The Acceptance of Loss, Part I
In the Writings of Jack Kerouac
“I accept lostness forever. Everything belongs to me because I am poor.”
—Jack Kerouac
The paradox for Jack Kerouac was irresolvable: either he aborted his own narrative thought mid-novel, and felt more spiritually corrupted, or he groaned on in an attempt to by-pass the novelistic tricks of the “serious” writer and become merely a shrouded traveller in the spectacle of the new world taking shape inside his head. The alternative to the outcome of such a paradox was and is inescapable, so much so that they proved almost impossible to resolve for a man whose feeling of homelessness left him, at least when writing, incapable of chasing even his own shadow from the void; for by failing in each book to give birth to his no-god in the celestially abbreviated heaven of his Buddhist nirvana, Kerouac decided to die trying to resolve the predicament of a man in self-imposed exile. His sensibility thus veered between two contradictory, but almost related, options: give yourself up to the tortured, the alien, the Kierkegaardian impulse of self, or likewise to the tamed, near domesticated self which is only a “member” of the literary society. By choosing the former, Kerouac attempted to tear down “the arbitrary confines of the story” and thus become more semantical ghost than writer, and, for better or worse, a chronicler of caprice, a man borne aloft by the mollified repetitiveness of ecstasy, the ecstasy of being lost, imbued as his world was with a tenderness that not even the biographer of Christ could override via a complete “historical” knowledge of heaven and hell. Breaking every rule of intellectual decorum and suffering always from a non-corporeal pre-world sense of bliss and nostalgia for a time when he didn’t exist, Kerouac’s torture was that, by purely arbitrary and contingent means, one day he did. Thus we find in his writing “landscapes” seen through the “keyhole of his eye’, multitudinous panoramas that explode suddenly into our consciousness as if blasted by his breath out of the bedrock of his own soul; immediately remembered places, half TV film-sets, half frontier settlements, consisting (usually) of the downtrodden, the pariah, and yes, like him, the lost, or if not either of those, then figures so forsaken by their surroundings, so emaciated and worn-out by their efforts to love both God and their country, that we can barely imagine a society that would consider including them at all:
Everybody looked like a broken-down movie extra, a withered starlet, disenchanted stunt-men, midget auto-racers, poignant California characters with their end-of-the-continent sadness…
On the Road
Roy DeCarava, Catsup Bottles, Table and Coat, New York, 1952. LA Times.
Robert Frank, Lusk, Wyoming, 1956. 20 Minutos.
Jack Kerouac lived in a period in which America, or the “literature” about it, sought justification for itself in only what got absorbed back into its intellectual, artistic, and conformist moral abyss, an abyss cratered out of its own historicized soul; for the post-war culture, in which Kerouac was emerging as a novelist of “promise”, was only looking for what would consolidate its position, not for anything that might explode and/or undermine its myths; subsequently, by writing in a style that seemed to belittle what had come to be known as the “fashionable”, “traditional”, or worse, the self-serving, seemed far too much like a “literature” written outside the mind for Kerouac, a method of creativity that seemed more justification by incongruity, more a prophecy unlived than one experienced; hence Kerouac’s need to die and keep the universe alive by embalming himself in the amber of his every “thought” unhistoricized by language. That said, much about his early attempts to out-plot “plot” by sketching in his small spiral notebooks is painful, even at times contemptible, hence the beginning of the attacks on his “new” methods, such as Kenneth Rexroth calling it a “naïve effrontery” to say that Kerouac’s poetry was “poetry”, but poetry is what it was, even if it offended those of a more conformist sensibility. It was his inevitable fate, for like a man lost in eternity with only a pedometer to help him trace back his steps to Earth, only Kerouac’s imaginative stamina kept him close to reaching the outer perimeters of his own mind; thus his irreverence, his rejection of “traditional” forms and overwhelmingly free licence given to himself by himself, took him to the most troubling and death-defying of all intellectual outposts: radicalism, that seemingly ignorant self-analysis of no analysis which, for the writer, amounts to shame, yes, but not just his — ours also. In terms of the literature he produced (novels, poems, essays, Buddhist writings) such risk-taking, such soul-abrading testimony was never deemed worthy enough to be part of that great American canon that gave the world Twain, Crane, Melville, Dickinson, Fitzgerald, Hemingway; yet Kerouac’s writing, incautious, and yes, judiciously naïve, is major, if only for the way that it tried to explain away the compromise between poetry and prose, holiness and darkness, risk-taking and rules; but whose rules? The literary world’s? For in line with how Simone de Beauvoir summed up her existential position by saying: “seule la révolte est pure”, Kerouac misthought “rules”, especially those seeking only to stymie the contradictions between conformity and individualism, between puritanical (Christian?) love and sexual freedom, between violence and passivity; for aren’t those the types of contradictions on which “individualism” is built? For, as Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about his fellow Frenchman André Gide: “observance of the rules coexists with a quest for spontaneity”; that said, Kerouac’s task was not to demean himself or weigh and counterweigh the pros and cons of every sentence, no; simply his task (as he saw it) was, like Nietzsche, to say a resounding “yes” to life, to a life lived free of intellectual introspection and inspection of every cognitive decision made, and, in this way, Kerouac reminded us that in literature, anything can and should be said, or as Kerouac so incautiously describes it:
if you don’t stick to what you first thought, and to the words the thought brought, what’s the sense of bothering with it anyway, what’s the sense of foisting your little lies on others, or, that is, hiding your little truths from others? What I find to be really “stupefying in its unreadability” is this laborious and dreary lying called craft and revision by writers, and certainly recognized by the sharpest psychologists as sheer blockage of the mental spontaneous process known 2,500 years ago as “The Seven Streams of swiftness”.
From The First Word: Jack Kerouac Takes a Fresh Look at Jack Kerouac
Roy DeCarava, Child in Window, Clothesline, 1950. Saint Sulpice.
In the works after his first novel The Town and the City, Kerouac began, wrongly or rightly, to write about the world by ignoring that part of his consciousness that was still being organized by past, present, and future, and began to rely instead on only the mental carriage of the human body carrying the universe to the end of cognitive thought. America itself began to dissolve in his word-streams, as if the cultural conditions that preceded his birth in the world had become, in the mind of each of his “characters”, a new beaten-down and syncopated rhythm for mankind. Mankind, or all of the former “versions” of it before Kerouac first picked up his pencil, now seemed in novels like On the Road, The Subterraneans, and Visions of Cody as if only the unmasked and discredited possibilities of what it should never (again?) be: an epistemological conditioning of itself, i.e., part of a race blinded by its own unholy insight into what has been steadily decaying and dismantling it of difference from any other “peoples” in the world. This is why, for Kerouac, even the black or “coloured” man, whether African-American, or “fellaheen” Indian, or Mexican, seems in his writing so apparently close to being assimilated into the heart of a “white kid” born in “a sterile, middle-class, industrial background”, i.e., Lowell, Massachusetts.
To leave America, to experience any other culture became, in his novels, a journey into a land built (seemingly) on pure speculative creation, his. In truth his peregrinations or linguistic travails were simply journeys into himself, into those parts of himself not yet given up to nostalgia, for on arriving in any place when followed by what he and Allen Ginsberg called “the shrouded stranger”, he stepped into the always lost lands of his joy, the ontic and irreversible plains of his pre-planetary state, the only place he ever wanted to end up travelling to, and the only no-place in which all walls and all inhibitions fall away, there, where, after the desuetude of the world, true holy bliss exists:
And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I had always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic moth swarm of heaven.
from On the Road
Kerouac did not want to exist, yet by existing, he captivated us into believing that the realm of non-birth, of Buddhist nirvana, was a more beautiful realm to not exist in! But how? Well, by crumpling the universe back into a page of A4 paper and throwing it into the giant wastepaper basket that we have named the “void”, there, where birth and death are but the same and where every last particle of matter has never to exist inside God’s head. After reading Dwight Goddard’s BuddhistBible, even America, for Kerouac, became subsumed by the void; subsequently, his lack of love for America became more interesting, his near admiration for what now stopped it from remaining the America he was born into, and especially the America his somewhat bigoted father all his life mourned the loss of. To Kerouac the America of the 1940s and 1950s, of flannel suits, mass industrial complexes (the war machine), consumerism, etc., could never be changed by anything even approaching Western values: thus, his mind, on the verge of, and always drawn to, Catholic small-town ruin, was always at its most incisive, and yes, most beautiful when, as an etymological archaeologist, he kept himself busy burying the artefacts of an America which, by the time that he had finished writing the “one vast book” of his “Duluoz legend”, would already have been forgotten. For despite the fact that Ginsberg called Kerouac “the great rememberer”, he was, in fact, only this: an indignant but indissoluble diagnostician of what made people “beat”, what made one person holier than the next; thus, Kerouac would, in his most holiest and gloomiest moods, relegate America to what, for the European, it had always been: a graveyard for the numerically “free”, a nation whose contagious need for “freedom” has proved simply impossible to find an intellectual or artistic cure for, let alone a “constitutional” one. So that by the time that the “New Vision” was being so crudely instigated by the likes of Lucien Carr in the early 1940s, Kerouac, while an early adherent to its one central idea, individualism, was soon to become an opponent of anything that sought to differentiate his thought from anyone else’s.
Roy DeCarava, Hallway, 1953. Saint Sulpice.
Robert Frank, Covered Car, Long Beach, California, 1955. NY Times.
It quickly became obvious then that Kerouac was not seeking to provide an account of what America was, but what, when experienced with a pure and almost a pre-religious heart, it still could be; his naivety and innocence (elements of his character for which he is still attacked today) are simply what prevented him from becoming a conventional American, one that is born under the aegis of a land-mass still to be visited by order, harmony, intelligibility, or in fact by any one idea that might politicize it free of its faults. With that in mind, Kerouac then seems quite possibly the holiest of American writers for one reason: he denuded himself of what a writer ought to be, and bluffed the literary world by providing it with something purer, more fictional, but, in an epistemological sense, less abstract, i.e., the self behind the author who, by re-recognizing the bliss of everything lost inside of him, sought, in other more traditional American narratives, to “find” only his equivalent in words. Hence Kerouac’s need to “sketch” (using a seemingly endless supply of pocket notebooks) America free of its conceptual identity, and by doing that, abandon it to the most uncivilized of all human modes of sensation: love; but a new kind of beatific and sympathetic love which Kerouac plays off against all conventional forms of it, and which, for all its self-congratulatory bluster, America, until the mid-1960s, would never manage to give itself up to, let alone embrace. For while the rejected, the condemned, and the invisible members of post-war American society were busy being made “divine” by Ginsberg in his long poem Howl, they were (in Kerouac’s heart) already being superseded: by nothingness, by what in all human souls is already lost: the world. For to imagine the America that Kerouac did, the one almost crowded out by his near splenetic head-rush of words, is to imagine the America hidden behind the smoke-curtains of Times Square, behind its “winking neons”, the America slowed down by sunsets on the Hudson, then emptied into a bottle in a “little alley” behind the Greyhound bus terminal in San Francisco, the one suddenly quickened up again by a jazz solo, or by whatever spontaneous phrase or burst of resurrectional language Kerouac could suddenly muster. In short, there was not one America, only literary versions of it, such as in the “new” literature that sought to usurp eternity, or at least to re-begin the universe in which everything, even the then pre-recorded voice of God, began to scream “holy, holy, holy….” Essentially, Kerouac believed that he could salvage, head-on, what of the human consciousness history misses, refusing as he did to lose himself to any one historical perspective. After all, he didn’t make imaginative statements in as much as he reduced those “statements” about the imagination to what he believed they amounted to: zero, because everything did. So much did he think this that his interest in Buddhism, an impersonal and ultimately not necessarily dissimilar viewpoint to anything he deemed Christian, allowed him no earthbound existence if that “existence” did not faint him back into faithlessness when thinking about the bliss before birth:
This world has no marks, signs or evidence of existence, nor the noises in it, like accident of wind or voices or heehawing animals, yet listen closely the eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been going on, and will go on and on. This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it.
From The Scripture of the Golden Eternity
Roy DeCarava, Cab 173, 1962. Medium.
At times, then, Kerouac’s writing seems no more than a sum of beguiling contradictions, which, by setting forth only the splendour of his own golden eternities, ends up by being preoccupied less with literature than with what one day he knows will replace it: emptiness. That said, when focussing on the books themselves, we realize that, despite the fact that each one comprises “one vast book”, not one of them is identical, for the “characters” themselves that people his world “of raging action and folly”, despite being denatured by his nature, world-ravaged by his morbidity, never (miraculously) masquerade under the guise of his personality; thus all of his truths are reduced in the books to near counter-truths, which is why the difficulties, the rancour, and death-provided obsessions in his writing are never, for the reader, anything other than a sideshow to what his writing is really about: imagelessness, or more accurately a “use” of time that manages to subjugate each “character” to the holiest of all earthly ideas: that they might just be able to escape it, with both flesh and bone intact. Thus Kerouac, more dream than autonomous “human”, more ghost than reified “writer”, discovered himself reflected in the sphere of his own eyeball, and that he wasn’t a solid, physical “author”, but he continued to write regardless, without the philosophical knowledge of a world which, for Schopenhauer, was simply our “idea”, a world unable to exist without us. That said, Kerouac, by remaining unable to break “into the realms of revealed picture”, knew that until he did, he would continue to fail as a novelist. Carl Solomon, as editor of A. A. Wyn’s Magazine Publishers, in rejecting Kerouac’s first drafts of On the Road (or the first “sketches” for Visions of Cody, which Kerouac gave him instead), rejected not just its artistic authenticity, but worse, its right to be called a “novel” at all, i.e., a book of fiction whose verbal and syntactical structure communicates to the reader what a novel is supposed to; so that even if Kerouac’s hubris in saying that he was just another James Joyce has, over time, been almost, if not quite, vindicated, then it was not by writing the “kind” of novel that the likes of Solomon demanded; so how then did he go about writing his novel? Well, by actively avoiding many of the narrative conventions which, for him, failed to break the spell of magic that his prose would induce in the reader; thus to surpass the limitations of any one “conventional” form, Kerouac decided, is only really to re-define the guidelines of the impulse to write in the first place. So Kerouac, by yearning to be “free to wander from the laws of the novel” begs the question: why, if critics, and even friends, were saying he wasn’t one, did he still want to be called a novelist? Because of his hope that the soul itself might be a scroll which could, one day, be unrolled at the feet of Jesus Christ himself, a “scroll” containing earthly truths not even God could avoid relearning.
Aaron Siskind, Chicago Facade 7, 1960. ICP.
Kerouac’s dictum that “art which is not manifest to ‘everybody’ is a dead art” (and by everybody he meant everybody’s soul) was, and still is, a huge demand to place on one’s shoulders when simply trying to write. That said, if a reader approaches Kerouac’s sprawling prose and allows his or her opinions to be reversed by its narrative, to be set back on their heels by the abrupt stops and starts, by the series of grammatical deflections from what seemed the original course of a sentence, then the shifting transcription of Kerouac’s experience does then become part of the significant meaning of the overall vision. Jorge Luis Borges wrote that a novel is an “axis of innumerable relationships” which, despite the fact that he could never finish one, does seem a relevant quotation when talking about the writing of Jack Kerouac. In the same spirit then maybe only Jacques Derrida’s ideas of “deconstruction” can actually help a reader get to the heart of Kerouac’s always deflecting and shifting style. For everything valid and logical when talking about the overall structure of it does sometimes seem meaningless if the reader fails to remember that these extreme idiosyncrasies are the stylistic hierarchies of its most meaningful truths. In short, “invalidity” is as much a “valid” method of interpreting Kerouac’s work, especially when reading his most experimental prose without keeping in mind any forms of conventional literary criticism; for to revert a text, any text, to only what a reader’s opinions might be about it is a dead literature, thus Kerouac’s work is best read when we the reader feel our own observance of it destabilized by what we think a novel is meant to be like. So much so that it is imperative to remember then that the somewhat glaring inconsistencies between plot and narrative in Kerouac are simply the human “inconsistencies” of the crooked path leading all the way to God; there is nothing “literary” about it, only the realization that our human existence is undermined at every step by our ignorance and despair at what might follow next, hence Kerouac’s justification in wanting to be a part only of the always shifting perspective of his perception, rather than any one novelistic approach to how the world, by words, is to be experienced. His “use” of time, a divergent, if not playful, use of linearity is, at best, merely his own way of stopping time long enough for him to take refuge in the coequal durations between rationality and irrationality, narrative and non-narrative techniques; thus, we might suggest then that Kerouac was not so much a novelist as he was a mutational subdivision of his own existence, “arranged” as his experiences were into non-literary appointments with God outside of time.
Aaron Siskind, Uruapan 11, 1955. Wikiart.
By the time The Subterraneans and experiments like Old Angel Midnight were written, Kerouac could no longer disappoint himself, shifting between his “characters” to almost force them to oscillate between caricatural portraits of himself, in the guise of Ray Smith, Carlo Marx, Dean Moriarty, Sal Paradise, etc., and by allowing “them” and their peregrinations between sensations to feel more dizzying faults in the tectonic plates of reality itself than in the pages of a novel, so much so that by the time his treatment of Neal Cassady as Cody in The Visions of Cody reached its apotheosis in such “sketches” as “Neal and the Three Stooges”, Kerouac literally felt as if he were walking on air, or if not walking then soaring, like some impalpable but aerial insect flying his finger-tips to the moon. For once his sophistries had taken root, and his babble become erudition, then Kerouac began to imagine that the universe was the only “story” which remained unsaid in his head; thus the more we read him, the more we feel our existences moderated by his, his notions of nothingness that awaken us to the imaginative after-birth of all false human births in the void, so that when he tells us “nobody believes there is nothing to believe in”, we feel only the irruption in our souls of a writer who has long since refused to give up on the idea of banishing, if not negating what made him a writer in the first place, thus it would be no exaggeration to say that Kerouac knew that he was all writer, in the same way that God “knew” that he was all God.
Between the publication of his first novel The Town and the City in 1950 and his breakthrough second On the Road in 1957, Kerouac went through the kind of metamorphosis and purging of the soul that would have killed less resilient writers, or at least forced them to admit that their emergence from the chrysalis of every word in their youth was but an anomalous birth, if not a deliberate literary miscarriage. In reality, Kerouac’s “emergence” from the post-war conformist society of America was a “birth” that had no ephemeral aspect to it, no underlying sense of vertigo except in the way that he seemingly dropped from the skies of Lowell into the lap of a largely unsuspecting American public; hence Kerouac’s innocence — when set against the innocence of his New England, small-town joy — left him with little choice but to be an originator of his own “talent”, rather than a self-generative American author. What even the most insidious of critics couldn’t ignore was that when his writing triumphs, when all of its minutest details flower and spring up through the crust of his climacteric soul, when the furtive fanaticism of his own thoughts seem to proselytize you into his obsessions, then no critic can drag you away from it; but when his writing is too contaminated by its own self-referential power to remind you of its power to tease and cajole you into his way of thinking, then the effect on the reader can be equally jarring, but for the reasons you don’t want to admit: that occasionally, when at its most indolent, glib, and overly sentimental, Kerouac can come off as simply unstoppably twee, or worse, as having no counterbalance to his self-serving ideas. That occasionally one encounters in Kerouac impulses of viridity, and expressions of undeniable childlike wonder cannot be ignored, but neither can its daring, its breadth of hope in what it wants to achieve, its journey to the edges of language, because for Kerouac “where the subconscious begins… words come from the holy ghost, first in the form of babble which suddenly by its sound indicates the word truly intended”. Phrases like “from the holy ghost” are, in truth, what so enraged the literati of his day, and it’s not hard to see why; yet surely they missed the point: that the transparency of his vision was not just the removal of inhibition in his heart, but the complete and total removal of a need for the grammarian to be the only rule-maker in our minds when reading him:
The other night I had a dream that I was sitting on the sidewalk on Moody street, Pawtucketville, Lowell, Mass., with a pencil and paper in my hand saying to myself “Describe the wrinkly tar of this sidewalk, also the iron pickets of Textile Institute, or the doorway where lousy and you and G. J’s always sittin and don’t stop to think of words when you do stop, just stop to think of the picture better and let your mind off yourself in this work.”
From Doctor Sax
Aaron Siskind, Martha’s Vineyard Rocks, 1954. Widewalls.
Robert Frank, Columbia, South Carolina, 1958. The Guardian.
So what, exactly, does it entail to let your mind “off yourself”? For Kerouac it meant entering the vacuum of the parenthesis that kept apart how he wanted to write and how he should; the stylistic mode of writing in a work like Doctor Sax was what Kerouac called “sketching”; which, for the critic, was no “method” at all; that said, to read Kerouac in such an experimental novel is not to hear him fulminate a decree on what all writing should be like, but only on how his methods had become involuntary spasms in a soul already slipping free of its authorial after-birth to be reborn on the other side of language; so that to read him between 1951 and 1958 was to be reduced to the nervosity of someone epileptic, or to someone coruscated only with the bright lights of his heavenly mind; for his sentences, both stylistic trance and ecstatic holy tics, foam from both the mind and the mouth with the left-over detritus of a kind of celestial glossolalia, a never-to-be fossilized love for God in the heart. But from the very start Kerouac, incurious as to what anyone else was saying about his “method”, exploited the best of his informal abilities, so that the America he searched for mirrored his own struggle, an “America” that evoked his truth by separating itself “from West-European civilization”, and doing so because he believed “that in this decision beats the unconscious pulse of soul and destiny”, i.e., his. These words, written in 1946, reveal a Kerouac attempting at the time to discover a truth about America that would make him re-remember the country not yet planted in the memory of his still-to-be-written characters. If, by originating a language alone, Kerouac became too conscious only of his own words, his triumph was in realizing that even language cannot pull across the flesh to reveal the true self “beyond all this show of cruelty and personality”, for rather than abdicate his own eccentric sense of singularity, his odd, and yes, sometimes off-hand preoccupations with “form”, Kerouac chose a path every bit as lonely as that taken by Søren Kierkegaard, Blaise Pascal, and Simone Weil. That he took this alternative route is true, that he took it belligerently, in ignorance, is false, for it is never the world that Kerouac speaks of — only the us-dependent world which, without us, could not be experienced. Thus after each outburst of writing, triumph was accompanied by inevitable despair, followed in its turn by an almost anti-intellectual exaltation; for Kerouac knew, like an astronomer knows when contemplating a billion new suns, that no amount of knowledge of the universe can rid us of the horror of admitting that the universe will never be exhumed from the graveyard of our human thought. In short, Kerouac mistrusted the world, because according to him we should just “Rest in inaction, and the world will be reformed of itself; Forget your body and SPIT FORTH INTELLIGENCE. Ignore all differences and become one with the infinite. Release yr mind, and free yr spirit. Be vacuous, be devoid of soul”. That said, none of this helped with his fame, for even fame was, for him when it happened, nothing but another illusory “term” in a world created by illusions:
Just because you won’t be here 7,000,000 million years from now doesn’t mean that this world and all you see, trees, houses, automobiles, won’t change and vanish all utterly away, You cling to the notion that the world is real and permanent, but you know that no created and compounded thing lasts 7 million million years so you know it is all unreal and impermanent, a vanishment, a dream, a temporary imaginary arbitrary manifestation from the mind which is not your mind.
From Some of the Dharma
Aaron Siskind, St. Louis 9, 1953. Monovisions.
In light of such thinking, the beginnings of his breakdown began in earnest, for by realizing that no man would end up on the cross because he had already been crucified at birth, Kerouac encouraged in both himself and others around him an always overweening sense of despair and lack of irreconcilable judgement on his work, especially if that judgement did not concur with his own inestimable faith in the idea that there are no real contingent people outside of him, but only fleeting, homogenized shoals of atoms, ghostly extensions of his own consciousness. Subsequently, the only conclusion about himself that Kerouac agreed with was that he was but a seed on the wind, an a priori blossoming of space and time which, in his heart, was neither cosmological gift nor supernatural privilege, and cannot be said to have resembled any kind of gnomic grace. After all, to acquire existence requires nothing, no pre-world effort beyond the randomness of possessing a mother in the universe. Thus, all of Kerouac’s novels and poems seem nothing, if anything at all, but predestined returns to the womb. Stricken by the perpetual crisis of having been born in the first place, Kerouac’s clear-sightedness was not in what humans possess but in what they have already lost by leaving the womb: purity. For most of the human race, existence is the belated result of accident, and is to be celebrated as the fruit of that accident, but for a man like Kerouac who, like Pascal, was transcendentally troubled by the very fact that he was born in his century rather than any other one, nothing prepared him for life after the womb, or readied him to endure its unbearable truths; thus he suffered the echo of the spatial drum of his pulse every day in the void. From childhood onward, he created mental images of himself, and then, through his writing, spent the rest of his life attempting to resemble them; and because he understood that real existence resides apart from life, Kerouac, to achieve his aims in writing, was forced to worship vacuity, that unrealizable god of maskless incarnations; that, or (he decided) waste the unscathed nakedness of being upon the template of a rank conformity — for if everything is empty, what is there to celebrate about being anything at all? Hence Kerouac’s need to subtract his own living body from it: nothingness, that which, in the end, only a philosopher like Heidegger remained interested enough in to keep on worshipping. But Kerouac was a nomad, a man on fire with his own presence, and only in the role of an ascetic, or as one living between religions, could he carry out the doctrine of lostness, for only when hidden by his novels, poems, haikus, dreams, could he keep a candlelight vigil over his own wounds, that and by writing as if his body was a mirror reflecting only his world; for by preventing his own breath from flagging in the temporary home of his author’s body, he remained free to write of, and interact with, only those people who, in his mind, yielded to the world as an instrument of inveterate generosity and spirit and, above all else, as a fortification of his truths. //
Part II will be published in June 2021 at Caesura
Robert Frank, Ranch Market, Hollywood, 1956. LA Times.
