Robert Inchausti

Robert Inchausti

Robert Inchausti isProfessor Emeritus of English at California State Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo. He is the editor of three collec­tions of the work of ThomasMerton and is also the author of five previous books, including The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People.

Robert Inchausti

Robert Inchausti isProfessor Emeritus of English at California State Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo. He is the editor of three collec­tions of the work of ThomasMerton and is also the author of five previous books, including The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People.

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GUIDES

The Future of Religion: A Reader's Guide

In the world of religion, some things stay the same, while many are constantly adapting to meet our new world of the internet and cell phones, scientific discovery, increasing awareness of gender and race dynamics, multiculturalism, the numbers of people identifying their religion as “none” or “spiritual but not religious,” and so much more.

We have chosen a few books below that address these issues, each in its own way.

The Religion of Tomorrow

$34.95 - Paperback

By: Ken Wilber

"The religion of tomorrow, according to Ken Wilber, will not be one religion, but all religions guiding their respective constituents toward oneness with Ultimate Reality. This book is Ken Wilber’s comprehensive synthesis of all the elements that make for human development from the Big Bang through the course of material and biological evolution. The recent discoveries of science, especially in the areas of developmental psychology and historical criticism, as well as mystical experience, have enabled him to bring together contemporary science, the wisdom of the world religions, and an integral presentation of the human condition with all its potential. The endless complexities of the evolutionary process gives way to a sublime simplicity, culminating in the spiritual and integral evolution of the human person toward unity with That Which Is." —Thomas Keating, author of Open Mind, Open Heart

Buddhism beyond Gender

$29.95 - Paperback

By: Rita M. Gross

“Rita Gross offers readers an amazing example of a lifelong, ongoing commitment to feminist thinking and practice. Her visionary insistence that the path to ending patriarchal domination must lead us beyond gender is a revolutionary paradigm shift, one that can lead to greater freedom for everyone.”
—bell hooks

Integral Buddhism

$19.95 - Paperback

By: Ken Wilber

What might religion look like in the future? Using Buddhism to explore this question, Ken Wilber offers insights that are relevant to all of the great traditions. He shows that traditional Buddhist teachings suggest an ongoing evolution leading toward a more unified, holistic, and interconnected spirituality. Touching on all of the key turning points in the history of Buddhism, Wilber describes the ways in which the tradition has been open to the continuing expansion of its teachings, and he suggests possible paths toward an ever more Integral approach. This work is a precursor to and condensed version of Wilber’s The Religion of Tomorrow.

Mindfulness on the Go

$12.95 - Paperback

By: Jan Chozen Bays

If you’ve heard about the many benefits of mindfulness practice but think you don’t have time for it in your busy life, prepare to be proven delightfully wrong. Mindfulness is available every moment, including right now, as Zen teacher Jan Chozen Bays shows with these twenty-five mindfulness exercises that can be done anywhere. Use them to cultivate the gratitude and insight that come from paying attention with body, heart, and mind to life’s many small moments.

Hard to Be a Saint in the City

$16.95 - Paperback

By: Robert Inchausti

It’s been said that Jack Kerouac made it cool to be a thinking person seeking a spiritual experience. And there is no doubt that the writers he knew and inspired—Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, and others—were thinkers seeking exactly that. In this re-claiming of their vision, Robert Inchausti explores the Beat canon to reveal that the movement was at heart a spiritual one. It’s about their shared perception of an existence in which the Divine reveals itself in the ordinary.

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Thomas Merton, “Honorary Beatnik”

Thomas Merton's Influence on the Beats

by Robert Inchausti, author of Hard to Be a Saint in the City
Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton, “Honorary Beatnik”

It’s hard to say exactly when Thomas Merton became an “Honorary Beatnik.” One could chase the association all the way back to the mid-thirties when, as an undergraduate at Columbia, he first became friends with the hipster Seymour Freedgood, the bohemian poet Robert Lax, and the painter Ad Reinhardt.

But it wasn’t until much later that Beat “icons” Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder all admitted to being greatly influenced by Merton’s autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, published in 1948. Snyder even went so far as to say Merton’s autobiography convinced him to turn away from the study of anthropology for monasticism, Zen, and the contemplative life.

But if there is any “official” date when Merton became an “Honorary Beatnik,” it would have to be in the summer of 1961 when he contributed the lead poem to the premier issue of the first radical ecology publication The Journal for the Protection of All Living Beings, edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, and David Meltzer.

The poem Merton contributed, “Chant to be Used in a Procession around a Site with Furnaces” was later read by Lenny Bruce in his nightclub act. All the ensuing attention and notoriety earned Merton a rebuke from his abbot (James Fox) who told the monk he would not be allowed to publish in such journals again—primarily due to the “free” language of some of the other contributors (which included Norman Mailer, Bertrand Russell, Albert Camus, Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, et al.)  Merton’s piece did not violate any Catholic teachings; the problem, Abbot Fox said, was that Merton’s association with the other writers threw an unsavory light upon the Order.

Merton, of course, did not agree but remained true to his vow of obedience and never published in the journal again.

Merton's Thoughts on the Beats

Merton was, himself, ambivalent about the Beats as a literary movement, and although in 1963 he published a collection of poems, Emblems in a Season of Fury, clearly influenced by their work, he also wrote to a friend that year, “The protest of the Beatniks, while having a certain element of sincerity, is largely a delusion . . . . Yet this much can be said for them: their very formlessness may perhaps enable them to reject most of the false solutions and deride the ‘square’ propositions of the decadent liberalism around them. It may perhaps prepare them to go in the right direction.” (Courage for Truth, p. 170)

Merton soon came around to a greater appreciation of the Beats, for not long after, Merton published his own literary journal in 1968 titled Monk’s Pond, which included contributions by Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Merton’s death that year ended the conversation.

Even Mad Hepcats are Children of God

The popular conception of the Beats in general—and Kerouac in particular—has always been skewed toward the licentious and the sensational. Even to this day, Kerouac’s reputation as a no-nothing Bohemian addicted to vice and immorality confounds any true appreciation of his work as an artist and has led to a series of specious movies and “appreciations” that do him no justice.

Carolyn Cassady, wife of Neal Cassady and close friend of Kerouac, explained the problem rather succinctly when she wrote:

Young people felt Kerouac had given them a passport to selfish self-indulgence; they could now do anything that took their fancy. They abandoned homes and schools and threw the baby out with the bath water. They didn’t stop to think that Kerouac had no responsibilities and had to be free to roam in order to pursue his one aim—writing. He never meant to promote drug abuse, free love, or irresponsibility. When he was cast as The King of the Beats and The Father of the Hippies, he was shattered. He thought he was promoting love and appreciation of life in all its forms, a joyous celebration and awe derived from that love, with its ups and downs. He was basically very conventional, a gentleman of the old order who didn’t swear in mixed company nor talk about sex except with male cronies. He told me he was going to drink himself to death. I thought he was joking, but that is exactly what he did. [i]

Kerouac explained his aspirations as a writer this way:

I want to work in revelations not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down. [ii]

And so, the novels and poems poured out of him, one after the other in an uncensored rain of both sacred and profane narratives, written in the first-bloom of their immediate discovery. When asked what any of this “soul searching” had to do with Beatniks or “mad hepcats,” Kerouac replied:

Even mad happy hepcats with all their kicks and chicks and hepcat talk are creatures of God laid out in this infinite universe without knowing what forAnd besides, I have never heard more talk about God, the Last Things, and the soul, than among the kids of my generation—and not just the religious or the intellectual kids, but all of them. “What are you searching for? they asked me. I answered that I was waiting for God to show his face. (Later I got a letter from a 16-year-old girl saying that was exactly what she’d been waiting for too.) [iii]

Jack Kerouac

In a State of Beatitude

Kerouac was never the corny “King” of the Beatniks the media made him out to be. And it is a sorry shame this popular misconception poisoned his reputation and gave rise to the misunderstandings of Merton’s religious censors—keeping Merton from ever fully appreciating the spiritual vision of the Beats.

But let’s give Kerouac the last word:

As the man who suddenly thought of that word beat to describe our generation, I would like to have my little say about it before everyone else in the writing field begins to call it roughneck,violent,heedless,rootless. How can people be rootless? Heedless of what? Wants? Roughneck because you don’t come on elegant? Beat doesn’t mean tired, or bushed, so much as it means beato, the Italian for beatific: to be in a state of beatitude, like St. Francis, trying to love all life, trying to be utterly sincere with everyone, practicing endurance, kindness, cultivating joy of heart. How can this be done in our mad modern world of multiplicities and millions? By practicing a little solitude, going off by yourself once in a while to store up that most precious of golds: the vibrations of sincerity. [iv]

Sounds pretty contemplative to me.

[i] Beat p. xx
[ii] Letter to Ed White (5 July 1950) published in The Missouri Review, Vol. XVII, No. 3, 1994, page 137, and also quoted in Jack Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster (1996) by Steve Turner, p. 117
[iii] Good Blond p. 51–53 “Lamb, No Lion”
[iv] Good Blond p. 51–53 “Lamb, No Lion”

Related Books

Hard to Be a Saint in the City

$16.95 - Paperback

By: Robert Inchausti

The Beat Book

$26.95 - Paperback

By: Anne Waldman

The Pocket Thomas Merton

$12.95 - Paperback

By: Robert Inchausti & Thomas Merton

Echoing Silence

$27.95 - Paperback

By: Robert Inchausti & Thomas Merton

Seeds

$16.95 - Paperback

By: Robert Inchausti & Thomas Merton

Robert Inchausti is the author of four books including Subversive Orthodoxy and The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People and the editor of several Thomas Merton anthologies including, Seeds, The Pocket Thomas Merton, and Echoing Silence.

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Meditation Looks Inward, Poetry Holds Forth | An Excerpt from Hard to Be a Saint in the City

We have excerpted part of the chapter “Meditation Looks Inward, Poetry Holds Forth: Is There a Beat Way of Writing?” from Hard to Be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats here.

In this book, Robert Inchausti explores the Beat canon to reveal that the movement was at its heart a spiritual one. It goes deeper than the Buddhism with which many of the key figures became identified. It’s about their shared perception of an existence in which the Divine reveals itself in the ordinary. Theirs is a spirituality where real life triumphs over airy ideals and personal authenticity becomes both the content and the vehicle for a kind of refurbished American Transcendentalism.

To order the full book, click here.

Beat writing, like other forms of contemplative practice, is a form of autopoesis (or self-making). It liberates both readers and writers from their enthrallment to the prevailing cultural trance, so as to free the pent-up personal energies of their organisms, thereby advancing their individual survival capacities and those of the species.

Jack Kerouac

I believe that there is a general movement at this very moment among the great hidden honest writers living in the world today, some of them bearded saints, one of them that old Spanish Reichian eccentric who lived in the California woods and wrote the legends of the Pomos and other Indians in his own hip crazy way, but he is only one of many, a movement of men who in the 19th century would have been great novelists but are now so bared down to the bony truth that fiction can only be fiction to them from this moment onward, who know that the modern world can only be expressed in great straight statements made on the spot almost like Christ speaking from the Cross as the winds rise and just as crucial & fatal as that, men who have come to learn that there is nothing more amazing, instructive, filled with soul-saving love or apocalyptic and world-making than what actually happens anywhere at any moment, and soon, (as Whitman knew). I say this movement is growing the more so as cheap novels ease on bookstands and quite naturally. But I’m not concerned with reforms, only my love life.

Allen Ginsberg

Kerouac’s motive for his probe was disillusionment: the heavy experience of the lives, old age, sickness and death of his father and his older brother, whose dying he experienced as he took care of them and watched them in their beds, close to their deaths. As he wrote in Visions of Cody, in 1951:

I’m writing this book because we’re all going to die—in the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother far away, my sister and wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands . . . that are now left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our death, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid: with just this one pride and consolation: my heart broke in the general despair and opened up inwards to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream.

As a motive for writing a giant novel, this passage from Visions of Cody is a terrific stroke of awareness and bodhisattva heart, or outgoingness of heart. So I’m speaking about the ground of poetry and purification of motive.

Michael McClure

My poetry is to make myself conscious. And my poetry is to illuminate a reader, if he or she is interested, with what I’ve been able to do with my consciousness, which may be of use to them on their own. Perhaps my poetry is to broaden my sensorium, and hopefully it will broaden the sensoriums of other individuals who read it. In other words, the function of poetry, as I see it, is to create a myriad-mindedness. I see myself wholly as an artist, as a poet. I am not a utopian. I’m not a socio-biological thinker. But I do align myself with a movement or a thread or a stream or a surge of individuals who are interested in liberation of the body, in the liberation of the imagination and the liberation of consciousness. In that sense, we may be of help to those who begin to deal with the situations that need to be dealt with. I constantly ask biologists, botanists, or bio-philosophers what we may do, what we may think about, what the situation is. That’s reflected in my poetry. I’m an artist.

Gary Snyder

How do you prepare your mind to become a singer? It takes an attitude of openness, inwardness, gratitude; plus meditation, fasting, a little suffering, some rupturing of the day-to-day ties with the social fabric. I quote from the Papago (or more properly, O’od-ham):

A man who desires song did not put his mind on words and tunes. He put it on pleasing the supernaturals. He must be a good hunter or a good warrior. Perhaps they would like his ways. And one day in natural sleep he would hear singing. He hears a song and he knows it is the hawk singing to him of the great white birds that fly in from the ocean. Perhaps the clouds sing or the wind or the feathery red rain spider on its invisible rope. The reward of heroism is not personal glory nor riches. The reward is dreams. One who performs acts of heroism puts himself in contact with the supernatural. After that, and not before, he fasts and waits for a vision. The Papago holds to the belief that visions do not come to the unworthy, but to the worthy man who shows himself humble there comes a dream and the dream always contains a song.

William Everson

There is a difference between an authentic artist and the pseudos. There is the pseudo artist who is a man not willing to carry his art to the point where the art drops away and a superior principle subsumes it. To be able to do that heroically; to be able to carry your art to that point and then to be able to cancel it out, and know your search is for that life beyond art—this is the thing that makes an artist great.

Hard to Be a Saint in the City

$16.95 - Paperback

By: Robert Inchausti

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