Sleeping on the backdeck by the dog. Dreams by the backdeck dog made of glass below the glass sky. There is no substance to the sky, yet in dreams the sky is made of glass or crystal through which the dog on the backdeck and I can swim as if through water, but it is glass, nothing but crystal glass upon which the glittering gems of the stars and the planets are placed one by one in their myriad billions.
I am glass, the dog is glass, the sky is glass and the stars are placed one by one as gems on velvet cloth. Some are blue, some are white, some are red and green and orange and yellow. There are planets roaming through the crystal sky and now and then a shooting star shoots and dazzles and fizzles away. That is the sky.
And when the sky and the dog and I are whacked, sometimes by the shooting stars falling in the sky, we shatter like glass and fall to the ground in glittering shards like the stars in the sky placed one by one on the black velvet cloth of eternity.
Reconstituting themselves, putting themselves together, the sky and the dog and I return to our places in the dreams on the backdeck after bhikkhuing through unfamiliar neighborhoods of sharp edges and shallow angles.
Wandering through brilliant-lit suburban night streets, jet engines on stands roaring in the maintenance sheds across the widest avenue waiting for the call to Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos, the War Over There, the perpetual War Over There, tramping one foot after another through unknown, sharp-edged, shallow angle suburban night streets. Where is he?
Lost, hard to say, hard to fathom, hard to imagine, wandering long curving arcs, rose and jasmine scented, fresh grass mown that day, piles of yard rakings placed neatly by the curb. It's another slightly sinister world. Bhikkhu on the road, not quite a dharma bum but on the way. Toward the sounds of furious jet engines screaming in the night. Is this what they hear Over There when they're trying to sleep to tend their rice paddies, when they're combing their young girl hair? Is this what it sounds like when the fighter jets swoop overhead and the B-52s come with their endless bombsupply of jasmine and rosepetals?
Jasmine and rosepetals.
Closer wandering to the sounds of the furious jets roar. A sharp angled house by the corner, long and low and lean, shallow angled roof projecting beams, fireplace prominent on the lowslung frontporch. Remember the Jeepster in the driveway. Dark blue undercarriage, off gray-white above. He's seen it before, somewhere, perhaps by the highschool to pick up one of his student friends, he doesn't quite remember, but he's seen this dark-night below Jeepster before.
Hello, he nods in recognition that isn't recognition at all, hands folded in front of him, bhikku-ic.
He'll have a Buick one day and he'll drive it to Big Sur.
The sea breeze isn't strong enough to blow away all the daytime heat, and he sweats some through the striped cotton longsleeve shirt he wears. White and blue stripes.
In the end, as lost as he is, he finds an exit and walk-stumbles back from this strange neighborhood to his own, barely noticing the railroad tracks and the pedestrian overpass that he negotiates on his way toward curling up on the backdeck of his slightly more pretentious suburban house with his dog Sindy.
I don't think I finished reading Big Sur when I was an angst-ridden teenager. At least I didn't remember anything in the book after the beginning of the Shakespearean Mad Scene and I probably stopped reading at that point because it was too powerful, honest and painful, and I wondered what it would be like for someone performing it on stage which a powerful angst-ridden pre-alchy actor could do like James Dean or someone, but he was already long dead so what would it be like with Martin Sheen, say? Oh, I don't know and didn't think about it too much.
What was evoked as I read through to the Sea poem this time -- I stopped there to savor it for later -- was watching my lanky teenage self lying propped up on the bed in my room reading Big Sur by Jack Kerouac, the light on the four-drawer maple dresser by my bed glowing yellow, seeing myself reflected in the black back window at night and watching myself from the outside like a voyeur peeping tom looking in, and thinking, "I could slip out the window and go walking the rest of the night and no one would know."
And I did if not that night then one summer night when the seabreeze kicked in and it was cool enough in the black heavy night to go walking for a while. Removing the screen and cranking the window open, slipping back to the dresser to turn off the light and to the door to make sure it was shut and the breeze couldn't blow it open, I shinnied out the crankopen window and plopped down into the ragged bushes below my blacknight window and staggered out and wended around the house to the sidegate opened quietly, the dog on the backdeck muffed as I passed, and down the walk to the suburban street of plenty of ticky-tacky houses by the freeway to Paradise.
I could hear the trucksandcars whooshing on the freeway past the ruins of the Jap assembly camp where the wretched Japanese American families from the rich cities and up and down the farmvalley were herded before being railroaded off to the tules and sand-mountains and tarpaper bedrooms the Army hadn't even set up for them yet.
I walked the night toward what? I didn't know where I was going, I wasn't going anywhere in particular, but soon enough, I found myself on the pedestrian bridge over the freeway, the one I trod to 1959 highschool when I walked which wasn't that often, but I did it sometimes just because I wanted to. It was five miles on the pedometer, from the crisscross glass of the front door of the house where I lived in the suburbs to the back door of the school or the swimming pool I'm not sure which. There wasn't a backdoor -- newer schools in California didn't have them or any doors except those to the classrooms and gyms and offices and such everything open to the wind and rain and awful summer heat.
I didn't go to the highschool this time but wandered off the main road into the sharp-edged military suburban housing tract where so many of those I went to school with lived.
Way too easy to get lost in the maze of arcing streets late at night. And I did. Thinking about Big Sur and Raton Canyon and the cruel Pacific and the fog-beaches and rock-heads and gulls swooping.
Jack references his appearance with Steve Allen and the clothes he never wore again in Big Sur.
I'm back in my Kerouac Phase, maybe because Ferlinghetti died not long ago, and as the godfather of the Beat Generation along with Burroughs and others, something went away when he passed. Gary Snyder is still around so there's that and the Works, oh the many Works, live on.
I'm re-reading Big Sur. The movie (I didn't know there was a movie) has been playing over and over again on one of the Roku channels, and the more I see it, the more I like it, but it's not the book, not really, so I'm reading the book again for the first time in almost 60 years.
Almost 60 years. I read it first in the mid-60s, about the time I first looked into and then took up the practice of Zen, not consciously influenced by Kerouac, but maybe subliminally so. The Zen is vaguely referenced in the Big Sur movie though it's a big part of the book. Kerouac as a Zen practitioner is sometimes hard to fathom, and I don't think anyone, let alone Jack, has ever resolved the contradictions between his deep Catholicism and his Zen practice and searching.
Dharma Bums I read first before Big Sur, well before it, and Dharma Bums I think was the real spur to my investigation and practice, but I went off in a totally different path than the Dharma Bums, Jack and Gary, and I haven't been to Japan or even more than momentarily wanted to go. This is partly because when I was first looking into becoming a bhikkhu or just engaging in the practice of Zen through correspondence with someone at the Zen Center in San Francisco -- I don't remember his name, but he was Anglo, not Japanese, and we exchanged letters for several months -- I learned that I could practice without becoming a bhikkhu in the formal sense, that I didn't have to join the Center, and that my sangha was wherever I found others on the Dharma Path -- even if they didn't know it.
So part of my search ever since has been for others on the Dharma Path, even if they don't know it, and also spotting some of those who claim to be Dharma adepts, Roshis and so forth, who are little more than con artists.
Yes, even Buddhism has its share or more than its share of con-men and -women whose main objective is to fleece the rubes and keep them coming back for more. It's a business.
Big Sur is in part the story of Jack's falling into drunken madness after the success of his magnum opus, On the Road around 1960-something or other. He couldn't handle fame, no, fame was eating him alive. No, he was being eaten from the inside out by... something. He took up drink, but he'd always been a drinker. Drugs too. Anything to get through, and in his novels you can see how it happened, not even consciously, he just fell into the habits of escape that were available/acceptable at the time.
In Big Sur, he tries to make sense of it and break free and fails. Which is so much a part of what makes the book so powerful, perhaps the most deeply felt and honest of his many Works.
So anyway here I am back in a Kerouac Phase, re-reading, re-capturing some of what influenced my youth. Even pulling up pictures from my high school yearbooks, surprising myself at how many of those long-lost souls' names I remember, and surprising myself at what I looked like then. I resembled, in some lights strongly, Rennie Davis who also died recently, which is probably why, surprisingly, Jerry Rubin sat with me for a while at a house on Steiner St in San Francisco talking about anti-war theater actions he'd taken in the Bay Area and speculating on what could be done in the Central Valley where there was no anti-war movement or even sentiment to speak of. No, the crisis issue was the plight of farmworkers and the marches and actions of Cesar Chavez to organize the campesinos and preserve their lives against the shotguns and greed of the owners. The war was far away -- but not so far, really -- the farms and orchards were right there.
And yet we would do anti-war theater in the Valley, even within shouting distance of The Base from which Colonel DeVoe would fly his B-52s over to Vietnam to "bomb the shit out of the Gooks," even though he knew it was awful and his job, and if he didn't do it, somebody else would, so what could he do? Bomb the shit out of the Gooks.
Chop wood, carry water.
Was he a bhikkhu on the Dharma Path? I don't know. But I liked him very much. One of the many contradictions of an era now passed.
People make pilgrimage after Kerouac or Ginsberg or Burroughs or whathaveyou today, and I don't really understand it. Well, but I do. Yes, I've been to Big Sur, but not -- I thought -- searching for Jack, or really searching for anything. Drove down the entire length of the Coast Highway one wild day/night in the 1951 Buick Roadmaster in 1969, around and around the same curve and over the same arched bridges again and again, past Big Sur and the Hot Springs and so forth, down and down the coast, the ocean on the right, moon up above, following long trod path till we got to Los Angeles and found so many angels dead or gone or never were. It had been my lost home, ten years before, and now that tie was broken. I saw it for the first time for what it was. "LA Plays Itself". Wasn't pretty.
