I read The Dharma Bums almost every year; perhaps every two. The first time I read it, it opened me up. The next time, I still enjoyed it, but my feminist critique started coming in. It remains compelling, but I can’t help thinking about the circumstances surrounding the text, and the spaces/left out parts within it. My favourite part is the mountain climb; my favourite part is the solo ranger station work; my favourite part is thinking about what it felt like.
I’ve re-read a few of my other heroic authors, thinking about their stories – do we have any non-male protagonists enjoying this kind of agency and fluidity in the world? On The Road, similarly. Marylou and Camille – I think about them. All my favourite early and mid 20th century auto-fictions are haunted by interesting women. Sidelined as supporting actors; diminished as such, but clearly fascinating humans. Could we tell their stories? Is there the possibility of a femme/non-binary/trans-man drifting across America on the knife edge of poverty, getting by on their good looks, enmeshing themselves with the landscape and spirituality of America for all time? At least Jack was queer; I don’t know how much was self-censored and how much was obscured by publishers. When I drive around America, I think about Jack; especially moving across in either direction. In Boulder I wonder about Ginsberg. Was the Trident open while he made this place? I went there, had a coffee, and felt at home; it’s so similar to its sister in Halifax. I imagined a golden thread running down into the Earth below Boulder and then back up again under Halifax. The children of the American Buddhists who moved to Nova Scotia en masse call themselves the Dharma Brats; I term I learned long before reading Dharma Bums.
What would those adventures look like if I had them? Again, I’ve got enormous amounts of privilege; no right to claim “Bum”, no right to romanticise poverty when it is purely optional. I can get a job anywhere, I’ve always been able to. I couldn’t get a lease on an apartment when I was 18; nobody in Kelowna wanted to rent to a girl and her boyfriend and their two dude friends. I never thought to ask my 20 year old boyfriend to make those calls. I filled three months with rapid consumption of important life lessons, and then took the train home to live with my parents again.
I’m safe most of the time; but not as much as Jack enjoyed in the 1950s. That ease. We need to live in a world where that ease which is really a birthright is something enjoyed by all.
Kids have such an innate sense of Justice. They know instinctively when things aren’t exactly fair, and they will call out the wielder of power / judgement (teacher, parent, older kid) to try and set things back into balance. I still have that; as strong as a little kid I have it. I want things to be fair; I feel strongly that they are out of balance when they are not fair; “that’s just the way it is – roll with it”; isn’t a good enough answer for me. I’ve become more pragmatic, but deploying pragmatism is superficial; I know it’s not how I really feel. I want maximum fairness. Agency; I am an artist because it’s my fastest and best access point to agency. Everyone should be an artist; everyone should feel they have the creative tools to rub up against the edges that might otherwise hem them in – rules of propriety, civic bylaws, economic rules, citizenship, rules of gender. Wherever boundaries are most rigid they are most vulnerable to cracks; artists are trained to get their fingers in there; I want to talk to artists who pry those boundaries back a little; artists who conflate things, bother containment, artists who are double agents. Artists who point out contradictions and sway on a trapeze between them, making space, making room for fairness; (sometimes on the nose, sometimes subversively). Jack made a little room for me; I’d say it’s about 10’ x 10’. The woman-shaped space in his literature is small, but could be radically inhabited, filled until it’s forced to expand. Stretched to accommodate the largesse of experience that isn’t strictly white and male. Re-reading The Dharma Bums has helped me to find it; to see that light coming through. Repetition gives us insight into the variations, the cracks, the missing parts of the story.
I’m calling for that life to be lived. I’m calling for that book to be written and celebrated. We need and hunger for it to define a generation; this generation.
