On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [34]
Kerouac seemed to be grasping to know America in a way that would encode a hidden editing process, a way that would recuperate the losses and failures inherent in the very structures of our language. In early 1950, after spending an evening listening to a number of jazz greats, including Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, he understood that an “art that expresses the mind of mind, and not the mind of life (the idea of mortal life on earth), is a dead art.” Like the European avant-garde artists of the preceding decades, Kerouac sought to collapse the distance between life and art. In explaining the importance of 1970s punk band the Sex Pistols, Greil Marcus writes that the band’s record “had to change the way a given person performed his or her commute.” While reading the scroll in a local coffee shop, I recently found myself staring out the window at people going by and realizing, mid-reverie, that On the Road has to change the way a person drinks his or her coffee. It is simultaneously about the most minute details of one’s life and the most monumental, a cartography of human desire in its extreme immensity and insignificance. In his spontaneous prose-infused biography on Kerouac entitled Jack Kerouac: A Chicken Essay, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, a Québécois writer, explains that the question “Who was I?” was at the heart of Kerouac’s project as a writer, because he knew that “the revolution is nothing if not interior.”
Kerouac’s questions of the self must change the way we know America. In one of my shameful memories of being embarrassed by my immigrant parents as a child, I remember criticizing my mother for exposing her foreignness in some way and her saying to me, “We do not blend easily.” As I read On the Road, I think of what they endured—living through two brutal wars and innumerable days of poverty and death—to go to a place where the desire to blend was swiftly replaced by the need to make a space in which survival could mean something personal. On the Road is a kind of map for these spaces. It inspires some vestigial picture of idealism that perhaps only existed in books—something akin to Jay Gatsby’s “orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.” At the same time, it is a feeling of comfortable foreignness, of being perfectly outside, of edging, like the Beats, “just another step toward that last, pale generation which will not know the answers either.” Kerouac lets you love to lose yourself. You become attuned to something that is ultimately outside language—some faint hum of knowingness that is only felt, all the way to the deepest core of being. The best way, I think, to experience On the Road is sitting alone by a window, feeling the onrush of a poem, a painting, a song about to happen, head slightly tilted toward invisible forces that ensure, no matter what, that artists will continue to, in Kerouac’s words, “translate the passionate intensity of life.” You are wrapped in a sense of being haunted by people and places and particular moments that drive you, like Kerouac, to “the edges of language where the babble of the subconscious begins,” hoping for access to the secret PAUSE button before the thing that is revealed, so you can keep it going, whatever it is.
“Into the Heart of Things”
Neal Cassady and the Search for the Authentic
George Mouratidis
Writing of the impending release of On the Road at the conclusion of Desolation Angels, Jack Kerouac gives a markedly mythologized impression of the unexpected appearance of Neal Cassady at the very moment “Jack Duluoz” is unpacking advance copies of his novel, “all about Cody and me