Post by Paul Maher Jr. on Jan 1, 2017 15:57:54 GMT -5
I have stacked next to me the three Library of America volumes, all sitting there, just in case I need to dip into any one of them to retrieve a quote, profundity, witticism …. or a “Kerouacism” perhaps? All this to say, here I sit with the written works of a man I have been in constant acquaintance with for almost 35 years now, and wondering, just what it is that draws me back into his world?
Opening up any one of these volumes can unfold another slice of truth. For example, blindly opening up one book to The Dharma Bums, I read the following:
“This little prayer made me feel good and fool good as I packed up my things and took off to the tumbling water that came down from a rock across the highway, delicious spring water to bathe my face in and wash my teeth in and drink. Then I was ready for the three-thousand-mile hitchhike to Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where my mother was waiting, probably washing dishes in her dear pitiful kitchen.”
Really? Jack? Blowing my mind again . . . I don’t normally dip into The Dharma Bums all that much, I think the prose is compromised and sort of a sell-out but there he is proving me wrong. We have the famished writer in all of his Buddhist glory, on the road once more and so many miles from home, and who hasn’t felt that sense of irrepresible distance on a journey far from home, thinking of a loved one back there in yoru familiar corner of the world transacting the ordinary matters of the day, and that all at once, those ordinary matters become sort of holy and precious, to use words of Jack to express the rarefied air of honest living. He takes a simple matter of his mother washing dishes as a holy act, and there is her renegade son stooped over in a mountain stream washing his face and brushing his teeth, wondering what she was doing at that very moment.
I then pinch a cluster of pages and turn to The Subterraneans and we see another side of Kerouac:
“But in eying her little charms I only had the foremost one idea that I had to immerse my lonely being (“A big sad lonely man,” is what she said to me one night later, seeing me suddenly in the chair) in the warm bath and salvation of her thighs–the intimacies of younglovers in a bed, high, facing eye to eye, breast to breast naked, organ to organ, knee to shivering goosepimpled knee, exchanging existential and lover-acts for a crack at making it […]”
And who hasn’t experienced this in one form or another? It’s that moment of intimate experience that Jack, in his 1950s America of the Cold War and McCarthyism, arrested and elevated to a holy experience worthy of inclusion in a hot streak of visionary perceptive writing. It’s endlessly fascinating, at least to me, to find these nuggets almost carelessly tossed matter-of-factly into the marketplace. It’s a craving to be alive and celebrate that craving as natura phenomenon. It’s Kerouac’s diamond eye resting somewhere between the heart and the soul, bringing himself and his readers into that experience, of getting a virtual high on together and grooving on the seeming simplicity of the moment, assuring us all the while that “life is holy and every moment is precious.”
Right?
Turn more pages and arrive to Tristessa, one of my favorite visionary tic novellas. I love Tristessa because it is a beautiful demonstration of how Kerouac can distill the depths of a damaged soul into sympathetic non-judgmental prose. He writes of a “face so expressive of the pain and loveliness that went no doubt into the making of htis fatal world.” A few lines down, Kerouac’s empathetic assessment of Tristessa, a junkie Mexican prostitute, is both punishing and rewarding. He makes us feel like a better person by virtue of being lock-stepped into his unique worldview for a while:
“the fragile and holy countenance of poor Tristessa, the tremulous bravery of her little junk-racked body that a man could throw up in the air ten feet–the bundle of death and beauty–all pure Form standing in front of me, all the racks and tortures of sexual beauty, the breast, the limb of the middle body, the whole huggable mess of a woman some of them even though 6 feet high you can slumber on their bellies in the night like a nap on a dreaming bankside of a woman […]”
This, folks, is honest uncompromised writing. Jack Kerouac among the fellaheen, stirring his literary noise in the dusty Mexican streets, jotting down these very thoughts into a little notebook that he began on a Monday afternoon, August 22, 1955 (and carried over to another notebook where the conclusion of the handwritten novel merged with other stranded elements comprising of Mexico City Blues and Book of Dreams). Kerouac, with his ever-present pencil scribbling these tortured thoughts, is so far removed from our picture of what life in the 1950s must have been like. Even that week, as morphine-stewed Kerouac, only less than two years away from becoming a household name, unfortunately, as a n’er-do-well renegade writer beatnik, wrote his precious tomes, Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” was a nationwide hit and Mitch Miller’s “Yellow Rose of Texas” made lovers pant in their dark parlor shadows. Kerouac, to me, is the underbelly of that homogenized nation, one that kept minorities in their place and relegated women as compliant domestic servants. This, you see, is why he endures and outsells his authorial peers of post-modern American literature.
Part of me wishes that a LoA volume was devoted to Kerouac’s vision-quest writings, when he set his mind free unbridled by convention or the urge/need to earn. Perhaps one such volume would be Visions of Gerard, Visions of Cody, Tristessa, Book of Dreams and a handful of other unpublished works of the same vein.
I could very well drive a little way from where I sit in a coffee shop in Amherst, New Hampshire, driving from Route 101A southbound on Route 3, soon crossing the intersecting highway of Route 111 where, off the highway is Gabrielle, Leo, Gerard and Jan Kerouac all buried (and even moreso, at the moment, under about 3 to 4 feet of frozen snow) on downward to Route 495, crossing Thoreau’s Concord River, a slow-moving body of water that is about to converge with the Merrimac, a blending of waters that didn’t escape Jack’s attention back in his day, just like it didn’t escape Henry Thoreau’s, and stand graveside and perhaps honor the man with a handful of the faithful who are also keeping him in mind that day. However, my way of doing this is to write this blog entry, an act that hardly serves the man any justice, other than to say that in the corner of my consciousness, I have it in mind. He made an impact.
“Now I’m going to tell you the truth.”
Need any more be said?
Opening up any one of these volumes can unfold another slice of truth. For example, blindly opening up one book to The Dharma Bums, I read the following:
“This little prayer made me feel good and fool good as I packed up my things and took off to the tumbling water that came down from a rock across the highway, delicious spring water to bathe my face in and wash my teeth in and drink. Then I was ready for the three-thousand-mile hitchhike to Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where my mother was waiting, probably washing dishes in her dear pitiful kitchen.”
Really? Jack? Blowing my mind again . . . I don’t normally dip into The Dharma Bums all that much, I think the prose is compromised and sort of a sell-out but there he is proving me wrong. We have the famished writer in all of his Buddhist glory, on the road once more and so many miles from home, and who hasn’t felt that sense of irrepresible distance on a journey far from home, thinking of a loved one back there in yoru familiar corner of the world transacting the ordinary matters of the day, and that all at once, those ordinary matters become sort of holy and precious, to use words of Jack to express the rarefied air of honest living. He takes a simple matter of his mother washing dishes as a holy act, and there is her renegade son stooped over in a mountain stream washing his face and brushing his teeth, wondering what she was doing at that very moment.
I then pinch a cluster of pages and turn to The Subterraneans and we see another side of Kerouac:
“But in eying her little charms I only had the foremost one idea that I had to immerse my lonely being (“A big sad lonely man,” is what she said to me one night later, seeing me suddenly in the chair) in the warm bath and salvation of her thighs–the intimacies of younglovers in a bed, high, facing eye to eye, breast to breast naked, organ to organ, knee to shivering goosepimpled knee, exchanging existential and lover-acts for a crack at making it […]”
And who hasn’t experienced this in one form or another? It’s that moment of intimate experience that Jack, in his 1950s America of the Cold War and McCarthyism, arrested and elevated to a holy experience worthy of inclusion in a hot streak of visionary perceptive writing. It’s endlessly fascinating, at least to me, to find these nuggets almost carelessly tossed matter-of-factly into the marketplace. It’s a craving to be alive and celebrate that craving as natura phenomenon. It’s Kerouac’s diamond eye resting somewhere between the heart and the soul, bringing himself and his readers into that experience, of getting a virtual high on together and grooving on the seeming simplicity of the moment, assuring us all the while that “life is holy and every moment is precious.”
Right?
Turn more pages and arrive to Tristessa, one of my favorite visionary tic novellas. I love Tristessa because it is a beautiful demonstration of how Kerouac can distill the depths of a damaged soul into sympathetic non-judgmental prose. He writes of a “face so expressive of the pain and loveliness that went no doubt into the making of htis fatal world.” A few lines down, Kerouac’s empathetic assessment of Tristessa, a junkie Mexican prostitute, is both punishing and rewarding. He makes us feel like a better person by virtue of being lock-stepped into his unique worldview for a while:
“the fragile and holy countenance of poor Tristessa, the tremulous bravery of her little junk-racked body that a man could throw up in the air ten feet–the bundle of death and beauty–all pure Form standing in front of me, all the racks and tortures of sexual beauty, the breast, the limb of the middle body, the whole huggable mess of a woman some of them even though 6 feet high you can slumber on their bellies in the night like a nap on a dreaming bankside of a woman […]”
This, folks, is honest uncompromised writing. Jack Kerouac among the fellaheen, stirring his literary noise in the dusty Mexican streets, jotting down these very thoughts into a little notebook that he began on a Monday afternoon, August 22, 1955 (and carried over to another notebook where the conclusion of the handwritten novel merged with other stranded elements comprising of Mexico City Blues and Book of Dreams). Kerouac, with his ever-present pencil scribbling these tortured thoughts, is so far removed from our picture of what life in the 1950s must have been like. Even that week, as morphine-stewed Kerouac, only less than two years away from becoming a household name, unfortunately, as a n’er-do-well renegade writer beatnik, wrote his precious tomes, Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” was a nationwide hit and Mitch Miller’s “Yellow Rose of Texas” made lovers pant in their dark parlor shadows. Kerouac, to me, is the underbelly of that homogenized nation, one that kept minorities in their place and relegated women as compliant domestic servants. This, you see, is why he endures and outsells his authorial peers of post-modern American literature.
Part of me wishes that a LoA volume was devoted to Kerouac’s vision-quest writings, when he set his mind free unbridled by convention or the urge/need to earn. Perhaps one such volume would be Visions of Gerard, Visions of Cody, Tristessa, Book of Dreams and a handful of other unpublished works of the same vein.
I could very well drive a little way from where I sit in a coffee shop in Amherst, New Hampshire, driving from Route 101A southbound on Route 3, soon crossing the intersecting highway of Route 111 where, off the highway is Gabrielle, Leo, Gerard and Jan Kerouac all buried (and even moreso, at the moment, under about 3 to 4 feet of frozen snow) on downward to Route 495, crossing Thoreau’s Concord River, a slow-moving body of water that is about to converge with the Merrimac, a blending of waters that didn’t escape Jack’s attention back in his day, just like it didn’t escape Henry Thoreau’s, and stand graveside and perhaps honor the man with a handful of the faithful who are also keeping him in mind that day. However, my way of doing this is to write this blog entry, an act that hardly serves the man any justice, other than to say that in the corner of my consciousness, I have it in mind. He made an impact.
“Now I’m going to tell you the truth.”
Need any more be said?