Jack Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums is one of my favorite books. I reread it at least every two years to gauge myself against the lessons it taught me when I first read it a decade ago.
I’m currently rereading it, and in doing so, came across a highlighted part in my dog-eared copy that never fails to bring a smile.
‘I went over to an old cook in the doorway of the kitchen and asked him ‘Why did Bodhidharma come from the West? (Bodhidharma was the Indian who brought Buddhism eastward to China.)
‘I don’t care,” said the old cook, and I told Japhy and he said “ Perfect answer, absolutely perfect. Now you know what I mean by Zen.”
Zen. Like most seekers, I’ve done my rounds trying to figure out what this is supposed to mean. I’ve found it in India, writing, teaching, pizza, and cappuccinos. Still, those sorts of things are temporary and have never thoroughly thwarted me from my semi-permanent path of confused irritability aimed at a world where, quite frankly, less and less makes sense.
But hey, I do possess the ability to shed the skins of meaningless as well as anyone, provided I have some source of light to distract me from myself and the apparent importance of my own muddled karma.
And holy mother of Maya, that occasionally materializes in full-force. The most recent actualization of Life-Guide came in the form of Old Pop in an Oak, a pop song by the Swedish band, Rednex. These ontological magicians achieved fame in the 1990s for their dizzying anthem Cotton Eye Joe, which (I’m sure they didn’t expect this) subsequently catalyzed a mini-epiphany within me.
I was watching Old Pop in an Oak the other day and thought, ‘Hell, this IS me.’ For all the pretensions and defense mechanisms that I am, they all melted like crap bags in a volcano when these guys hit full stride. I mean:
A toasty old patriarch smoking his pipe up high in a tree!
Total nutters delivering soul-rendering lyrical nonsense mixed over musical non-sequiturs!
A moonshine-modeled montage of dolled-up dancers, half-formed band members, and other utterly compelling visual buffoonery!
Yes! Behind all my run-of-the-mill intellectualization, conceptualizations, visions, and orientations, a kitchen-cook freak lives on and says with a smile ‘I don’t care’ when the apparent importances of the world come a-knocking. As per The Dharma Bums, anyone who knows anything about existence’s unavoidable voidness (that nothing truly matters) except in how you let it matter will ultimately live well-a-swell.
Right, Rednexers?
And so, laden with farce, absurdity, and the joy of not literally or figuratively being forced to give a baloney sandwich, I hereby declare my birthright from Heaven through Hell and everywhere in-between: a part of me will always side with the base, and living with that diamond of Rednexistent truth out in the open sure makes me feel a whole bunch more real.