Stars

Because I am running out of new music (and new ways of reinventing the old) to listen to, this blog is going to start connecting to the spirit of adventure more through literature, especially Kerouac. Though On The Road is more than worthy of endless discussion, being a bible of the wanderer, I picked up Dharma Bums at request of a fellow Kerouac enthusiast and at the unwitting recommendation by a rainbow-speckled infant egg who was reading it and enjoying it. What On The Road covers by road be it hitch-hiking or driving, Dharma Bums covers it via train and straight walking, which Kerouac later perceived as the purest way. Dharma Bums expresses Kerouac's naive fascination with Buddhism, inspired by his other soul-mate and crazy Zen poet Gary Snyder, which soul-friendship began soon after his time with "poorchild Angel Neal" more or less ended. With that introduction, I would like to savour a passage from the first marvelous section of the book. I would really like y'all to listen this song (right-click, open in new tab) as you read the below passage (and it is best to put the music at low background volume). And for goodness sakes, savour the words. Read them slowly.

I bade farewell to the little bum of Saint Teresa at the crossing, where we jumped off, and went to sleep the night in the sand in my blankets, far down the beach at the foot of a cliff where cops wouldn't see me and drive me away. I cooked hotdogs on freshly cut and sharpened sticks over the coals of a big wood fire, and heated a can of beans and a can of cheese macaroni in the redhot hollows, and drank my newly bought wine, and exulted in one of the most pleasant nights of my life. I waded in the water and dunked a little and stood looking up at the splendorous night sky, Avalokitesvara's ten-wondered universe of dark and diamonds. "Well, Ray," sez I, glad, "only a few miles to go. You've done it again." Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running -- that's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there, with the Ma-Wing fallopian virgin warm stars reflecting on the outer channel fluid belly waters. And if your cans are redhot and you can't hold them in your hands, just use good old railroad gloves, that's all. I let the food cool a little to enjoy more wine and my thoughts. I sat crosslegged in the sand and contemplated my life. Well, there, and what difference did it make? "What's going to happen to me up ahead?" Then the wine got to work on my taste buds and before long I had to pitch into those hotdogs, biting them right off the end of the stick spit, and chomp chomp, and dig down into the two tasty cans with the old pack spoon, spooning up rich bites of hot beans and pork, or of macaroni with sizzling hot sauce, and maybe a little sand thrown in. "And how many grains of sand are there on this beach?" I think. "Why, as many grans of sand as there are stars in that sky!" (chomp chomp) and if so "How many human beings have there been, in fact how many living creatures have there been, since before the less part of beginningless time? Why, oy, I reckon you would have to calculate the number of grains of sand on this beach and on every star in the sky, in every one of the ten thousand great chili-cosms, which would be a number of sand grains uncomputable by IBM and Burroughs too, why boy I don't rightly know" (swig of wine) "I don't rightly know but it must be a couple umpteen trillion sextillion infideled and busted up unnumberable number of roses that sweet Saint Teresa and that fine little old man are now this minute showering on your head, with lilies"

Notice the stars, the diamond stars, the warm stars falling like cherryblossoms. There's a song out there, Angel Eyes (Performed by New Grass Revival) that sings, "And tonight I ask the stars above, how did I ever win your love? What did I do, what did I say, to turn your angel eyes my way?". Again with the love-nature metaphors, falling into a mind-swirl of warm love of God and love of woman and cool enchantment of nature, being sucked under, smothered warm and cool, with no inclination to escape or resist. I can't wait.