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UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Headless UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Headless and Homeless: Zen Non-Thinking Awareness in American Countercultural Trip Narratives Post-WWI to the Vietnam War A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Matthew James Bond June 2014 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Robert Latham, Chairperson Dr. Kimberly J. Devlin Dr. Steven Gould Axelrod Copyright by Matthew James Bond 2014 The Dissertation of Matthew James Bond is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside DEDICATION To Matt and Anne, for working to keep the way open for new travelers. And to Lauren, for traveling the way with me. iv ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Headless and Homeless: Zen Non-Thinking Awareness in American Countercultural Trip Narratives Post-WWI to the Vietnam War by Matthew James Bond Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, June 2014 Dr. Robert Latham, Chairperson This project surveys the appearance of a phenomenon that I will call “non-thinking awareness,” something not exclusive to but usually identified with the practice of Zen Buddhism. I argue that the importation of Eastern religious and philosophical ideas introduced into American literature a mode of perception radically divergent from the dualistic Cartesian cogito upon which modern Western thought primarily owes its origins. Instead of identifying with one’s thoughts, a person who practices non-thinking awareness sees his or her existence as a holistic embodiment rather than as an identity split between mind and body. The four chapters of this project read texts that evince trip narratives, stories that depict some sort of pilgrimage or journey toward a higher consciousness. More specifically, these trip narratives respond to American wars, starting from World War I and continuing through the Vietnam War. The protagonists featured, in some part affected directly by a given war or by the war’s deleterious effect on their culture, radiate away from the urban or suburban social site that was their home and move to the fringes of society in pursuit of v wholeness in the face of fragmentation. I correlate the movement away from society with a practice of relinquishing logocentric thought because language is a social tool. By leaving sites of the social, these characters are able to abandon identification with a linguistically mediated self. This project focuses on work by Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and Marco Vassi. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1— Noguchi, Hemingway’s Zen Heritage, and Nick Adams’s Zen Practice 23 Chapter 2—Cutting off the Head: The Headless Body in St. Mawr, the Bodiless Mind in The Unnamable, and the Threat of Language Against Reality 64 Chapter 3—Linguistic Nonsense, Subverted Social Roles, and Social Escapism in Cold War Literature 118 Chapter 4—“A splendour among shadows”: Radiant Selfhood, Dual Realities, and Postmodern Sacred Production in Marco Vassi’s The Stoned Apocalypse 173 Project Conclusion—Coming off It: Failure as Success 222 Works Cited 230 vii “Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.” —Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus “Here in the West, I do not think it advisable to follow Buddhism. Changing religions is not like changing professions. Excitement [lessens] over the years, and soon you are not excited, and then where are you? Homeless inside yourself.” —The Dalai Lama, “The man from the town of Roaring Tiger (TA)” viii INTRODUCTION NON-THINKING: AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISM TO AMERICAN ZEN “Perception is connected in western thought with a representational mode of thinking,” explains Carl Olson in Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy (8). Olson argues that Zen Buddhism is a philosophy that shares a tendency in postmodern thought, largely seen in the work of Derrida and deconstructionist theory in general, of seeking a style of thought not subject to the ontological pitfalls of relying on symbolic representation—he claims both philosophical traditions desire the advent of a non-representational “paradigm” of thought to replace logocentrism. While it is not my ambition to validate Olson’s argument, this point serves as an apt place to start a discussion interested in some of the larger concerns voiced in Olson’s study. Despite the connection in western thought that ties perception to representation, there does exist a history of an advocacy of non-representational perception in America thought, and this history arrives through the importation of certain Eastern philosophical beliefs. Henry David Thoreau, a thinker whose ideas were influenced by various Eastern spiritual traditions, including but not limited to Hinduism and Buddhism, claimed that a person could witness the passing of worldly phenomena from a place of “expanded” or “transpersonal” awareness—my terms, not his; and in Walden, a deeply spiritually inflected text, he seems to advocate an activity that in these named Asian spiritual traditions we would call meditation; and Thoreau explains the benefit of such an activity, which is the ability to move from one type of identification, that with a person’s human form and thinking mind, to a kind of unfettered, unmoored awareness, necessarily impersonal and consequently infinite. He writes, “With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By conscious 1 effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent” (94). What he seems to be saying is that there exists the ability of the human mind to dis-identify with the thinking mind as the seat of one’s identity and to instead reside in a place not affected by the passing of phenomena, including one’s thoughts, and to do so might even be “sane” or healthy. To do so presents the option of extricating one’s self from involvement in the drama or “theatrical exhibition” of the world’s movements, and from this vantage point he believes he “may not be affected by an actual event which [only] appears to concern [him]” (emphasis original 94). The verb “appear” is key in this sentiment, because Thoreau draws a distinction between the seeming reality of these phenomena and the illusory nature of this reality, describing life as “fiction, a work of imagination only” (94). He writes that though he “know[s himself] as a human being,” a being that is itself the “scene…of thoughts and affections,” it is also possible to “stand as remote from [himself] as from another” (94). Though tempting to read this possibility as a form of quietism, Thoreau is not advocating an escape from mundane reality, so much as imploring his reader to discover in him or herself that which can stand unmoved in the face of global crisis and inevitable change, and so to experience the existence of “the spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than you” (94). This spectator, by existing beyond the limits of the human form, as Thoreau suggests is the case, necessarily transcends the personal ego and thus the separation between self and other. More than a century after the publication of Walden, ex-Harvard psychology professor Richard Alpert, right-hand man to Timothy Leary’s acid politics of ecstasy, returned from a self-seeking pilgrimage that had led him to India and that had found him under the guidance of Neem Karoli Baba, his guru. Now living as Ram Dass, like Thoreau, 2 he published his own philosophical memoir, Be Here Now, one that like Walden, questioned the sanity of the American way of life. Though Dass had converted to become a follower of ashtanga yoga, his approach to teaching spirituality encompasses a wide range of (mostly Eastern) spiritual practices, where he draws on their cosmological commonalities. One prominent practice he frequently suggests is the cultivation of what he calls “the witness,” which “could be thought of as an eye” (Dass 67), a function I understand to be identical to the “spectator” so described by Thoreau because it “is not evaluative” and offers a place where a person can “[watch] the drama of life unfold” (Dass 69). Called by either name, the “spectator” or the “witness,” this viewpoint fundamentally alters the experience of consciousness in those who would employ it because it breaks the commonly held identification with the thinking mind. Rather than view the linguistically dependent “I” and the stream of consciousness “I” thinks—that is, the Cartesian cogito—as the basis of one’s identity, such a stance as sees the body as something vaguely separate and subordinate to the thinking mind, Thoreau’s spectator and Ram Dass’s witness provide in addition to a sense of equanimity in response to worldly “drama,” an awareness outside and beyond the logocentric self. Though supposedly surviving death as Thoreau claims, a claim that cannot be tested nor validated here, this spectator/witness is an embodied non-egocentrically based awareness that instead observes both the passing of internal phenomena—that is, thought—and the passing of external “drama” or “theatrical exhibition.” This project is interested in precisely this possibility, that of non-logocentric awareness, one in which the ego loses primacy and instead an embodied non- representational awareness becomes ascendant. I will read texts in which both third-person 3 protagonists and first person narrators resist identifying themselves with the language-based ego and experiment with this impersonal, ego-transcendent awareness. There are many spiritual or metaphysical traditions that suggest such a possibility, but for a few reasons I will explain now, I will approach these readings through the consideration of Zen meditation practice. For one, in twentieth century America, Zen Buddhism became a prominent alternative to both Christianity and atheism, and many of the texts discussed herein where this stated awareness appears refer to Zen by name, exploring its potential benefits and extolling its perceived virtues.
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