The precipitation of crystals ; reading Murakami's Underground

Haruki Murkami 

アンダーグラウンド (Andaguraundo / Underground) 

Kodansha (Japan) 1997-98 Harvill Press (UK) 2000 

Recently, as I was drifting through the pages of Murakami's Underground, the oral history and coming-to-terms of the 1995 Tokyo gas attack, I found myself drawn to these lives that had – seemingly out of sheer, implacable chance – been caught up in an atrocity. Some of them had been altered forever – a man whose sight will never fully recover; a sportswoman who can't bear the strain of exercise and now tires quickly. What stood out across these narratives was not, however, their involvement in this bizarre end-of-days blood letting, but instead the narratives with which they framed their participation or experience. What stood out, most of all, were their routines.

On that morning, thousands of people – salarymen, housewives, pilots, metro staff – encountered – perhaps for the first time – the strangeness of the absurd, the un-ordinary, in the half-wakeful steps of their ordinary lives. After all, the commute – in whatever nation on earth, whether it is clung to the side of a steam train or slept in a cramped electric carriage – is a time of passage, a movement from the private into the public life. Murakami, to make his subjects comfortable, and to emplace the narratives in some sort of humanity, had asked the interviewees to recount a little of their routine. They agreed (but why does this matter? You really want to know? I imagine they asked these questions, a little confused).

After a brief author's portrait, the transcribed interview begins. It is an ordinary voice caught in the process of recollecting. “I always take the front carriage when I change trains at Kasumigaseki”. Partly this might be the flattening that occurs in the translation of conversation (I am reading a translation). But I suspect that it might be due to some other effect, such as the struggle of conversation to encompass the sudden eruption of violence that constitutes the unexpected. As Yury Lotman has drawn out, there is value to the analogies of biological and chemical processes within the experience of the articulation of narrative, of voice; Lotman describes how, “an alien body falling into a supersaturated solution causes the precipitation of crystals, i.e., reveals the true structure of the dissolved substance”.

On that morning, the 20th of March 1995, an alien body did indeed fall into an already supersaturated solution – the cramped, complex, layered lives of Tokyo's residents, its commuters, its salarymen. In one of the largest cities on earth each individual, as an individual, maintains their own space of personal reflection – their routines, which act like anchors in the midst of a stormy sea. This alien body – sarin, Aum Shinrikyo – brought forth, even for a moment, a state change in the solution itself – in society. I don't want to labour this analogy, and I am not arguing that these people were simply chemically reacting to a given event (!), but I do think that Lotman's analogy has a certain relevance to the concept of routine, especially when routine – the opposite of chaos – is precisely implicated within that chaos. Routine is the negation of a loss of control, or at least an attempt to push it away. That Murakami wanted each interviewee to begin there, and that each interviewee agreed with precise and specific language, tells us a great deal about the complex crystals of meaning and identity that appear to become activated in a moment of precipitation, when the alien object – chaos itself – encounters the ordinary, the routine.

We associate our routines – our rituals of keeping chaos at bay – with a particular place. That place is usually our own home, or bedroom; it is a safe place, a place in which your routines are not only central, but primitively woven into the existence of the place itself.Your rituals – like drum thumping – constitute the sanctity and sacristy of these places. And even when you must depart that place, you carry your rituals with you; sit in a café and watch how two people drink an identical cup of tea. But by the precipitation of our rituals, their coming into focus precisely as routines, as objects of stabilisation, do they become less meaningful, even awkward? We never say, “I must now have a cigarette while closing my eyes, imagining nothing”, or “now I boil the kettle and stand with my head against the door jamb, listening to its boil”. We don't say that these things fill our time at all – we simply say, “I had breakfast”, or “I made a cup of tea”. “I sat around for a bit before leaving the house”.

What seems incomprehensible to these people is precisely that their routines – their silent, unconscious self-stabilisation – bought them into contact with the absurd extrusion of a gas attack, an act of wanton and unimaginable terrorism. The shock comes with realising that the routine is now implicated in that event – and without it, if you had broken your routine, would everything have been okay? What is to blame, the routine – which ensured that you got on this train in this carriage at precisely this time – or the attack itself. Which is responsible for severing the anchor, after all? That the interviewee has a favourite carriage, perhaps even a favourite seat, is not uncommon amongst these accounts. Other individuals maintained similarly precise remembrances of travel; “I always take the fourth carriage by the front, by the rear door”. In the crushing mass of the train, packed in like cattle, the performance of routine confirms a certain continuity of the Self amidst the flattening two-dimensionality of the group. Performing routine is to say, “I am here, me; I remain”. 

And yet, on the other side of the coin, the members of Aum Shinrikyo – the renunciates who had packed in their ordinary lives, their families, their attachments with the outside world, had traded one routine for another – a routine less biting. Of the Aum members interviewed by Murakami, many were emphatic that they had given up the complexities and unsynchronised meanderings of their life in the 'secular world' in order to find some fixity within the spiritual community that Aum represented. These members describe the spartan discipline, the regulatory requirements of being a member, of joining that holy brethren. So many tapes must be listened to; so many hours of standing and seated meditation performed. Each renunciate was given a job, perhaps a counterpart of their profession in the 'secular world'. The difference was that the members were not accruing wealth, but spiritual “merit” (while their leader, Asahara, accrued the eerily clichéd postures of the prophet-cultist; wealth, violence, paranoia and questionable sexual behaviours towards female members of the sect; the oddly typical contrasts between ordinary members and their Master). You can easily see why the draw of routine is so persuasive. New, entirely new and risky experiences cause us to flinch or pull away.

Despite the delusions and eventual terror of Aum, in reading the explanations of its members – not those who committed the attacks, but those who were, for whatever reason, members – you can sense a feeling of spiritual awakening, of existential reconfiguration. Meditation and the study of the Self brings attention to the confusions and faults that criss-cross our identities. To focus attention on these faults, a great white beacon of light punched through the fog of night, is to awaken and confront things that are not easy to confront. Routine – the smoking of a cigarette, spreading butter on bread, how you wash your hands and when – these things smudge and smooth across the recognition of faults, of the great gulfs. Routine – at least, unexamined routine – helps to ease our existence in a world even if we do not fit completely with it. And yet, at the same time, routines can also reaffirm our strengths – many old Zen koans precisely urge us to do simple, 'boring' things; “drink tea”, “chop wood, carry water”. These routines, these systems of habituated behaviour, can also provide deep pools for reflection and immersion. They help us to stabilise the often chaotic vicissitudes through which we pass, and flag, and fail.

As readers of the Paris Review will know, routine is an essential thing for a writer; sure, many say, inspiration can come, but you need to be in the habit of it all, in the mode of receptiveness. E.B. White; “a writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper”. Or Jack Kerouac, with his burning candles, his bedroom desk and good light, a drink when you begin to drift away, drift off. Hemingway with his lectern and bourbon, the hour to rise, to eat, to stop and start again. To say that routine is only ever linked with unconscious drifting, with mindless activity, is to misread the whole effect of routine – to misread how it can, like a koan, like seated meditation on a small, square pillow in the spare bedroom (my own little habit, facing the scuffed-up wall), become a great reservoir of understanding, of allowing the self to drift to the surface, unobserved. I'll hedge the following with Murakami's own warning, that I promise I'll only draw on the pop-psychology this once, but is the fact that each interviewee put emphasis on their routine, its specificity, its consistency (“I always”, “on Mondays”), a means of securing themselves emotionally from what they were about to divulge – their involvement, their being caught-up-in the strange and stuttered apocalypse of the gas attack itself?

One of the great strengths of Murakami's work is his distance from it; the narratives of the survivors speak to us on their own terms, without the great, leering authority of the author reaching down to fix and transfix the revelation. The author's natural predisposition to strut and stride is reduced to a shuffle on carpets several rooms away, faint yet present. The temporary overlap, on that March Monday morning in 1995, of end-of-days apocalypse and workaday routine, changed the until then unfocused solution of people's lives; with the evaporation of sarin, its sweetness and heaviness on the breath, crystals spread through the solution, reflecting strangely the ordinary lives of people.

Rupert Brooke abroad ; "too old for romance"

Rupert Brooke. Letters from America. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd, 1931; repr. 1947 

Mamua, when our laughter ends,
And hearts and bodies, brown as white,
Are dust about the doors of friends,
Or scent ablowing down the night,
Then, oh! then, the wise agree,
Comes our immortality. 

From ‘Tiare tahiti’

- 1 -

It’s natural to imagine how the life of the poet Rupert Brooke would have played out had he not contracted malaria, and died, aboard a French hospital ship moored off the Aegean island of Skyros on 23rd April 1915. And yet, it seemed inevitable that Brooke would be immortalized for this sad, unmartial death. He died in Byronic quietude, a victim to the ungainly war for which he was headed.

His poems, which had been published to great acclaim in the Times Literary Supplement, had boosted him to the status of a celebrity. Handsome, elite, cultured. More importantly still (wagging, hatted heads; parasols dipped just so) he was a soldier, a soldier who gave the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ - his life - for the ‘cause’. Brooke’s life and education leading up to his death are not unusual for one of his ‘set’. Born in Rugby in 1887 to a schoolmaster father, Brooke went on to attend Rugby and, later, King’s College, Cambridge, an avid classicist.

From the outset Brooke was surrounded by literary activity; he was close friends with Virginia Woolf, who later claimed she had skinny-dipped with Brooke in a moonlit pool. Later, still, Brooke was affiliated with the Gloucestershire village poetic group, the Dymocks. Brooke’s star seemed to be in a hackneyed ascendant. It is unsettling to read, then, in a love letter penned aboard RMS Tahiti in January 1914; “let’s all be successful when we’re 50 - at least that is what we (the great poets) are going to be, we think it a little hasty, a little previous, a little undignified to be successful at 24”. Putting his tongue in cheek aside, it would come about that Brooke would find success at a young age.

But what happens next will always be unknown. And yet, immortality always shimmers there at the edges of his poetry; in ‘The soldier’, in ‘Tiare tahiti’; two poems at opposite ends of the world, of sentiment and idea. On one side the dapper, languorous traveller (we can imagine, his neck braced with flowers, warm wind stirring his hair), and on the other the stiff-backed soldier, khaki green, leather gloves and a pacing stick. But this essay isn’t about Brooke the war poet, the Homeric martyr.

But what is more interesting, to me, is Brooke’s pre-life, in the war’s sickly, shuddering shadow. It might come to a shock to know that Brooke’s reaction to the war was not a martial lunge for the Dardanelles (where that old war had been fought, long before), but something more complex, more uncertain: “He didn’t know whether he was glad or sad. It was a new feeling”. Brooke, here, is writing obliquely about himself, casting himself as “an unusual young man” in an essay later collected in his travel writing, collected after his death. In the typical slant of comfortable journalism today, there is a certain ghoulish enjoyment in ‘denting’ the supposed reputation of such hallowed heroes. In a typical example Fiachra Gibbons, writing in the Guardian, takes a strange pleasure in depicting Brooke as “cruel, sadistic and unbearable”. Sure, nobody is debating that people living lives - long dead - in the past could be less than perfect (of course!). What grates with Gibbons’ ‘criticism’ is her apparent sickly surprise in Brooke’s “complexity” (saying this as if it were a slur). We can breathe a sigh of relief about his “complexity” without condoning the conduct of his relationships.

And despite all of this, his poems are taught in school classrooms, and his name is invariably recited at the feet of the cenotaph. These are statuesque poems, glorious poems, martial poems. What this emphasis, this blind-sided obsession does is kill the man twice, denying his strange wit, his bubbling prose and keen observation. As Edward Marsh, Brooke’s mentor and friend, put it in the forward to Brooke’s Letters from America: “the author started in May 1913 on a journey to the United States, Canada, and the South Seas, from which he returned next year at the beginning of June”. This is the journey, in my mind, that reflects the man as much as it does the poet. Indeed, Marsh was certain that Brooke, had he lived, would have published “his travels” in longer form. What we are left with is the strange fruit, the unusual bounty, of his published ‘letters’, private correspondence and the poetry inspired by his journeys. But what do they say?


- 2 -

For Brooke, like any European of his class and time, travel was a natural curiosity, a thing to uncover, to understand. In his first letter, before he even sets foot on American soil, Brooke’s head is filled with pre-impressions, slabs of conversation, testy suggestions thrown (we can imagine) over central London lunch tables; “the pilgrim who is crossing the Atlantic for the first time cannot approach Sandy Hook Bar with so completely blank a mind as he would wish”. America instantly leaps out, folds out as something different, something big and unscrupulous and warm; like Fitzgerald, not so many years apart, Brooke is touched by the “very definite taste of a jerking, vital, bizarre ‘rag time’ civilisation”. There’s also the unmissable American taste for music, so keen in London, which “has bitten into one’s brain”. At the end of all this, a bemused footnote, Brooke lets an American speak: “Wal! It’s a great country!”.

Brooke’s letters are, throughout, edged with a certain melancholy and a forced, stretched-smile joyfulness. When describing feelings of dispossession, of loss, he is eloquent and observant. He turns out to be a keen observer of nature and men’s relationship with the world around them:

“There was perceptible, even here, though less urgent than elsewhere, the strangeness I had noticed in woods by the St Lawrence, and on the banks of the Delaware (where are red-haired girls who sing at dawn), and in British Columbia, and afterwards among the brown hills and colossal trees of California, but especially by that lonely golden beach in Manitoba, where the high-stepping little brown deer run down to drink, and the wild geese through the evening go flying and crying. It is an empty land. To love the country here—mountains are worshipped, not loved—is like embracing a wraith. A European can find nothing to satisfy the hunger of his heart. The air is too thin to breathe. He requires haunted woods, and the friendly presence of ghosts. The immaterial soil of England is heavy and fertile with the decaying stuff of past seasons and generations. Here is the floor of a new wood, yet uncumbered by one year's autumn fall. We Europeans find the Orient stale and too luxuriantly fetid by reason of the multitude of bygone lives and thoughts, oppressive with the crowded presence of the dead, both men and gods. So, I imagine, a Canadian would feel our woods and fields heavy with the past and the invisible, and suffer claustrophobia in an English countryside beneath the dreadful pressure of immortals. For his own forests and wild places are windswept and empty. That is their charm, and their terror” (Letter XIII) 

What Brooke craves is the sense of past, cluttered, clustered lives; the pleasant claustrophobia of “haunted woods, and the friendly presence of ghosts”. In earlier, private letters to James Strachey, Brooke’s melancholia brews up; “I came back last term feeling hopeless about everything”, “I dwelt, if you like, in a rather useless and petty self-pity”. Brooke is honest to admit the apparent self-centeredness of his feelings, and hopes that Strachey can at least accommodate them a little. What stands out from Brooke's correspondence is his unobtrusive, even his meek attitude to America. In a recent article on foreigners abroad - on British visitors who 'speak for' the continent (or, at least presume to do so) - Carlin Romano argues that they "become know it alls [throwing] slingshots from the prestigious literary scholar on a lark, unburdening his prejudices in any bloody way he pleases, with cheeks frequently stuffed of tongue". Brooke, in contrast, readily appreciates the broadness of America, its variability, its hugeness. Rather than climbing to the vantage of height and 'seeing all and everything', Brooke is coy, halting:

"At Calgary, if you can spare a minute from more important matters, slip beyond the hurrying white city, climb the golf links, and gaze west. A low bank of dark clouds disturbs you by the fixity of its outline. It is the Rockies, seventy miles away. On a good day, it is said, they are visible twice as far, so clear and serene is this air. Five hundred miles west is the coast of British Columbia, a region with a different climate, different country, and different problems" 

Climbing to the head of the Rockies (whether he climbed them or not), he sees difference, not, in a god-like swipe, everything. Unlike the orientalising traveler of Edward Said's criticism, Brooke admits the delimitations inherent in his own perspective.


- 3 -

 "Oh, Eddie, it's all true about the South Seas! I get a little tired of it at moments, because I am just too old for Romance. But there it is: there it wonderfully is: heaven on earth, the ideal life, little work, dancing and singing and eating, naked people of incredible loveliness, perfect manners, and immense kindliness, a divine tropic climate, and intoxicating beauty of scenery." Letter to Edward Marsh, near Fiji, November 15th (?) 1913 

If Brooke had been charmed by America's openness (albeit uncomfortable in its sheer ghostless vastness), he was doubly so in Fiji's warmth - singing, dancing, eating. It doesn't take long to pick up on the sensuousness of the young poet's experience, yet also his lack of judgement - something we might find a little surprising from a Cambridge-educated classicist.

If Brooke's account sounds very slanted, an orientalising emphasis on mystery, romance, and the exotic (as if the Samoans he encounters, and others, truly had no cares, no three dimensional depth), then we also have to acknowledge that Brooke is writing self-consciously; he wryly admits to its strangeness, the way in which his travels hinge a little on the image of the European abroad; Life, Eddie, is what you get in the bars of the hotels in 'Frisco, or Honolulu, or Suva, or Apia, and in the smoking-rooms in these steamers. It is incredibly like a Kipling story, and all the people are very self-consciously Kiplingesque. Yesterday, for instance, I sat in the Chief Engineer's cabin, with the first officer and a successful beach-comber lawyer from the white-man's town in Samoa, drinking Australian champagne from breakfast to lunch. "To-day I am not well." The beach-comber matriculated at Wadham, and was sent down. Also, he rode with the Pytchley, quotes you Virgil, and discusses the ins and outs of the Peninsular campaign. And his repertoire of smut is enormous. Mere Kipling, you see, but one gets some good stories. Verses, of a school-boy kind, too... Sehr primitiv. The whole thing makes a funny world. Kipling; Wadham college; Virgil; cards and alcohol on a south seas steamer.

At the same time Brooke's image, really his self-conscious identification with the South Seas, folds out to layer up images not only of "goddess" like, bare-chested Samoan women, but sent-down Oxbridgers, and smoky underlit bars in San Francisco. Brooke revels in the image, the impression, not only of the exotic southern seas, but the entire difference inhabited in America, in this other world (so unlike Grantchester, King's College, London). Brooke's imaginary of 'west' (both America and the south seas combined) is then a widely encompassing and partly unstable set of impressions, but also one in which Brooke happily dons the language and the swagger of the European traveller - such a careful observer as Brooke is means that he can happily pick up cliches and run with them, such as the swagger of not being able to write "on the trail", implying that his correspondence, his published impressions, are not the polished and carefully articulated things that they are.

The attraction of Polynesia seemed, then, to be its sensuality, its openness. Brooke had only recently experienced a mental breakdown brought about by the ending of his affair with Ka Kox. It is widely known that Brooke had a relationship in Tahiti with a woman called Taatamata while staying in a village in 1913, "a girl with wonderful eyes, the walk of a goddess, and the heart of an angel, who is, luckily, devoted to me". She had a child with him, which he neglected. From his letters to Edward Marsh, Brooke seems to acknowledge his own emotional fragility, fearing that, despite the South Sea's separation from Cambridge and London, he will suffer the same inescapable feelings: "Can't you imagine how shattered and fragmentary a heart I'm bearing away to Fiji and Tahiti? And, oh dear! I'm afraid they'll be just as bad". Another writer has suggested that, for Rupert Brooke, the expectation of a love that was both romantic and erotic was a great - and yet sorrow-tinged - expectation.

On his death bed in the Aegean, Brooke asked a friend to write to Taatamata, to notify her of his death - which he knew was not far away - and to send his love. In the end, despite his desire to create a blankness of mind (something he achieved, fleetingly, in America), "one only finds in the South Seas what one brings there". Brooke's journeys could be seen both as an escape from the cloying emotional experience that had been Cambridge - and his relationship with Ka Kox - as well as an opportunity to embrace fully his extremities of emotion, to exist as himself - as an accepted self - within a place where 'Rupert Brooke' - the Brooke of tripos exams, poetry and tea at Grantchester - did not, could not, exist. In his most famous South Seas poem, Brooke delights in the simplicity, the freshness of his emotions.

Down the dark, the flowered way,
Along the whiteness of the sand,
And in the water's soft caress,
Wash the mind of foolishness,
Mamua, until the day 

We can speculate, but that "foolishness" could be many things. It could be the entire project of western civilisation, with all of its strictures, its rules and expectations. It could also be Brooke himself - the ties and frustrations in which he found himself caught 'back home'. Ultimately, as he says - we can imagine, a throwing up of the hands: Well this side of Paradise! ... There's little comfort in the wise The wise, the strictured, the ruled and structured - all of these things wash away, or seem to, "this side of paradise", even if he cannot finally separate himself from the things he brought with him. If Brooke's journey to the south seas was an attempt to wash away his old life - his world of 'foolishness' - then it was not successful. Brooke's ultimate finding was that he could not pull himself away from his old, sensual life; the "wise" - who see that "our immortality" comes at the end of life, when we are "dust" - are worth nothing "this side of paradise". It is in "soft caress", in the "flowered way" that life will be found. Undeniable, unquenchable.

the ecstasies of Jack

The interview, which took place in the beat writer's home in 1968, quickly took a strange turn. The at-first reticently amiable Kerouac grudged the company of his interviewers, yet quickly offered drink and pills, pills that were “a little white beard in your mortality”. And then, at the end, in the last word, Kerouac prompted the interviewer; he tells him to ask him what Kerouac means. “Jack, just tell me what Kerouac means?”. It's like he isn't so sure, himself. Like he's looking for confirmation.

I came to Kerouac, to all of the beats, “late”. And by this I mean, I read them when I was twenty five, in a hot summer burst while I sat on night buses and waited in coach stations and ran out of money in Austria, with the snow line tantalising on the Julian alps. In a sense, I expected an affinity, because I had been told there would be an affinity. Jack Kerouac was the beat darling, the road hipster, the vernacular poet ; he was the novelist for the down and out, for the “sentimental young man”.

And so when I began to read, not On the Road but The Dharma Bums, I read with an expectation to confirm certain things, impressions, that I had been given. But in that reading, and in subsequent readings, I found not only that I intensely liked (I'd half expected not) Kerouac, but that I liked him in spite of this reputation – of the hip beat poet. Where he travelled wasn't important. What he drank or took was not important. It was in the level of words and in the metrical structure of his writing; a prose that creates an atmosphere of expansive, ecstatic mysticism. For me, it's just not about the road. It's about the vision.

 *

 For me, Kerouac is not “the beat poet”. He is the complex, confused man who saw himself variously as a speaker, a listener, a Catholic mystic. When I first brought my copy of Dharma Bums, in a little, musty bookshop in the afternoon's cold, I actually felt slightly embarrassed, as if I were late to a party that everybody else had left. I confided to a bookish friend about not having read Kerouac, and he seemed taken aback. He didn't like Kerouac, but as a younger man had been carried away by him. “But why don't you like him, now?” I asked. He replied, “well, because he's immature. I mean, all those crazy days and nights, all that posing and strutting. I mean, you can't live like that”.

 He wasn't the only one. I kept talking to people, before I'd even read the book, and they each said similar things, how Kerouac was more like a “rite of passage”, an “object” from their youth, than a book in its own merit, in its own glow. And then I thought back to when I was young, and people my age were reading him, or had read him, and they said there was this “affinity”, but an affinity that dies out; “you outgrow it”. Even my parents said it. But none of them really “liked” it. None of them had a copy on their shelves. They wouldn't dream of reading it again, even if they did. What had once seemed so sexy and cool and exciting was dead. Now the world has changed; move with it. So I thought I'd give Kerouac a try.

 *

The Dharma Bums was not brooding like I thought it would be. Nor was it really pretentious. If anything it was light-hearted, fulsome, naïve. Like its bigger, bad cousin, On the Road, it has the same narrative mechanic, of the relationship between a teacher and his pupil (here, Japhy and Ray, rather than Dean and Sal), but it is not and cannot be the same. Automatically, Dharma Bums is a less self-aware, less pensive book precisely for its exposure to early West Coast Zen ; not the patient practice of the Zen we think of now, but the idea of Zen as thought association, gladness, openness. Ray cuts a naïve figure, torn between the bright city lights and the solitude of the mountain. Japhy, his teacher (based perhaps not too loosely on the poet Gary Snyder), provides the entrance and exposure to Buddhist thinking, to meditation and the loss of stricture. It, too, is a short, glad little book. But despite this honesty and earnestness, the book received not a little criticism; Ruth Fuller Sasaki said, “his [Kerouac's] Buddhism is the most garbled and mistaken I have read in many a day […] as a novelist he shows no talent whatsoever and no imagination”. Reading those words, I think Ruth Sasaki is wrong and crude in her own way. I think very much that Kerouac's glib openness, his sensitivity, are quite earnestly connected with particular strands and expressions in Zen thought and practice. And even then, Ray/Jack doesn't pretend he is somehow a Zen Master – the entire book lays itself open through its naivety, because it is exploring a principle, a sentiment.

The “garbled” critique of Ruth Sasaki is, then, a little amusing when Kerouac himself dedicated the book to the wry Tang dynasty Chinese poet Han Shan; the poet who poked fun at his own detractors with; “Mister Wang the Graduate / Laughs at my poor prosody. / I don't know a wasp's waist / much less a crane's knee / And, he followed, “my words come helter skelter”.

By opening up his Dharma Bums to that expression, Kerouac was linking himself with a particular strand or line of Zen-inspired thought, of a Zen lyrical practice. We must also remember that Kerouac was painting a portrait ; of a time and place. The torid, drunken debates of the characters in hot city jazz bars are supposed – I think – to be a little bit funny, a little off piste. “You'll be sorry some day. Why don't you ever understand what I'm trying to tell you; it's with your six senses that you're fooled into believing [that] you have six senses”. And then, its associations too are supposed to be raw ; the prose is vernacular, glad, ecstatic. “Yeah man, you know to me a mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sittin there perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence”. You can, like Ruth Sasaki, say that this just “isn't proper”, or you can go with it like Han Shan, or to pare Zen back to its Gathas and prayers, such as the teaching of the seven Buddhas ;

“Not to commit evils, /
 But to do all that is good, /
 And to keep one's thought pure - /
This is the teaching of all the Buddhas /”

 I think the reason that Dharma Bums rubs off the wrong way is because it is less procedural, less academic than critics like Ruth Sasaki would have liked. So be it, then. But I think it has an essential purity and consciousness about it that escapes, gladly, all of that. Its mistakes are both as relevant as irrelevant as the things it gets right. In a way, Ruth Sasaki was saying, “hey, he's not doing Buddhism right”. And that, for anybody who has sat on a mat in a Buddhist centre, is a downright annoying criticism to make.

 *

But then there was On the Road, which really is not On the Road but the original manuscript of it, and then it was Visions of Cody. The fact that Kerouac bifurcated On the Road into so many separate imaginations, later rereadings of the whole, tells us a great deal about his discomfiture with it, about his own vision of their being, somewhere, a true imagination of it – the history to the myth. But in its pages – whether it is On the Road, the manuscript, or Visions of Cody, there is also my own discomfort. The fact that I don't like Dean Moriarty, but that's okay. And while Ray's friendship with Japhy seemed idealistic but good, that of Sal and Dean seemed dangerous and poor, built on nothing but air. And the skewed relationships that the characters set up for each other, I knew, were doomed to fail not because they were intrinsically bad, but because they didn't have the sense, the emotional sense, to sort their lives out.

On the Road is a lot about people getting hurt because they are insensitive to one another. All of the quaint expectations that I had built around Dharma Bums now suffered in light of this. At first I just thought, “I'd been told to expect this”. But then I looked again, and read again.