Kerouac links 'Jesus' with 'Buddha' in a non-doctrinal, non-dogmatic gesture, within a 'call-and-response' pattern ('Of Jesus', 'I believe,' etc.) that has an echo of the African-American church. This inclusive feeling towards religion is fuelled, perhaps, by Kerouac's mystical strain: born and raised a Catholic, he would die a Catholic (as Gary Snyder predicted ), (1.) yet at a certain point in the early Fifties, he, along with many others, became attracted to Buddhism. (2.) The extent of his spiritual immersion is difficult to decide; Philip Whalen theorised that Kerouac's 'interest in Buddhism was pretty much literary.' (JB, 217) And Paul Giles, (admittedly writing from a committed stance of Catholicism) wrote: 'Kerouac seems to play at being a Dharma bum; he does not quite believe in any of it. In the end the image of the crucifix will be too strong.' (3.) But he certainly studied Buddhism extensively, being attracted to the school of Mahayana (Indian Buddhism) rather than Zen, in which context, Alan Watt's comment is apposite: '... their[Mahayana] followers [in the West] seem for the most part to be displaced Christians...' (4.) I am attracted to these last comments, because I feel that in his Buddhist phase, Kerouac was very much the 'displaced Christian,' driven by a deep spiritual yearning that saw his own Church as alien to this sensibility:

'... Kerouac's subjective mysticism was partly fuelled by a sense of dissatisfaction with what he conceived to be the dessicated nature of American Catholicism during the 1940s and 1950s.' (5.)

Given the intensity of his emotions, and especially his religious impulses, I feel that Buddhism was more than just a 'literary' adoption. Mexico City Blues would appear to bear this out: if, at the end of the poem, he seems to be moving back to some form or nuance of Christianity, it is not without an intense exploration of his interior religious life as mediated heavily by Buddhism. But the underlying pull of Catholicism is too strong:

'Despite the fact that Allen Ginsberg sees Mexico City Blues as evidence of Kerouac's intelligent understanding of Buddhism, it seems likely that the book marked the start of his emergence from Buddhist influence... As further evidence of the basic religious orientation of Mexico City Blues, one should consider that after it was published in 1959 Kerouac consistently autographed copies of the book by placing a cross under his signature, a practice he didn't normally use for his other books.' (MB, 490)

The spontaneous improvisatory form that he chose seems to throw up so many Christian references from the unconscious that suggest he was, in the end, embedded too far in his cultural roots to succumb for long to the seductions of Buddhism:

'The philosophical argument of the book has come full circle. Its resolution requires a fresh perspective outside the poet's own tautologies. In short, the book needs a hero, whose example can break the deadlock between Buddhist detachment and Christian (or artistic) development. That hero is Charlie Parker.' (MB, 488.)

Here the importance of the choice of Parker as a 'Beat' ikon is significant: I feel that Kerouac uses him to resolve the poem within what might be termed 'The Beat Aesthetic.' One can see that Charlie Parker is "beat" in several ways which resonate with the different meanings that the word encapsulates. He was a purveyor of the beat of bebop (and equally importantly the blues as refracted through his modern jazz technique). But alongside his undoubted musical influence, Parker embodied the hipster/outsider/outlaw stance, both for his own people and white bohemians like Kerouac. The sub-cultural ethos that contained bop was a 'free zone,' where whites especially could acquire the black street-hipster style and language:

'It was a lateral and reciprocal identification the young white American intellectual, artist and Bohemian of the forties and fifties made with the Negro, attempting, with varying degrees of success, to reap some emotional benefit from the similarity of their position in American society.' (6.)

This ethos offered a freedom that did not exist outside it in the America of the forties and fifties - although one must bear in mind that it was a constrained freedom, existing uneasily within the dominant culture. And, in this context, Parker, was, first of all, obviously black - a member of the underprivileged in American society, whatever his musical abilities, and therefore, "beat" in that sense. He was also a notorious Rimbaud-like figure, with a gargantuan appetite for sex, food, drink - and drugs. The extreme 'beat' figure is probably the junkie - and Parker's drug addiction was disastrously emulated by many, musicians and non-musicians. Moving backwards through the poem, one can track the lines that culminate in Parker as a Beat symbol back to Bill Garver - an old junkie himself. 'Beat,' in this context, shifts slightly from its musical resonation, and means 'down and out,' poor etc.

But there is an important religious aspect to the concept of 'beat,' to be found specifically in Kerouac's insistent linkage of the word to the spiritual (and Catholic) concept of 'beatific:'

'Before leaving Lowell, Jack went to the basement church of Ste. Jeanne d'Arc, and in the shadows of dusk saw the statue of the Virgin Mary turn its head. In his later rewriting of Beat history, he would cite that moment as the point when beat began to signify beatific. Actually, apart from Al Hinckle's even earlier memories, Jack had written to Allen in August explaining the beatitude of beat life, and the word beatific had been used in The Subterraneans, written in 1953.' (MB, 468.)

Kerouac can move across the different nuances of the word 'beat' to first of all position Parker as some recent Buddhist Tathagata:

  Charley Parker Looked like Buddha
     Charley Parker, who recently died
     Laughing at a juggler on the TV
     after weeks of strain and sickness,
     was called the Perfect Musician.
     And his expression on his face
     Was as calm, beautiful, and profound
     As the image of the Buddha
     Represented in the East, the lidded eyes,
     The expression that says "All is Well"
     - This was what Charley Parker
     Said when he played, All is Well.
     You had the feeling of early-in-the-morning
     Like a hermit's joy, or like
                                   the perfect cry
     Of some wild gang at a jam session
     "Wail, Wop" - Charley burst
     His lungs to reach the speed
     Of what the speedsters wanted
     And what they wanted
     Was his Eternal Slowdown.
     A great musician and a great
                               creator of forms
     That ultimately find expression
     In mores and what have you.
(MCB, 239, 241.)    

Having established the resemblance: 'Charlie looked like Buddha,' he takes this figure and places him in the phenomenal world: 'Charlie Parker, who recently died,' via an almost Dadaist turn - dying while 'Laughing at a juggler on the TV.' Parker's musical message is that 'All is Well,' an appropriation of Buddhist fatalism to musical art. The turn back to lived reality continues in the lines 'You had a feeling of early-in-the-morning/like a hermit's joy,' which can be seen as a reference to the archetypal Buddhist holy man - or one of the great American influences on Kerouac: Thoreau. (7.) He can move further from the natural world of the 'hermit' joy,' via Thoreau, into a specifically modern American environment - the city and the 'perfect cry/of some wild gang at a jam session.' Here, I feel that the poem is slowly 'coming home,' (one remembers the introductory note about jam sessions etc.) By the next chorus, having established further Parker's credentials, not just within jazz, but in the wider line of musical tradition: 'Musically as important as Beethoven/Yet not regarded as such at all,' (MCB, 240,1-2, 242) he is seen as leading his orchestra on the global (or cosmic) stage of 'the Great Historic World Night,' (MCB, 240, 8) And his saxophone is linked to Catholic imagery: 'his Irish St. Patrick/patootle stick.' (MCB, 240, 19-20)

In the following chorus, Kerouac, again alternating between Christian terminology: 'Charlie Parker, pray for me - /Pray for me and everybody/ (MCB, 240, 15-16, 243) and Buddhist: 'In the Nirvanas of your brain/' (MCB, 241, 17) finally attempts to raise Parker as some kind of Christ figure, invoking him to intercede for suffering humanity: 'Charley Parker, lay the bane,/off me, and every body/.' (MCB, 241, 24-25)

The last chorus of the poem will track between these two positions, Buddhist and Christian, until it finishes with a specifically aesthetic statement:

     The sound in your mind
        is the first sound
           that you could sing

     If you were singing
        at a cash register
            with nothing on yr mind -
 
     But when that grim reper 
        comes to lay you
            look out my lady

     He will steal all you got
     while you dingle with the dangle
     and having robbed you

     Vanish
          Which will be your best reward,
          T'Were better to get rid o
           John O'Twill, then sit a-mortying
          In this Half Eternity with nobody
          To save the old man from being hanged
          In my closet for nothing
          And everybody watches
          When the act is done - 

     Stop the murder and the suicide!
          All's well!
              I am the Guard

(MCB, 242, 244)

Starting with Buddhism, 'the sound in your mind,' (8.) the poem enters the phenomenal world - 'cash register' - then encounters death, 'that grim reper,' the dread spectre that has haunted the entire work, and against which Kerouac has sought an escape. Nicosia glosses this passage as stating that 'The poet would prefer suicide to waiting in pitiful pride for a humiliating, senseless death before his fellow men (John O'Twill being the well-tailored man of dumb propriety'). (MB, 490) The reference to the 'old man.. being hanged/ In my closet for nothing/' has a strong similarity to a passage in Book of Dreams, where the 'old man' is identified as his father. (9.) Is he still haunted by guilt and loss over his father's (senseless) death? Leo Kerouac as victim of society: 'And everybody watches/When the act is done?' (In this context, the (malicious?) story that Gore Vidal related about Allen Ginsberg saying that his father was a homosexual takes on an added frisson, given the imagery of the closet). (10.) But the poem ends on an assertion of artistic will:

'But there is still one more alternative, and that is to assume the role of Charlie Parker and assert by sheer will that all is well, guarding humanity from the killing face of nothingness.' (MB, 490)

Thus the imperative: 'Stop the Murder and the suicide!/All's Well!/I am the Guard.' Noting, yet again, the tripartite approximation of the blues structure, marked off by the lines 'The sound in your mind,' 'But when that grim reper,' and 'Vanish,' these last lines are reminiscent of a coda - such as the one that famously closes Parker's Mood, for example. But who is 'the Guard?' Kerouac? Parker? Or the poem itself? I would suggest a complex combination of all three interpretations. Kerouac has ended his long improvisation, wearied by the fact that Buddhism does not seem to offer the ultimate answer to his quest for spiritual surety or a defence against the inevitability of death. In a letter to Allen Ginsberg from Mexico, around the time of the composition of Mexico City Blues, he states:

'... I have reached the point beyond Enlightenment now and can abandon Buddhism now because Buddhism is an arbitrary conception, I mean, in reality, there is no difference between Ignorance and Enlightenment...' (L, 483)

If Buddhism teaches that life is an 'arbitrary conception' then Kerouac has used this logic, impelled by his own spiritual disatisfaction and the pull of his ingrained Catholicism, to 'abandon Buddhism' itself, as yet one more 'arbitrary conception' as well. For someone driven by a deep compulsion to be a writer - and who had struggled for so long to attain his true place in American letters - his art is too strong to be denied. He will accept the 'Magic of Ignorance,' a human art, as an affirmation of life and a barrier against suffering. By a neat sleight-of-hand, he ends the poem by escaping into an identification with Parker's music, the music that has been such an important influence on all his work, poetry and prose. This allows him a solution which can give the poem a loose formal unity that can include all the contradictions within it - inside the terms of what I have called 'The Beat Aesthetic,' a concept which possesses enough flexibility to contain the secular and the spiritual, united perhaps by the thread of compassion for all suffering humanity. And the physical beat of music. The modern jazz of Parker et al. was a formidable combination of high artistic instrumental technique coupled to the earthiness of the blues and the popular cultural form of the standard song - played in nightclubs. The cerebral and the physical - an exact paradigm for Kerouac's poetry, soulful and spiritual, yet also playful, messy, light - irritating, even. The 'sound on the page' - the 'vocalised text' - is the music of jazz verbalised into poetry - and this is the 'Guard' against death and suffering, when everything else is played out, or emotionally and philosophically unacceptable. Parker the Artist, Kerouac the Artist, and the product of his identification with Parker's music - his poem - become a composite affirmative symbol: 'I am the Guard' (with a buried reference, perhaps, to his college football experience and his time on the railroad?) In Robert Duncan's poem, Song of the Borderguard (1951), whose title, perhaps, has a certain aesthetic relevance in this context, a similar image occurs which links music and poetry; whether by synchronicity or conscious or unconscious reference:

            'I the guard because of my guitar
     believe.  I am the certain guard,
     certain of the Beloved, certain of the Lion,
     certain of the Empire.  I with my guitar.
     Dear, dear, dear, dear, I sing.
     I the Prize-Winner, the Poet on Guard.
     (12.)

Kerouac, the 'Poet on Guard,' has ended his poetic magnum opus by raising poetry and music - his 'bop poetics' - as a 'Guard' against the suffering of the world - a gesture that escapes the anguished religious contradictions thrown up in his improvisations. If one can regard his poetics as one aesthetic aspect of the 'Magic of Ignorance,' the poem comes to rest with a certain symmetry, and one that takes him nearer to Olson than his Buddhist-inflected 'breath separations of the mind' would imply on first reading. 'I am the Guard,' suggests a return to the body, with all the human fallibility, contradictions, fears - and sheer joy in being - that this implies. It is also a vindication of the influence of jazz on his work; the symbol of Charlie Parker gives the poem a unity that arises organically out of its improvisatory mode, a culmination of the energies of jazz within the terms of jazz - and the 'Beat Aethetic.'

Go to Conclusion

Back to Chapter Three