This Gun For Hire is a dream Raven opening his eyes in the start and closing his eyes in the end. This was a reality that Jack Kerouac was well aware of by 1953 when his studies of Buddhism inspired him to write Some of the Dharma. "It was the bliss of knowing that our lives are but dreams, arbitrary conceptions, from which the big dreamer wakes--What could be more like a dream, with birth the falling-asleep, and death the awaking from sleep?--a dream, with beginning and ending . . ." 65
"Life is a dream. My birth records, my family's birth records and recorded origins,
my athletic records in the newspaper clippings I have, my own notebooks and published books are not real at all, my own dreams are not dreams at all but products of my waking imagination." 66 Since Lowell childhood, experiencing the death of his child brother, "Small wonder that the baby sees people in the world as giant put-together phantoms slashing in a violent projection INSIDE MIND," 67 the vision was instilled in him--it was all a dream movie--"I saw my father, my old girlfriends, my long Lowell night walks, clearly, without regret, on that Bliss Screen of Movies." 68
Some of the Dharma, built over years, fed by scriptures of golden eternity, is filled with his thoughts on life as a movie. Beginning with the practice of meditation, which he envisioned: "You let it melt away, ignoring the dream of life for an examination of the mind itself the makes the dream appear . . . like watching a movie on a screen. But because it's like a movie on a screen, you realize the movie itself is unreal phantasms and the screen is the only reality. The 'screen' is your Mind Essence, the movie is forms that come and go." 69
So when translating his visions to paper, he pictured "bookmovies", "movie novels", "mindmovies" with "prose concentration camera-eye visions of a definite movie of the mind with fade-ins, pans, close-ups, and fade-outs." 70
He even hoped to turn writing into actual film. In On the Road, he describes coming to California expectantly, "I was to stay in a shack and write a shining original story for a Hollywood studio." 71
But it didn't work, "the first week I stayed in the shack in Mill City, writing furiously at some gloomy tale about New York that I thought would satisfy a Hollywood director, and the trouble with it was that it was too sad." 72
In fact it sounds like a description of The Subterraneans, a work that was made into a movie by Hollywood in 1960. A more successful dream into film was Pull My Daisy. Like the opening of This Gun for Hire, the camera pans around a black and white room, "early morning in the universe--the room's in a mess." Kerouac narrates his friends through the wonder, "Is it true that we're all in Heaven now and that we don't know it. And that if we knew it we would still know it but that because we don't know it we go around and act just the way that we do."
And Heaven being where all his ideas were anyway--"The Holy Ghost writes
through me . . . I'm taking orders from Heaven" 73
, "All these books are published in Heaven" 74
--that's also where the movie of On the Road glows: "I can see it now, Marlon Brando as Dean Moriarty and Montgomery Clift as Sal Paradise." 75
He could even translate the legendary plot for a Buddhist movie, "two brothers from the Himalayan Highlands floating down the Ganges on a home-made raft, to Benares, the sensual jealous lover and the goodhearted imbecile." 76
The movie realization hit him deep, like a powerful spotlight projected beam. He was changed and haunted for life. From On the Road, "We decided to stay up in all-night movies on Skid Row . . . For thirty-five cents each we went into the beat-up old movie and sat down in the balcony till morning . . . We saw both of these things six times each during the night. We saw them waking, we heard them sleeping, we sensed them dreaming, we were permeated completely with the strange Gray Myth of the West and the weird dark Myth of the East when morning came. All my actions since then have been dictated automatically to my subconscious by this horrible osmotic experience." 77
So when he saw This Gun For Hire and lay on that Boston grass that day in the middle of America at war, his visions went out, he watched clouds going away, knowing he would go too. Life was a film and a legend and a dream and it starts every time the pages turn.
Next page: Notes
