But For Jack Kerouac

“…we’re at home; I can go anywhere in America and get to know what I want because I know it is all the same in every corner, I know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side.” There was nothing clear about the things he said, but what he meant to say was somehow made pure and clear. He used the word “pure” a great deal. I never dreamed Dean would become a mystic. These were the days of his mysticism, which would lead to the strange, ragged W.C. Fields saintliness of his later days.

Jack Kerouac

On The Road

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Jack Kerouac is getting a lot of attention with this generation… On The Road is made into a movie today after decades have passed since its first publication in 1957. The places and things; the cars and the girls; the drugs and alcohol, compare little with crack, meth, X-tacy, and the potpourri of drugs available today. They had not yet come to be nor had  the word Beatnik. There were no; I-phones, laptops or 150 + channels via satellite on flat screen T.V.s, giant malls, or Wall-Marts in every town. Words were pounded out on typewriters and corrected with white-out… scribbled corrections with pencil on coffee and wine stained paper manuscripts that were sent off to publishers in vanilla envelopes along with dreams of fame and fortune. People made contact with each other via snail mail and long distance from pay-phones from San Francisco to New York… the inner cities left cheap decaying hotels and apartments for poets and painters as suburbia and tract houses mushroomed out from them like atomic clouds… Eisenhower was president and a poem by Alan Ginsberg “Howl” was in court charged with obscenity. North Beach and the trolleys had not yet become tourist attractions, complete with the alley between the Vesuvio and City Lights bookstore named after Jack Kerouac. So much has changed but so much is the same. You can go anywhere in America and it is all the same in every corner.
    Jack was an alcoholic who died of liver failure at the age of forty seven in 1969. He wrote about the longing for the mysticism of his Dean Moriarty. The disenfranchisement of post World War II industrialist America that these writers lived in was the first step towards where we are now in the world now… with no purpose other than surviving as long as we can, accumulating the most stuff that we think of as our “quality of life”. But the truth that haunts us is that the one thing we have in common from birth; we eat, we sleep, we shit, and then we all die. Somewhere in between is the fulcrum that levers us into the spiritual awakening poor Jack missed out on. He was on the doorstep of despair outside of immersion into the purity and clarity of that awakening. Until I passed that threshold I almost stayed there too. I love Jack Kerouac.

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