More on Kerouac

It was an act of sheer brilliance, generously sustained, written beautifully. Kerouac had the single-handed genius to find an art form to critique the Post-Enlightenment mid-century attitudes of America, to expose the complacent lack of spirituality in every day thought and discourse. His work stands as a way of taking seriously what the nation, in its mood of success, was ignoring.

After his early experimentation, constant writing and correspondence, Kerouac found the form of the 'true life novel.' Any account of life's moments and consciousness is a creation of the mind, a fiction laden with spiritual leanings and beliefs. Kerouac scrubbed and rescrubbed the surface of thoughts recreating moments of life. He tried a thousand voices, a million ways of looking at things, meditating on the nature of thought.

He comes up with a vehicle. He is telling us that life itself, just as it is, is enough by which to achieve enlightenment. His prose suggests that life's moments of day to day reality have great significance, that they may be explored in such a way as to suggest a fictional hand of some divine sort comes up with what is appropriate to our us, our lives, our inner life, our character. From his work it is not a far leap to the real lasting ideas of Buddhism, the facts of karma from previous lives, that weight of the past meeting a reality which offers constant enlightenment and the chance to live properly. Both sides of this equation have their poetry, Kerouac's prose on the one hand, all his artistic ideas, the spirituality of Buddhist law on the other.

And so Kerouac wrote of his home town, of his father and his print shop, of his brother Gerard, of his mother, etc., and all of it true to life, but also developed as far as the poetry native to each subject, as if he could, more or less accurately, bring us something of the cosmic significance of each.

The literary world is still irritated by his form and any follower of it. "What the hell is this? Is it fiction? Is it memoir?" Lawyers from publishing houses, forget about it, those times litigious, maybe not so much as ours. Kerouac changed all the names, had people sign forms so On The Road could finally see the light of day. He wrote about people who might find themselves recognizable, say in a Frisco jazz bar, real people, but few seemed to have taken offense. Maybe those aren't the kind of people to object to being memorialized in a small way in a great American book.

Still, though, Neal Cassidy wouldn't speak to his old buddy Kerouac for two years after On The Road came out. In many ways, Cassidy suffered from the identification and the portrayal. One could guess people were quick to stereotype, 'oh, you're the guy...' Cassidy, aka Dean Moriarty, points this out in a City Lights reading with Ginsburg. "Oh, they expected I was high on marijuana, so I acted it."

No, you can't blame people for wanting their privacy in a country full of so many people, some of them nuts. (The media has greedily taken over telling people's true-life stories as they really are, with all the nitty gritty, as opposed to the official press release version.) But Kerouac had a higher value, one of being on a spiritual pilgrimage, life being full of spiritual lessons, lessons by which to achieve humility and good stuff like that. Kerouac wished to expose his own life in this way, in real honest warts and all detail, as he wanted to achieve spiritual insight and peace. And, he wanted to offer himself as a kind of teacher, teaching by example, but also through administering lessons to those who might be curious. "I treat my own life as a spiritual occurrence, worthy of note through the simple fact that I exist, have a mind and higher consciousness and a memory and beautiful people around me and an understanding of emotion," he seems to have held. And maybe he saw the same in other people, whether or not they were willing to openly admit or not.

Maybe that's some of the beauty of Dean Moriarty, as he is not afraid to be just as he is, as happens, as he his inclinations present themselves. An individual, but not so private that he might not see some higher involvement which made his portrayal by Kerouac--the two were into writing, wrote side by side, influencing in each other in no small amount, at least in their honeymoon--okay.

No, spirituality is something you share, not to keep private. And as an aside, one might note that in regard to the Catholic Church officially covering up quite a lot, to say the least. If spirituality and the lessons that come of studying real life with an eye toward something transcendent, it would come to pass quickly that we would not only listen and bring forward the experiences of the molested, but also of the perpetrating members of the clergy. Let the great lesson about the life of the great spirit come out through the truth. But no, that's not how the church of Christ's steadfast friend Saint Peter wanted to treat the fabric of real actual life and experience both within the church setting and without it.

Again, a sign of the times. The fear of lawsuits, the official silence, the repression behind doors.

But that's not what Kerouac stood for.

Kerouac stood up for an ideal, one of openness, one we can but crudely describe compared to the achievements of his prose. His metaphors and tales stand beside the natural ingredients of parable.



As an afterthought, but one that slips quickly into the stream, we could say that many issues today bear a similarity to the ones Kerouac stood up against. The secrecy which corporations shroud their operations in, the inability for the institutions of Congress, at least part of it, to admit that people get sick and need to be taken care of without being bankrupted, to admit that people benefit from stable secure housing without taking advantage of this need by providing a temporary high that gets further and further away, to admit that people need financial security, no secret rate increases, no hidden charges, no usury, no need for certain medical procedures that people are going to do anyway after having done the math of whether they can afford certain consequences and responsibilities that aren't small... it all boils down to something about hiding, about not taking life as a lesson to learn from and acquire generosity and mutual respect. Physicists collide the atom now in order to learn its secrets. Kerouac was up to the same thing, and rather than a bomb, his work stands as a great positive humane thing.

As Saroyan said, and I've quoted it here before I think, the man wrote of a long series of tender nervous breakdowns, and that at the bottom, you'd be hard-pressed to find within his work an unkind word about anyone.