Kerouac

"Spontaneous bop prosody," he called it. One doesn't have to look too hard through his mature works to find an example. It's when he gets emotional about something as he describes it. Words run on like the saxophonist's riff, full of sound and flow and energy. He could be describing the Mississippi, or Times Square, the river in his own town, his father, brother, childhood. It's when his prose gets poetic, rich, stopping for a moment to let out something. (He's really not far away from Twain, nor Whitman, nor others of the American or any other tradition.)

Ol' Kerouac. I guess we could fairly say he was of an empathetic type. He didn't have a career to put that into, and so he wrote, as he'd always wanted to. In the blood, that sort of thing. He liked to read up on Buddhism. You Tube him on the Steve Allen Show and you can hear him read with all his inflection and sensitivity.

To write on that level, with that consistency, as Kerouac did, one wonders. With so much rich inflection, poetry, sheer verbage about things and moments big and small, he was a sensitive guy, caring, like we say, empathetic. Maybe even sort of selfless as a being obliged to record life as he saw it. He didn't ask for much, just that he could continue writing, some wine, some food, some shelter, some friends, and why not some interesting travels as required by testosterone and curiosity. (His favorite shirt, found in a junk yard.)

It takes a high-mindedness to write as Kerouac did. It also takes the classic combination of feistiness and sensitivity, but really empathy and all that Corinthian stuff. Which left him to be, in his great empathy, passive and a bit vulnerable. He was a nice guy. And so, we can feel it when he complains, in Big Sur, of all the freaks coming out to his mother's house in Long Island and knocking on the window as he tried to sit down and write in the basement, "Hey, we want to party with King of the Beatniks..." We wished he could have said no.

He was, on the one hand, a wise man, an avatar, a reader of dreams, with some useful Eastern takes on things. It would have seemed somewhat natural to allow such interlopers in for a moment, maybe to cure them and send them away, but it was always more troubling than that for him. They wanted to drink with him. And so the poor guy, wishing just to write peacefully and quietly, was drawn away, time and time again, by his fame, by people.

His great empathy led him to adopt a kind of passivity, as Buddha preaches passivity, as Jesus does, both realizing one is part of the other. Something we have a hard time with. How can passivity be manliness? That's not what TV and magazine commercials preach to us. By common logic, passivity is a trap.

He wanted to escape, and Big Sur is a story of one attempt of his. The book is a notebook, a journal, of trying to find a balance once having fallen into that strange trap of being a popular celebrity. We don't come away from reading this particular account sensing he found the perfect escape. (Though he does, through alcoholic nightmare find The Cross, and we can't blame him for his French Canadian Catholic sensibilities at the bottom of his soul's decorative tastes. A good story, anyway.) And we know his end, as his drinking, rather than decreasing, increased, or at least, stayed the same as when fame goaded him into it.

Yet, we read him, and we find a beautiful balance, an outward empathy, an outward passivity, an inward peace, a discovery of truth and beauty and eternal things.