Mountains and Rivers

No. 

Well no. I've never much cared for Gary Snyder for a whole lot of unimportant reasons. Why? Because he's short and old and thinks he's the King of the World? I don't know. How very Zen.

But on a whim and suggestion from Roshi, I'm reading his "Mountains and Rivers Without End" one of his seeming many Epic Poems of being-not-being and wanderlust. And I rather like it. Well, insofar as I can relate. 

And that's the thing. I have had long years of wandering the landscape. Mountains and rivers yes. Many mountains, many rivers, many forests, many deserts. It's my bloodline. 

So I can in part relate to Gary and his own wanderings far afield, abroad and at home. Never settling, though he's been a fixture in Nevada City for generations. He still wanders.

Yet I've become rooted.

Partially anyway.

An ancient adobe home on the high plains of New Mexico -- llano alto -- keeps me rooted to the land that's harsh and cruel and yet... the mountains brood or smile in the distance now and then dusted with snow, mostly standing charcoal gray in the daytime, dark and monstrous at night. You can't see the mountains easily from our house, though they are there, through the thicket of trees, invasive Siberian elms that were planted so long ago no one remembers.

The trees protect us from the mountains. 

There are no rivers close at hand, but last spring Mary discovered what she called The Swamp, a portion of our land where water seems to collect and even flow though not on the surface. She was walking her circles and said to me, "You know the ground is soft there, up there near the fence, and you can see how the plants grow thick and tall. And look, the swampy place extends toward the house. We can see where there's some kind of water flow."

And I looked and it was there, a broad patch of wetlands in the midst of the dust-dry. 

Time to bathe now. My daily Tubzen. 

And then I'll read some more of Gary Snyder's Epic. 

And then for the Daily Dharma Talk. 

Then it's off to Santa Fe for socializing (rare, still) before returning home to feed the cats.

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

Ack! Plumbers! Again!

Well.

They've come and gone, and they made discoveries.

Those of you who followed the saga of Casa Ché in California know of the seemingly interminable episode of The Plumbers wherein the water heater gave out early one AM leading to replacing all of the supply piping in the house (as well as the water heater) and also part of the drains and sewer piping. There was a break in the drain line out of the bathtub which probably would have gone unnoticed if not for the fact that the wall behind the tub was opened up to put in new copper piping. So all that had to be re-done, even as we thought things were about to get back to normal.

Here in New Mexico our place started out around 1900 as an adobe ranch house more or less in the middle of nowhere; it had no plumbing. Supposedly, this was the house where Toney Anaya grew up, though personally I don't believe it. The story he tells, the house where he grew up had dirt floors and no indoor plumbing until the later 1950s. This house has pretty much always had wood floors (mostly wide pine planks, but the north and south bedrooms have narrow floor boards, not sure what species, probably pine, too, but it actually looks like maple), and there was at least an attempt to put in plumbing in the 1930's as far as I can determine from the old piping and its location. In the 1950's, pretty early I'd say, a bathroom was installed in the older wing of the house, and a kitchen and laundry room were added to the front by enclosing what was the portal. That's basically how the house is now. Though we had a lot of renovations done, it was primarily to rehab the place from a ruin and make it liveable, not to change the footprint.

So yesterday morning, I noticed strange sounds coming from the plumbing in the bathroom. Gurgling, burping, and what sounded like water draining directly onto the ground under the floor. Not good. There wasn't really a back up, either, though the water was draining slowly. I decided I better call the plumbers.

They came, shortly -- within a few hours -- Rich and Chris, local fellows who hadn't had their lunch. They scoped out the situation, heard the sounds, said, "Oh dear," kind of like I did, and they called their boss, Fred, who came to look things over. It sounded like the sewer line had broken, no doubt about it, and Fred gave me two bids to replace the sewer line, one if the break was close to the toilet, the other (much bigger) if it was far and they had to dig extensively. Both were pretty reasonable for what would have to be done, so I said OK, and Rich commenced to open a small hole in the bathroom floor in order to see if he could determine where the break was.

I was in the other room while he and his helper Chris were doing their business in the bathroom. Suddenly everything went quiet. I checked, Chris was here by himself, Rich having left. Chris was peering into the hole.

"What's up?" I queried.

"Ohhhh," says Chris. "It's not broken."

"It isn't?"

"Nope. Gonna go run the snake."

So he does, opening up the cleanout in front of the house. Meanwhile, it seems like the whole world is coming over. Fred had called the utility Emergency Spot number to locate all the utility lines in case they had to dig. So the gas man came, and the electric co-op people came, and the phone man came, and someone from the water and sewer side, the cable guy too, an endless parade of semi-officials, one after the other. It was quite a show.

Chris busied himself with the snake, and sure enough, the drain ran free within a few minutes.

"Is it OK now?" I asked.

"Yup. Shoulda done that first. Rich jumped the gun and Fred just went along. It was only a clog. Rich went to get the bigger equipment, but we don't even need that. Everything's running fine now. I'll put the toilet back as soon as I can get a wax ring."

A few minutes later, Rich shows up looking sheepish. Chris asks if he has a wax ring. He does, so Chris goes to put the toilet back and clean up.

Rich explains what had happened. He said there was a clog pretty far down the sewer line, but the problem seemed to be that the sewer line was broken because no water was backing up into the house, which is usually what happens when the problem is a clog. Instead, he said, they found out when they opened the floor that the water was coming out right below the toilet flange, so it never got into the house, it was just pouring out under it. He said it was really soaked down there and it would be best to leave the hole open for several days to let things dry out. Run a fan.

So the sewer lines are fine? Seem to be. I told him that the supply piping had been replaced just before we bought the house five years ago. It was all that no-break-when-frozen plastic, and it worked well. All the other drains were OK so far as I knew. He said they'd only charge for the clog and a helper, and that was fine.

He asked if he could have the stump at the side of the house. I wondered what for. "Heat" he says. It was the only thing he could afford to keep warm. Oh. I said sure. Take it. It might provide a few days' heat in a good tight stove.

I had to pay for the plumbers at the hardware store in town since they weren't able to take charge cards at the job site. And I learned that there had been very little work for anyone in construction and plumbing and electrics and so on for quite some time. This was a big job, even though it turned out to be only a clog. And the rush to make it bigger, it seems, was in part due to the lack of work for so long before. They weren't trying to over bid or over charge at all -- at least not to my way of looking at it, if what we suspected was wrong had been wrong, they would have had a lot to do, and their charges for it were in line. The problem was, they hadn't tried to clear the clog first, which they really should have done.

And the idea that Rich actually needed the stump to heat his own house -- because he couldn't afford to pay for gas -- made me sad and confused at the same time. Gas (natural and LP) rates are not cheap in this area, but they aren't outrageously high, either. Our house doesn't have central heat. There's a big free-standing gas furnace in the living room and we use electric heaters in the bedrooms when needed. The adobe warms up after a few days and holds the heat. When we're not here, we keep the house at about 50 degrees; when we're here, it's 68-70. We haven't spent a whole winter here, but from the utility bumps in the weeks we have been here during cold weather, we figure winter heating costs at around $250 a month, which is higher than we pay in California -- it's a lot colder here! -- but not shocking.

Well, we say. Compared to what? You'd expect a plumber would make decent money, and heating his house wouldn't be that big an expense comparatively, but it turns out there's so little work in the field, nobody's making much money, and yes, heat is a huge expense comparatively. What I paid at the hardware store went right to paying the bill the plumbers had run up there for supplies and equipment. So... how do the plumbers get paid? I don't know. So yeah, take the stump. Please.

Of course a lot of folks around here heat with wood, either what they can chop or purchase already chopped or pellets, and it is overall, they say, about 30-50% less than gas or electricity. If they can get the wood free, it's gravy. Or at least a warmer few days.

The Endless Recession is partially to blame for this situation, but part of it is just the way things are here and have been for generations. So much of what lucky people like me take for granted is a struggle here -- and it has been for as long as anyone can remember. I realize how lucky we are and how little I really have to complain about.

It was a beautiful day yesterday, the sky an incredible deep blue, the clouds almost too pure in their whiteness. After all the excitement, I went to check for something in the van, and witnessed the most incredible sunset in the west. Well. Compared to what? We've shown pictures of New Mexico sunrises and sunsets to friends in California, and they always remark on how "unusual" it must be. And we say, no. It's practically every day. When I was driving over to the hardware store to pay the plumbers' bill, I caught my breath gazing at the mountains, as I do almost every time I come here. The mountains here are just a stunning sight, like the starry firmament at night, with bright stars all the way down to the horizon, the Milky Way shining bright, like nothing you would ever see in California unless you were in the high mountains on a good night.

Below is an incredible picture taken outside of Flagstaff, AZ, that appeared on APOD in 2008. It's consciously dramatic, showing the San Francisco Peaks enveloped in the clouds they attract (mountains do attract the clouds around these parts) and the Night Sky -- after long exposure. No, your eye doesn't quite see it this way, but the sensation of what you do see, on a clear night in Flagstaff, or from where I am now, is almost as strong.