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.
So.
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