The men who failed to win the princess hanging from trees all around.

And if I can have a bonus sixth, "The Match Girl" pays homage to the lonely world of the child, with the most sublime passing over after a life of poverty and abuse, into the arms of the only one who genuinely cared for her, her grandmother.

It was a delight to read all of these stories, and it will be a delight to revisit them over and over as we have been doing for over a century.

"It doesn't matter if you're born in a duck yard when you've been lying inside a swan's egg."

when the world brings its fire...

"We Have Always Lived in the Castle", Shirley Jackson, 1962.

Merricat Blackwood poisoned her family long ago. She strategically kept her sister Constance and Uncle Julian alive; everyone else had to go. In this sinister story themed around reclusiveness and resistance to mainstream culture, we have a villainess and heroine all wrapped into one person.

All's well, or so it'd seem for these outcasted ladies. Following a trial that set Constance free of being charged for murdering her family (you don't have Merricat confirmed as the perpetrator until halfway through the book or so), the Blackwoods live a life away from everyone. Constance never leaves, Uncle Julian can't, and Merricat only goes into town for shopping (and a side order of harsh ridicule).

Then Charles arrives. A mainstream main disguised as family, the girls' cousin, he infiltrates the their away-from-it-all world in attempts to assimilate. Unwittingly, he sets fire to the house with one of his pipes and burns the entire upstairs. Then the house is plundered and pillaged, the climax being the time where society attempts to crush the girls forever. But see them a few days later, the remaining portion of the house barricaded, with only their garden and tablecloths for Merricat's clothes, and on they go, to their own drum.

But is the drum sinister? Is Merricat's design to keep her sister down and subservient? Or has Merricat liberated what was left of her family and separated them and their useless fortune from the doldrums of normalcy? These are appropriate questions, I believe, and ridiculously hard to answer. I suppose that qualifies the books as challenging, morally speaking, and you almost feel pleasure out of not answering, simply pondering. I couldn't help but feel oddly hopeful in the last chapter as I heard of Society's hindsight horrible guilt as they left food for the girls who waited until late at night to retrieve it. Charity. Heavy consciences. And the girls, not needing, not caring, but eating it and living on the essentials of love, garden, and air. It's bohemian stuff. With some sick fantasy we've all had in our most bitter moments -- to be on an island with our families, and everyone, just everyone, lost forever -- if not killed, then just exiled.

Just be on an island.

"'The least Charles could have done', Constance said, considering seriously, 'was shoot himself through the head in the driveway.'"

the garden of laughter

"Candide", Francois Voltaire, 1759

After reading Michael Wood's excellent and exhaustive introduction on Voltaire's satirical masterpiece, "Candide", I've got no cause to write some retread interpretation. Instead, I offer my exhilaration upon my first of many readings of this novel, and what it means to my own work.

First of all, I sit in stream-of-postmodern-conscious and reel out all my anxieties, and I call it writing (which it is). Yet, I see Candide and his friends, who have been beaten, torn to shreds, tending their garden, and I forget to tend mine. I see Voltaire tending his for 94 pages and shredding the art of philosophy he made his legend off of, and I forget to *laugh* as he laughs at humanity.

To see Candide go through the the horrors, lie on a bed of philosophy and hope, travel the lands only to find perfection and deny it by some strange nature expelling himself from a land not natural to himself, all in the name of refuting Optimism, may be of the darkest joys I have ever partaken of. Even as he comes about his lovely Cunegonde, she is exposed as hideous and he marries her out of duty -- and I like the thought that this is reality realized through the previous ideal of marrying Cunegonde, or the idea of her.

No character leads a pointless existence, no episode drags, the pace of writing is extreme and refreshing to my eyes. There is an inkling of sentimentality toward the end, an existential nuance amidst the absurdity, even if it's the absurdity of destiny (a stylized contradiction in my reflection only). I love that Voltaire can even tease himself through Pococurante, and his pickiness toward literature, which the melancholy philosopher Martin chides when Candide suggests he's happy for his ability to criticize ("Which is to say...that there is pleasure to be had in not taking pleasure"). I can't say enough of the two day experience in reading "Candide", and how it reminds us that 1) Everything is indeed not OK and it's OK to confront this, and 2) Laugh at it, it's absurd.

Perhaps then I write my satire. Or just read more of them. Or, at the simplest and most useful, I walk around town and remember to laugh, that it's chaos and no one knows what to do and, indeed, we are asses. And I just laugh.

PS: The packaging with the various comics including the front cover of the opening of the novel and how Candide is thrown into his horrors, as well as the maze to discover the origin of Pangloss's social disease, are awesome, as well are the apt appendices (including excerpts from Voltaire's philosophical encyclopedia, a poem on the earthquake at Lisbon and its use toward refuting Optimism, and an alternate opening to the Paris chapter).

PPS: I also learned what an auto-da-fe is: When heretics were publicly charged and invited to make an "act of faith"; though in the circumstance in "Candide", Pangloss was hanged and Candide flogged in this horrid world.

"'What is Optimism?' asked Cacambo - 'Alas!' said Candide, 'it is the mania for insisting that all is well when all is by no means well.'"