The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [8]
“Comparisons are odious,” Japhy likes to say, but he lives on them, prefacing his remarks with phrases like “the trouble with you” or “you don’t realize.” “It’ll do you good” passes for an explanation. Climbing Matterhorn, the irrepressibly loquacious Henry Morley (based on the Berkeley librarian John Montgomery and one of Kerouac’s greatest comic portraits), a master of dadaist feats of free association and a charmingly feckless hiker, lets out a yodel. Japhy corrects him, explaining that the Native American “hoo!” is “much nicer,” though once he’s reached the summit, naked save for his jockstrap, he starts yodeling himself. Again and again, Japhy condemns middle-class America, its “grooming school” colleges, “white-tiled toilets,” and general “fuggup with appearances”; he wants to start a printing press that will turn out “icy bombs for the booby public.” But Ray demurs—“Ah, the public aren’t so bad, they suffer too.” He understands why his mother loves her kitchen appliances; he even sympathizes with his hardworking brother-in-law and his growing impatience with Ray’s apparently shiftless ways. However frightened he is at the prospect of a world “electrified to the Master Switch,” Ray can’t forget that the people sitting in front of their TV sets—an activity in which he occasionally indulges himself—are also individuals, and “they’re not hurting anyone.” Ray knows that his own demand for unconditional acceptance means that he must accept others unconditionally too.
Nor do Japhy and Ray respond to nature in quite the same way. Coming down Matterhorn, Ray is ecstatic because, he says, he’s learned from Japhy that “you can’t fall off a mountain.” He’s also thrilled to “begin to smell people” again; returning to civilization is like “waking up from an endless nightmare.” As Ray’s first forebodings approaching the isolated bleakness of Desolation Peak again reveal, nature unadorned by human inventiveness can look premeditated to Kerouac, like a plot or a crime. In the far darker account he gives in Desolation Angels, Kerouac can’t wait to leave Desolation Peak for the city, where there will be “rumpled couches with women on them” and “drama rag[ing] all unthinking,” the world that, after all, birthed Kerouac’s own spontaneous prose. In his hikes in Dharma Bums, Ray is happiest when he has a sense that he already knows this wilderness, when he feels “something inexpressibly broken in my heart as though I’d lived before and walked this trail.” To activate his deepest imagination, Kerouac needed a doublefold of memory on place that nature unaided does not supply—not someone else’s memories but his memories, if need be from another life. Ideas can’t interpret landscapes for Kerouac as they sometimes did for Snyder; he could never write, as Snyder did, that “the most / Revolutionary consciousness is to be found / Among the most ruthlessly exploited classes: /Animals, trees, water, air, grasses.” Only people, or ghosts, can populate Kerouac’s world.
Kerouac’s real Buddhist period was over by the late 1950s, but at no time did he pretend that Christ had lost the dominant place in his heart. In an interview with The Paris Review in the last year of his life, when questioned as to why he had written about Buddha and not Christ, Kerouac retorted angrily, “All I write about is Jesus!” For Kerouac, there was no real difference between the two religious leaders; the story of Siddhartha, later known as the Buddha, born in India in the fifth century BCE, a tale Kerouac retells