Dharma Bum

I recently submitted a major written project for my master's degree in journalism, a long-form piece entitled Fathers and Sons about two generations of environmentalists living in a small mountain town in Idaho. The feeling of completing a defining and important task usually overrides the despair of suddenly having nothing to do, but sitting in my trashed office full of proposal drafts and coffee-stained newspapers I concluded that what I'd handed to my committee wasn't at all the project I'd envisioned writing.

To quiet my mind I purchased an old favorite book, The Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac. It's the book that made me excited about writing when I was in high school, and if anything could elevate my spirit, it was Kerouac's unique ability to bring the Pacific Northwest, the part of America from which I hail, into vivid relief.

Boy was I mistaken.

Yes, The Dharma Bums still glows with poetry and detail. But like my project, dead ends, unrealized ambitions and disillusion define it more than what Kerouac likely intended to write. In the final passages of the novel, Kerouac’s stand-in Ray Smith sits atop Desolation Peak where he has agreed to keep fire watch. Instead of the spiritual enlightenment or the “becoming Buddha” he seeks in the solitude of the Cascade range, he finds only the silent specter of Hozomeen Mountain, which “stood there returning the attack with a surl of silence.”

I made a tremendous investment of time and energy into Fathers and Sons, only to realize that my story was ultimately about neither. In fact, after reflecting on the interviews I’d conducted, I decided that I could vouch for everything in my project except the parts about the relationship between fathers and sons.

In the hours before submitting my project, it dawned on me that I could only suggest a metaphorical father/son relationship between my Idaho environmentalists, and that I’d written about facts and figures more than I’d written a story. Like Ray Smith waiting for Hozomeen to speak to him, I had undertaken a journey only to arrive at an unintended destination.

Kerouac wrote The Dharma Bums in a fit of Buddhist enthusiasm in 1957 after publishing the hugely popular but dimly understood novel, On The Road. It’s the story of Ray Smith bouncing between huge personalities, the cultivation of his own Buddhist philosophy, and his core values shaped by Roman Catholicism while he traipses around America in the vain hope of becoming a “Dharma bum.”

Most importantly, it’s a novel about calls and responses. While climbing the Matterhorn in the Sierras, Smith and his mentor Japhy Rider shout haikus at each other, and communicate using yodels with their lost companion Morley. All this back-and-forth reinforces Smith’s burgeoning Buddhism, but we quickly realize that Smith’s exploration of eastern philosophy depends on this reinforcement.

As Smith’s friend Alva (a thinly disguised Allen Ginsburg) points out, “Your Buddhism has made you mean Ray.” It’s the first of several signs of Smith’s growing pretention and moral incompatibility with his newfound interest. The more he tries to become a Dharma bum, the more that incompatibility strikes the reader.

In the climactic scene atop Desolation Peak, the silence of Smith’s surroundings is too much for either him or the reader to bear, since it connotes nature’s denial of profound truths, ostensibly because of Smith’s moral and intellectual dishonesty.

The Dharma Bums is best read as a preamble to the physical and psychological collapse described in Big Sur. The emotional void at the end of Dharma Bums foreshadows Kerouac’s eventual abandonment of Buddhism, and demonstrates what happens when we find things we weren’t looking for. Kerouac got a novel out of his misadventure. I got Fathers and Sons.

Why Ai Weiwei is the Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn of our generation

On April 3, Chinese police officers carted off one of China's most prolific and visible artists, Ai Weiwei, for reasons unknown. Unknown, because while those of us on the outside looking in at the latest crackdown on political dissent can guess that Ai's outspoken views about the PRC are the reason for his imprisonment, the official reason for Ai's detention remains a mystery.

Ai is part of a fresh wave of artists and journalists targeted by a regime deigning to quell dissent by silencing those who would hold a mirror up to reality. While other Chinese artists have protected their status in society by shying away from political themes, Ai has made an industry out of observing his observers.

One of his exhibitions included replicas of the surveillance cameras that have recently been installed outside his Shanghai studio, and until recently he made sport of documenting the comings and goings of an unmarked police van using a digital camera and his Twitter feed.

He drew the ire of Chinese authorities with his response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake which killed at least 68,000 people (at least, again, in the sense that the real figure has been hidden from us by the authorities). Ai conducted an independent investigation of the disaster, compiling a list of students killed as a result of poor construction of schoolhouses. By the end of the project, he had collected the names of 5,385 children.

Infusing his art with a mix of curiosity and rebelliousness, Ai knows perfectly that the more outspoken his protest, the harder it is for authorities to dispose of him––something he learned from his father, the poet Ai Qing, who was suspected of "rightism" during the Cultural Revolution and exiled to Xinjiang, but not killed.

Somewhere along the line, Ai fils learned that consciousness and observation of one's surroundings can be the most potent transgression against an authority that thrives on its own invisibility. His lesson bears the hallmark of his Russian forebear, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who bemoaned his countrymen's apathy in the face of tyranny.

Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago is an epic-length analysis of how secret police organizations like the Cheka and KGB exploited a silent, cowering populace. By isolating one citizen from another, these organizations dragged hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Soviet citizens to prisons and forced labor camps.

He argued there that if even one citizen had protested while being taken away, the secret police would never have dared to proceed as brazenly as they had, and the crimes against the Russian people would have been greatly mitigated.

Instead, the people of the Soviet Union quietly cooperated with their oppressors. The rest is history.

Ai, whose art boldly investigates Ai's investigators, has refused to pretend that everything is copasetic in the PRC. His metacognition of the police as a subject prioritizes his own consciousness over blind obedience to the unspoken rules of living in an unfree society.

Alex Pasternak, one of Ai's associates writing for Slate, tells us that,

"The combination of breakneck development, deeply rooted cultural ties and the giant panopticon of an unpredictable authoritarian state can make you feel like you're living in an unending magical realist saga, the kind that yields the sort of spectacles that in quick retrospect make as much sense as anything else."

Ai's rebellion––and, ultimately, his genius––is that he never succumbed to the temptation to normalize the abuses that took place all around him. For him, the everyday violence in "the giant panopticon" would always be weird, intrusive, and impossible to ignore. Documenting those abuses and publicizing them draws attention to all the ways the system coerces the people it's ostensibly designed to protect.

It's also Ai's way of telling the authorities that he refuses to play the game by their rules.

Until two days ago, this strategy had worked for Ai. Yes, he'd been beaten nearly to death by police thugs. He'd been threatened. Shanghai municipal authorities even razed his newly-built studio, which he later claimed was his most brilliant artistic endeavor––playing the people who tried to silence him for fools. But now he's in jail. Like Solzhenitsyn before him, he's somewhat protected by his notoriety, and may only face deportation.

We hope.