The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [53]
“The President of the United States suddenly grows crosseyed and floats away!” I yell.
“And anchovies will turn to dust!” yells Coughlin.
“The Golden Gate is creaking with sunset rust,” says Alvah.
“And anchovies will turn to dust,” insists Coughlin.
“Give me another slug of that jug. How! Ho! Hoo!” Japhy leaping up: “I’ve been reading Whitman, know what he says, Cheer up slaves, and horrify foreign despots, he means that’s the attitude for the Bard, the Zen Lunacy bard of old desert paths, 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, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants 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, that’s what I like about you Goldbook and Smith, you two guys from the East Coast which I thought was dead.”
“We thought the West Coast was dead!”
“You’ve really brought a fresh wind around here. Why, do you realize the Jurassic pure granite of Sierra Nevada with the straggling high conifers of the last ice age and lakes we just saw is one of the greatest expressions on this earth, just think how truly great and wise America will be, with all this energy and exuberance and space focused into the Dharma.”
“Oh”—Alvah—“balls on that old tired Dharma.”
“Ho! What we need is a floating zendo, where an old Bodhisattva can wander from place to place and always be sure to find a spot to sleep in among friends and cook up mush.”
“‘The boys was glad, and rested up for more, and Jack cooked mush, in honor of the door,’” I recited.
“What’s that?”
“That’s a poem I wrote. ‘The boys was sittin in a grove of trees, listenin to Buddy explain the keys. Boys, sez he, the Dharma is a door…Let’s see…Boys, I say the keys, cause there’s lotsa keys, but only one door, one hive for the bees. So listen to me, and I’ll try to tell all, as I heard it long ago, in the Pure Land Hall. For you good boys, with winesoaked teeth, that can’t understand these words on a heath, I’ll make it simpler, like a bottle of wine, and a good woodfire, under stars divine. Now listen to me, and when you have learned the Dharma of the Buddhas of old and yearned, to sit down with the truth, under a lonesome tree, in Yuma Arizony, or anywhere you be, don’t thank me for tellin, what was told me, this is the wheel I’m a-turnin, this is the reason I be: Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.’”
“Ah but that’s too pessimistic and like dream gucky,” says Alvah, “though the rhyme is pure like Melville.”
“We’ll have a floatin zendo for Buddy’s winesoaked boys to come and lay up in and learn to drink tea like Ray did, learn to meditate like you should Alvah, and I’ll be a head monk of a zendo with a big jar full of crickets.”
“Crickets?”
“Yessir, that’s what, a series of monasteries for fellows to go and monastate and meditate in, we can have groups of shacks up in the Sierras or the High Cascades or even Ray says down in Mexico and have big wild gangs of pure holy men getting together