Maverick Philosopher

Three American Sophomores

The Restlessness of Thomas Merton, J. D. Salinger, and Jack Kerouac.

On balance, a very good essay, but just wrong in places. For example:

Due to our separation from God that occurred in the Garden, all men intuitively sense that they are missing something, that they are radically incomplete.3 Aristotle had this incompleteness in mind when he opened Metaphysics with the statement, “All men by nature desire to know.” 

Vito Caiati, cradle Catholic, native New Yorker, former resident of Greenwich Village, ex-pat in France for a time, historian, NYU Ph.D., with a finely-honed literary sensibility, is well qualified to offer some astute commentary on this essay.  I invite him to do so. 

Caiati introduced me to the novels of Richard Yates.

Why did Kerouac's writing give rise to an outpouring of biographies, commentaries, dissertations, articles, not to mention new editions and the publication of the shoddiest of his literary efforts, when Yates' novels and short stories had no similar effect?  One thought is this. Kerouac was a sort of unwitting pied piper. His 1957 On the Road gave rise to the 'rucksack revolution' of the 'sixties.  Yates' 1961 Revolutionary Road, his best novel, was backward-looking, in large part social criticism of the  Zeitgeist of the fading 'fifties.  

But my one thought is one-sided and wants augmentation and qualification. Later perhaps.

While I admire Yates' superb craftsmanship, his writing does not move me. Kerouac moves me, literary slop, hyper-romantic gush, and all.  No one would accuse Kerouac of being a craftsman. 

Literary sensibility is an ineluctably subjective thing,  but not so subjective as to disallow higher and lower grades of sensibility. But how describe and order them? 

Two weblogs I regularly consult are Patrick Kurp's Anecdotal Evidence, and the late D. G. Myers' A Commonplace Blog. Myers died ten years ago. Kurp here recounts a meeting with him.

The Paradox of Solitude

Jack Kerouac and Thomas Merton

Drive, He Wrote

What the Beats were About. Lewis Menand, The New Yorker.

Enlisting William S. Burroughs in the War Against Leftist Language-Abusers

I've been fulminating for over 20 years online against the language-abuse of  the language-abusing Left, having found it necessary on only a few occasions to take conservatives to task. Although my Beat credentials are impeccable,  I never took William Seward Burroughs seriously enough to suppose he could be enlisted on our side.  And then I stumbled upon this  article:

The modern left is unabashed about wielding language as a virus—or, really, as a form of control. “Supercut” videos by critics of corporate leftist media, like Tom Eliot, reveal the media figures and politicians repeating the same words and slogans over and over again: President Joe Biden, despite drooling on himself, is “sharp.” Kamala Harris has brought the “Joy, joy, joy” back into politics. Conservatives are “weird.” Abortion is “healthcare.” These word storms rip through the country via television, radio, and social media, infecting hosts from D.C. to California. Millions of people mindlessly repeat them as if they have been infected with some kind of mentally impairing disease. It’s a virus worse than COVID.

I agree with that completely. I am rather less enthusiastic about the following:

So how to fight the language virus? According to Burroughs, language can also be used to liberate. He believed that if words were cut into pieces and rearranged, you could break free from what he called the Control. Burroughs used rearranged texts, “found sound,” and tape-splicing—techniques still used by artists today—to defy the establishment. Burroughs used the method of cutting up sentences and rearranging them in famous countercultural books like Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine. 

My generation took a more direct approach to using language to dismantle Control: punk rock. Not for nothing was Burroughs known as “the Godfather of Punk.” The writer was lionized by people like Lou Reed, David Bowie, and bands like U2, Nirvana, Joy Division, Led Zeppelin, and Steely Dan. In his book American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Beat Generation, Jonah Raskin describes meeting Burroughs in San Francisco in the 1970s.

I will leave it for you to decide whether the way to combat the leftist language virus is via Old Bull Lee and punk rock.

Of the Beat triumvirate, "sweet gone Jack," alone moves me, supreme screw-up that he was, and surely no role model.  

One month to go, and then then it is October, Kerouac month in my literary liturgy. 

Young Man's Bible, Old Man's Bible

When he was a young man he travelled around the country with On the Road, the 'Bible of the Beat Generation,' in his rucksack, just as Kerouac had with Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible in his. Now the young man is old. Now when he travels he carries a different light paperback, the plain old Bible.

 

And he says a prayer for the soul of a lonesome traveller who quit the via dolorosa on this date 54 years ago thereby securing his release from the samsaric meat wheel and the granting of his wish:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead. (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).

Thomas Merton and the Beat Generation

Here

Fr. 'Spike' Morrissette on Jack Kerouac

Here

Saturday Night at the Oldies: October Jazz

The 15th already! October's a bird that flies too fast. Time herself's such a bird. I would freeze her flight, but not that of

Charley 'Bird' Parker, Ornithology

Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen, Charlie Parker

Kerouac and Allen, October in the Railroad Earth

Jack Kerouac, San Francisco

Mose Allison, Parchman Farm.

This one goes out to Tom Gastineau, keyboard man in our band Dudley Nightshade, who introduced me to Mose Allison in the late '60s. Tom went on to make it, more or less, in the music business. I caught Allison at The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, California, a couple or three times before I headed East in August of '73.  Heard him on the East Coast as well at a joint in Marblehead, Mass. with a girlfriend  I dubbed 'Springtime Mary'  which was Kerouac's name for his girlfriend Mary Carney.

Mose Allison, Young Man's Blues

Mose Allison, I Ain't Got Nothing but the Blues

Dave Brubeck, Blue Rondo al a Turk

Herbie Hancock, Watermelon Man

Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac

Substack latest. 

From Hagiography to Pathography: Yates and Kerouac

I'll admit to being more fascinated by Richard Yates' life as reported in the 671 pages of Blake Bailey's biography than in Yates' writing. So this struck a nerve:

I’m no fan of hagiographers, obviously, but I’m only a bit less distrustful of literary biographers.  Too often their books slide toward what Joyce Carol Oates has dubbed “pathography,” which she defined as “hagiography’s diminished and often prurient twin.”  Its motifs are “dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct.”

Since we live in an age that’s obsessed with personalities and celebrities, it’s not surprising that so few readers are satisfied with loving a book and so many insist on knowing as much as possible about the person who wrote it.  While this appetite has inspired literary biographers to produce a long shelf of pathographies and other monstrosities – does the world really need Norman Sherry’s three-volume biography of Graham Greene? – it has also resulted in some well researched and finely written literary biographies that did what such exercises do at their best: they led readers back to the subject’s books.  Among these I would include Blake Bailey’s recent biographies of Richard Yates and John Cheever and, strangely enough, Ann Charters’s thorough and balanced 1973 bio of Kerouac.  In her introduction, Charters wrote insightfully, if a bit clunkily: “The value of Kerouac’s life is what he did, how he acted.  And what he did, was that he wrote.  I tried to arrange the incidents of his life to show that he was a writer first, and a mythologized figure afterward.  Kerouac’s writing counts as much as his life.”

I would argue that his writing counts more than his life, much more.  Eventually Charters seemed to come around to my way of thinking.  In 1995, after she’d edited two fat volumes, Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956 and The Portable Jack Kerouac, I interviewed her for a newspaper article.  “I wanted (the book of letters) to be a biography in Jack’s own words,” she told me.  “His life is in his books, but on the other hand the most essential thing is missing from those novels.  What he tells you in the letters is that the most important thing in his life is writing.”

Why did Kerouac's writing give rise to an outpouring of biographies, commentaries, dissertations, articles, not to mention new editions and the publication of the shoddiest of his literary efforts, when Yates' novels and short stories had no similar effect?  One thought is this. Kerouac was a sort of unwitting pied piper. His 1957 On the Road gave rise to the 'rucksack revolution' of the 'sixties.  Yates' 1961 Revolutionary Road, his best novel, was backward-looking, in large part social criticism of the  Zeitgeist of the fading 'fifties.  

But my one thought is one-sided and wants augmentation and qualification. Later perhaps.

While I admire Yates' superb craftsmanship, his writing does not move me. Kerouac moves me.  Literary slop, hyper-romantic gush, and all. So far I have found nothing in three of Yates' novels and a couple of his short stories  like this:

Here is Jack Kerouac on the road, not in a '49 Hudson with Neal Cassady, but in a bus  with his mother:

Who are men that they can insult men? Who are these people who wear pants and dresses and sneer? What am I talking about? I'm talking about human helplessness and unbelievable loneliness in the darkness of birth and death and asking "What is there to laugh about in that?" "How can you be clever in a meatgrinder?" "Who makes fun of misery?" There's my mother a hunk of flesh that didnt ask to be born, sleeping restlessly, dreaming hopefully, beside her son who didnt ask to be born, thinking desperately, praying hopelessly, in a bouncing earthly vehicle going from nowhere to nowhere, all in the night, worst of all for that matter all in noonday glare of bestial Gulf Coast roads — Where is the rock that will sustain us? Why are we here? What kind of crazy college would feature a seminar where people talk about hopelessness forever?

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), Desolation Angels, 1960, p. 339.

Compare Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . .
. . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel
and safe in heaven dead.

Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats

Still 'jacking off' in December? Well, when I find something relevant I snag it for my files. The bit about Jack's saintly & sickly older brother Gerard in this chapter of a book by Barry Miles caught my eye re: my response to Vito C. , so here it is, below the fold.

Jack Kerouac: Religious Writer?

Beatific October, Kerouac month hereabouts, is at its sad redbrick end once again, but I can't let her slip away without one more substantial Kerouac entry. So raise your glass with me on this eve of All Saint's Day as I say a prayer for Jack's soul which, I fear, is still in need of purgation before it is ready for the ultimate beat vision, the visio beata. We rest at the end  of the road, but don't assume that the road ends with death.

..........................

The Kerouac and Friends industry churns on, a recent product being Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats by Robert Inchausti, Shambhala (January 30, 2018), 208 pages.

From Scott Beauchamp's review:

The real tragedy of Kerouac’s reception was that the people who should have known better took the en vogue hedonist reading at face value, writing him off as a word-vomiting miscreant. But that’s a caricature of Kerouac that over-emphasizes the most obvious personal flaws of an intensely spiritual writer. It’s an oversimplification by way of calling someone a simpleton. The truth is more complex and so much more interesting: Kerouac was one of the most humble and devoted American religious writers of the 20th century. Robert Inchausti’s recently published Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats makes an attempt at recognizing the heterodox spiritual focus of the entire Beat oeuvre, but it only points the reader in the right direction. Its simple and hodgepodge construction suggests the vast amount of analysis, particularly of Kerouac’s work, which remains to be done in order to change his reputation in the popular imagination.

I'm a Kerouac aficionado from way back. I love the guy and the rush and gush of his hyper-romantic and heart-felt wordage.* He brings tears to my eyes every October. His tapes and CDs accompany me on every road trip. He was a writer who was religious, but a "religious writer"? It's an exaggeration, like calling Thomas Merton, who was a religious writer,  a spiritual master. I love him too, especially the Merton of the journals, all seven of which I have read and re-read, but he was no more a spiritual master than I am.  And then there is Bob Dylan, the greatest American writer of popular songs, who added so much to our lives, but deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature?  We live in an age of exaggeration. I submit that Flannery O'Connor is closer to the truth about Kerouac & Co.

Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), pp. 336-337, in a letter to Dr. T. R. Spivey dated 21 June 1959:

I haven't read the article in PR [Paris Review?] or the beat writers themselves.  That seems about the most appalling thing you could set yourself to do -- read them.  But reading about them and reading what they have to say about themselves makes me think that there is a lot of ill-directed good in them.  Certainly some revolt against our exaggerated materialism is long overdue.  They seem to know a good many of the right things to run away from, but to lack any necessary discipline.  They call themselves holy but holiness costs and so far as I can see they pay nothing.  It's true that grace is the free gift of God  but to put yourself in the way of being receptive to it you have to practice self-denial.  I observe that Baron von Hügel's most used words are derivatives of the word cost.  As long as the beat people abandon themselves to all sensual satisfactions, on principle, you can't take them for anything  but false mystics.  A good look at St. John of the Cross makes them all look sick.

You can't trust them as poets either because they are too busy acting like poets.  The true poet is anonymous, as to his habits, but these boys have to look, act, and apparently smell like poets.This is the only reference to the Beats that I found in The Habit of Being apart from the sentence, "That boy is on the road more than Kerouac, though in a more elegant manner." (p. 373)

Although O'Connor did not read the Beat authors  she correctly sensed their appalling side (William Burroughs, for one example) and zeroed in accurately on their lack of discipline and adolescent posturing as 'holy' when they refused to satisfy the elementary requirements of becoming such.  But in fairness to Kerouac one should point out that he really did at one time make a very serious effort at reforming his life. See Resolutions Made and Broken, No More Booze, Publishing, or Seminal Emission, Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac. 

And I wonder what Miss O'Connor would say had she lived long enough  to read that book by the Holy Goof, Neal Cassady, entitled Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison 1958-1960? (Blast Books, 1993)  Grace Beats Karma: what a wonderful  title, apt, witty, and pithy!  

Arguably, the central figure of the Beat movement was not Kerouac (OTR's Sal Paradise) but Neal Cassady (OTR's Dean Moriarty).

Lucky me, to have been both in and of the '60s. And to have survived.

_____________________

*'Wordage' to my ear embodies a sense between the pejorative 'verbiage'  and the commendatory 'writing.' I am reminded of Truman Capote's anti-Kerouac jab, "That's not writing; it's typewriting!" 

Addendum.  Vito Caiati writes,

I read with interest your post “Jack Kerouac, Religious Writer?” and it struck me that, with a bit of editing, Flannery O’Connor’s remark on “the true poet” might be applied to the too worldly Merton:  “The true monk is anonymous, as to his habits, but this boy has to look, act, and apparently smell like a monk” I feel that Merton’s superiors, who failed to check his wanderings of one kind or another, harmed his rich spiritual potential, which is most evident in the early journals. As the protagonist of Georges Bernanos’ Journal de un cure de la campagne observes,  when speaking of monks extra muros,  “Les moines sont d’incomparables maitres de la vie intérieur, . . . mais il en est de la plupart of ces fameux ‘traits’ comme des vins de terroir, qui doivent se consommer sur place. Ils ne supportent pas le voyage. ” Monks are incomparable masters of the interior life, . . . but most of these famous ‘traits’ [that they possess] like the terroir wines, must be consumed in place,  They do not support the trip.”

 

Vito,

 

Very good observation.

 

While deeply appreciative of monasticism with its contemptus mundi, Merton, desirous of name and fame, was wide open to the siren song of the world, which became irresistibly loud when the '60s came along. Had he been our age, would he have become a monk at all?  Had he lived beyond the age of 53, would he have remained a monk? 

 

I love his Journals. That is where you will find the real Merton.  As in Kerouac, a deep sincerity of the heart to break the heart.

 

I am familiar with Bernanos' The Diary of a Country Priest, which is both theologically penetrating and of high literary value. (I would not say that Kerouac's novels are of high literary value, but on the other hand, they are not trash like those of Bukowski.)

 

There are superb passages on prayer, sin, lust, and confession in Bernanos which I may post. 

 

But I haven't found the passage you cite. Where is it roughly? Near the beginning, middle, end?  I don't imagine you have an English trans.

 

It is always good to hear from you.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Route 66 and Kerouac's Favorite Song

Jack Kerouac in a letter from 17 January 1962: "Everybody is making money off my ideas, like those "Route 66" TV producers, everybody except me . . . ." (Selected Letters 1957-1969, ed. Charters, Viking 1999, p. 326; see also p. 461 and pp. 301-302.)  Here is the Nelson Riddle theme music from the TV series.  And here is part of an episode from the series which ran from 1960-1964.  George Maharis bears a striking resemblance to Jack, wouldn't you say? And notice Maharis is riding shotgun.  Kerouac wasn't a driver.  Neal Cassady was the driver.

Now dig Bobby Troup.  And if that's too cool for you, here is Depeche Mode.  Behind the Wheel for good photos of the Mother Road. Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones, Dr. Feelgood,  and others such as Asleep at the Wheel have covered the tune.

Jack's Favorite Song

Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:

One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken." Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity." They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song. Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's. Sobbed by a harmonic, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.

Indeed they do. A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveler, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of tears and mist, a pilgrim on the via dolorosa of this dolorous life, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore. 

Another 'river' song in the same plaintive vein is Chase Webster's Moody River from 1961. It has been covered by such artists as Pat Boone, John Fogerty, and Doc Watson.

Jack Kerouac on Robert Lax

During his years of unsuccess, when he was actually at his purest and best, an "unpublished freak," as he describes himself in a late summer 1954 letter to Robert Giroux, living for his art alone, Kerouac contemplated entering a monastery: "I've become extremely religious and may go to a monastery before even before you do." [. . .] "I've recently made friends in a way with Bob Lax and I find him sweet -- tho I think his metaphysics are pure faith. Okay, that's what it's supposed to be." (Selected Letters 1940-1956, ed. Charters, Penguin 1995, p. 444.)

And then on pp. 446-448 we find an amazing 26 October [sic!] 1954 letter to Robert Lax packed with etymology and scholarly detail which ends:

I'm no saint, I'm sensual, I cant resist wine, am liable to sneers & secret wraths & attachment to imaginary lures before my eyes -- but I intend to ascend by stages & self-control to the Vow to help all sentient beings find enlightenment and holy escape from sin and stain of life-body itself [. . .] but thank God I'm a lazy bum because of that repose will come, in repose the secret, and in the secret: Ceaseless Ecstasy.

"Nirvana, as when the rain puts out a little fire."

See you in the world,

Jack K.

For information on the enigmatic hermit Robert Lax (1915-2000) , see here

Robert Lax: A Life Slowly Lived is especially good. Excerpts:

One of the touchstone words in Lax’s spiritual vocabulary was “waiting”. By this he meant being still, standing one’s ground, knowing one’s ground, but never quite knowing the reality of what was awaited, longed for. In his volume 33 Poems, recently reissued by New Directions, he puts it this way:

Wake up & wait. Lie down & wait. Sit up again & wait. All in the dark now. No way of telling day from night. Do I expect to hear a voice? See a light? A dim one? A bright one? See a face? I sit up. I’m alert. Do I know what to expect? [2]

“What you see,” said Paul Spaeth, keeper of the Lax archive at St Bonaventure, “is the opposite of what can be called social action. What you see is a slowing down and waiting on God. Very much in keeping with the monastic tradition. Also very similar to the Buddhist tradition of moment to moment mindfulness.”

Robert Lax with his two close friends: Thomas Merton (middle) and the abstract painter, Ad Reinhardt (left). Photograph courtesy of the Thomas Merton Center © Bellarmine University

Unlike his friend Thomas Merton, the Trappist poet and author who shared Lax’s interest in Buddhism and brought his name to the world in The Seven Storey Mountain, [3] Lax never lived a life of structured monasticism. A Jewish convert to Catholicism, he built for himself an interior monastery, within which he wrote, prayed, contemplated, and received many visitors: poets, painters, writers (he’d been friends with the legendary abstract artist, Ad Reinhardt, and with Jack Kerouac), and spiritual seekers.  “Lax can be thought of as a mystic,” said his biographer Michael N. McGregor, who nevertheless refrained from using that word in his book Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax. [4] He shared his subject’s aversion to the superficiality of labels. He wanted readers to come to their own conclusions about who he was, what he was.

Steve Georgiou, a seeker from California and author of The Way of the Dreamcatcher, a book of dialogues with Lax, remembers their walks down to Skala, the Patmos harbour. “He would walk with a slow roll like the roll of a boat. He would take his meditative steps, encouraging you to slow down yourself and feel the actual experience of walking”. [5]

For Lax, there was no seam between walking, praying, writing. All experiences were to be fully absorbed, integrated into a life fully lived. Once Georgiou saw his friend writing a single word – “river” – over and over. He asked him why. “I want to live with the word for a while,” Lax said.

one word at a time.
I believe
I believe
that all people
should stop their fight;
I believe that one should
blow a whistle or
sing or play
on the
lute [6]

Visions of Tom: Jack Kerouac's Monastic Elder Brother

Thomas Merton's "spontaneous prose" is to be found in the seven volumes of his journals. That's where you will find the real Merton in all his depth and complexity, his faith, his doubts, his inner (and outer) conflicts, and his endless self-examination. I never tire of re-reading them.

 

This essay by Angus Stuart delineates some Kerouac-Merton parallels.

 

"Even the timing of their own deaths is remarkably close: Merton on December 10, 1968 and Kerouac less than a year later on October 21, 1969." Kerouac died of drink at age 47, Merton of electrocution at age 53.

Kerouac No Role Model

Lest I lead  astray any young and impressionable readers, I am duty-bound to point out that my annual October focus on Kerouac is by no means to be taken as an endorsement of him as someone to be imitated.  Far from it! He failed utterly to live up to the Christian precepts that he learned as a child and the Buddhist precepts he assiduously studied in the mid-1950s.  Not that he was a hypocrite; he was just a deeply flawed human being. 

I just now recall a critique of Kerouac by Douglas Groothuis from some years ago.  (Old Memory Babe ain't got nothing on me.)  Ah yes, here it is.   I am in basic agreement with it.

Kerouac's Beat(ific) Visions and the Cross

A good essay by Joshua Hren at First Things.

What Hren says is complemented by this entry of mine from 31 October 2010:

The despairing section X of Book Thirteen of Vanity of Duluoz which I quoted yesterday is followed immediately by this:

Yet I saw the cross just then when I closed my eyes after writing all this.  I cant escape its mysterious penetration into all this brutality.  I just simply SEE it all the time, even the Greek cross sometimes.  I hope it will all turn out true.

It is fitting to conclude Kerouac month with the last section of Jack's last book, a section in which, while alluding to the Catholic mass, he raises his glass to his own piecemeal suicide:

Forget it wifey. Go to sleep. Tomorrow's another day. Hic calix! Look that up in Latin, it means "Here's the chalice," and be sure there's wine in it.

Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac

If there is divine light, sexual indulgence prevents it from streaming in.  Herein lies the best argument for continence.  The sex monkey may not be as destructive of the body as the booze monkey, but he is more destructive of the spirit.  You may dismiss what I am saying here either by denying that there is any divine light, or by denying that sexual indulgence impedes its influx, or both.  But if you are in the grip of either monkey I will dismiss your dismissal.  Why should I listen to a man with a monkey on his back?  How do I know it is the man speaking and not the monkey?

Poor Kerouac got the holy hell beaten out of him by the simian tag  team.   The Ellis Amburn biography goes into the greatest detail regarding Kerouac's homo- and hetero-erotic sexual excesses.  His fatal fondness for the sauce, for the devil in liquid form, is documented in all the biographies.

It is not that the lovable dharma lush did not struggle mightily in his jihad against his lower self.  He did, in his Buddhist phase in the mid-fifties, before the 1957 success of On the Road and the blandishments of fame did him in.  (Worldly $ucce$$/Suckcess is an ambiguous good.) I've already pulled some quotations from Some of the Dharma which  offers the best documentation of Jack's attempt to tread the straight path to the narrow gate.

One lesson, perhaps, is that we cannot be lamps unto ourselves even if the Tathagata succeeded in pulling himself up into Nirvana by his samsaric sandal straps.  To the vast run of us ordinary "poor suffering fucks" a religion of self-help is no help at all.  The help we need, if help there be, must come from Elsewhere.

And so in the end Jack returned to the religion of his childhood.

The Last Interview, 12 October 1969.  "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic."  "I just sneak into church now, at dusk, at vespers. But yeah, as you get older you get more . . . genealogical."

As much of a screw-up and sinner as he was, as irresponsible, self-indulgent, and self-destructive, Kerouac was a deeply religious man.  He went through a Buddhist phase, but at the end he came home to Catholicism.  

"Everybody goes home in October." (On the Road, Part I, Ch. 14, Para 1)

Withdrawn from Circulation

The very best books, or so it seems, are usually the ones that get withdrawn from circulation in local public libraries, while the trash remains on the shelves. The librarians' bad judgment, however,  redounds to my benefit as I am able to purchase fine books for fifty cents a pop. A while back, the literary luminaries at the Apache Junction Public Library saw fit to remove Linda Hamalian, A Life of Kenneth Rexroth (Norton, 1991) from the shelves.

Why, I have no idea. (It wasn't a second copy.) But I snatched it up. A find to rejoice over. A   beautifully produced first edition of over 400 pages, the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America wanted $25 for it. I shall set it on the Beat shelf next to Kerouac's Dharma Bums wherein Rexroth figures as Reinhold Cacoethes. I hope the two volumes refrain from breaking each other's spines.

Moral: Always search diligently through biblic aisles and piles, remainder bins, and the like. It is amazing what treasure lies among the trash. 

 

Conservatives, especially, are bound to find gems. The reason being that the tribe of librarians, dominated as they are by the distaff contingent, reliably tilt left and are eager to remove from the shelves what their shallow pates consider offensive materials.

Big Sur, Kerouac, and Being on the Edge

Dwight Green writes,

I had forgotten about your focus on the Beats in October (more of a remembrance of Kerouac, if I remember right) until I saw your recent post introducing it for this year. 

 

A couple of years ago I drove to the Big Sur area and was unable to do much hiking due to recent fire and weather wiping out many trails in the parks. On one of my stops I witnessed what helped push Kerouac mentally over the edge, as he published in Big Sur. The incredible power that defines the area is truly awesome (despite the overuse of that word). It's been a long time since I really connected with Kerouac but I did that weekend. See here.  (I'm in the process of moving this to a new site but I don't have all the links working yet, so this is the old site.) 

 

The incident is more than a little macabre and I don't mean to "profit" from it in any way, but I had not understood his feelings in Big Sur until that moment. Just wanted to pass it on in case it's of interest.

Yes, a remembrance of Kerouac, Memory Babe, by this acolyte of anamnesis. You are using 'awesome' correctly and so you can hardly be taxed with overuse.  Thanks for reminding me of the passage:

So that when later I heard people say “Oh Big Sur must be beautiful!” I gulp to wonder why it has the reputation of being beautiful above and beyond its fearfulness, its Blakean groaning roughrock Creation throes, those vistas when you drive the coast highway on a sunny day opening up the eye for miles of horrible washing sawing.  Jack Kerouac, Big Sur (1962)

I am a native Californian  who knows Jack's book and the coastal road and the bridge and the views and has had his own remarkable experiences at Big Sur.  Gazing out at the Pacific  nearly 50 years ago I felt as if locked into the same nunc stans that I had glimpsed a few months before at Playa del Rey on the southern California coast. 

 

Nature in the extremity of her beauty has the power to unhinge the soul from the door jambs of what passes for sanity.  Mystical glimpses of the Unseen and the Eternal come mainly to the young if they come at all, and some of the recipients of these gifts spend the rest of their lives trying to live up to their vouchsafings.

 

The unhinging I just spoke of can also take a dark and terrible form in this place of beauty and hazard:

. . . Big Sur follows Kerouac a few years after On the Road had been published (and fourteen years after the events in the book) as he's trying to handle the fame of his book as well as his inability to control himself, especially with alcohol. Kerouac's mental deterioration coincides with his visits to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin in Big Sur. His isolation, exacerbated by the insignificance he feels in comparison to nature's power brings on a mental and physical breakdown. The poem he wrote while in Big Sur, "Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur," echoes the parts of the novel comparing man's transience to nature's permanence, one of the many tensions in the book such as image vs. reality and beauty vs. hazard.

Worse still are the accidental deaths and the suicides.  You link to the story of the young man who fell into a blowhole and perished while inspecting a marine geyser. 

 

The 19-year-old son of an undergraduate philosophy professor of mine committed suicide by plunging from the bridge.  I remember him as a baby in a high chair in his mother's kitchen. We both wanted Ronda's attention. Little Charley was hungry for food, my young self for truth.  Mommy dutifully divided her attention, but little Charley won.

 

Addendum:  At the end of the above Memory Babe link you will find a number of good critical comments on Jack and on Nicosia's biography.

 

BEATific October Again

It's October again, my favorite month, and Kerouac month in my personal literary liturgy.  And no better way to kick off Kerouac month than with 'sweet gone Jack'  reading from "October in Railroad Earth" from Lonesome Traveler, 1960.  Steve Allen provides the wonderful piano accompaniment.  I have the Grove Press Black Cat 1970 paperback edition. I bought it on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, 12 April 1973. I was travelling East by thumb to check out East Coast graduate schools where I had been accepted, but mostly  I 'rode the dog' (Greyhound bus), a mode of transport I wouldn't put up with today: two guys behind me chain-smoked  and talked all the way from Los Angeles to Phoenix.  New Orleans proved to be memorable, including the flophouse on Carondelet I stayed in for $2.  It was there that Lonesome  Traveler joined On the Road in my rucksack. 

I never before had seen Tabasco bottles so big as on the tables of the Bourbon Street bars and eateries.  Exulting in the beat quiddity of the scene, I couldn't help but share my enthusiasm for Nawlins with a lady of the evening, not sampling her wares, but just talking to her on the street, she thinking me naive, and I was. 

Here is a long  excerpt (7:10), which contains the whole of the first two sections of "October in Railroad Earth," pp. 37-40, of the Black Cat edition.

You don't know jack about Jack if you don't know that he was deeply conservative despite his excesses.  The aficionados will enjoy The Conservative Kerouac.

And a tip of the hat to old college buddy and Kerouac and jazz aficionado 'Monterey Tom' Coleman who will enjoy Jack and Frank.

For the Kerouac File

Black Like Kerouac

I was awfully naïve once, but never so naïve as Kerouac/Paradise, who understands so little about the lives of black Americans that he wishes he “were a Negro [because] the best the white world could offer was not enough ecstasy, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.” It is passages like that—about, for instance, the “happy, true-heart ecstatic Negroes of America”—that inspired me to pull from the shelf another book that expresses much the same desire. It did so, however, with greater honesty and courage than On the Road. It also conveys more pleasure, in large part because it makes far fewer claims for itself.

This was Really the Blues, the autobiography of an endearing oddball named Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow. Born in Chicago in 1899 to Russian Jewish parents, Mezzrow fell under the spell of Bix Beiderbecke, Sidney Bechet, and other early jazz musicians. He learned to play the clarinet, recorded with many of these better known musicians, including Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, and—here’s where things get fun—decided he too wanted to be black. Mezzrow determined that he “was going to be a Negro musician, hipping the world about the blues the way only Negroes can.”

Jack Kerouac: Religious Writer?

Beatific October, Kerouac month hereabouts, is at its sad redbrick end once again, but I can't let her slip away without at least one substantial Kerouac entry. So raise your glass with me on this eve of All Saint's Day as I say a prayer for Jack's soul which, I fear, is still in need of purgation before it is ready for the ultimate beat vision, the visio beata. We rest at the end  of the road, but don't assume that the road ends with death.

..........................

The Kerouac and Friends industry churns on, a recent product being Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats by Robert Inchausti, Shambhala (January 30, 2018), 208 pages.

From Scott Beauchamp's review:

The real tragedy of Kerouac’s reception was that the people who should have known better took the en vogue hedonist reading at face value, writing him off as a word-vomiting miscreant. But that’s a caricature of Kerouac that over-emphasizes the most obvious personal flaws of an intensely spiritual writer. It’s an oversimplification by way of calling someone a simpleton. The truth is more complex and so much more interesting: Kerouac was one of the most humble and devoted American religious writers of the 20th century. Robert Inchausti’s recently published Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats makes an attempt at recognizing the heterodox spiritual focus of the entire Beat oeuvre, but it only points the reader in the right direction. Its simple and hodgepodge construction suggests the vast amount of analysis, particularly of Kerouac’s work, which remains to be done in order to change his reputation in the popular imagination.

I'm a Kerouac aficionado from way back. I love the guy and the rush and gush of his hyper-romantic and heart-felt wordage.* He brings tears to my eyes every October. His tapes and CDs accompany me on every road trip. He was a writer who was religious, but a "religious writer"? It's an exaggeration, like calling Thomas Merton, who was a religious writer,  a spiritual master. I love him too, especially the Merton of the journals, all seven of which I have read and re-read, but he was no more a spiritual master than I am.  And then there is Bob Dylan, the greatest American writer of popular songs, who added so much to our lives, but deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature?  We live in an age of exaggeration. I submit that Flannery O'Connor is closer to the truth about Kerouac & Co.

Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), pp. 336-337, in a letter to Dr. T. R. Spivey dated 21 June 1959:

I haven't read the article in PR [Paris Review?] or the beat writers themselves.  That seems about the most appalling thing you could set yourself to do -- read them.  But reading about them and reading what they have to say about themselves makes me think that there is a lot of ill-directed good in them.  Certainly some revolt against our exaggerated materialism is long overdue.  They seem to know a good many of the right things to run away from, but to lack any necessary discipline.  They call themselves holy but holiness costs and so far as I can see they pay nothing.  It's true that grace is the free gift of God  but to put yourself in the way of being receptive to it you have to practice self-denial.  I observe that Baron von Hügel's most used words are derivatives of the word cost.  As long as the beat people abandon themselves to all sensual satisfactions, on principle, you can't take them for anything  but false mystics.  A good look at St. John of the Cross makes them all look sick.

You can't trust them as poets either because they are too busy acting like poets.  The true poet is anonymous, as to his habits, but these boys have to look, act, and apparently smell like poets.

This is the only reference to the Beats that I found in The Habit of Being apart from the sentence, "That boy is on the road more than Kerouac, though in a more elegant manner." (p. 373)

Although O'Connor did not read the Beat authors  she correctly sensed their appalling side (William Burroughs, for one example) and zeroed in accurately on their lack of discipline and adolescent posturing as 'holy' when they refused to satisfy the elementary requirements of becoming such.  But in fairness to Kerouac one should point out that he really did at one time make a very serious effort at reforming his life. 

See Resolutions Made and Broken, No More Booze, Publishing, or Seminal Emission, Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac. 

And I wonder what Miss O'Connor would say had she lived long enough  to read that book by the Holy Goof, Neal Cassady, entitled Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison 1958-1960? (Blast Books, 1993)  Grace Beats Karma: what a wonderful  title, apt, witty, and pithy!  

Arguably, the central figure of the Beat movement was not Kerouac (OTR's Sal Paradise) but Neal Cassady (OTR's Dean Moriarty).

Lucky me, to have been both in and of the '60s. And to have survived.

_____________________

*'Wordage' to my ear embodies a sense between the pejorative 'verbiage'  and the commendatory 'writing.' I am reminded of Truman Capote's anti-Kerouac jab, "That's not writing; it's typewriting!" 

Addendum (11/5).  Vito Caiati writes,

I read with interest your post “Jack Kerouac, Religious Writer?” and it struck me that, with a bit of editing, Flannery O’Connor’s remark on “the true poet” might be applied to the too worldly Merton:  “The true monk is anonymous, as to his habits, but this boy has to look, act, and apparently smell like a monk” I feel that Merton’s superiors, who failed to check his wanderings of one kind or another, harmed his rich spiritual potential, which is most evident in the early journals. As the protagonist of Georges Bernanos’ Journal de un cure de la campagne observes,  when speaking of monks extra muros,  “Les moines sont d’incomparables maitres de la vie intérieur, . . . mais il en est de la plupart of ces fameux ‘traits’ comme des vins de terroir, qui doivent se consommer sur place. Ils ne supportent pas le voyage. ” Monks are incomparable masters of the interior life, . . . but most of these famous ‘traits’ [that they possess] like the terroir wines, must be consumed in place,  They do not support the trip.”

 

Vito,

 

Very good observation.

 

While deeply appreciative of monasticism with its contemptus mundi, Merton, desirous of name and fame, was wide open to the siren song of the world, which became irresistibly loud when the '60s came along. Had he been our age, would he have become a monk at all?  Had he lived beyond the age of 53, would he have remained a monk? 

 

I love his Journals. That is where you will find the real Merton.  As in Kerouac, a deep sincerity of the heart to break the heart.

 

I am familiar with Bernanos' The Diary of a Country Priest, which is both theologically penetrating and of high literary value. (I would not say that Kerouac's novels are of high literary value, but on the other hand, they are not trash like those of Bukowski.)

 

There are superb passages on prayer, sin, lust, and confession in Bernanos which I may post. 

 

But I haven't found the passage you cite. Where is it roughly? Near the beginning, middle, end?  I don't imagine you have an English trans.

 

It is always good to hear from you.

Dr. Johnson versus Kerouac

Patrick Kurp makes the case against spontaneous bop prosody. And a strong case it is. The Rolling Stones sang that it's only Rock and Roll, but I like it. I'd say something similar about Sweet Gone Jack's hyper-romantic effusions.  It's only rush and gush, flow and go, but I like it, like it, yes I do.  

(The 'go' alludes to the title of which minor Beat figure's novel?)

Jack Kerouac Went Home in October

Jack Kerouac quit the mortal coil 50 years ago today, October 21st, securing his release from the samsaric wheel of the quivering meat conception, and the granting of his wish:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead.  (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).

The Last Interview, 12 October 1969.  "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic."  "I just sneak into church now, at dusk, at vespers. But yeah, as you get older you get more . . . genealogical."

As much of a screw-up and sinner as he was, as irresponsible, self-indulgent, and self-destructive, Kerouac was a deeply religious man.  He went through a Buddhist phase, but at the end he came home to Catholicism.  

"Everybody goes home in October." (On the Road, Part I, Ch. 14, Para 1) Here's the whole paragraph:

At dawn my bus was zooming across the Arizona desert -- Indio, Blythe, Salome (where she danced); the great dry stretches leading to Mexican mountains in the south. Then we swung north to the Arizona mountains, Flagstaff, clifftowns. I had a book with me I stole from a Hollywood stall, "Le Grand Meaulnes" by Alain-Fournier, but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing. In inky night we crossed New Mexico; at gray dawn it was Dalhart, Texas; in the bleak Sunday afternoon we rode through one Oklahoma flat-town after another; at nightfall it was Kansas. The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.

 "Pretty girls make graves." (Dharma Bums) 

 Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (G. P. Putnam 1965), p. 48:

Outside it's October night in Manhattan and on the waterfront wholesale markets there are barrels with fires left burning in them by the longshoremen where I stop and warm my hands and take a nip two nips from the bottle and hear the bvoom of ships in the channel and I look up and there, the same stars as over Lowell, October, old melancholy October, tender and loving and sad, and it will all tie up eventually into a perfect posy of love I think and I shall present it to Tathagata, my Lord, to God, saying "Lord Thou didst exult -- and praise be You for showing me how You did it -- Lord now I'm ready for more -- And this time I won't whine -- This time I'll keep my mind clear on the fact that it is Thy Empty Forms."

. . . This world, the palpable thought of God . . . [ellipsis in original]

Alela Diane, We Are Nothing  

Jack Kerouac, Tristessa (written 1955-56, first published in 1960), p. 59:

Since beginningless time and into the never-ending future, men have loved women without telling them, and the Lord has loved them without telling, and the void is not the void because there's nothing to be empty of.

Henry Mancini, Moon River.  Video with shots of Rita Hayworth. YouTuber comment: indimenticabile Rita, stupenda Rita, vivi nei nostri ricordi, vivi nei nostri cuori. This was Jack Kerouac's favorite song.  Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:

One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken."  Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity."  They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song.  Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's.  Sobbed by a harmonica, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.

Indeed they do.  A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveller, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of mist, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore.  

Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard, California Zephyr

10,000 Maniacs, Hey Jack Kerouac

Tom Waits, Jack Kerouac on the Road

Aztec Two-Step, The Persecution and Restoration of Dean Moriarty

Some readings:

Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues, 228th Chorus

Jack Kerouac, The Wheel of the Quivering Meat Conception.  "I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel, safe in heaven, dead." Steve Allen on piano.

Jack Kerouac, Charlie Parker.  "Charlie, Parker, lay the bane off me, and everybody."

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Route 66

Jack Kerouac in a letter from 17 January 1962: "Everybody is making money off my ideas, like those "Route 66" TV producers, everybody except me . . . ." (Selected Letters 1957-1969, ed. Charters, Viking 1999, p. 326; see also p. 461 and pp. 301-302.) 

Here is the Nelson Riddle theme music from the TV series.  And here is part of an episode from the series which ran from 1960-1964.  George Maharis bears a striking resemblance to Jack, wouldn't you say? And notice Maharis is riding shotgun.  Kerouac wasn't a driver.  Neal Cassady was the driver.

Now dig Bobby Troup.  Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones, Dr. Feelgood,  and others have covered the tune. The version by Asleep at the Wheel is especially good.

 

A Couple of Venice Characters I Met While Working for Manpower

Bill Keezer e-mails re: my  Manpower post:

I think it would be good for all young men somewhere in their early years to have to work for Manpower. It might give them more appreciation of what they have. It also might teach them something useful. I remember my various Manpower stints with some pleasure. I worked hard at a variety of jobs, learned a number of things I might not have, and felt like I earned my money. That’s not all bad.

I agree entirely, Bill, though your "with pleasure" I would qualify.  It is not pleasant to be bossed around by inferior specimens of humanity, but that can and does happen when you are at the bottom of the labor pool.  But working Manpower grunt jobs  was well worth it, if not for the money, then for the experiences and the characters I met.

One cat, Larry Setnosky, was a failed academic, known in the seedy bars we'd hit after work as 'The Professor.'  A doctoral student in history, he never finished his Ph. D.  He lived in Venice, California, with a couple of other marginal characters, rode a motorcycle, wore a vest with no shirt underneath.  He'd write articles and then file them away. He was just too wild and crazy to submit to the academic discipline necessary to crank out a thesis and get the degree.  Booze and dope didn't help either.  I still recall his "Nary a stem nor a seed, Acapulco Gold is bad ass weed!"

 

Ernie Fletcher was one of Setnosky's housemates.  A law school dropout, he was convinced that the system was a "rigged wheel."  When I met him he was in his mid-thirties, an ex-boozer, and warmly in praise of sobriety.  He had sworn off what he called 'tune-ups" but was not averse to watching me "dissipate" as he told me once, not that I did much dissipating.  In point of dissipation I was closer to the Buddha than to the Bukowski end of the spectrum.

Fletcher was from the Pacific Northwest and had worked as a logger there.  Observing me during Manpower gigs he thought I was a good worker and not "lame" or "light in the ass" as he put it.  So he suggested we head up to Washington State and get logging jobs.  And so we drove 1200 miles up the beautiful Pacific Coast along Highway 1 from Los Angeles to Forks, Washington in my 1963 Karmann Ghia convertible.  Amazing as it is to my present cautious self, we took off the very next day after Ernie suggested the trip to me.  We probably had little more than a hundred bucks between us, but gas in those days was 25 cents a gallon.  On the way we stopped to see Kerouac's friend John Montgomery, who was also a friend of Ernie.  John Montgomery was the Henry Morley of The Dharma Bums and the Alex Fairbrother of Desolation Angels.  (For more on Montgomery see here.)  Unfortunately, when we located Montgomery's house, he wasn't at home.  I've regretted that non-meeting ever since.  Now I hand off to my Journal, volume 5, p. 32:

Saturday Midday 10 February 1973

Last Monday left L. A. about 12:00 PM.  Saw [brother] Philip in Santa Barbara, made Santa Cruz that night, stayed in motel after checking out [folk/rock venue] "The Catalyst" and local flophouse.  While passing Saratoga, CA  decided to look up John Montgomery, friend of Ernie's who knew Kerouac and the Beats.  We couldn't get in touch with him.  So on to Frisco, entered the city, became involved in intricate traffic tangles, visited [Lawrence Ferlinghetti's] City Lights Bookstore and Caffe Trieste where I had a cup of espresso.  By the way, in Big Sur visited Ernie's friend Gary Koeppel. [He was bemused to hear from Ernie that I was a Kerouac aficionado. In those days, Kerouac was pretty much in eclipse.  The first of the Kerouac biographies, Ann Charters' was not yet out and Kerouac's 'rehabilitation' was still in the future.] 

Spent Tuesday night in Dave Burn's trailer in Arcata, CA.  [Dave was the drummer of a couple of bands I was in back in L. A. 1968-1971]  Gave him the two tabs of acid I had in my attache case.  Wednesday morning fixed the headlight (highbeam) which was malfunctioning and for which I received a citation the night before.  Then went to the nearest CHP office and had the citation cleared.  Breakfast at Ramada Inn and then on to Eugene, Oregon.  Dug Taylor's, The New World Coffee House,and Ernie and Larry's old haunt, Maxie's.  Arrived at Ernie's brother-in-law's house at 11:30 PM.  Thursday spent in Eugene.  I bought Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Habermas' Knowledge and Human Interests.  Friday morning left early for Forks, Washington, arriving around 6:00 PM.  Presently lodged in Woodland Hotel.  Drinks last night with Ernie and legendary logger,  Jim Huntsman.  Arranged to start working Monday morning.  So far, so good.

October Ends . . .

. . .  and we say farewell once again to Jack Kerouac, cat man and mama's boy, as he prepares to "leave all San Francisco behind and go back home across autumn America" proving once again to his romantic predecessor Thomas Wolfe that one can go back home again where

it'll all be like it was in the beginning -- Simple golden eternity blessing all . . . My mother'll be waiting for me glad -- the corner of the yard where Tyke is buried will be a new and fragrant shrine making my home more homelike somehow -- On soft Spring nights I'll stand in the yard under the stars -- Something good will come out of all things yet -- And it will be golden and eternal just like that - There's no need to say another word. (Big Sur, 1962, last lines, last page.)

It's a good last word: something good will come of it all: of all of the wandering, all of the searching, all of the pain, and misery, and drunken folly, and lonely nights, and broken dreams.  The vanity will give way to vision.  The beat will taste beatitude.  The road will end and the restless will rest.

Kerouac in Scollay Square

Beatific October, Kerouac month hereabouts, is at its sad redbrick end once again and it is time for me to stop the hyper-romantic Jacking off.  From On the Road:  

 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Kerouac Goes Home in October

Jack Kerouac quit the mortal coil 49 years ago tomorrow, securing his release from the samsaric wheel of the quivering meat conception, and the granting of his wish:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead.  (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).

The Last Interview, 12 October 1969.  "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic."  "I just sneak into church now, at dusk, at vespers. But yeah, as you get older you get more . . . genealogical."

As much of a screw-up and sinner as he was, as irresponsible, self-indulgent, and self-destructive, Kerouac was a deeply religious man.  He went through a Buddhist phase, but at the end he came home to Catholicism.  

"Everybody goes home in October." (On the Road, Part I, Ch. 14, Para 1) Here's the whole paragraph:

At dawn my bus was zooming across the Arizona desert -- Indio, Blythe, Salome (where she danced); the great dry stretches leading to Mexican mountains in the south. Then we swung north to the Arizona mountains, Flagstaff, clifftowns. I had a book with me I stole from a Hollywood stall, "Le Grand Meaulnes" by Alain-Fournier, but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing. In inky night we crossed New Mexico; at gray dawn it was Dalhart, Texas; in the bleak Sunday afternoon we rode through one Oklahoma flat-town after another; at nightfall it was Kansas. The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.

 "Pretty girls make graves." (Dharma Bums) 

 Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (G. P. Putnam 1965), p. 48:

Outside it's October night in Manhattan and on the waterfront wholesale markets there are barrels with fires left burning in them by the longshoremen where I stop and warm my hands and take a nip two nips from the bottle and hear the bvoom of ships in the channel and I look up and there, the same stars as over Lowell, October, old melancholy October, tender and loving and sad, and it will all tie up eventually into a perfect posy of love I think and I shall present it to Tathagata, my Lord, to God, saying "Lord Thou didst exult -- and praise be You for showing me how You did it -- Lord now I'm ready for more -- And this time I won't whine -- This time I'll keep my mind clear on the fact that it is Thy Empty Forms."

. . . This world, the palpable thought of God . . . [ellipsis in original]

Alela Diane, We Are Nothing  

Jack Kerouac, Tristessa (written 1955-56, first published in 1960), p. 59:

Since beginningless time and into the never-ending future, men have loved women without telling them, and the Lord has loved them without telling, and the void is not the void because there's nothing to be empty of.

Henry Mancini, Moon River.  Video with shots of Rita Hayworth. YouTuber comment: indimenticabile Rita, stupenda Rita, vivi nei nostri ricordi, vivi nei nostri cuori. This was Jack Kerouac's favorite song.  Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:

One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken."  Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity."  They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song.  Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's.  Sobbed by a harmonica, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.

Indeed they do.  A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveller, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of mist, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore.  

Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard, California Zephyr

10,000 Maniacs, Hey Jack Kerouac

Tom Waits, Jack Kerouac on the Road!!

Aztec Two-Step, The Persecution and Restoration of Dean Moriarty

Some readings:

Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues, 228th Chorus

Jack Kerouac, Safe in Heaven, Dead.  Good sound quality.  "I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel, safe in heaven, dead."

Jack Kerouac, Charlie Parker.  "Charlie, Parker, lay the bane off me, and everybody."

Cactus Ed on Sweet Gone Jack

Here:

Some of Abbey's most entertaining letters involve skirmishes over literary reputation, one of his enduring obsessions. In a letter to the Nation, he contrasted Kurt Vonnegut's "concern for justice, love, honesty and hope" with "novels about the ethnic introspection project (Roth, Bellow)" and "the miseries of suburban hanky-panky (Updike, Cheever, Irving)."

He disparaged Jack Kerouac as "that creepy adolescent bisexual who dabbled in Orientalism and all the other fads of his time, wrote stacks of complacently self-indulgent, onanastic [sic] books and then drank himself to death while sitting on his mother's lap, down in Florida." He called Tom Wolfe a "faggoty fascist little fop" but later defended "Bonfire of the Vanities" as a "novel that reminds us, in the end, that defiance and resistance, manhood and honor, are still possible."

The Canticle of Jack Kerouac

BY LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

  

1.

 

Far from the sea far from the sea

                                     of Breton fishermen

       the white clouds scudding

                                             over Lowell

            and the white birches the

                                           bare white birches   

                along the blear night roads

                                       flashing by in darkness   

            (where once he rode

                                        in Pop’s old Plymouth)   

And the birch-white face

                                    of a Merrimac madonna   

            shadowed in streetlight

                            by Merrimac’s shroudy waters   

                  —a leaf blown

                                     upon sea wind

                     out of Brittany

                                           over endless oceans

 

 

2.

 

There is a garden in the memory of America

There is a nightbird in its memory

There is an andante cantabile

in a garden in the memory   

of America

In a secret garden

in a private place

a song a melody

a nightsong echoing

in the memory of America   

In the sound of a nightbird   

outside a Lowell window

In the cry of kids

in tenement yards at night

In the deep sound

of a woman murmuring

a woman singing broken melody

in a shuttered room

in an old wood house

in Lowell

As the world cracks by

                                 thundering

like a lost lumber truck

                                    on a steep grade   

               in Kerouac America

The woman sits silent now

                                     rocking backward   

      to Whistler’s Mother in Lowell

                         and all the tough old

                                          Canuck mothers   

                              and Jack’s Mémère

And they continue rocking

 

      And may still on stormy nights show through   

          as a phantom after-image

                            on silent TV screens   

             a flickered after-image

                              that will not go away   

                in Moody Street

                  in Beaulieu Street

                   in ‘dirtstreet Sarah Avenue’   

    in Pawtucketville

       And in the Church of St. Jean Baptiste

 

 

Kerouac Alley

A Northern California reader sends this photo of a street scene in the vicinity of City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco. I made a 'pilgrimage' to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's famous bookstore in the early '70s. That was before the Kerouac street sign was up.

Some of Ferlinghetti's poetry can be read here.  To my surprise, Ferlinghetti is still alive at 99. By contrast, old Kerouac quit the mortal coil and "the slaving meat wheel" at age 47.  He is, we hope, "safe in heaven, dead."  

 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ramblin' Elliot Charles Adnopoz

David Dalton, Who is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion, 2012, p. 65:

As Dave van Ronk pointed out in his autobiography, many of the people involved in the first folk revival of the 1930s and '40s were Jewish -- as were the folkies of the '60s. Van Ronk reasoned that for Jews, belonging to a movement centered on American traditional music was a form of belonging and assimilation.

[. . .]

"The revelation that Jack [Elliot] was Jewish was vouchsafed unto Bobby one afternoon at the Figaro," Van Ronk recalled.  "We were sitting around shooting the bull with Barry Kornfeld and maybe a couple of other people and somehow it came out that Jack had grown up in Ocean Parkway and was named Elliot Adnopoz.  Bobby literally fell off his chair; he was rolling around on the floor, and it took him a couple of minutes to pull himself together and get up again.  Then Barry, who can be diabolical in things like this, leaned over to him and just whispered the word 'Adnopoz' and back he went under the table."

Lacking as it does the proper American cowboy resonance, 'Elliot Charles Adnopoz' was ditched by its bearer who came to call himself 'Ramblin' Jack Elliot.'  Born in 1931 in Brooklyn to Jewish parents who wanted him to become a doctor, young Adnopoz rebelled, ran away, and became a protege of Woody Guthrie.  If it weren't for Ramblin' Jack, Guthrie would be nowhere near as well-known as he is today. 

Pretty Boy Floyd.  "As through this life you ramble, as through this life you roam/You'll never see an outlaw drive a family from their home."  No?  An example of the  tendency of lefties invariably to  take the side of the underdog regardless of whether right or wrong.  

Ramblin' Jack does a haunting version of Dylan's Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues.  It grows on you. Give it a chance.  Cigarettes and Whisky and Wild Woman.  Soul of a Man. Dylan's unforgettable,  Don't Think Twice.  Here he is with Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Buffy Sainte Marie singing the beautiful, Passing Through.

Lyrics below the fold.

The Beats' Holy Grail

The Joan Anderson letter.  Not to be missed by Kerouac aficionados. (HT: the indefatigable and ever-helpful Dave Lull)

Related: Who is Dave Lull?

Neal Cassady (on the right) as brakeman for Southern Pacific Railroad:

 

Vanitas Vanitatum. Omnia Vanitas

But, wifey, I did it all, I wrote the book, I stalked the streets of life, of Manhattan, of Long Island, stalked thru 1,183 pages of my first novel, sold the book, got an advance, whooped, hallelujah’d, went on, did everything you’re supposed to do in life.

But nothing ever came of it.

No ‘generation’ is ‘new’. There’s ‘nothing new under the sun’. ‘All is vanity.’ (268).

LIfe is for Living

BEATific October Again

It's October again, my favorite month, and Kerouac month in my personal literary liturgy.  And no better way to kick off Kerouac month than with 'sweet gone Jack'  reading from "October in Railroad Earth" from Lonesome Traveler, 1960.  Steve Allen provides the wonderful piano accompaniment.  I have the Grove Press Black Cat 1970 paperback edition. I bought it on Bourbon Street in New Orleans on 12 April 1973. I was travelling East by thumb to check out East Coast graduate schools where I had been accepted, but mostly  I 'rode the dog' (Greyhound bus), a mode of transport I wouldn't put up with today: two guys behind me chain-smoked  and talked all the way from Los Angeles to Phoenix.  New Orleans proved to be memorable, including the flophouse on Carondelet I stayed in for $2.  It was there that Lonesome  Traveler joined On the Road in my rucksack. 

I never before had seen Tabasco bottles so big as on the tables of the Bourbon Street bars and eateries.  Exulting in the beat quiddity of the scene, I couldn't help but share my enthusiasm for Nawlins with a lady of the evening, not sampling her wares, but just talking to her on the street, she thinking me naive, and I was. 

Here is a long  excerpt (7:10), which contains the whole of the first two sections of "October in Railroad Earth," pp. 37-40, of the Black Cat edition.

You don't know jack about Jack if you don't know that he was deeply conservative despite his excesses.  The aficionados will enjoy The Conservative Kerouac.

Kerouac: Religious Writer?

The Kerouac and Friends industry churns on, its latest product being Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats by Robert Inchausti, Shambhala (January 30, 2018), 208 pages.

From Scott Beauchamp's review:

The real tragedy of Kerouac’s reception was that the people who should have known better took the en vogue hedonist reading at face value, writing him off as a word-vomiting miscreant. But that’s a caricature of Kerouac that over-emphasizes the most obvious personal flaws of an intensely spiritual writer. It’s an oversimplification by way of calling someone a simpleton. The truth is more complex and so much more interesting: Kerouac was one of the most humble and devoted American religious writers of the 20th century. Robert Inchausti’s recently published Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats makes an attempt at recognizing the heterodox spiritual focus of the entire Beat oeuvre, but it only points the reader in the right direction. Its simple and hodgepodge construction suggests the vast amount of analysis, particularly of Kerouac’s work, which remains to be done in order to change his reputation in the popular imagination.

I'm a Kerouac aficionado from way back. I love the guy and the rush and gush of his hyper-romantic and heart-felt wordage.* He brings tears to my eyes every October. His tapes and CDs accompany me on every road trip. He was a writer who was religious, but a "religious writer"? It's an exaggeration, like calling Thomas Merton, who was a religious writer,  a spiritual master. I love him too, especially the Merton of the journals, but he was no more a spiritual master than I am.  And then there is Bob Dylan, the greatest American writer of popular songs, who added so much to our lives, but deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature?  I submit that Flannery O'Connor is closer to the truth about Kerouac & Co.

Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), pp. 336-337, in a letter to Dr. T. R. Spivey dated 21 June 1959:

I haven't read the article in PR [Paris Review?] or the beat writers themselves.  That seems about the most appalling thing you could set yourself to do -- read them.  But reading about them and reading what they have to say about themselves makes me think that there is a lot of ill-directed good in them.  Certainly some revolt against our exaggerated materialism is long overdue.  They seem to know a good many of the right things to run away from, but to lack any necessary discipline.  They call themselves holy but holiness costs and so far as I can see they pay nothing.  It's true that grace is the free gift of God  but to put yourself in the way of being receptive to it you have to practice self-denial.  I observe that Baron von Hügel's most used words are derivatives of the word cost.  As long as the beat people abandon themselves to all sensual satisfactions, on principle, you can't take them for anything  but false mystics.  A good look at St. John of the Cross makes them all look sick.

You can't trust them as poets either because they are too busy acting like poets.  The true poet is anonymous, as to his habits, but these boys have to look, act, and apparently smell like poets.

This is the only reference to the Beats that I found in The Habit of Being apart from the sentence, "That boy is on the road more than Kerouac, though in a more elegant manner." (p. 373)

Although O'Connor did not read the Beat authors  she correctly sensed their appalling side (William Burroughs, for one example) and zeroed in accurately on their lack of discipline and adolescent posturing as 'holy' when they refused to satisfy the elementary requirements of becoming such.  But in fairness to Kerouac one should point out that he really did at one time make a very serious effort at reforming his life. 

See Resolutions Made and Broken, No More Booze, Publishing, or Seminal Emission, Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac. 

And I wonder what Miss O'Connor would say had she lived long enough  to read that book by the Holy Goof, Neal Cassady, entitled Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison 1958-1960? (Blast Books, 1993)  Grace Beats Karma: what a wonderful  title, apt, witty, and pithy!  

Arguably, the central figure of the Beat movement was not Kerouac (OTR's Sal Paradise) but Neal Cassady (OTR's Dean Moriarty).

Lucky me, to have been both in and of the '60s. And to have survived.

_____________________

*'Wordage' to my ear embodies a sense between the pejorative 'verbiage'  and the commendatory 'writing.' I am reminded of Truman Capote's anti-Kerouac jab, "That's not writing; it's typewriting!" 

Related articles

Merton the Conflicted

October Ends . . .

. . .  and we say farewell once again to Jack Kerouac, cat man and mama's boy, as he prepares to "leave all San Francisco behind and go back home across autumn America" proving once again to his romantic predecessor Thomas Wolfe that one can go back home again where

it'll all be like it was in the beginning -- Simple golden eternity blessing all . . . My mother'll be waiting for me glad -- the corner of the yard where Tyke is buried will be a new and fragrant shrine making my home more homelike somehow -- On soft Spring nights I'll stand in the yard under the stars -- Something good will come out of all things yet -- And it will be golden and eternal just like that - There's no need to say another word. (Big Sur, 1962, last lines, last page.)

It's a good last word: something good will come of it all: of all of the wandering, all of the searching, all of the pain, and misery, and drunken folly, and lonely nights, and broken dreams.  The vanity will give way to vision.  The beat will taste beatitude.  The road will end and the restless will rest.

Related articles

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Kerouac Goes Home in October

Kerouac at the End of the Road

A week or so and then I'll be through with Jacking off until next October. So bear with me, ragazzi.

Here  is a NYT piece from 1988 by Richard Hill that gets at the truth of Jack. Excerpts:

He seemed uncertain of his friends from the 50's. Ginsberg was lost; he hadn't found the answers Jack had, in the Roman Catholic Church. Burroughs was a brilliant and heroic old devil, but Jack hadn't seen him since his trip to New York for William Buckley's Firing Line. ''I admire Buckley,'' he said. ''He stopped the show and took me into his office to give me hell about being drunk. Then we went back to do the show and I still gave those intellectuals the old raspberry.'' Burroughs was staying in the same hotel at the time, but didn't want to go out. ''Into those streets?'' said the man whose daring and decadence had become a legend, and Jack gave up on him.

But of Neal Cassady, Jack's companion on the road through many of the novels, he was more sure: ''Neal's not dead. He'll show up someday and we'll go someplace.'' Jack loved Cassady, who died on a railroad track in Mexico on one of the last trips of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. ''Turn your mind on,'' Jack said bitterly. ''I've been trying to turn mine off.''

Jack was also trying to get his affairs in order. He knew he was going to die soon; the doctor had told him his liver was nearly gone. He talked about his will, read and reread his genealogy and spoke much of the Kerouac family tradition and his boyhood home in Lowell. He worried that critics would fail to see his novels as he intended them to be read - not only as an ambitious chronicle of America, but also as a loving portrait of his family and his childhood home. In his later writings, he seemed more interested in capturing Lowell than in an America he no longer understood or liked. He asked about funeral homes and embalming: ''Do they treat you with dignity?'' He asserted his faith in the church he had abandoned years ago for Zen Buddhism.

[. . .]

People sometimes wrote or called me to ask what Jack had really been like, hoping I could confirm one romantic thesis or another. One man wanted to believe he died from the scuffle in the black bar. Ironic, but untrue. Nobody wanted to believe he died of drinking.

He did. Drinking was part of his pilgrimage. He was a sensitive soul who'd set his sights on nothing less than enlightenment. When the booze failed to take him there, it at least numbed the disappointment. It is a classic alcoholic pattern, which has produced statements as powerful as Under the Volcano as well as several Kerouac novels - from the sweetness of ''The Dharma Bums'' to the terrifying wine-soaked hallucination of the true cross over ''Big Sur.'' We may know the drinking wasn't necessary, but Jack didn't. And though he gave in to his drinking, he never completely abandoned his search. His record of that search reminds us why we value him so much. It was a sacrifice from which most of us shrink, a gift for which he paid the highest price. We can argue that his life was tragic or his talent misspent, but never doubt the passion that drove it. He showed us America through his innocent eyes, singing to us like the canary old-time coal miners took underground. When the bird died, they knew it as a warning that the air was deadly and that their own lives were no longer safe. 

Should There be University Courses on Beat Generation Authors?

From a longer essay:

I've read my fair share of [William S. ] Burroughs and I concur [with Patrick Kurp] that his stuff is trash: Junkie, Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Exterminator.  All in my library.  But there is a place for literary trash.  It has its uses as do the pathologist's  slides and samples.  But put on your mental gloves before handling the stuff. 

Kerouac alone of the Beat Triumvirate [Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs] moves me, though I surely don't consider him a great writer.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that there really shouldn't be any university courses on Kerouac or Dylan or other culturally influential recent figures since their material is easily accessible and easily understandable.  Universities ought not pander. They should remain -- or rather return to being -- institutions whose sacred task is the preservation and transmission of HIGH culture, great culture, culture which is not easily understood and requires expert guidance to penetrate and appreciate. 

The thought is extended in Inheritance and Appropriation.

I am but a vox clamantis in deserto. You will be forgiven for thinking me a superannuated idealistic sermonizer out of touch with current events and trends. The West may be finished, and my preaching useless.   The barbarians are at the gates and the destructive Left is eager to let them in. The authorities are in abdication. The Pope is a fool: a leftist first, a Catholic second. Leftist termites have rotted out the foundations of the universities.

On the other hand, it ain't over til it's over.  So we battle on.  

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Kerouac Goes Home in October

Jack Kerouac quit the mortal coil 48 years ago today, securing his release from the samsaric wheel of the quivering meat conception, and the granting of his wish:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead.  (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).

The Last Interview, 12 October 1969.  "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic."  "I just sneak into church now, at dusk, at vespers. But yeah, as you get older you get more . . . genealogical."

As much of a screw-up and sinner as he was, as irresponsible, self-indulgent, and self-destructive, Kerouac was a deeply religious man.  He went through a Buddhist phase, but at the end he came home to Catholicism.  

"Everybody goes home in October." (On the Road, Part I, Ch. 14, Para 1) Here's the whole paragraph:

At dawn my bus was zooming across the Arizona desert -- Indio, Blythe, Salome (where she danced); the great dry stretches leading to Mexican mountains in the south. Then we swung north to the Arizona mountains, Flagstaff, clifftowns. I had a book with me I stole from a Hollywood stall, "Le Grand Meaulnes" by Alain-Fournier, but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing. In inky night we crossed New Mexico; at gray dawn it was Dalhart, Texas; in the bleak Sunday afternoon we rode through one Oklahoma flat-town after another; at nightfall it was Kansas. The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.

 "Pretty girls make graves." (Dharma Bums) 

 Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (G. P. Putnam 1965), p. 48:

Outside it's October night in Manhattan and on the waterfront wholesale markets there are barrels with fires left burning in them by the longshoremen where I stop and warm my hands and take a nip two nips from the bottle and hear the bvoom of ships in the channel and I look up and there, the same stars as over Lowell, October, old melancholy October, tender and loving and sad, and it will all tie up eventually into a perfect posy of love I think and I shall present it to Tathagata, my Lord, to God, saying "Lord Thou didst exult -- and praise be You for showing me how You did it -- Lord now I'm ready for more -- And this time I won't whine -- This time I'll keep my mind clear on the fact that it is Thy Empty Forms."

. . . This world, the palpable thought of God . . . [ellipsis in original]

Alela Diane, We Are Nothing  

Jack Kerouac, Tristessa (written 1955-56, first published in 1960), p. 59:

Since beginningless time and into the never-ending future, men have loved women without telling them, and the Lord has loved them without telling, and the void is not the void because there's nothing to be empty of.

Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard, California Zephyr

10,000 Maniacs, Hey Jack Kerouac

Tom Waits, Jack Kerouac on the Road

Aztec Two-Step, The Persecution and Restoration of Dean Moriarty

Some readings:

Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues, 228th Chorus

Jack Kerouac, Safe in Heaven, Dead.  Good sound quality.  "I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel, safe in heaven, dead."

Jack Kerouac, Charlie Parker.  "Charlie, Parker, lay the bane off me, and everybody."

The Beat Goes On: On the Road Turns 60

Here is a 50th anniversary NYT retrospect.  I'll look for a 60th.

Charlie Parker

A tribute to Charlie Parker by Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen. Hyper-romanticism and cool jazz. 

Charlie Parker looked like Buddha. Charlie Parker . . . was called the perfect musician and his expression on his face was as calm beautiful and profound as the image of the Buddha represented in the East — the lidded eyes the expression that says: all is well.

This was what Charlie Parker said when he played: all is well. You had the feeling of early-in-the-morning like a hermit's joy or like the perfect cry of some wild gang at a jam session Wail! Whap! Charlie burst his lungs to reach the speed of what the speedsters wanted and what they wanted was his eternal slowdown. A great musician and a great creator of forms . . . . 

. . . Charlie Parker whistling them on to the brink of eternity with his Irish St. Patrick Patootlestick. And like the holy mists we blop and we plop in the waters of slaughter and white meat — and die one after one in Time. And how sweet a story it is

. . . Charlie Parker forgive me. Forgive me for not answering your eyes. For not having made an indication of that which you can devise. Charlie Parker pray for me. Pray for me and everybody.

In the Nirvanas of your brain where you hide — indulgent and huge — no longer Charlie Parker but the secret unsayable Name that carries with it merit not-to-be-measured from here to up down east or west.

Charlie Parker lay the bane off me - - and everybody.

BEATific October Again

It's October again, my favorite month, and Kerouac month in my personal literary liturgy.  And no better way to kick off Kerouac month than with 'sweet gone Jack'  reading from "October in Railroad Earth" from Lonesome Traveler, 1960.  Steve Allen provides the wonderful piano accompaniment.  I have the Grove Press Black Cat 1970 paperback edition. I bought it on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, 12 April 1973. I was travelling East by thumb to check out East Coast graduate schools where I had been accepted, but mostly  I 'rode the dog' (Greyhound bus), a mode of transport I wouldn't put up with today: two guys behind me chain-smoked  and talked all the way from Los Angeles to Phoenix.  New Orleans proved to be memorable, including the flophouse on Carondelet I stayed in for $2.  It was there that Lonesome  Traveler joined On the Road in my rucksack. 

I never before had seen Tabasco bottles so big as on the tables of the Bourbon Street bars and eateries.  Exulting in the beat quiddity of the scene, I couldn't help but share my enthusiasm for Nawlins with a lady of the evening, not sampling her wares, but just talking to her on the street, she thinking me naive, and I was. 

Here is a long  excerpt (7:10), which contains the whole of the first two sections of "October in Railroad Earth," pp. 37-40, of the Black Cat edition.

You don't know jack about Jack if you don't know that he was deeply conservative despite his excesses.  The aficionados will enjoy The Conservative Kerouac.

And a tip of the hat to old college buddy and Kerouac and jazz aficionado 'Monterey Tom' Coleman for sending me to Kerouac on Sinatra, and Hit the Road, Jack.

The Beat of the Heart

Kerouac reads to jazz accompaniment.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Water High, Wide, Dirty, Troubled, and Moody

In Dispatch from Houston, our friend Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence reports: 

Power out. Car flooded. Books dry.

So all is well. But I don't reckon Dean Martin will be returning to Houston for a spell even if he could, he being dead and all. 

Not to make light of the suffering of those sorely afflicted. Pray, send benevolent thoughts, fork over some serious money for relief efforts, but don't blog about it. Your charitable contribution, that is.

Bob Dylan, High Water.  This is a late-career Dylan gem from Love and Theft (2001). A tribute to Charley Patton.  Demonstrates Dylan's mastery of the arcana of Americana. Our greatest and deepest singer-songwriter. 

My favorite verse:

Well, George Lewis told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew
You can't open up your mind, boys, to every conceivable point of view
They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway 5
Judge says to the High Sheriff, "I want them dead or alive"
Either one, I don't care, high water everywhere.

Nosiree, Bob, you can't open up your mind to every conceivable point of view, especially when it's not dark yet, but getting there.

Charley Patton, High Water Everywhere.  Nice slide show.

The Band, Up on Cripple Creek

Jimi Hendrix, May This Be Love.  I had forgotten the wonderful guitar solo.

Karla Bonoff, The Water is Wide.  I listened to a lot of Bonoff in the early '80s.  She does a great job with this traditional song.

Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, Banks of the Ohio.  Joan Baez's version from an obscure 1959 album, Folksingers 'Round Harvard Square.

Similar theme though not water-related: Doc Watson, Tom Dooley.  Doc and family in a BBC clip.

Standells, Dirty Water.  Boston and the River Charles. My mecca in the '70s, the Athens of America, the Hub of the Universe, etc.  A great town to be young in.  But when it comes time to own property and pay taxes, then a right-thinking man high tails it for the West.

Simon and Garfunkel, Bridge Over Troubled Water.  A beautiful song.  

Henry Mancini, Moon River.  This was Jack Kerouac's favorite song.  Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:

One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken."  Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity."  They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song.  Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's.  Sobbed by a harmonica, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.

Indeed they do.  A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveller, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of mist, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore.  Here is another version of the tune with some beautiful images.

Doc Watson, Moody River.  A moodier version than the Pat Boone hit which was based on the Chase Webster effort.

Clever YouTube comment: "It might be a little early in the day for an Am7."  But this here's Saturday night and I'm working on my second wine spodiodi. Chords minor and melancholy go good 'long about now. 

My favorite verse:

Well, George Lewis told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew
You can't open up your mind, boys, to every conceivable point of view
They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway 5
Judge says to the High Sheriff, "I want them dead or alive"
Either one, I don't care, high water everywhere.

Nosiree, Bob, you can't open up your mind to every conceivable point of view, especially when it's not dark yet, but getting there.

Charley Patton, High Water Everywhere.  Nice slide show.

The Band, Up on Cripple Creek

Jimi Hendrix, May This Be Love.  I had forgotten the wonderful guitar solo.

Karla Bonoff, The Water is Wide.  I listened to a lot of Bonoff in the early '80s.  She does a great job with this traditional song.

Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, Banks of the Ohio.  Joan Baez's version from an obscure 1959 album, Folksingers 'Round Harvard Square.

Similar theme though not water-related: Doc Watson, Tom Dooley.  Doc and family in a BBC clip.

Standells, Dirty Water.  Boston and the River Charles. My mecca in the '70s, the Athens of America, the Hub of the Universe, etc.  A great town to be young in.  But when it comes time to own property and pay taxes, then a right-thinking man high tails it for the West.

Simon and Garfunkel, Bridge Over Troubled Water.  A beautiful song.  

Henry Mancini, Moon River.  This was Jack Kerouac's favorite song.  Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:

One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken."  Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity."  They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song.  Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's.  Sobbed by a harmonica, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.

Indeed they do.  A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveller, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of mist, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore.  Here is another version of the tune with some beautiful images.

Doc Watson, Moody River.  A moodier version than the Pat Boone hit which was based on the Chase Webster effort.

Clever YouTube comment: "It might be a little early in the day for an Am7."  But this here's Saturday night and I'm working on my second wine spodiodi. Chords minor and melancholy go good 'long about now. 

Anti-Natalism, Zombies, and the Role of Consciousness in the Question of the Value of Life

Extreme anti-natalism is the view espoused by David Benatar according to which "it would be better if there were no more humans" (David Benatar and David Wasserman, Debating Procreation, Oxford UP 2015, 13). This is an axiological thesis. From it follows the deontic conclusion that "all procreation is wrong." (12)

Procreation is obviously a biological process. But in the case of humans, procreation is more than a merely biological process in that it leads to the production of extremely sensitive conscious and self-conscious individuals. Human procreation is an objective process in the world that leads to the production of subjects of experience for whom there is a world! If you don't find that astonishing, you are no philosopher. For as Plato taught, wonder is the feeling of the philosopher.

A Thought Experiment

Suppose one could keep (human) procreation going but that the offspring were no longer conscious. The offspring would react to stimuli and initiate chains of causation but have no conscious experiences whatsoever. It is conceivable that all biological processes including all the ones involved in procreation transpire 'in the dark.'

The idea is that at some point procreation becomes the procreation of genetically human zombies, as philosophers use the term 'zombie.' This is a learned usage, not a vulgar one.

A human zombie is a living being that is physically and behaviorally exactly like a living human being except that it lacks (phenomenal) consciousness.  Cut a zombie open, and you find exactly what you would find were you to cut a human being open. And in terms of linguistic and non-linguistic behavior, there is no way to tell a human being from a zombie. (So don't think of something sleepy, or drugged, or comatose or Halloweenish.) 

When a zombie sees a tree, what is going on in the zombie's brain is a 'visual' computational process, but the zombie lacks what a French philosopher would call interiority. There is no irreducible subjectivity, no irreducible intentionality, no qualitative feel to the 'visual' processing; there is nothing it is like for a zombie to see a female zombie or to desire her. (What's it like to be a zombie? There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.)  I suspect that Daniel Dennett is a zombie.  But I have and can have no evidence for this suspicion.  His denial of qualia is not evidence.  It might just be evidence of his being a sophist.  More to the point, his linguistic behavior and facial expressions could be just the same as those of a non-zombie qualia-denier. 

Zombies are surely conceivable whether or not they are possible. (We are conceiving them right now.) But if they are conceivable then it is conceivable that, starting tomorrow, human procreation proceed as usual except 'in the dark.' It is conceivable that future human offspring lack all  sentience and higher forms of consciousness.

On this scenario it might still be the case that it would have been better had we non-zombies never have been born, but it would not be the case that a convincing quality-of-life case could be made that "it would be better if there were no more humans" (David Benatar and David Wasserman, Debating Procreation, Oxford UP 2015, 13). For without consciousness, human life is devoid of felt quality.  No consciousness, no qualia. Without consciousness there is no suffering mental or physical or spiritual. And without these negatives, what becomes of the anti-natalist argument?

What my thought experiment seems to show is that what is problematic about human life is the consciousness associated with it, not life itself viewed objectively and biologically. If so, it is not the value of life that we question, but the value of consciousness.  So the problem is not that we were born (or conceived) but that we became conscious.

The Original Calamity?

If a philosopher can't speculate, who the hell can speculate? Could it be that the Original Calamity, the Fall of Man if you will, repeated in each one of us is the arisal of consciousness? Or perhaps the calamity is not the arisal of consciousness from the slime and stench of life, bottom up, but the entanglement of consciousness in the flesh, top down. Either way, embodied consciousness is the problem. This is a thought I had when I was 20 or so but lacked the 'chops' to articulate.  

The question now shifts to why the value of consciousness is in doubt.  Presumably consciousness is bad because of its objects and contents, not because it itself is bad.  Being conscious, as such, is presumably good. But consciousness -- this side of enlightenment --  is never without an (intentional) object or a (non-intentional) content. 

If consciousness were a pure beholding, a pure spectatorship, then perhaps consciousness would be an unalloyed good. Schopenhauer says that the world is beautiful to behold but terrible to be a part of. Things wouldn't be so bad if the beholding were transcendental to the world. But it is not: it is incarnated in the world.  Every beholding is a situated beholding. I am not a merely a transcendental spectator; I am also a bloody bit of nature's charnel house.  I am a prey to wolves human and non-human with all the mental and physical pain they bring, and prey to doubts about the sense and value of life with all the spiritual suffering they bring.

A Way Out?

If consciousness is contingently entangled in life, then there way be a way out, a path to salvation. Maybe there's a way to get clear of the samsaric crapstorm and step off of:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead.  ( Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).

Here is an anti-natalist passage from Kerouac's Buddhist period. From Some of the Dharma, Viking 1997, p. 175, emphasis added:

No hangup on nature is going to solve anything -- nature is bestial -- desire for Eternal Life of the individual is bestial, is the final creature-longing -- I say, Let us cease bestiality & go into the bright room of the mind realizing emptiness, and sit with the truth. And let no man be guilty, after this, Dec. 9 1954, of causing birth. -- Let there be an end to birth, an end to life, and therefore an end to death.  Let there be no more fairy tales and ghost stories around and about this.  I don't advocate that everybody die, I only say everybody finish your lives in purity and solitude and gentleness and realization of the truth and be not the cause of any further birth and turning of the black wheel of death.  Let then the animals take the hint, and then the insects, and all sentient beings in all one hundred directions of the One Hundred Thousand Chilicosms of Universes. Period.

Nature is the cause of all our suffering; joy is the reverse side of suffering.  Instead of seducing women, control yourself and treat them like sisters; instead of seducing men, control yourself and treat them like brothers.  For life is pitiful.

Stop.

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Cacoethes Scribendi

The fan is on and my shirt is off. The Sonoran spring is sprung. Spring fever in the form of cacoethes scribendi has me in her sweet grip.

A weird mix of Greek and Latin, cacoethes scribendi  means compulsion to write. ‘Cacoethes’ is a Latinization of the Greek kakoethes, which combines kakos (‘bad’) with ethos (‘habit’). It can mean ‘urge,’ ‘itch,’ ‘compulsion,’ ‘mania.’ Similar constructions: cacoethes loquendi, compulsive talking, and cacoethes carpendi, a mania for fault-finding. You can see ‘carp’ lurking within the infinitive, carpere, to pluck (Cf. Eugene Ehrlich, Amo, Amas, Amat and More, Harper & Row, 1985, pp. 71-72.) To this list I add cacoethes blogendi, compulsion to blog, a compulsion with which I have been for a long time afflicted.

Aficionados of Jack Kerouac’s not-so-spontaneous spontaneous prose will recall how he got his revenge on poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth in his Dharma Bums: he bestowed upon him the name, Reinhold Cacoethes. Sweet gone Jack was a wonderful coiner of names. I’ll have to return to this topic in October, Kerouac month in my personal liturgy.

As for my own cacoethes scribendi et blogendi: once a scribbler, always a scribbler. My fifth grade teacher had us begin each day by writing a 200 word composition. At the end of the year, she announced in class that my compositions were the best she had ever seen in her teaching career. I decided right then and there to become a free-lance writer, which in a sense is what I have become. 

Moral: be careful what you wish for. Wishes and dreams are seeds. They just might fall on fertile ground. 

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