Visions of Gary

Japhy Ryder, a character based on poet-environmentalist and man of letters Gary Snyder, figures prominently in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums (1958). He's presented as the epitome of the Zen Lunatic, a frequently encountered order of beings in the book. Japhy is Zen, he is a lunatic, and wiser than a god and more down to earth than cornpone. He can do anything. He can be anything. He is the center of Ray Smith's (Jack Kerouac's) world in the book, and Ray/Jack cries when Japhy sails off to Japan to become a Zen monk -- on a foundation grant.

I've been asked "Did you know Gary Snyder? Did you ever meet him?" And the short answer is "No," but then someone will tap me on the shoulder and say, "Actually, you did. You just don't remember."

OK. Where, when, how?

In the mid '80s I was deeply involved in the Sacramento arts and cultural community, and part of that meant I was going to meetings and receptions and such practically every day and night that I wasn't involved in rehearsals. 

Gary Snyder at the time was a member of the California Arts Council and if I recall correctly (ha!) he was teaching writing at UC Davis, and that meant that from time to time he would come down to the Valley from his ranch up in the Sierra foothills and mingle a bit with us lowlanders. What I can visualize are the flyers and ads for the retreats he would hold for writers and Zen bhikkhus at his place up the hill, and how they seemed at the time to be wildly expensive ($150 for a week? Ack!) 

But he was a celebrity, a major literary celebrity in our midst, and some people said he was worth every penny. 

I still say "No," but I'm told "Yes." 

I was colleagues with some of the staff of the Arts Council and knew a member or two, and I was sometimes invited to their events. I worked on projects with some of the faculty at UC Davis. And what is suggested is that my contact with Gary Snyder happened at a couple of receptions for artists and writers sponsored by the Arts Council or UC Davis. Those events are something of a blur to me these days. There were often hundreds of people drinking and mixing and mingling and laughing and carrying on the way they do. Apparently Gary Snyder was pointed out to me, surrounded by a cloud of worshipful fans, very barely visible, blondish bangs, crusty hooded eyes, and a toothy grin flashing now and then. "Don't you want to meet him?" "Not really," said I. "He seems to be having a good time, though. Loves that adulation."

Apparently I was taken over to the cloud and introduced to him, apparently we nodded to one another and maybe shook hands, and that, as far as I can tell, was that. We retreated to our corners. It may have happened pretty much the same way a time or two after that, but I honestly don't recall. 

Let's say we didn't hit it off. Part of it, I know, is that I was very anti-celebrity in those days. I was much more interested in helping to build up the talents of the many folks who weren't celebrities but who were creative and eager and had much to offer -- if only somebody would pay attention. Of course, then as now the conundrum was that if you're not a celebrity no one will pay attention. I had no inclination to fawn over any celebrity in those days and tended to try to avoid them as much as I could, and when I couldn't, I kept any contact to a minimum. "Hullo, howareya, nice to meecha, bye." 

I knew who Gary Snyder was, knew some of what he was famous for, and I knew he was the inspiration for the character Japhy Ryder in "Dharma Bums."  I would learn later that he really didn't care for Jack Kerouac's depiction of him in the book and he was annoyed that he had to dispel misconceptions about himself and his Zen lunacy based on what Kerouac had written. He wasn't really like that. You see. Kerouac wrote a novel not a first person non-fiction report. It wasn't journalism. It was a story, much of it invented. 

And I think maybe he was annoyed that Kerouac became obsessed with him. It went well beyond friendship into realms that are hard to quantify. I don't know what was going on in Jack's mind, but from the novel, there's a suggestion that Ray/Jack wanted to become Japhy/Gary. And so maybe Gary Snyder couldn't escape to Japan soon enough. 

Leaving Ray/Jack on the dock to cry bitter tears of loss and longing.

This was always the thing with Kerouac's writing. There is some deep-seated longing for... something unnamed, even unmentionable... in the characters Jack bases on himself. There is someone else who exemplifies what he wants to be, particularly Neal Cassady and Gary Snyder. They are these bigger-than-life shining, incredible characters who completely dominate Jack's character. They take over everything, life itself, they are life itself, and Jack's character wonders why he isn't like them, can't be like them, and who made them this way in the first place.

Japhy/Gary is wild, untamed, gritty, funny, and wicked. Wicked smart to a New Englander like Kerouac, but wicked bad too, given Kerouac's strict Catholic upbringing. Was it the Zen that made him that way? 

Japhy/Gary is wild and uninhibited and would drink and do drugs and get naked and sing and dance and fuck with abandon right there in front of everybody, and Jack's character would be amazed and wish he could be like him and would try and fail and be mortified. How does a Zen lunatic do it?

Snyder insists he was not like that, not really, though there may be pictures and receipts. The issue is that Kerouac was writing a novel about events in the mid 1950s, while Gary was still a graduate student at UC Berkeley. The wild man, the untamed Zen lunatic that he describes Japhy to be is almost an impossibility in that context. That kind of non-conformity would have been stamped out almost instantly in those days; it could not have happened. Period. 

Just look what happened to Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley a decade later. There could not have been something even wilder in Japhy's time. 

The Gary Snyder I must have seen 30 years later was diminutive, smartly-casually dressed like the professor he was (with a twist, like monk's cloth wide britches and huaraches or hiking boots.) He laughed easily among his cloud of fans, he drank the way most people did in those days, and he adored being adored. He was used to it. 

In other words, there was nothing really abnormal or particularly noteworthy about him at all.

I still say I never met Gary Snyder, never knew him, but memories get jogged and come back and I find out that things I was sure never happened actually did. Things I had forgotten were still vivid in other people's memories. Life once led but left behind is still the active narrative in some minds.

Gary is 90-something now and I assume still lives up at his ranch or outpost or retreat in the Sierra foothills. He will probably live forever at this rate.

---------------------------------------

Little bit of an Update: 

After I wrote this post I went to the Google Machine to see if I could pin down any real memories of Gary Snyder, and I came across a link to a story in the Nevada County Press or whatever about a film of a conversation between Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison. The story was from 2019. I found the film, made by Will Hearst III in 2009, "Practice of the Wild", and I was more or less stunned. Yes, I had memories and visions of Gary from way back, but mostly in the mid-'80s when he was actually around in the same places I was quite a bit. I recalled several times we met, despite his cloud of worshipful fans, and even without them when they weren't there, and I managed to recall who among my friends and colleagues were his friends or colleagues. And no, we didn't get along.

It was a strange feeling, very strange. How very much I have forgotten. I'm reluctant to say that whole phase of my life is gone, but realistically, without a trigger, it is.

 Hm.

A video that won't embed:

https://youtu.be/oFg7K4vAGnk?t=880

Another addendum:

From Jack Kerouac's long letter to Gary Snyder, December 1957:

.have no time now, just adding p.s. to Allen’s letter, I haven’t written to you for the odd Mexico reasons of no post offices and stamp facilities for overseas etc. and couldn’t get up in time …….but I think of you all the time….more than you know—— On Desolation, well I’ll tell you later, it’s a long beautiful tale quietude….Meanwhile I have been writing furious, for this  year for instance I have three new novels and new perms (poems??) and now all of a sudden 2 contracts with publishers in NY here this very day it’s taking place…..have great new way of transliterating Diamond Sutra that will at last spread the diamond sutra in the west and maybe even in the east, all Sanskrit terms out of it, but translated into simple English, I cry when I read it sometimes and I read it every day……that too I’ll send you later….meanwhile be you the Gary Snyder of my dreams…be you sad deep Gary, sad funny crazy Gary, and be bejesus god we’ll go climb mountains again soon              Jack

Emphasis mine. I just sit with that in wonder.

 Further noting: A) One of my tasks during this practice period and Sesshin is learning to be less judgmental of others. I have a long way to go. 

B) Reading Jack's letter to Gary, however, brings forth some judgement. 

If I were a Zen master receiving this letter, as Gary Snyder was in the budding stages of becoming, I would be alarmed. I mentioned earlier that Jack had become obsessed with Gary, almost as if he were determined to become Gary Snyder somehow, absorb him, devour him. And this letter is, I think, proof. What is a bhikku to do with something like this, let alone a Zen master? Would it even be possible for Gary to (gently) guide Jack away from this obsession? Maybe. I don't think so. I'm not at all sure Gary had it in him -- even as a Zen master -- in any case. The course of gentle guidance was always in conflict with Gary's determined forcefulness. I can well imagine Gary giving Jack the back of his hand, hard, with no explanation and storming away. 

This brings forth so much sadness and compassion for both of them within me. It's hard to bear without breaking down completely. It wasn't long after this that Jack went on his long drunken bender into madness and death. 

And Gary became the iconic Man of Letters he is today and likely always was or saw himself to be. An image, perhaps, not a being. 

Which is what I encountered in the person thirty-forty twenty-five-thirty years ago and... found wanting.

This is one of those rounds of the Dharma wheel I continue to work with/on. For-ever.

-------------------------------

On the other hand (remember, Zen is contradiction) if I were a Zen master, which I have no intention of being, I wouldn't be alarmed by that letter from Jack at all. No, I'd figure instead that he was making progress and his expressions of devotion to Gary were positive signs of immanence and Awakening. Or maybe not. People come to the Awakened Mind in their own way and their own time. Expressions of devotion to someone else can be over the top and it's OK. Like everything else, that too will pass. 

If Jack would sit for a while... just sit with no expectations... he'd come around to see what he needed to.

Mantra

 "All equally empty; all equally to be loved; all come a Buddha"

This is the "prayer" Jack Kerouac (as Ray Smith) gives Gary Snyder (as Japhy Ryder) in "Dharma Bums".

It has become my go-to mantra during this practice period somewhat randomly as well as intentionally when I get all judgmental about others as I sometimes do. As I did yesterday. Oh my.

There was a Dharma talk by a big Sanskrit scholar from out of town, and it got me so, shall we say wound up that I clicked off the Zoom, went to the other room and fumed for a while. And then when I clicked on the Zoom again, he was still there with his "I know everything about everything, and you don't" attitude and presentation, and I just wanted to push him off the engawa into the mud in the hopes that he'd come to recognize a scrap of reality for once in his life. (There's a story about a Zen master in Japan whose disciple asked a question and in answer, the master pushed him off the veranda of the zendo and into the mud after a rainstorm. The disciple gained enlightenment at that moment: "Mud is better than words." It may be a subtle thing, but it is very Zen.)

This scholar much beloved at the Zen center hosting this practice period went on and on using several trillions of words an hour and seemed to say... well, approximately nothing. The text of A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life is not so much opaque as it is indirect as I alluded to in a previous post. This makes it useful to some, not so much to others, but not something that needs or benefits from having every jot and tittle dissected, examined, and then re-animated "correctly". But dude is a PhD scholar. In the academy, it's what they do, it's what they have to do to make a living. And then there will be endless arguments over what constitutes "correct." So on and so on and so forth and so forth, endlessly. But... but... dude reads and speaks Sanskrit; reads and speaks Pali. He knows whereof he speaks. And you, benighted ones, don't. 

Face it!

Well, by the end of his... talk... yes he did end it because he had to go on to another very important meeting... I was laughing so hard. I know it's bad. My whole reaction to this talk ran counter to our teachings of equanimity, charity and wisdom. Among other things. And not judging or bad mouthing another. But there I was, laughing my fool head off as he prattled endlessly and so many of the other participants (a number of whom are PhDs themselves) cooed and bowed before him. Not me. Nope.

So bad I was. And the more I held on to this reaction of mine, the more it seemed to eat at me. Why? I was outside doing some work-practice putting the side yard back together after a succession of wind-storms, and I was still thinking about this talk-waste-of-time, rolling it over and over in my mind, while I was supposed to be in Zen space doing the work that needed doing, and I sat down in a chair in the yard to catch my breath and practice zazen for a moment, pondering how stupid I was to hold onto, to be attached to my reaction to this Dharma talk, and almost immediately came the mantra:

All equally empty; all equally to be loved; all equally come a Buddha

It's obvious how spare and lean that is. It's very Zen. Also, words are left out and the mantra is a question, too... "all" what? for example. And for me, it is a nearly perfect distillation of the teachings over the ages, starting -- but not starting -- with the teachings of Sakyamuni Buddha himself. It's like the whole of the rule and the law of the Bodhisattva way of life. Shantideva's instructions boil down to just about that. But sometimes it might take a whack over the head, a sudden toss into the mud, or a trillion words to get to that realization.

And with the mantra, my reaction was gone -- not gone, because I can still conjure it up as I had to do to write this. The point is, my reaction isn't in control of my mind any more. And that, dear friends, is what all of us are getting at one way or another in our Zen or other Buddhist practice.

May we live long enough to bring all beings to Awakening on the path to Buddhahood.

Dharma

Next month, Ms Ché will head north to Boulder to spend three weeks at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. Oh my. When she told me she was going, I nearly burst, it was so exciting.

She's wanted to go for a couple of years but hadn't yet been invited and was a bit reluctant anyway as Boulder is not necessarily kind to Indians or elder women, both of which she happens to be. But her buddy Doug went last year and came back a Bodhisattva, so what can you say? He's an Indian too, but not an elder woman. Ms Ché arranged for Doug to live in a shack up on the side of a hill in Lower Cañoncito outside of Santa Fé after he was thrown out of the tent he was living in on the arroyo down the Turquoise Trail. So now he's staying in this hand-built Eagle's Nest on Dr. Z's property where he can watch the sky and the clouds and the soaring, wheeling turkey buzzards, eagles, hawks and ravens and hear the coyotes and think there might be bobcats jumping on his roof just because there might be. There is a round cave opening high on the hill behind his shack and it's probably the bobcat's den, or at least it might be. He has a full buffalo hide on a stand in his shack for ceremony and a deck on which to sit and contemplate the Universe when the spirit moves him.

A poetry reading up there at his shack might happen sometime in the next year or so, though Dr. Z is nervous about it. One thing, it's hard to get up there. Lame as I am, though, I made it, one step at a time, careful, careful, and it's even harder to get down again, as the slope is steep and you're not entirely sure where you should or shouldn't step at any given moment. Especially in the dark.

But that's as may be. It hasn't happened yet and maybe it won't. We'll have to wait and see.

I gave Ms Ché a copy of "The Dharma Bums" to take with her to Naropa. I tried to find my copy, all dog-eared and dusty, to give to her as a graduation present, but I couldn't find it, so I got her a new one. That and the Truman Capote Reader. She's always admired TC since a version of him appeared as Dill in Harper Lee's "Bird Book" (as he called it.) On the other hand, Kerouac has scared her more than anything. Kerouac the pacifist who might have been part Indian himself.

I'm linking to a piece I wrote about "The Dharma Bums" after re-reading it four years ago. Time may fly, but... oh my.

The Dharma, "The Dharma Bums," Prefiguring the Rucksack Revolution, and How We Got Here -- Or Something

The Dharma, "The Dharma Bums," Prefiguring the Rucksack Revolution, and How We Got Here -- Or Something

This is the one I recall reading c. 1962 or 63; the cover illustration and blurb are simply silly

Jack Kerouac wrote "The Dharma Bums" in 1957 and published it in 1958 after the wild success of his first second published novel, "On the Road," which became a defining work of the Beat Generation. Most of the incidents described in "The Dharma Bums" apparently take place in California in 1955 and '56 with excursions to the South and Southwest and finally to the Northwest Desolation Wilderness where the novel's ending is set.

The key characters are novelized versions of Jack Kerouac himself (as Ray Smith) and Gary Snyder (as Japhy Ryder.) Ray is in his thirties, getting close to middle age, while Japhy is still in his mid twenties, or at least, those were the ages of Kerouac and Snyder during the period of the novel.

Japhy's on the Dharma Path and he lives in a shack out behind a big house on a hill while he goes to classes at UC Berkeley, drinks tea, meditates, contemplates Nature, expostulates and has wild parties and orgies and stuff.

Ray's on a Dharma Path as well, but in the telling of the tale, he's just a bum who drinks and writes and meditates and travels around with his rucksack meeting people, Bodhisattvas and Buddhas all, along the way.

Japhy has a purpose and will wind up going to Japan on a fellowship to study under Zen Mountains and Masters and become one himself. Ray just is. And you sort of know that like Kerouac, he will eventually drink himself to death just as the Rucksack Revolution that Japhy predicts and prefigures is about to climax and thence to peter out.

We know, because we've lived, what happens to these people.

Gary Snyder is now an old man, but he's still going strong they say, living a not-so-primitive life, surrounded by acolytes and devotees, probably none of whom remember him from back when, but that hardly matters as his diamond life has been one of constant becoming. There may or may not be a handful who have stayed with him since those Dharma Bum days, but most I would venture have long since, like Jack Kerouac, died off. Snyder is an honored elder in other words; the others are mostly long gone.

I read "The Dharma Bums" when I was maybe 14, I don't know exactly. It was a period during which I devoured everything I could get my hands on of Kerouac's work, and it continued pretty much consistently until I was 18 or so, when my attentions were focused elsewhere. I think I read "The Dharma Bums" first, then "On the Road," then "Desolation Angels" but the sequence could have been different as my memory has faded over the years and I can't even be sure that I'm remembering events and not imagining them. So much of my life has been an adventure, you might say, and I haven't kept good records.

When I was 14, of course, I could not and did not understand a lot of the references to Buddhism in "The Dharma Bums," and in re-reading it recently, I find some references are still a bit obscure, though most are easily digested now. I didn't really understand the point of the novel either. A travelogue, yes, but obviously something more as well, but I had no idea what. In re-reading it, of course, it is much clearer, and the point -- such as it is -- is obvious. It was probably not meant for a 14 year old to understand in any case.

The writing is as strikingly visual now as it was when I was merely a lad, and re-reading it is a powerful reminder of how penetrating those visuals were and are; the descriptions of place are so strong and I have been to so many of those very places or places like them or near them, that I feel I'm living the novel as I'm reading it. I recall some passages in re-reading that had a powerful present impact when I first read them, but much more often, it's simply words and phrases that pop out at me, not whole passages, and they trigger memories or just their presence within. Clearly, although I didn't understand much of the book, I internalized many of its elements.

That may well have happened to many others who read it around the same time and later, they would read the book and internalize its elements without necessarily understanding them or needing to. The book is a travelogue of sorts (as was, of course, "On the Road") but it's also a meditation on the meaning and discovery of existence and its illusory nature. The Dharma Path is the Buddha Path, and the wanderers in "The Dharma Bums" see themselves as Zen Lunatics sent out to bring joy and find enlightenment and to discover the illusion of their own existence and that of every other.

It's all an illusion, you see?

Practically everybody Ray-Jack encounters on his adventures as a Dharma Bum is a Buddha-Bodhisattva, which is something you discover when you're on that path, but it is a path not many are on at any given time, and while Ray-Jack discovers he can't fall off a mountain, he does fall off the path (it seems to me) more often than he realizes. That's part of the journey. If you're going to be a Zen Lunatic, you cannot always be what you think you are, nor can you always stick to the path you think you're on. As a Zen Lunatic, you are bound to diversions. Many and frequent. And so it is for Ray-Jack and for Japhy-Gary (who is at one point, just one time, called "Gary" in the novel).

Ray-Jack Writing-sleeping, posed for the photographer no doubt.

When you become famous, as Ray-Jack became famous shortly after finishing "The Dharma Bums", you have to pose for pictures like this. It's part of the job of a famous writer.

Gary Snyder having tea in his Dharma Shack, c. 1955?

Whether the picture of Japhy-Gary is posed for a famous-writer photographer, I can't be sure. It's posed, yes, but it has the feeling of a snapshot rather than a professional production, and that's probably intentional, no matter who took the picture or why. I wouldn't be surprised if it was in LIFE magazine, just because and for no other reason at all. Gary Snyder may have been only 25 or so, but he was already a Buddhist Master or near-master. At least in the context of the USofA where Buddhism was still exotic and Anglos practicing Zen were practically unknown -- which Kerouac in his silliness and word-crafting might have written "unkoan" if only because he liked the sound of it and to drive his editors nuts.

They had editors then. I'm trying to imagine how his editor approached something like "On the Road." I can't quite grasp and the story -- which I'm sure has been told somewhere -- probably isn't all that interesting. You do what you do. But I've seen a posed picture of Kerouac transferring the text of "The Dharma Bums" from scroll to typed pages in standard format. In other words, he didn't just turn in a scroll of teletype paper to Viking or whoever his publisher was; he sat down and typed the whole thing all over again on pages of 8 1/2 x 11 typing paper like any other author and turned in the manuscript for publication just like anybody else looking to be published at the time. It's interesting to me, that part of the process, because the vision I've had is not that. It's a vision of Kerouac defiantly submitting his scroll(s) for publication and daring anybody to do anything about it.

The standard form manuscript of "The Dharma Bums" has been sent around to various literary events and memorials and museums and such, and I think I posted an image of the first page of it previously. The scroll has disappeared. It was sold, apparently, at auction and the buyer was "undisclosed." Wherever it is, and whoever has it, may it be enjoyed.

Jack Kerouac's notebook wherein he declares "The Dharma Bums" complete (clickage will embiggen)

Kerouac says he wrote and finished "The Dharma Bums" in 12 days; it reads very much like that's the case, and I'd say -- but for a purposeful delay to finish reading it -- it took me just about as long to read the novel this time. I have no idea how long it took me to read it when I was a kid, and I suspect, because many parts of it didn't ring a bell this time around and seemed to be all new to me, that I skipped through it back then. That could be my failing memory, too. But I suspect I didn't read it closely in any case, and even this time around, in re-paging through it for this essay and other things, there are whole passages I know I read that I don't remember.

I did delay reading the last two chapters this time around. Purposefully. I knew the story had to end but I didn't want it to end, and so I slowed then stopped reading it. Set the book aside and tried to take in the bloody horrors going on in so many places this horrible summer. The contrast between the vision, Kerouac's vision, I was reading and the reality outside it could not have been stronger. I have some idea what was going on in the country and the world in 1955 and 56 when the novel is set, and neither the world nor the nation were at peace.

Yet somebody on a Dharma path at that time would not have been numbed by the abundance of bloodshed along the way, at least I don't think so. There would have been terrible things, yes (Emmett Till, anyone?) and Kerouac himself mentions passing by Alamogordo and having a vision relating to the Bomb:

From that desert in Arizona he roared on up to New Mexico, took the cut through Las Cruces up to Alamogordo where the atom bomb was first blasted and where I had a strange vision as we drove along seeing in the clouds above the Alamogordo mountains the words as if imprinted in the sky: "This Is the Impossibility of the Existence of Anything" (which was a strange place for that strange true vision) and then he batted on through the beau­tiful Atascadero Indian country in the uphills of New Mexico beautiful green valleys and pines and New England-like roll­ing meadows and then down to Oklahoma (at outside Bowie Arizona we'd had a short nap at dawn, he in the truck, me in my bag in the cold red clay with just stars blazing silence overhead and a distant coyote)...

Breathtaking.  Of course, I quibble. "Atascadero" is a place in California. A well-known place at that. Atascadero is not the name of the Indians who live in the beautiful uphills of New Mexico; he must have been thinking of "Mescalero" -- but does it matter? Even more interesting, this was pre-Interstate Highway, and so I'm wondering the route his truckdriver benefactor Bodhisattva took him through New Mexico on his way to North Carolina because it seems he bypassed Albuquerque. Which was certainly possible to do...

He saw the words as if imprinted on the sky: This Is the Impossibility of the Existence of Anything as he passed near the site of the Trinity blast, which he declared a "strange vision" yet it's perfectly apropos it seems to me.

As I've reported, I've been to Trinity Site itself a couple of times, last April most recently, and I was nearly struck dumb by the stunning display in the skies that day, the clouds dancing and the slashes of virga in many places and the wind blasts, the shafts of sunlight on the sere ground, the subtle illuminations on the mountains. I'd never seen anything like it, I imagined anything like it. The visual image was even more intense than a painting, than a movie, than any description I could try to give. And I was in the midst of it, in the midst of a crowd, and I wondered if any of them could see what I was seeing, and if they could, whether it had the same impact or any impact for that matter.

The blast site itself is on a kind of upslope ledge against and below the mountains, and from this ledge there is the possibility of a sweeping view into the Jornado de los Muertos, the plain below where many are said to have died due to the lack of water for people and animals passing through. There is the possibility of a view because sometimes there will be too much dust or cloud or other stuff in the air to see much of anything below except maybe the mountains in the distance. So you might go out there and feel enclosed rather than exposed to something grander.

But in April, the view was grand. And yes, I digress, but so what?

Desolation Peak Lookout, Mt. Hozomeen in the background. Photograph by: Basil Tsimoyianis; Creative Commons license

This is where Kerouac spent his summer of 1956 after Gary Snyder sailed for Japan. Ray-Jack made it to the top of A Mountain, barely, and he stayed there for his allotted time and then he made his way back down the mountain.

I delayed finishing "The Dharma Bums" because I knew it was coming to an end and I didn't want it to end. It had been an extraordinary journey to that point, and I had a heart-wrenching notion of how it might conclude though I knew -- because Kerouac had already told us -- that Ray-Jack would leave the mountain lookout on Desolation Peak and go back into "the world." That's what a Dharma Bum does, even after being on the mountaintop for 60 days or however long he was there.  

He goes back into the world.

The last few chapters of "The Dharma Bums" are pure poetry, practically decorative yet highly evocative, and as is the case with everything else in the book, exceedingly visual. You are there. I was there. To wit:

(The initial passage of Chapter 34)

August finally came in with a blast that shook my house and augured little augusticity. I made raspberry Jello the color of rubies in the setting sun. Mad raging sunsets poured in seafoams of cloud through unimaginable crags, with every rose tint of hope beyond, I felt just like it, brilliant and bleak beyond words. Everywhere awful ice fields and snow straws; one blade of grass jiggling in the winds of infinity, anchored to a rock. To the east, it was gray; to the north, aw­ful; to the west, raging mad, hard iron fools wrestling in the groomian gloom; to the south, my father's mist. Jack Moun­tain, his thousand-foot rock hat overlooked a hundred football fields of snow. Cinnamon Creek was an eyrie of Scottish fog. Shull lost itself in the Golden Horn of Bleak. My oil lamp burned in infinity. "Poor gentle flesh," I realized, "there is no answer." I didn't know anything any more, I didn't care, and it didn't matter, and suddenly I felt really free. Then would come really freezing mornings, cracking fire, I'd chop wood with my hat on (earmuff cap), and would feel lazy and won­derful indoors, fogged in by icy clouds. Rain, thunder in the mountains, but in front of the stove I read my Western magazines. Everywhere snowy air and woodsmoke. Finally the snow came, in a whirling shroud from Hozomeen by Canada, it came surling my way sending radiant white heralds through which I saw the angel of light peep, and the wind rose, dark low clouds rushed up as out of a forge, Canada was a sea of meaningless mist; it came in a general fanning attack adver­tised by the sing in my stovepipe; it rammed it, to absorb my old blue sky view which had been all thoughtful clouds of gold; far, the rum dum dum of Canadian thunder; and to the south another vaster darker storm closing in like a pincer; but Hozomeen mountain stood there returning the attack with a surl of silence. And nothing could induce the gay golden horizons far northeast where there was no storm, to change places with Desolation. Suddenly a green and rose rainbow shafted right down into Starvation Ridge not three hundred yards away from my door, like a bolt, like a pillar: it came among steaming clouds and orange sun turmoiling.

What is a rainbow, Lord?

A hoop

For the lowly.

Is it any wonder I didn't want it to end?

But it had to, for "The Dharma Bums" is only a novel, no? It had to come to an end, and it the end, though I shed a tear or two, the ending seemed perfect:

"Japhy," I said out loud, "I don't know when we'll meet again or what'll happen in the future, but Desolation, Desolation, I owe so much to Desolation, thank you forever for guiding me to the place where I learned all. Now comes the sadness of com­ing back to cities and I've grown two months older and there's all that humanity of bars and burlesque shows and gritty love, all upsidedown in the void God bless them, but Japhy you and me forever we know, O ever youthful, O ever weeping." Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said "God, I love you" and looked up to the sky and really meant it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other."

To the children and the innocent it's all the same.

And in keeping with Japhy's habit of always getting down on one knee and delivering a little prayer to the camp we left, to the one in the Sierra, and the others in Marin, and the little prayer of gratitude he had delivered to Sean's shack the day he sailed away, as I was hiking down the mountain with my pack I turned and knelt on the trail and said "Thank you, shack."

Yah. How many times have I... ?

Then I added "Blah," with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world.

The Rucksack Revolution was yet to come. "The Dharma Bums" is a pre-figuring journey through time and space and spirit that blazed the path, though many at the time -- like me -- had no idea it would be so. It was a novel, a Beat novel, like jazz and dancing down a mountain, not meant to do anything at all, just to be.

And so it was.

Kerouac said "The Dharma Bums" was better than "On the Road"

 SUNDAY, DEC 8, 1957 -- Quiet Sunday, my work done -- I think DHARMA BUMS is not as dramatic as On the Road but it's a better book (more important) -- technically almost just as good in any case -- If Viking doesn't want to publish it, they'll be mistaken & sorry later on --

.... 

Wrote Dharma Bums from Nov. 26 to Dec. 7 -- 12 days 

^THE DHARMA BUMS, for me, is better than ON THE ROAD.... in the end... because what Neal was, a mad holy hepcat, wasn't as great as what the dharma bums were, religious heroes of America, preaching kindness and mindfulness (that's what Neal could have been)-- oh well, it probably stinks--------------

"The Dharma Bums" is so pure and clear by comparison to either "On the Road" or "Desolation Angels." And yet... there is a sadness to it. That's part of the Dharma too.

You Can't Fall Off A Mountain

Matterhorn Peak, CA

Now when I went around that ledge that had scared me it was just fun and a lark, I just skipped and jumped and danced along and I had really learned that you can’t fall off a mountain. Whether you can fall off a mountain or not I don’t know, but I had learned that you can’t. 'The Dharma Bums' -- Jack Kerouac

The South Bedroom and the Jesus Room

South Bedroom Alight

Unless we have overnight guests and need a place to put them, we keep the South Bedroom and the Jesus Room shut during the wintertime to save on heating costs and don't open them up unless we need to in the summer time to help keep the rest of the house cool.

Our house is not all that large, but it is large for an adobe pioneer house. It's been added on to at various times by various owners, so it kind of rambles about, with wings and spare rooms and whatnot, and it's not very well insulated among other things, like the finish polished pine floor is also the subfloor in some rooms so sometimes when the wind blows in the winter, the cold air seeps up from below.... There is no central heating or air conditioning, only a large free-standing gas heater in the living room that puts out abundant heat but it's kind of iffy getting said heat well distributed to distant rooms. In fact, we use electric heaters in those distant rooms to supplement the main heater when the temperature falls. There are some portable air conditioners, and we run the one in our bedroom through most of the summer to keep things in there nice and cool for sleepy-time.

The South Bedroom has become another library room; there are books and bookcases in every room in the house except the bathroom, where there are stacks of magazines instead. We picked up two new bookcases at Claudio's in town -- his brother builds them out of scrap lumber and they're very rustic and southwestern and nice -- and we thought that would be enough for the books we planned to put in there, but of course they filled up right away and we had to get another one. A skinny one this time because we were running out of room to put more bookcases. Most of our "good" books are in the South Bedroom, that is the ones that have some special meaning or financial value, the many signed copies, the still nice old ones, and some are kept in a glass fronted bookcase that dates from the 19teens or sometime like that that we brought with us from California. One of those Craftsman pieces that are practically worshiped by subcultures of house restorers. We sometimes stack bookcases on top of one another, so they reach toward the ceiling and we should probably have a ladder handy to get to the books at the very top. Practically every flat surface except the bed has stacks of books as well... We'll need to find some place for another bookcase some day.

Jesus Room Shrine Corner

The Jesus Room also has books: your missals and prayerbooks and catechisms and whatnot but also some cook-books and how-to books and so on, simply because we didn't have room for them in the kitchen and other places.

The Jesus Room also has lots of paintings and religious statues and icons and so forth. Many of the paintings are paint-by-number items that I picked up at thrift stores, and some of them are quite nice examples of the genre. The Gethsemane picture above the shrine is paint-by-number, for example (if that weren't obvious). Other paintings are what you might call "motel-commercial." They're actual paintings and they're technically very well done, but their subject matter is so generic, whether landscapes or marinas or city skylines, that they seem to be cranked out rather than thought through. They were probably originally bought for motel rooms or offices or set up on easels on tourist byways.

There is a stunning photograph, too, of what I think is a Mormon Temple in Hawaii or maybe it's Mesa, Arizona -- very dramatically lit with pinks and golds and a sunset sky -- I just like it, and so it hangs in the corner away from the corner shrine with all the other Jesus (and Mary and St. Francis) stuff. Wouldn't want to cross contaminate... There's a small carving of St. Francis in the shrine that keeps falling down, and I sometimes take that as a "sign," though I'm pretty sure it happens because one of the feral cats that sometimes gets in the house goes exploring the way they do. Cats love to explore. The shrine is like a cave for them. The items on the semi-altar below the shrine also get knocked about from time to time. That's why I think it must be the cats.

There's a pressed tin Our Lady of Lourdes that all the silver has worn off of so you don't really know right off what it is, and then it hits you and it's pretty cool because it is very three-dimensional and serene; There's a huge gold-framed print of The Last Supper that must have come from a church hall somewhere, but I don't know where. Of course there's a photo-print of Our Lady of Guadalupe from her shrine in Mexico. That's her hiding above St. Anthony peeking out behind the door to the shrine in the photo.

Yes, of course, most of the iconography is Catholic, though there are a few overtly Protestant or Mormon or Orthodox items as well. I suppose some of the crosses could be considered "non-denominational" -- though whether they are or not depends on one's point of view. My favorite is the miniature replica of the San Damiano Cross, the one that allegedly spoke to St. Francis in the ruined chapel of San Damiano in Umbria below Assisi, the one that told him "Francis, go, rebuild my house..."

There are "oriental" paintings --*ha ha*-- of the Paint-by-Number kind but nothing, really that be-speaks the Buddhist light behind a lot of this stuff. Except for St. Francis. Who I think must have been a veritable "Dharma Bum." And thus was himself a Buddha.

Nevertheless, we keep the Jesus Room and the South Bedroom shut during the winter and don't open them unless we need to in summer so as to save on heating and cooling costs.

Must be our practical natures.

I'm kind of ticked though because I wanted to go to the Spanish Market at the Santa Fe Plaza today, but I'm too lame and can't really get around for long enough or well enough to make it enjoyable; that and the heat of course. We're having quite a heatwave, the last couple of days in the mid-upper 90s (which is high for here) and it's uncomfortable to be outside, especially if there's little or no shade. It would have been a chance to get together with Nicolas Otero, a remarkably serene santero whose works are beautiful and spiritual and who illustrated several of Rudolpho Anaya's recent children's books -- "How Hollyhocks Came to New Mexico" and such. But not this time. Not today.

A Passage

This passage just whapped me up side the head (From "The Dharma Bums" by Jack Kerouac, 1958):

[Japhy and Ray are up in the mountains above Bridgeport, CA, on a hiking adventure, about to make camp for the night. Ray says:

  ...I have a prayer. Did you know the prayer I use?

What?

I sit down and say, and I run all my friends and relatives and enemies one by one in this, without entertaining any angers or gratitudes or anything, and I say, like, "Japhy Ryder, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha," and then I run on and say, "David O. Selznick, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha," though I don't use names like David O. Selznick, just people I know, because when I say the words "equally a coming Buddha" I want to be thinking of their eyes, like you take Morley, his blue eyes behind those glasses, when you think "equally a coming Buddha," you think of those eyes and you really do suddenly see the true secret serenity and the truth of his coming Buddhahood. Then you think of your enemy's eyes.

 Anybody can do it.

Name. Name any name, make up a name, name a group, name your enemies, one by one and in batches, and think and say: ")Name(, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha" and think of those eyes and suddenly see the true secret serenity and the truth of their coming Buddhahood.

Namaste.

"The Dharma Bums"

Clickage will make the image big enough to read the dialog. It's funny.

As something of an antidote to this Blood Summer, I ordered a couple of books from afar (no, I don't use Amazon, these were ordered from Abe Books): "The Dharma Bums" and "On the Road -- the Original Scroll" both by Jack Kerouac -- and they came yesterday. There was a yellow card in my post office box with a whole series of hand-written numbers scratched off, and at the bottom was my box number with a (2) beside it. That's how they let you know you've got to go to the counter and pick something up. They don't actually tell you that, they just leave the yellow card in the post office box, and one day when I was laid up Ms Ché checked the mail in the box and found one of those yellow cards and she didn't know what it was. She thought it was maybe a mistake so she left it there and it stayed there for days. She was expecting a package though, and she said to me that it hadn't come, and she wondered what happened. I said that when there is a package, they'll leave a yellow card sometimes and you have to go to the counter to pick up whatever it is.

"Oh. There was a yellow card in the box the other day. I didn't know what it was, so I left it there. I thought it was a sorting thing or they made a mistake or something."

No, that's how you find out there's a package. So when she went to the post office that day, the card was still there and she took it to the counter, and sure enough, there was her package, waiting.

Yesterday there was a yellow card in the post office box and I took it to the counter and the woman at the counter said, "Good morning, Mister Ché. I see you have a package." and she took the yellow card from me, "No, I see you have two packages! I will be right back." And she disappeared around the corner to where the packages that have arrived are kept. Sure enough, within a few seconds she returned with two bubble packs, looking about book size, and placed them on the counter. "Here they are, Mister Ché. Will there be anything else?" I told her that no, I was fine, and then I dropped a few of the other mail pieces that had been in the box, "except I'm dropping everything this morning." She laughed. "Would you like some stamps?" "No, thank you. I'm fine." As I picked up the things that had fallen on the floor and scooped up the bubble packs from the counter, she said, "Well you have a very nice day, then, and we'll see you next time."

There are times when I've had my differences with the Post Office, like just a few days before, but this was not one of them, and I wished her well. I think her name is Lorene, but I get her confused with Mary who is also quite friendly and well-wishing and they don't wear name tags so I'm not sure which is which. I wished her well as well and went on my way.

When I got home I opened the bubble bags and there were the books, new Penguin editions, large format paperbacks, really quite nice, and they made me smile and then I laughed out loud when I read the cartoons on the end flaps of "The Dharma Bums." I will attempt to scan and add them to this post in due time.

"The Dharma Bums." It was, as far as I can recall, the first Kerouac book I read, but it may have been the second, after "On the Road." One loses track. It was a long time ago. At least 50 years ago. I opened the book yesterday and skipped over the scholarly introductions (imagine "scholarly introductions" to a Jack Kerouac novel fifty years ago!) and went right to the meat and was transported in a sense back to that time fifty or more years ago when I first read it.

And I've been more or less devouring it ever since -- well, except for this break to write something about it. It's an odd sensation because I read the book all those years ago and it made quite an impression on me, but I didn't actually carry it around with me and use it as a kind of talisman or bible or anything, I just read it and said, "Whoa," or maybe "Wow." As I'm reading it now, the words and images and sometimes whole passages are firing off in my memories, "Oh yes, I've been here before..." oh yes. Absolutely. But here's the thing, what Kerouac is writing about, the places at least, are places I have been, or near where I have been, like Berkeley and Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, and climbing in the Sierras and San Francisco and so forth, and North Beach and all of that, I've been there, spent lots of time there, traveling up and down the state of California and eventually traveling into Oregon and Washington, and up into the mountains and getting drunk on cheap wine in San Francisco with friends and talking all about everything far into the night with friends I thought were smarter than me and certainly much more fashionable, some of whom even became famous.

I didn't know anything about Buddhism when I first read "The Dharma Bums," so many of the references and even the title went right over my head, or maybe they entered somehow and germinated there eventually, because as I read it now, I know what most of the Buddhist terms refer to like "Bodhisattva" and so forth, and the various things you do when you're a "Zen Lunatic" and what not. It's all very familiar to me now but I can't imagine I knew anything about it when I was 14 or whatever when I first read the book, so I've been trying to figure out how I might have imagined what all this foreign gobbledegook meant at the time, and I can't do it. It couldn't have meant anything, and yet it must have, because now it all seems just right.

Practically everything seems just right now.

It's surprising and a little bit scary.

I realize I'm writing somewhat in the style of Jack Kerouac right now. It's because his influence is very strong on me and it's a style I've always liked. It's a style that always seemed very real and honest to me, far more so than the styles of so many tamer novelists who make their livings churning out the same thing over and over again that never actually says anything. Kerouac is saying something different and whipping you about this way and that and making you look at things you may never have seen before -- or like me, you may have been seeing or doing them all your life but never actually paid attention. As I re-read "The Dharma Bums" I wonder if he actually had more of an influence on my life than I could even imagine.

No, I say to myself, just because I have been to some of these places, done some of these things, known some of these people -- well, people like them or people who actually knew the people he's writing about  -- it doesn't mean very much in the vaster scheme of things. Everybody could say the same thing, couldn't they? They did and they knew many of the same things some novelist or other did and knew as well, didn't they? We're all related in some way like that, aren't we?

I don't know.

I don't know. And so I'll read some more and see how much more I remember. It was fifty years ago or more after all, and who can remember everything?

One thing I keep thinking about which may not mean anything at all is that Kerouac wrote "the Dharma Bums" in the mid or late 1950s and I read it in the early 1960s and I felt it was very contemporary, that it wasn't about a previous time at all. And I feel the same way about it now, it's not about a previous time or an earlier, safer and saner and more innocent era, it's about right now, today. These things and these people are going on right now, today, in some of the same places, in contrast to the chaos and the bloodfest our rulers are delighting in. Of course it was different then, but it wasn't. Not really.

A Rucksack Revolution

First Page, "Dharma Bums" Manuscript

Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac read by Allen Ginsberg from Sal Paradise on Myspace.

My man Jack Kerouac let it be known back in the 1950s -- 1958 I think it was -- that when the Revolution comes, it will come via a cohort of Rucksack Revolutionaries:

See the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ‘em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.

Except my man himself is quoting here, quoting a character in "The Dharma Bums" named Japhy Ryder (a fictionalized version of American man of letters Gary Snyder of Mt Aukum and Bixby Canyon and so on and so forth) who is predicting the surreal events of a Revolution yet to come some years down the road. And so it does.

It does and then something happens to it, to the Rucksack Revolutionaries, who, like Gary Snyder, or like Japhy Ryder, become tamed somehow and take up their positions of honor, trust and majesty, with their awards and sinecures and their hail-fellows. They continue on their Way, to be sure, but they no longer know or practice revolution, rucksack or otherwise. Their dharma caught up with them.

Can't say when I first read Kerouac, but I was pre-teen, 12 maybe even younger. "The Dharma Bums" was first, and it left a huge impression on me, more even than "The Catcher in the Rye" would when I read it later. I remember reading "Dharma Bums," then "On the Road," and finally, when I was about 14, "Big Sur", devouring them really wondering what would come next, and how could anyone write like that?

Now I wonder why no one writes that way any more.

Of course, Kerouac was fucked up on liquor and drugs, a basket case, dead well before his time, aged 47, in 1969.

His later output could not match the three exquisite novels I read when I was barely an adolescent. At least for me his later stuff didn't. Others may disagree.

I know I have a copy of "Big Sur" here at the house somewhere, I remember packing it -- probably in a box out in one of the sheds -- but I doubt I have copies of either "Dharma Bums" or "On the Road" any more.

I find things now and then, though, so maybe if I dig around enough, I'll find them. You never know.

In the meantime, there's a Dharma Bum Temple in San Diego, and for those more Catholic-ly inclined -- we must recall Jack Kerouac was Catholic and never left the faith -- there is the San Juan Diego Friary in Albuquerque which seems so similar in so many ways...