Re: ZOOEYCAM
Pierrot65@aol.com
Sat, 27 Feb 1999 13:52:03 -0500 (EST)
Most of the people I have known who have turned to zen buddhism have done so
out of desperation: they find our Western ways and means and culture
enervated, worn out, bereft of energy, momentum and charm. Now I am not
generalizing, I swear: I don't mean to suggest that everyone, or even the
majority, of people who turn to zen do so in this way or for this reason. That
would be ludicrous and inaccurate. I just mean the people I have come in
contact with have that motivation for it. Kerouac's zen was a very tattered-
jeans, highway zen (if G. Snyder's was more learned, Ginsberg's closer to
Judaism, etc.), but you get the sense, reading from one end of his work to the
other, that it was an experiment for him that failed (and it should really
come as no surprise to see it with his massive, overbearing Catholic
background: maybe another thread for another time, the turning toward buddhism
as an alternative to the oppression of Catholicism). When it had run its
course, and he was back in Lowell, Mass., he was still as lonely and
dissatisfied as ever, if not more so. (Of course much of it was due to the
ravages of alcoholism, too.) I only bring him up as a somewhat known
commodity, an example, good or bad I don't know, of someone who turned to zen
for answers and, I think, didn't find any. The point I am trying to make is
not that there are no answers in zen: I'm just interested in exploring the
motivation for Westerners to turn to the Eastern faiths, as it may help me
make a (totally belabored) point about Salinger's characters.
I wouldn't presume to know Salinger's personal situation, whether he turned
to zen out of loneliness and desperation, or wanted to try on some religion
for size, or just was taking buddhism out for an intellectual test run. But I
think you see quite a bit of desperation, of floundering and grasping, in his
characters. You can almost see them searching in their New York world for ...
something, as, simultaneously, Salinger was applying zen principles to make a
... statement of some kind in his fiction. I guess what I am asking is, what
is that something? What is that statement? It's a pretty vague question, God
knows. I don't know if I am asking for the question at the heart of the
Salinger canon as a whole or what. To me it is all about "banana fever," that
hypersensitivity to stimuli beautiful and gross, and the inability to deal
with the reaction to those stimuli. In other words, does Seymour cure banana
fever by killing himself? Is that the only way? We are dealing with a very
unique, particular kind of personal damage with this banana fever, the likes
of which are, really, nowhere else in fiction that I've seen: and yet, we are
all on this list, Salinger's post-Catcher work is still widely admired, still
very personally affects us all. Why? What's the problem and the solution? I
just don't think the answer to those things comes in the field of zen. It
seems to me to be more deeply involved with the fields of psychology and human
relations than it does religion.
I've tried to speak clearly for a change. I hope that makes a little sense.
rick