The Dharma Bums and the Pavement Sutra

Almost a generation back when libraries were not yet six-letter portals on computers, a pseudo-artist/quasi-intellectual classmate in Diliman introduced me to Jack the Ripper, Jack Daniels, Jack Keroauc and their kind. As a quick counterpoint, a classmate who wrote like Henry James admonished me on the last: Jack Keroauc and the Beats are lousy, infantile poets and diarists whose literary claims extend to no more than being winos, druggists and amateur writers. True to my inebriated maturation, I read thereafter all the Kerouac I could get my hands on. I read about the nuances of rucksack hitchhiking, the contrarieties of a Zen universe, the etiquette of drunkard poets, enlightened hobos and the ever so proud deviants of the middle class. I felt like a hitchhiker in the galaxy if not Alice herself, lost in one sweet confusion, educated and completely unenlightened. In the phony words of the screaming Japanese teenager in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers: "James Dean and Jack Keroauc are sooo coool!!!" Right, Mickey and Mallory, and mind you, Jack writes, too. Or in the velvet words of Natalie Merchant and the Maniacs: "Hey Jack Keroauc, I think of your mother and the tears she cried, she cried for none other than her little boy lost in our little world that hated and that dared to drag him down…"

The Dharma Bums has the familiar strains and sad falsettos of On the Road, arguably Kerouac’s best, and its simplistic yet seminal structure of one-cool-place to another one-cool-place and move back and so on and so forth. The heavy spastic breathing pace that transported On the Road once more up-tempoed the breakneck narration of Keroauc’s confused pursuit of life’s essential truths. Kerouac’s often derided spontaneous and marathon gallop of writing his piece delivered the dharma moments as would the crazy jazz of his times. Dizzy Gillespie aside, however, Bums highlighted the spiritual period of the Beats and Jack Kerouac as Ray Smith and shaman poet Gary Snyder as Japhy Ryder were at the forefront of it all. The story undulated from a frantic spiritual pilgrimage to an orgy of cultural headiness, frenetic intellectual energies and hedonistic excess. The novel, as does the story, subverts one’s attention as it is not typified as a beginning-to-end tale as it does not clearly have one. The Dharma Bums is a pastiche, a vignette of moments, ideal and spleen, be it in Berkeley, in the High Sierras or the US East Coast suburbs.


Bums has one of the most memorable opening paragraphs just as On the Road has one of the most unforgettable, often quoted closing paragraphs in modern fiction. While Sal Paradise/Jack Keroauc in Road sadly elucidates on the vast raw land and all the roads going and don’t you know that God is pooh Bear? in one languorous, free-flowing sentence, Ray Smith/Jack Keroauc in the Bums’ prelude, bumming a ride to San Francisco in a freight train, sits and shares a boxcar with a hobo whose most treasured belonging is a magazine cutout of a Saint Teresa prayer. The hobo is the first dharma bum Smith meets and Japhy Ryder is going to be the second and the No. 1 of them all. Touched by the hobo’s modest belief system centered on Saint Teresa’s promise of returning to shower the earth with roses from heaven, Smith jumps off the gondola, heads to a beach, cooks hotdogs and macaroni in the sand and swigging wine to no end, contemplates on Avalokitesvara, chomp, chomp, his place in God’s merciful design, glug, glug, and after passing out, wakes up to a gray dawn to gasp in a voice-in-a-void manner a Zen quip: "It’s all the same thing."


After reading a few pages, I flipped the book back and marveled at the front cover of Bums – the fat Buddha in half lotus, John Lennon specs, rolled weed between fingers, smoke sneaking then enveloping him. This was not a smooth ride to Sunday Gospel school for sure.


Japhy Rider’s Zen Buddhism counterpoints the rather tory and piously traditional spiritual approach Ray Smith has taken. In all the chance and contrived encounters between the two, the disparate Buddhist approaches are keenly accentuated: Ryder the Zen lunatic incarnate vs. Smith the strict no-nonsense Theraveda Buddhist. Smith pursues the wonted spiritual perspective of the opposites: good-evil, purity-lust, truth-illusion. Ryder, the primitivist poet grounded his matter-of-fact spirituality to intuition and basic impulses. Ryder heartily leads a Buddhist life while Smith wrestles with tenets, catechisms, rituals and their nuances. Smith is Ryder’s novice, the wide-eyed, steadfast chronicler of the omnipresence of the latter. Ryder, the ultimate dharma bum, stands cooed and vituperated like everyone he venerates and crowes about from Bodhidharma to Han Shan to a lonesome lumberjack somewhere in the Oregon forest.

Smith abhors the Buddhist myths and only cares for Sakyamuni’s four noble truths about life’s suffering. As the novel or as the events unravel, it is not about the opposites melding and the golden truth lurking not far behind but Smith’s, not Ryder’s, uneasy articulation and eventual resolution of his suspended spiritual duty amidst the variety of explorations both sacred and profane.

Bums is not so much a road book as much as it is a pursuit book. The whole story in itself is outwardly anecdotal but, introspectively, it is sequential as well as reflective of Smith’s spiritual pilgrimage and journey away from the trappings of his middle-class bearings. The loci of events – Gallery Six (where Allen Ginsberg first "Howl"-ed), Mount Matterhorn, Skid Row in San Francisco, the backwoods of Jersey, Corte Madera in California, the Cascade Mountain ranges and the over 300,000 miles of roads tracking them – are electric dharma points as they are interstices of the American soul which molded Smith and his pack and which they now learn to detest for being superficial, meaningless and empty-headed.


Smith, Ryder, Alvah Goldbook/Allen Ginsberg, Warren Coughlin/Philip Whalen and the rest of the horde engineer a subtle yet radical departure from the middle-class values that nurtured them to embrace the ancient verities that the Orient represent. It is not accurate, however, to point out that the Beats in the Bums are just writers on the cusp of literary fame flying on a Buddhist kick. It was the confusion, their spiritual and moral orphanage, which characterized them and the ensuing passionate search for the essential truths by Smith and Ryder, poetic, innocent and sad in turn, gesticulated the unflinching attitude of the Beat generation writers to explode the forms and habits of thought imposed by tradition and class.


The novel turned out to be a primer of sorts for my credulous and pretentious desire for the highbrow and the abstruse. It introduced me to Buddhism, Zen and its other incarnations, better than, say, the overbearing references of Phil Jackson or the tear-jerking accounts of Leo Buscaglia or the pedantic meanderings of D.T. Suzuki et.al. The exchanges between Smith and Ryder and the entr’acte with the others offer religious insights in so oblique and in so expansive lengths punctuated by the innate humor and honesty of the interlopers and brought to fore by the intensely personal and pictorial narration of Smith/Kerouac. The pocket-sized tome is a minefield of Buddhist thought and recitals, sewn in a poetic mesh that only Kerouac can weave.


Yabyum, a sexual Tibetan religious ceremony, is performed by Japhy, Ray and Alvah with a beautiful guest, princess, and the repartee that follows cannot be more sad or poetic, rolling as it does from getting naked in tea-ceremony fashion to arcane Buddhist chants to Boddhisattva women to Pound taking peyote and concluding with Smith, describing the rooftops of Berkeley as "pitiful living meat sheltering grieving phantoms from the eternality of the heavens which they feared to face." Whew.


The characteristically earthy mountain climbs by Smith, alone or with Ryder, to seek lessons in solitude are symbolic and epigrammatic escapes short of deliverance. In those suspended moments, Smith/Kerouac is at his most articulate, poignant and zestful. Days before the big climb to Matterhorn, Ryder had Smith read his translation of Han Shan’s Cold Mountain, a fitting if not perfect overture as the poem is ideographic and impassioned. Smith’s climb with Ryder and Morley teaches him valuable lessons about rocks, peaks and screes. Smith’s remembrance of what Han Shan and the Zen lunatics impart, of climbing mountains even at their crests, of not ever falling off mountains brightlines his battles within and without and his failure to let go and give up vain desires. This, once again and for the last, he confronted, backstabbed and pinned to the ground when he spent a season as a fire lookout in the Cascade Mountain ranges. With everybody gone, Ryder in Japan, the rest in some other places, Smith was on the top of the desolation Peak sometimes joined by another dharma bum, Happy the Mule Skinner, watching lightning, errant bears, magic rocks and clefts, writing in his diary, "Oh, I’m happy!" and meditating, praying and hearing comforting words from Avalokitesvara and Dipankara. When the season ends, always in gratitude, he kneels on the trail and says, "Thank you, shack. Blah!" as he hikes down and navigates through the thinner mist.


As every reading affects us in some way or another, Bums devoured me the sucker that I am. Actually, Kerouac seems to do that to every unsuspecting, trying-hard boheme. My classmate, after reading On the Road, embraced quickies with neighbors and after reading The Dharma Bums embraced poetry readings until a girlie bar in Cubao had him arrested after attempting to read one while somebody was strip dancing. Road gave me a nervous breakdown while Bums lulled me into believing that I can be a Zen Buddhist on my own. I started writing haikus and tankas, read Buddhist texts and articles hyperlinked by Bums and before long I started to call myself – in all pretentious glory – a Catholic Buddhist until somebody rebuked my claim that I can have satori and more flashes of enlightenment by merely staring at a National Geographic picture of the Ryoanji rock garden.


Reading The Dharma Bums was no different as when I had my first alcohol fix: it gave me the buzz to adopt the life I had always wanted to lead. Recalling Han Shan’s taunt though, I hemmed and hawed until the drone was gone and I realized sooner that I had to go to work as everybody else.


In the spoken words of Lourd Ernest de Veyra: "I emerge from the thrushes/ completely unenlightened." What the heck, reading Kerouac was a helluva ride. A helluva ride.

The Praying Constitution

The collective gasps and shrieks of protest counter-slapping the Commission on Elections Second Division’s Bible and Koran-calling coup de grace to the application for accreditation in the Party-List system of Ang Ladlad have brought out of the closet the persistent and enduring foundational intercourse of the state to its sectarian and religious past. The Comelec took the easy way-out. By what any other way could the judges and arbiters of a modern organized society ground their indictment of an aggrupation of gay men for immorality other than reinscribing passages from the Bible and the Koran to the doctrinal page. Now that the Supreme Court has tiptoed into the fray by reverse mechanics—issuing a TRO against the Comelec for disqualifying Ang Ladlad and requiring the commission to treat the party as qualified while the Court is still appraising the propriety of the party’s dis-qualification—most will again be one in judicial forecasting and in parroting in all pompousness that our republican and post-religious colonial temperament forbids us any longer to situate legal norms in religious dogma and motivations. All will be undone by the Supreme Court and all should be well.

The utter reliance of the aged commissioners on overtly religious expressions to legitimize a legal construct could not just be simply brushed aside as factored by senility and antiquarian sensibilities as the gay-men have assiduously offered the tri-media as the totality of their party’s discourse. The commissioners could not be faulted; they were just too astute for their own good and their conventional reticence merely mirrored the rhetorical and textual underpinnings of a legal framework built upon the secular frontage of its modern American upbringing while forever locked in poisoned embrace with its Spanish religious colonial past. This confused temperament is not an anomaly. It has floundered and stood the test of a century as a healthy compromise. This legal equivocation authored the mélange of antinomian ideals and textual contradictions pervasive in our political and legal substructures. The 1987 Constitution, the latest of its three incarnations and the fountain from which mouth the many stabs at non-sectarianism gush forth, plays the biggest host to this antinomian scandal and justices, jurists, judges and arbiters play along, paying lip-services and rolling just as confused.

The project of secularism and the secularization of the legal system were derivatives of the country’s commitment to American constitutionalism and, as adopted and mimicked in this jurisdiction, were at once the evocative departure point away from the church-state interweave of the Spanish colonial regime. It was in a sense a dynamo of the country’s fêted transition from being theocratic to republican, from being a rampart of a religious colonial master of the past to a parapet of a secular super-country of the 20th century. The non-establishment and free exercise clauses formed the core of this notional shift. These twin pledges of constitutional secularism traversed constitutional evolution and have stood glinting in the 1987 Freedom Constitution as they were so worded a century back. They were there for everyone to see and as makeshift shrines to pay reverence to the modern deities of liberty, freedom and equality.

Ranged to the verbose remainder of the supreme law of the land, the textual guarantees of constitutional secularism, however, fall flat and cannot transcend their formalist breadth. Inceptively, the Constitution strongly decrees the inviolability of the separation of the church and the state. This positive language on a negative concept (the disengagement of what was once a cohesive scheme) aside, the Constitution, in fact, unfurls into a thought parade of carefully planted provisos and riders on how the state still divines a system of God-belief when public good and general welfare seem not apt or too boring perhaps to legitimize a constitutional articulation. The Constitution treads light in these dubious utterances by keeping awfully silent—not bothering to institute reinforcement provisions beside and adjacent to lest their theological anchor juts our for attention—and by letting them lie harmlessly enough. The layered surface, however, easily tapers off even by the most cursory of glances.

The Preamble, the foreword-distillation of the beliefs and aspirations of the Filipino people, prefaced the Constitution by a volte-face of its republican and democratic ideals by directly, openly and straightforwardly pre-positioning the collective aims of the authors to an Almighty God. If the Constitution really adheres to the tenets of republicanism and democracy, the direct reference to an Almighty God was an undue conscription of the atheists and non-theists to the God-believing Filipino people at the risk of being left out in the cold, un-Filipino and without a country to call their own. The Preamble rams to the feeble obverses of a state brandishing a civic-secular front a communal requirement of imploring the aid of an Almighty God before one can be made a subject of the supreme law of the land. Either the Constitution is by and for the God-believing Filipinos only or it is really prefaced to provide accommodation to the verity that more than half of the Filipinos are into God-belief of a monotheist orientation. Either that or otherwise, it runs afoul of the constitutional commitment to secularism.

While indeed the Preamble does not proffer constitutional rights, it set the mood to the underhanded introduction of textual reiterations of the Church-State interlace in the constitution. The present Constitution is littered with these textual anomalies. Article II, § 12 which in half a sentence imports an antiabortion clause, rejects Roe v. Wade by mandating state protection for the life of the unborn from conception. By affording protection to the life of the unborn from conception concedes the point that there is life thereabouts and that therefore it is a legal person. This is a worldview which traces support only from theological and sectarian credos. The Constitution without grounding this imperative to a civic-secular discourse proceeded to adopt a religious norm—one that is largely of Catholic origin—and put it deep in the haze of principles on family life and good parenting. If it can only find legitimization in a theological assumption, this state policy certainly renders a textual contradiction to the constitutional principle of state-church disengagement.

Delving further, Article VI, §28 (3) ups the ante in textual incongruity by so declaring as a constitutional verity that religious properties along with those of educational and charitable institutions, are exempted from taxes.

A Radiohead 2010

Fitter, happier and more productive.

Comfortable, not drinking too much except when the Villar jingle “nakatulog ka na ba…”goes autoplay in my head again.

Regular exercise at the gym (3 days a week, and a five kilometer run when Gibo needs warm and sentient bodies for his rallies in Boni High Street).

Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries at ease, as should Korina Araneta Roxas, as should yellowed Kris and Boy.

Eating well (no more microwave dinners, saturated fats, TV Patrol and Saksi).

A patient better driver with a faster draw in case that Freddie Aguilar nephew sprays me with 9mm bullets.

A safer car (baby smiling in back seat giving FYs to Bayani’s new U-turn great walls in Commonwealth and Edsa).

Sleeping well (no bad dreams and no more REM feeds of Noynoy Abunda smoking during his inauguration).

No paranoia, no comebacking Franklin Drilon, Peping Conjuangco, Dudut Jawo, Gilbert Remulla, et al. and etc.

Careful to all animals (no longer badmouthing the rest of the presidentiables and Boy and Korina and Kris, et al and etc.).

No longer empty and frantic.

Like a cat tied to a stick that’s driven into frozen winter shot (the ability to laugh at weakness) calm, fitter, healthier and more productive a pig in a cage of antibiotics.