Hey Jack Kerouac . . .
Friday 01 April, 1994
Man. I been reading Jack Kerouac all week. That gone
beat daddy; he's such a tremendous writing talent. Since Monday I've traveled
with Jack all around this American landscape in search of . . . hmmm? Good question.
All I know is that the guy just goes, goes, goes. He burns with life and vitality and he runs and runs. He drinks in . . . gulps down . . . gets drunk on, the incredible and spectral beauty of the American West. He uses Benzedrine. He finds The Force in a jazz bar in edge-of-the-continent San Francisco, and then moves and moves, again and again, searching and searching, criss-crossing the continent in the company of certifiable lunatics who he reveres and anoints as holy messengers of God. It's the sanctification and sacrament of movement; of action. Forward - never back. And more so in time, than in space.
And on he goes. Into the great, vast, dark, wide-open, and wild American night of 1949. But what's he looking for? Happiness? I think he's searching for some feeling of adventure. Some fulfillment of an ambition and aspiration for greatness.
A fulfillment that's hard to find, smack in the middle of the 20th-century-age-of-industry when men who've already been transformed into cogs for the reason of ensuring a tremendous and successful war-machine's efficiency, are being enticed into the cogdom of a permeating and all-consuming and soon-to-be ant-colony corporate culture.
During the dawning of the age of Levittown, Kerouac, an Ivy League athlete, circles his nation like a whirling slingshot, building up the momentum to escape the mundane expectations of his post-war society's gravity. He succeeds. And in doing so becomes a lonely satellite orbiting his homeland. Shunning the kinship of a well-bred east coast intellectual colony he chooses comradeship with alienated Charlie Mansonish fringe characters whose lives he documents and deifies with his books.
How can you not love Kerouac? He lived his philosophy.
Hell, he lived his life. For a brief meteoric moment he burned, burned, burned
- running head-on towards life and transcendence
in a way that those of us who settle for lives of quiet desperation and
television narcosis will never know. We'll only read It or see It in a movie or
hear a snippet of It put together with wonderful chords and notes on the radio.
But we'll never really know It as our own. Just as something some marketer
sells us as an anesthetic, numbing, virtual-reality because we know we need It
but we don't have the guts to go out and find IT on our own.
Bruce Springsteen was like Kerouac back in '75 when he was born to run. He sang of embracing the life, the joy, the adventure, and yes, the risk - the very real and great risk - of not compromising with society; but instead, living life on HIS own terms and chasing HIS ideals or HIS own art. But Springsteen got everything a guy could want, from his art. Wealth, freedom, respect. And he had enough sense - given the examples of some before him - to pull back and not become the lonely satellite bound only for fiery destruction. His compromise may mean that his art won't soar, and he's probably chosen 40 years of comfortable, mundane, worldliness over a fiery flare and a chance at transcendent greatness. Who can blame him? I'd choose the same. It'll be interesting to see what Kurt Cobain chooses.
Kerouac never thought he'd have that kind of choice, though. He just knew that he couldn't acquiesce to the life that was expected of him. It was insipid and it was an intolerable waste of years. He preferred life as a rocket-man ; even a rocket-man with no destination ; to the in-the-end-meaningless, consumer-in-the-big-machine middle-class existence.
He beautifully documents and romanticizes the trip. It's "journey simply for the sake of journey." It's a holy quest. He's Jonathan Livingston Seagull riding a bus through the American West. He only hoped that the journals he kept - which became On The Road and The Dharma Bums, and The Subterraneans and all the other beautiful stories - might be read and comprehended by a single discoverer in some future millennia long after his own death. And that hope freed Jack Kerouac. It freed him from the painful bonds of his material world and it let him soar high and dwell with his Angels - if only for a moment.
And then he POPPED like that Roman Candle he writes about; flaring with an artistic virtue, a purity, and a white-hot brilliance that may never be surpassed.
And then he became an empty burnt-out shell.
Maybe guys like Kerouac light our way. Maybe they illuminate a path around, or through, or over, the soul-and-spirit-killing traps of the industrial age.
Then again . . . maybe it's not really a path that most can follow.
But maybe the life of Kerouac should remind us that human creativity is something of immeasurable value to our species.
As our earth overpopulates, we're going to
have to evolve new social paradigms that stress conformity. If you think about
it, the models for this kind of a society are
Kerouac and the other fiery, burning - fleeting - artists of the late 20th century are warning us that we must make room in our crowded future for the free-spirited to roam. If we kill their creative contributions to our species, we'll surely go the way of the thunder lizards that dominated this planet as confidently, completely, and unobstructedly as we humans now do.
If we're going to learn from the lives of our
Kerouacs and our Hendrixs, and if we want to
preserve the creativity that they bring to the Human Race, then we've got to
find a way to keep the looming social changes that will be wrought by
overpopulation, from quashing our creative misfits.
Can the "Ant-Colonization" of the Human
Race be avoided in the 21st Century, short of some massive population-thinner
like disease or war? If we manage to avoid the apocalyptic horsemen (and by-God
we oughta try) can we find a way to encourage "wildness of
thought" in what will likely be a future of increasingly restrictive
social covenants due to the crowdedness of our planet?
I hope so. Things could get pretty blasé around here if we don't.
And thanks for everything Jack. Thanks a million.
Catch me On The cyberRoad at: williamf@tomjoad.us
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Text Copyright © 1994 Bill Frick (All Rights Reserved)