Satori in Paris and Pic. Jack Kerouac

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СКАЧАТЬ maybe thinking “That’s the National Library alright, ha ha ha” (“maybe they’ll shoot down that Quebec rat”)—Who knows? Any Parisian middle-aged gendarme oughta know where Rue de Richelieu is—But thinking he may be right and I’d made a mistake studying the Paris map back home I do go in the direction he points, afraid to go any other, and go down the upper spate of Champs-Elysées then cut across the damp green park and across Rue Gabriel to the back of an important government building of some kind where suddenly I see a sentry box and out of it steps a guard with bayonet in full Republican Guard regalia (like Napoleon with a cockatoo hat) and he snaps to attention and holds up his bayonet at Present Arms but it’s not for me really, it’s for a sudden black limousine full of bodyguards and guys in black suits who receive a salute from the other sentry men and zip on by—I stroll past the sentry bayonet and take out my plastic Camel cigarette container to light a butt—Immediately two strolling gendarmes are passing me in the opposite direction watching every move I make—It turns out I’m only lighting a butt but how can they tell? plastic and all that—And that is the marvelous tight security around big old de Gaulle’s very palace which is a few blocks away.

      I go down to the corner bar to have a cognac alone at a cool table by the open door.

      The bartender in there is very polite and tells me exactly how to get to the library: right down St.-Honoré then across la Place de la Concorde and then Rue Rivoli right at the Louvre and left on Richelieu to the Library dingblast it.

      So how can an American tourist who doesnt speak French get around at all? Let alone me?

      To know the name of the street of the sentry box itself I’d have to order a map from the C.I.A.

       11.

      A STRANGE SEVERE PAROCHIAL-STYLE LIBRARY, LA Bibliothèque Nationale on rue de Richelieu, with thousands of scholars and millions of books and strange assistant librarians with Zen Master brooms (really French aprons) who admire good handwriting more than anything in a scholar or writer—Here, you feel like an American genius who escaped the rules of Le Lycée. (French High School).

      All I wanted was: Histoire généalogique de plusieurs maisons illustres de Bretagne, enrichie des armes et blasons d’icelles … etc. by Fr. Augustin Du Paz, Paris, N.Buon, 1620, Folio Lm² 23 et Rés. Lm 23.

      Think I got it? Not on your—

      And also I wanted:– Pêre Anselme de Sainte Marie, (né Pierre de Guibours), his Histoire de la maison royale de France, des puirs, grands officiers de la couronne et de la maison du roy et des anciens barons du royaume, R.P. Anselme, Paris, E. Loyson 1674, Lm³ 397, (History of the royal house of France, and of also, the great officers of the crown and of the house of the king and of the ancient barons of the kingdom), all of which I had to write down neatly as I could on the call-cards and the old aproned fella told the old lady librarian “It’s well written” (meaning the legibility of the handwriting). Of course they all smelled the liquor on me and thought I was a nut but on seeing I knew what and how to ask for certain books they all went in back to huge dusty files and shelves as high as the roof and must’ve drawn up ladders high enough to make Finnegan fall again with an even bigger noise than the one in Finnegans Wake, this one being the noise of the name, the actual name the Indian Buddhists gave to the Tathagata or passer-through of the Aeon Priyadavsana more than Incalculable Aeons ago :–Here we go, Finn:–

      GALADHARAGARGITAGHOSHASUSVARA-NAKSHATRARAGASANKUSUMITABHIGNA.

      Now I mention this to show, that if I didnt know libraries, and specifically the greatest library in the world, the New York Public Library where I among a thousand other things actually copied down this long Sanskrit name exactly as it’s spelled, then why should I be regarded with suspicion in the Paris Library? Of course I’m not young any more and “smell of liquor” and even talk to interesting Jewish scholars in the library there (one Éli Flamand copying down notes for a history of Renaissance art and who kindly assisted me’s much’s he could), still I dont know, it seemed they really thought I was nuts when they saw what I asked for, which I copied from their incorrect and incomplete files, not fully what I showed you above about Pêre Anselme as written in the completely correct files of London, as I found later where the national records were not destroyed by fire, saw what I asked for, which did not conform to the actual titles of the old books they had in the back, and when they saw my name Kerouac but with a “Jack” in front of it, as tho I were a Johann Maria Philipp Frimont von Palota suddenly traveling from Staten Island to the Vienna library and signing my name on the call-cards Johnny Pelota and asking for Hergott’s Genealogia augustae gentis Habsburgicae (incomplete title) and my name not spelled “Palota,” as it should, just as my real name should be spelled “Kerouack,” but both old Johnny and me’ve been thru so many centuries of genealogical wars and crests and cockatoos and gules and jousts against Fitzwilliams, agh—

      It doesnt matter.

      And besides it’s all too long ago and worthless unless you can find the actual family monuments in fields, like with me I go claim the bloody dolmens of Carnac? Or I go and claim the Cornish language which is called Kernuak? Or some little old cliff-castle at Kenedjack in Cornwall or one of the “hundreds” called Kerrier in Cornwall? Or Cornouialles itself outside Quimper and Keroual? (Brittany thar).

      Well anyway I was trying to find things out about my old family, I was the first Lebris de Kérouack ever to go back to France in 210 years to find out and I was planning to go to Brittany and Cornwall England next (land of Tristan and King Mark) and later I was gonna hit Ireland and find Isolde and like Peter Sellers get banged in the mug in a Dublin pub.

      Ridiculous, but I was so happy on cognac I was going to try.

      The whole library groaned with the accumulated debris of centuries of recorded folly, as tho you had to record folly in the Old or the New World anyhow, like my closet with its incredible debris of cluttered old letters by the thousands, books, dust, magazines, childhood boxscores, the likes of which when I woke up the other night from a pure sleep, made me groan to think this is what I was doing with my waking hours: burdening myself with junk neither I nor anybody else should really want or will ever remember in Heaven.

      Anyway, an example of my troubles at the library. They didnt bring me those books. On opening them I think they would have cracked apart. What I really shoulda done is say to that head librarian:– “I’m gonna put you in a horseshoe and give you to a horse to wear in the Battle of Chickamauga.”

       12.

      MEANWHILE I KEPT ASKING EVERYBODY IN PARIS “Where’s Pascal buried? Where’s Balzac’s cemetery?” Somebody finally told me Pascal must certainly be buried out of town at Port Royal near his pious sister, Jansenists, and as for Balzac’s cemetery I didnt wanta go to no cemetery at midnight (Pere Lachaise) and anyway as we were blasting along in a wild taxi ride at 3 A.M. near Montparnasse they yelled “There’s your Balzac! His statue on the square!”

      “Stop the cab!” and I got out, swept off me hat in sweeping bow, saw the statue vaguely gray in the drunken misting streets, and that was that. And how could I find my way to Port Royal if I could hardly find my way back to my hotel?

      And besides they’re not there at all, only their bodies.

       13.

      PARIS IS A PLACE WHERE YOU CAN REALLY WALK around at night and find what you dont want, O Pascal.

      Trying to make my way to the Opera a hundred cars came charging СКАЧАТЬ