Satori in Paris & Pic

by Jack Kerouac

satori: the Japanese word for “sudden illumination,” “sudden awakening” or simply “kick in the eye.”—

SOMEWHERE DURING MY TEN DAYS IN PARIS (AND Brittany) I received an illumination of some kind that seems to’ve changed me again, towards what I suppose’ll be my pattern for another seven years or more: in effect, a satori: the Japanese word for “sudden illumination,” “sudden awakening” or simply “kick in the eye.”—Whatever, something did happen and in my first reveries after the trip and I’m back home regrouping all the confused rich events of those ten days, it seems the satori was handed to me by a taxi driver named Raymond Baillet, other times I think it might’ve been my paranoiac fear in the foggy streets of Brest Brittany at 3 A.M., other times I think it was Monsieur Casteljaloux and his dazzlingly beautiful secretary (a Bretonne with blue-black hair, green eyes, separated front teeth just right in eatable lips, white wool knit sweater, with gold bracelets and perfume) or the waiter who told me “Paris est pourri” (Paris is rotten) or the performance of Mozart’s Requiem in old church of St. Germain des Prés with elated violinists swinging their elbows with joy because so many distinguished people had shown up crowding the pews and special chairs (and outside it’s misting) or, in Heaven’s name, what? The straight tree lanes of Tuileries Gardens? Or the roaring sway of the bridge over the booming holiday Seine which I crossed holding on to my hat knowing it was not the bridge (the makeshift one at Quai des Tuileries) but I myself swaying from too much cognac and nerves and no sleep and jet airliner all the way from Florida twelve hours with airport anxieties, or bars, or anguishes, intervening? As in an earlier autobiographical book I’ll use my real name here, full name in this case, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, because this story is about my search for this name in France, and I’m not afraid of giving the real name of Raymond Baillet to public scrutiny because all I have to say about him, in connection with the fact he may be the cause of my satori in Paris, is that he was polite, kind, efficient, hip, aloof and many other things and mainly just a cabdriver who happened to drive me to Orly airfield on my way back home from France: and sure he wont be in trouble because of that—And besides probably never will see his name in print because there are so many books being published these days in America and in France nobody has time to keep up with all of them, and if told by someone that his name appears in an American “novel” he’ll probably never find out where to buy it in Paris, if it’s ever translated at all, and if he does find it, it wont hurt him to read that he, Raymond Baillet, is a great gentleman and cabdriver who happened to impress an American during a fare ride to the airport. Compris?

As in an earlier autobiographical book I’ll use my real name here, full name in this case, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac,

the tale that’s told for no other reason but companionship, which is another (and my favorite) definition of literature, the tale that’s told for companionship and to teach something religious, of religious reverence, about real life, in this real world which literature should (and here does) reflect.

made-up stories and romances about what would happen IF are for children and adult cretins who are afraid to read themselves in a book just as they might be afraid to look in the mirror when they’re sick or injured or hungover or insane.

THIS BOOK’LL SAY, IN EFFECT, HAVE PITY ON US all, and dont get mad at me for writing at all.

Greener than any palmetto country could ever be, and especially in June before August (Août) has withered it all away.

I live in Florida. Arriving over Paris suburbs in the big Air France jetliner I noticed how green the northern countryside is in the summer, because of winter snows that have melted right into that butterslug meadow. Greener than any palmetto country could ever be, and especially in June before August (Août) has withered it all away.

The plane touched down just right and here we were in Paris on a gray cold morning in June.

The plane touched down without a Georgia hitch. Here I’m referring to that planeload of prominent respectable Atlantans who were all loaded with gifts around 1962 and heading back to Atlanta when the liner shot itself into a farm and everybody died, it never left the ground and half of Atlanta was depleted and all the gifts were strewn and burned all over Orly, a great Christian tragedy not the fault of the French government at all since the pilots and steward’s crew were all French citizens. The plane touched down just right and here we were in Paris on a gray cold morning in June.

I gave a franc to a man beggar in St.-Germain to whom I then yelled: “Vieux voyou!” (Old hoodlum!)

I gave a franc to a man beggar in St.-Germain to whom I then yelled: “Vieux voyou!” (Old hoodlum!) and he laughed and said: ‘What?—Hood-lumT’ I said “Yes, you cant fool an old French Canadian” and I wonder today if that hurt him because what I really wanted to say was “Guenigiou” (ragpicker) but “voyou” came out.

(Ragpicker should be spelled “guenillou,” but that’s not the way it comes out in 300-year-old French which was preserved intact in Quebec and still understood in the streets of Paris not to mention the hay barns of the North.)

I saw the greatness of Paris that it can weep for the follies of the Revolution and at the same time rejoice they got rid of all those long nosed nobles, of which I am a descendant (Princes of Brittany).

CHATEAUBRIAND WAS AN AMAZING WRITER WHO wanted early old love affairs on a higher order than the Order was giving him in 1790 France—

I gaze into her eyes—I give her the double whammy blue eyes compassion shot—She falls for it.

I get drunk and forget.

In the bar there’s a woman who is a lovely 40-year-old redhead Spaniard amoureuse who takes an actual liking to me, does worse and takes me seriously, and actually makes a date for us to meet alone: I get drunk and forget.

I get so mad I go down to the whore districts.

The Swiss woman by now is asking me when I’m going to leave.

I stomp away and take out my Swiss Army knife with the cross on it, because I suspect I’m being followed by French muggers and thugs. I cut my own finger and bleed all over the place. I go back to my hotel room bleeding all over the lobby. The Swiss woman by now is asking me when I’m going to leave.

“What do you know about les Lebris de Kérouacks and their motto of Love Suffer and Work you dumb old Bourgeois bag.”)

I say “I’ll leave as soon as I’ve verified my family in the library.” (And add to myself: “What do you know about les Lebris de Kérouacks and their motto of Love Suffer and Work you dumb old Bourgeois bag.”)

in the Mazarine Library old sweet Madame Oury the head librarian patiently explains to me that the Nazis done bombed and burned all their French papers in 1944,

SO I GO TO THE LIBRARY, LA BIBLIOTHÈQUE NA-tionale, to check up on the list of the officers in Montcalm’s Army 1756 Quebec, and also Louis Moréri’s dictionary, and Pêre Anselme etc., all the information about the royal house of Brittany, and it aint even there and finally in the Mazarine Library old sweet Madame Oury the head librarian patiently explains to me that the Nazis done bombed and burned all their French papers in 1944, something which I’d forgotten in my zeal. Still I smell that there’s something fishy in Brittany—Surely de Kérouack should be recorded in France if it’s already recorded in the British Museum in London?—I tell her that— (less)

You cant smoke even in the toilet in the Bibliothèque Nationale

My cabdriver is Roland Ste. Jeanne d’Arc de la Pucelle who tells me that all Bretons are “corpulent” like me.

She is just too beautiful for words. I said to her “Tu passe toutes la journée dans maudite beauty parlor?” (You spend all day in the damn beauty parlor?)

Methinks women love me and then they realize I’m drunk for all the world and this makes them realize I cant concentrate on them alone, for long, makes them jealous, and I’m a fool in Love With God.

Well I’m not an idiot, and I like ladies, and I’m polite, but impolitic, like Ippolit my cousin from Russia.

My manners, abominable at times, can be sweet. As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind. I’m a Wretch. But I love love.

NOT ONLY THAT BUT YOU CANT GET A NIGHT’S sleep in France,

NOT ONLY THAT BUT YOU CANT GET A NIGHT’S sleep in France, they’re so lousy and noisy at 8 A.M. screaming over fresh bread it would make Abomination weep. Buy that. Their strong hot coffee and croissants and crackling French bread and Breton butter, Gad, where’s my Alsatian beer?

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

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.

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).

GALADHARAGARGITAGHOSHASUSVARA-NAKSHATRARAGASANKUSUMITABHIGNA.

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—

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?

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,

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.

burdening myself with junk neither I nor anybody else should really want or will ever remember in Heaven.

“I’m gonna put you in a horseshoe and give you to a horse to wear in the Battle of Chickamauga.”

MEANWHILE I KEPT ASKING EVERYBODY IN PARIS “Where’s Pascal buried? Where’s Balzac’s cemetery?”

“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.

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.

I saw dozens of cars screech to a stop from 70 M.P.H. to let some stroller have his way!

they rush at the very beginning with hors d’oeuvres and bread, and then plunge into their entrees

The one sympathetic counterman brought menu and Alsatian beer I ordered and I told him to wait awhile—He didnt understand that, drinking without eating at once, because he is partner to the secret of charming French eaters:–they rush at the very beginning with hors d’oeuvres and bread, and then plunge into their entrees (this is practically always before even a slug of wine) and then they slow down and start lingering, now the wine to wash the mouth, now comes the talk, and now the second half of the meal, wine, dessert and coffee, something I cannae do.

In any case I’m drinking my second beer and reading the menu and notice an American guy is sitting five stools away but he is so mean looking in his absolute disgust with Paris I’m afraid to say “Hey, you American?”—

So to my amazement I hear the first clear bell tones of American speech in a week:” “You got some oranges here?”

Then in come two American schoolteachers of Iowa, sisters on a big trip to Paris, they’ve apparently got a hotel room round the corner and aint left it except to ride the sightseeing buses which pick em up at the door, but they know this nearest restaurant and have just come down to buy a couple of oranges for tomorrow morning because the only oranges in France are apparently Valencias imported from Spain and too expensive for anything so avid as quick simple break of fast. So to my amazement I hear the first clear bell tones of American speech in a week:” “You got some oranges here?”

I had come to France to do nothing but walk and eat and this was my first meal and my last, ten days.

IN MY ROOM I LOOKED AT MY SUITCASE SO CLEVERLY packed for this big trip the idea of which began all the previous winter in Florida reading Voltaire, Chateaubriand, de Montherlant

IN MY ROOM I LOOKED AT MY SUITCASE SO CLEVERLY packed for this big trip the idea of which began all the previous winter in Florida reading Voltaire, Chateaubriand, de Montherlant (whose latest book was even now displayed in the shop-windows of Paris, “The Man Who Travels Alone is a Devil”)—Studying maps, planning to walk all over, eat, find my ancestors’ home town in the Library and then go to Brittany where it was and where the sea undoubtedly washed the rocks—My plan being, after five days in Paris, go to that inn on the sea in Finistère and go out at midnight in raincoat, rain hat, with notebook and pencil and with large plastic bag to write inside of, i.e., stick hand, pencil and notebook into bag, and write dry, while rain falls on rest of me, write the sounds of the sea, part two of poem “Sea” to be entitled: “SEA, Part Two, the Sounds of the Atlantic at X, Brittany,” either at outside of Carnac, or Concarneau, or Pointe de Penmarch, or Douardenez, or Plouzaimedeau, or Brest, or St. Malo—There in my suitcase, the plastic bag, the two pencils, the extra leads, the notebook, the scarf, the sweater, the raincoat in the closet, and the warm shoes—

stick hand, pencil and notebook into bag, and write dry, while rain falls on rest of me,

Yet this book is to prove that no matter how you travel, how “successful” your tour, or foreshortened, you always learn something and learn to change your thoughts.

“Yet this book is to prove that no matter how you travel, how 'successful' your tour, or foreshortened, you always learn something and learn to change your thoughts.” —Jack Kerouac, “Satori in Paris” (1966)

the movie turns out to be the last few scenes of O’Toole and Burton in “Becket,” very good, especially their meeting on the beach on horseback, and we say goodbye—

I roll my “r’s” on my tongue and not in my throat because I come from Medieval French Quebec-via-Brittany stock,

François Villon’s real name was pronounced “Ville On” and not “Viyon” (which is a corruption) and that in those days you said not “toi” or “moi” but like “twé” or “mwé” (as we still do in Quebec and in two days I heard it in Brittany)

Maybe that’s when my Satori took place.

Finally I began being so cocky I didn’t even bother with Parisian French and let loose blasts and pataraffes of chalivarie French that had them in stitches because they still understood,

Finally I began being so cocky I didn’t even bother with Parisian French and let loose blasts and pataraffes of chalivarie French that had them in stitches because they still understood, so there, Professor Sheffer and Professor Cannon (my old French “teachers” in college and prep school who used to laugh at my “accent” but gave me A’s.)

what a miracle are different languages and what an amazing Tower of Babel this world is.

Suffice it to say, when I got back to New York I had more fun talking in Brooklyn accents’n I ever had in me life and especially when I got back down South, whoosh, what a miracle are different languages and what an amazing Tower of Babel this world is. Like, imagine going to Moscow or Tokyo or Prague and listening to all that.

That people actually understand what their tongues are babbling. And that eyes do shine to understand, and that responses are made which indicate a soul

That people actually understand what their tongues are babbling. And that eyes do shine to understand, and that responses are made which indicate a soul in all this matter and mess of tongues and teeth, mouths, cities of stone, rain, heat, cold, the whole wooden mess all the way from Neanderthaler grunts to Martian-probe moans of intelligent scientists, nay, all the way from the Johnny Hart ZANG of anteater tongues to the dolorous “la notte, ch’i’ passai con tanta pieta” of Signore Dante in his understood shroud of robe ascending finally to Heaven in the arms of Beatrice.