Bostonist Books: Wake Up by Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac's Wake Up comes at us as something of a two-step: we enter thinking that we'll see a certain type of prose, and that we'll be reading a certain set of progressions typical of novels since the sixteenth and seventeenth century, modernity and Kerouac's jazz-styled Proustian riffs aside; we leave with a book that's more like Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Her (tho' not She; we'd never imagine Ferlinghetti writing She), something more along the lines of a copybook or one that runs on the personalized, internal rules of a notebook, something a little bit lower in the architecture, something the author wrote pointing South so they could fly North, i.e., Dharma Bums, Big Sur, or elsewhere.

Kerouac wrote that the purpose of the book was "to convert," and that brought to our mind WWI-era Soviet propaganda posters bearing the Buddha's likeness -- and not much more than that. It tells the story of the Buddha, as one can read in the original sources, which the book liberally draws upon. The book is deliberate, straightforward, and prosaic. Key words are underlined. There's plenty of if/then logic put to use. It bears the unfortunate position of coming in under the gun after Hesse's Siddhartha. If you don't know the story of the Buddha, this will provide a good, basic grounding; if you already know, then this is more about satisfying a curiosity. And despite all this and some other little things (Buddha wondering why glass doesn't catch on fire if a magnifying glass is put to that use) -- from time to time -- Kerouac comes through:

1. "... the pure sea of hearing, the Transcendental Sound of Nirvana heard by children in cribs and on the moon and in the heart of howling storms, and in which the young Buddha now heard a teaching going on, a ceaseless instruction wise and clear from all the Buddhas of Old that had come before him and all that Buddhas a-coming."

2. " ... where he meditated his prayer for the emancipation of the world from its beastial grief and incessant bloody deeds of death and birth, death and birth, the ignorant gnashing screaming wars, the murder of dogs, the histories, follies, parent beating child, child tormenting child, lover ruining lover, robbers raiding niggard, leering, cocky, crazy, wild, blood-louts moaning for more blood-lust, utter sots, running up and down simpleminded among charnels of their own making, simpering everywhere, mere tsorises and dream-pops, one monstrous beast raining from a central glut, all buried in unfathomable darkness crowing for rosy hope that can only be complete extinction, at base innocent and without any vestige of self-nature whatsoever ..."

3. "...crooked as a rooftree rafter ..."

4. "A drunken elephant was let loose on the royal highway just at the time the Blessed One was coming along that path; the savage and spiteful behemoth, beholding Buddha, came to himself at once, and bending, became docile in his presence ..."

Photo courtesy of debaird.