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“I wanta swim in rivers and drink goatmilk and talk with priests and just read Chinese books and amble around the valleys talking to farmers and their children.” These are Kerouacs’ words from The Dharma Bums, but read at a time when I was doing all of these things, they rang with an high school mentor’s eerie prescience.
It’s been 50 years since Kerouac’s preceding and better-known On the Road was published, and so it’s popular for the leading illuminati to debate the man’s literary legacy. Such academic squabbling is irrelevant to me.
A 33-year-old writer who drinks wine and smokes pot, parties with friends and hikes alone on the road and in the mountains, searching for personal meaning through thoughtful self-reflection: is this Kerouac’s alter-ego Ray Smith in The Dharma Bums, or me, reading his words almost half a century later? Art that so directly connects with its audience is simply successful art.
It was beautiful. The pinkness vanished and then it was all purple dusk and the roar of the silence was like a wash of diamond waves going through the liquid porches of our ears, enough to soothe a man a thousand years…. It was all completely serious, completely hallucinated, all completely happy.
…All the aching muscles and the hunger in my belly were bad enough, and the surroundant dark rocks, the fact that there is nothing there to soothe you with kisses and soft words, but just to be sitting there meditating and praying for the world with another earnest young man − ’twere good enough to have been born just to die, as we all are. [p. 71]
Everything was fine with the Zen Lunatics, the nut wagon was too far away to hear us. But there was a wisdom in it all, as you’ll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of wheels. You’ll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips. Only one thing I’ll say for the people watching television, the millions and millions of the One Eye: they’re not hurting anyone while they’re sitting in front of that Eye. [p. 104]
I was all alone by the fire and it was getting gray dawn in the east. “Boy, I am drunk!” I said. “Wake up! Wake up!” I yelled. “The goat of day is butting dawn! No ifs or buts! Bang! Come on, you girls! gimps! punks! thieves! pimps! hangmen! Run!” Then I suddenly had the most tremendous feeling of the pitifulness of human beings, whatever they were, their faces, pained mouths, personalities, attempts to be gay, little petulances, feelings of loss, their dull and empty witticisms so soon forgotten: Ah, for what? I knew that the sound of silence was everywhere and therefore everything everywhere was silence. Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain’t this and that at all? I staggered up the hill, greeted by birds, and looked at all the sleeping huddled figures on the floor. Who were all these strange ghosts rooted to the silly little adventure of earth with me? And who was I? [p. 199]
1 Comment
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Support Barack Obama
Japhy Rider, one of the most influential characters in my life. thanks for reminding me.
Larry