Category: Longer Works

Japhy as Hero

The more I think about Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, the more I’m impressed by Japhy, the hero of the story. Whether or not this is an accurate portrayal of Gary Snyder, the character is, as far as I know, a unique one in modern American lit. Certainly an individual who was an avid environmentalist, a Zen Buddhist, and a poet would have been anunusual phenomena in American society in the "50’s".

In many ways, he seems like a contemporary Henry David Thoreau with his unique blend of naturalist and religious philosopher, though he comes from a very different background:

Japhy Ryder was a kid from eastern Oregon brought up in a log cabin deep in the woods with his father and mother and sister, from the beginning a woods boy, an axman, farmer, interested in animals and Indian lore so that when he finally got to college by hook or crook he was already well equipped for his early studies in anthropology and later in Indian myth and in the actual texts of Indian mythology. Finally he learned Chinese and Japanese and became an Oriental scholar and discovered the greatest Dharma Bums of them all, the Zen Lunatics of China and Japan. At the same time, being a Northwest boy with idealistic tendencies, he got interested in oldfashioned I.W.W. anarchism and learned to play the guitar and sing old work songs to go with his Indian songs and general folksong interests.

In a very real sense, Japhy seems to symbolize the Northwest, or at least the coastal Northwest, for Eastern Washington and Eastern Oregon offer a very different heritage. Japhy represents many of the forces that have combined to give the Pacific Northwest its cultural heritage. Or, perhaps it just seems so because those are the same forces that have helped to shape me as a 3rd generation Pacific Northwesterner, though I seem to have acquired them in a very different order than Japhy did.

Those who know the Northwest know that it is dominated by the Cascade Mountains, whether it is Mount Rainer in Seattle or Mt Hood in Portland. Growing up in Seattle, I knew it was going to be a good day any time you could see Mt Rainier rising above the Puget Sound. Today, my whole day is uplifted if I can catch a glance of Mt Hood shining in the distance while driving home.

Those who actually spend much time in the mountains are even more influenced by them. And Japhy seems to have spent much of his time in them. Few can say they have reached the top of Rainier without guides:

I climbed some pretty big mountains up there, including a long haul up Rainier almost to the top where you sign your name. I finally made it one year. There are only a few names up there, you know. And I climbed all around the Cascades, off season and in season, and worked as a logger.

I have never climbed Mt Rainier, but I have climbed other mountains, and I can easily identify with Japhy’s statement that the silence and immense presence of the mountain almost makes it seem like the

…mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sittin there bein perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop all our frettin and foolin." And, at least while you are there, there is no ãfrettin and foolinä or you are silenced by your awe of the mountain.

After thirty years of hiking the high country, I can certainly identify with Japhy when he explains why Han Shan was his hero:

"Because," said he, "he was a poet, a mountain man, a Buddhist dedicated to the principle of meditation on the essence of all things, … And he was a man of solitude who could take off by himself and live purely and true to himself."

This seems like a pretty good role model to me. I can imagine no higher calling than to live true to yourself — if only you can take the time to discover that self you are to be true to.

The more you hike above the timberline, the more you appreciate the beauty of trees and plants that have had to struggle year after year for their very existence. Like Japanese bonsai, these plants seem to exhibit more than just a physical beauty.

"The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is. All these people thinking they’re hardheaded materialistic practical types, they don’t know shit about matter, their heads are full of dreamy ideas and notions."

And when you begin to realize the beauty in these simple objects, you can begin to appreciate the beauty in Japanese haikus.

"A real haiku’s gotta be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing, like the greatest haiku of them all probably is the one that goes ‘The sparrow hops along the veranda, with wet feet.’ By Shiki. You see the wet footprints like a vision in your mind and yet in those few words you also see all the rain that’s been falling that day and almost smell the wet pine needles."

In the end, it’s hard not to admire Japhy’s goals, even if they seem a little naive nearly fifty years later.

"You and I ain’t out to bust anybody’s skull, or cut someone’s throat in an economic way, we’ve dedicated ourselves to prayer for all sentient beings and when we’re strong enough we’ll really be able to do it, too, like the old saints. Who knows, the world might wake up and burst out into a beautiful flower of Dharma everywhere."

The Dharma Bums — First Impressions

Synchronicity – I think The Obvious? calls it. While searching the web for background on Gary Snyder for the poem I just posted on this site, I read that he was portrayed as Japhy, a central character in The Dharma Bums. Earlier, while buying a copy of Kerouacâs On the Road, I had picked up a copy of The Dharma Bums because the title intrigued me.

Obviously, I was meant to read this book now. So I did.

The book reminds me in some ways of Abbey’s Desert Solitaire because, for me, the best parts of the book are the scene where the narrator and Japhy climb Matterhorn in the Sierras and the last scene where the narrator spends the summer as a fire lookout on Mt. Desolation. Personally, I find Kerouac’s attempts to tie these events to his version of Buddhism the most interesting part of the book.

Of course, I also found the descriptions of Japhy, the main reason I read the novel, interesting. While it’s difficult to know how accurate these descriptions are, they do offer some insight into Snyderâs poetry. Also, Snyder writes in Mountains and Rivers without End, "By Way of Thanks: I thank the fellow writers who helped me shape this poem’s ideas from earliest on: Phillip Walen, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Jack Kerouac, and Lew Welch." Although this obviously doesn’t confirm the authenticity of Kerouac’s portrayal of him, it would at least seem to indicate that he wasn’t offended by his portrayal.

I am more ambivalent about the content of the novel and the characters who appear in it, particularly Ray Smith himself. Realizing this is "a slice of life" novel, without a real beginning or end, I still find it difficult to admire much about the narrator except his Huck-Finn-like search for his own personal freedom, a freedom you suspect he will sacrifice to his thirst for alcohol. At his worst, he reminds me of Holden Caufield in Catcher in the Rye , with his sense of personal superiority and constant whining about society in general, while at the same time failing to show any real superiority.

I need some more time to review my notes and think about the book, certainly more time than I have to devote to one day’s journal.

Here’s an enthusiastic review of the bookLitKicks: Dharma Bums if you’d like a different perspective.

Meanwhile, if you have strong feelings about the novel, let me know and I’ll try to consider them while thinking more about this novel.

Desert Solitaire Part III

Despite any philosophical differences I may have with Abbey, he articulates some of my feelings so precisely it makes me wonder if he hasn’t been listening to my conversations with my hiking partner. Perhaps, though, they are merely universal feelings shared by most dedicated hikers.

Standing alone on the top of a mountain looking down at the miles and miles of clearcuts, it’s hard not to agree with Abbey when he says:

But the love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need-if only we had the eyes to see. Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us-if only we were worthy of it.

The best way to recruit newcomers to the environmental movement is to get them out to truly experience the wilderness, to see nature first-hand, and then to have them compare it to a recent clear-cut.

It’s difficult for a lover of wilderness to go to a National Park and sense that Abbey is not absolutely right on when he says:

A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles. Better to idle through one park in two weeks than try to race through a dozen in the same amount of time. Flatlanders! Seeing the wonders of the world from behind the driver’s wheel is little different than experiencing them in a theater or through a web page.

Nor is virtual reality a substitute for real experience. It seems a little ironic for a writer of so many books about the environment to say it, but Abbey also seems right on when he says:

Through naming comes knowing; we grasp an object, mentally, by giving it a name comprehension, prehension, apprehension. And thus through language create a whole world, corresponding to the other world out there. Or we trust that it corresponds. Or perhaps, like a German poet, we cease to care, becoming more concerned with the naming than with the things named; the former becomes more real than the latter. And so in the end the world is lost again. No, the world remains those unique, particular, incorrigibly individual junipers and sandstone +monoliths-and it is we who are lost. Again. Round and round, through the endless labyrinth of thought-the maze.

If it came right down to it, I would trade all of the hiking books I own for one more week of hiking. On the other hand, I have more hiking books than I would ever be willing to carry on a hike. You have to do something when it’s raining, even if it is only dream.

Finally, Abbey offers the ultimate argument against those who argue that environmentalists are elitists and are only worried about preserving wildernesses and not about the workers who depend on the forests for their livelihood:

The finest quality of this stone, these plants and animals, this desert landscape is the indifference manifest to our presence, our absence, our coming, our staying or our going. Whether we live or die is a matter of absolutely no concern whatsoever to the desert. Let men in their madness blast every city on earth into black rubble and envelop the entire planet in a cloud of lethal gas-the canyons and hills, the springs and rocks will still be here, the sunlight will filter through, water will form and warmth shall be upon the land and after sufficient time, no matter how long, somewhere, living things will emerge and join and stand once again, this time perhaps to take a different and better course.

Only a fool believes that mankind has the power to destroy the earth. What really concerns environmentalists is that people will, in their ignorance, destroy the ecosystem that supports them, that the human race will no longer be here to experience the profound, eternal beauty of earth.

Looking for more? Here’s an interesting essay on Abbey by an important environmental writer: A FEW WORDS IN FAVOR OF EDWARD ABBEY

Desert Solitaire Part II

The most profound, and, for me, most disturbing, difference between Thoreau and Abbey is their perception of the interrelationship between man, nature and spirit. There can be little doubt that Thoreau found nature to be sympathetic to man, and that sympathy is, in its deepest sense, a spiritual relationship:

Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy, man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was Aeolian music to a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me.

This is the kind of experience I seek when I head out to the wilderness; for me hiking is a form of meditation, of communing with my deeper sense.

Though there is certain ambivalence in Abbey’s writings about man’s relationship to nature, the general attitude seems to be that nature is largely indifferent to man.

Is this at last the locus Dei? There are enough cathedrals and temples and altars here for a Hindu pantheon of divinities. Each time I look up one of the secretive little side canyons I half expect to see not only the cottonwood tree rising over its tiny spring-the leafy god, the desert’s liquid eye–but also a rainbow-colored corona of blazing light, pure spirit, pure being, pure disembodied intelligence, about to speak my name.

If a man’s imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would abandon forever such fantasies of the supernal. He would learn to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous, more than enough to console him for the loss of the ancient dreams.

It’s as if he wants to find God in nature, as if he somehow expects to find spiritual comfort in this place, but he ends up suggesting that belief is just a lack of real imagination.

Abbey states this idea even more explicitly:

Alone in the silence, I understand for a moment the dread which many feel in the presence of primeval desert, the unconscious fear which compels them to tame, alter or destroy what they cannot understand, to reduce the wild and prehuman to human dimensions. Anything rather than confront directly the antehuman, the other world which frightens not through danger or hostility but in something far "worse — it’s" implacable indifference.

This realization reminds me of Stephen Crane’s young hero’s flight to a �chapel� in the woods in The Red Badge of Courage, only to discover the ants carrying away bits of a dead soldier. It also brings back vague memories of discovering the beauty of Vietnam amidst a terrible war.

At first glance, this certainly seems like an existentialist point of view. Only a harsh reality faces us that we must bring our own meaning to:

Under the desert sun, in that dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist. The air is clean, the rock cuts cruel into flesh; shatter the rock and the odor of flint rises to your nostrils, bitter and sharp. Whirlwinds dance across the salt flats, a pillar of dust by day; the thornbush breaks into flame at night. What does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore, sublime.

Only the last lines, “The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore, sublime.” seem to offer any hope to us.

But in what sense is this “sublime”? Is this some kind of Zen koan? Or does it just reflects Abbey’s own ambivalence about his relationship to nature and to the universal?