A Tip of the Hat to Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac

 It's a day dedicated to thinking about the brief but vital friendship between Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder.  Through their meeting in the fall of 1955 to their residential camaraderie of spring, 1956, fertile seeds were sewn for the future of ideas in America.  The Sixties, and certainly hippies, would never have happened without the cross-fertilization of Beat poetics -- which really was just the triumvirate of NYC outcasts William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Kerouac -- and the early Buddhism of Snyder, Phillip Whalen and Jack Kerouac, chiefly Snyder and Kerouac.  Kerouac published a novel, "The Dharma Bums," in 1958 and Snyder's Cold Mountain poems appeared sometime thereafter.  Together, they launched thousands of spiritual quests, some sincere and some quixotic.

Here's a photo of Kerouac at Gary's going-away party in Marin in early May, 1956 (Gary was off to study Zen in Japan for several years).  It's my favorite photograph of Jack.  He'd been meditating for about two and a half years; his mind and spirit appear calm, collected, and relatively quiet.

Here's a picture of Gary from around the same time.  He seems an early archetypal hippie, certainly one of the originals.  In fact, Kerouac used Snyder as his heroic figure in "The Dharma Bums" and I'd argue it was Gary's individual ethos, as portrayed in that book, that helped shape much of the cultural ethic that  subsequently emerged in the Sixties.

And lastly, a rather risque photo of Gary enjoying a skinny-dipping session with his Japanese wife and their young son in the Sierras in July of 1969, where he built his own home and where he still lives to this day.  Gary and his first wife* Masa divorced.  He then married the writer Carol Koda, who has since passed on.  I just stumbled upon this photo online and figured what the hell, I may as well share it.

A man in his prime, enjoying the natural life in a natural setting.  And that was Snyder's greatness, really -- the ability to enjoy his life in a healthy, rather than destructive way, and to explore and integrate a philosophy that was both personal and larger-than-self; that served the health of all.

What these two guys stood for at that moment in time was authenticity.  Snyder was able to maintain and gradually expand upon his with further growth but Kerouac's authenticity was a casualty of his fame, or rather, literary notoriety, and the loss of his own internal compass.  It's a continual battle in life to hold true to what is best in oneself.  External forces, often in the shape of other people or external pressures and events, buffet us, wear us down, challenge us, and chip away at our sense of who we really are.  Tough to stay true to one's own star throughout a lifetime.

*  A footnote:  I forgot Gary Snyder's two earlier marriages: firstly to Alison Gass in 1950 and later to the poet Joann Kyger.  Kyger, Snyder, Allen Ginsberg and Ginsberg's partner Peter Orlovsky traveled for several months together in India in 1962, eventually meeting with the Dalai Lama.