Incoherence and Coherence in Jack Kerouac

I’ve just finished a “double-read” of the audiobook of the Original Scroll of On the Road, read by John Ventimiglia.

 

By “Double-read” I mean this:  After finishing Book 1, I went back and listened to it a second time.  After Book 2, I did the same with it.  And so on.  So when I got to the end of the whole thing, I’d actually listened to the entire novel twice.  And the ending of most of the books impressed me so, I went back and listened to each of the endings multiple times.  This being at least the eighth time I’ve listened to an unabridged recording of either On The Road or the The Original Scroll thereof, I can say that I have now gotten quite deep into Kerouac, the novel, and Kerouac’s story,  approach and style.

I’ve picked up on a lot of details.  There’s a certain seeming incoherence here.  This certainly is why a lot of early critics considered Kerouac a “barbarian with a typewriter.”  And yet—should books be coherent?  Maybe not in all ways!  Because life is not particularly coherent, is it?

So if William Burroughs says “when you’re dead your just dead,” but a page or two later starts talking about communicating with the dead, should we object?

If people are discussing how Carolyn Cassady threw Neal Cassady out, how should we react a page or two later when Helen Hinkle says, “I think it was very wise of Luann to throw you out.”  I thought I had found a real blooper here—and maybe I have.  Or not!  When I noticed this in The Scroll, I ran over to the published novel to check.  The same apparent inconsistency appears there.  Real people do misspeak!

One thing I’ve noticed is that Kerouac really doesn’t talk much about his feelings.  He gives us his ideas, but not so much his feelings.  He gives us his reactions (his response to jazz, for example), but that isn’t the same thing.

I think this is why people often miss the underlying mood of the book.  The recent film concentrated on the sex and jazz; but underlying the entire book is a search for something to make up for the fact that Kerouac’s father is dead and Kerouac’s wife has left him.  Neal Cassady is always trying to connect with his own father and family.  Allen Ginsberg is always asking what the meaning of these travels are.  They all feel pursued by some presence.  And at the end of the book, an old man with long flowing white hair walks past Kerouac and says, “Go moan for man.” 

This is all stated, but not emphasized.  Implications are left for the reader to realize on his own.  Part of Kerouac’s Art is to simply mention these things, then leave us to notice them.  You can debate whether this artistic strategy is good or bad.

Polyamory? Poly-Intimacy?

(From the October South Bay Poly newsletter)

Continuing from last month’s thought.  Looking back on my life, I see that I’m a lot more comfortable with physical affection—and sex—now, compared with how I used to be.  When I was young I felt threatened and intimidated, being rather shy and not terribly confident about myself, my body, and my personality.  I hope everyone eventually grows into feeling as comfortable as I do now—though I think some people don’t, for whatever reason. 

Maybe I just have a better idea now of what I like and what I don’t.  It isn’t so much that I disapprove of casual sex, or sex with strangers; it just isn’t something I enjoy very much.  It probably goes back to my original discomfort when I was younger—feeling uncomfortable with people I didn’t know very well, that I couldn’t relax with yet or trust.  I know there are people who don’t have this issue.

Also, I suspect that it isn’t so much the sex that I’m after, as it is the trust, safety, and intimacy.  I love to cuddle and become sexual with someone; I just need to feel safe with them first.  The question of multiple lovers is a separate issue.

And I think I need some expectation of a long-term interaction, not something that will be over immediately.  That may be a trust issue too.  Still thinking.

Kerouac and Despair

Just now thinking, maybe I like Kerouac because he addresses despair and the search for meaning, like Camus, like Genet.

I’ve just finished listening to the scene in Part 2 of The Original Scroll (of On The Road) where Cassady abandons Kerouac and Luanne on the street in San Francisco, then Luanne abandons him, then he imagines he’s run into his mother from 1800 in England.

Both Part 1 and Part 2 of On the Road end with despair – yet with glances ahead.

Of course despair is also a major theme in Big Sur.  It is an amazing book because it describes Kerouac going to pieces.  How was he able to write so coherently about it?  And at the end he still has hope, or faith—that things will still turn out all right, somehow.

People talk about Kerouac the Alcoholic.  And I do have the impression that Kerouac spent at least the last seven or more years of his life drunk.  Yet he still managed to write Big Sur, Satori in Paris, and Vanity of Duluoz.  Not bad, I think, for being always drunk.  Vanity of Duluoz, in particular, shows a coherence and straight-forward writing approach that goes against the idea that Kerouac by 1967 was a slobbering drunkard.  A drunkard he may have been, but as John Clellon Holmes remarks in the documentary “Kerouac,” he was always interesting to listen to.

So here’s to Jack.  I was surprised, yesterday, in looking at some jazz cuts on YouTube, to see how many people were accessing the music simply because Kerouac had mentioned it in On The Road.  In an essay included with The Original Scroll, someone asks “Why are students still interested in Kerouac?”  Indeed!  Why am I still reading him?  I haven’t figured that out yet!  I just know I find him interesting and sincere and honestly feeling and thinking—which is something I value.

Folk Dancing

On a whim last night, I went folk dancing after the South Bay Writers Open Mic in south San Jose.  I jumped into my car after tossing my books and papers into the trunk, calculated briefly (it was already a quarter to ten) and drove twenty-five miles up the highway to Palo Alto to find the Stanford International Folkdancers.  I was there by 10:20.  I had forty minutes to dance.
 

And not forty, really.  Because when I arrived the group was doing its announcements, not dancing.  For a moment I was afraid they were preparing to end early.  To one side of the entry a table lay spread with refreshments:  Someone’s birthday.  To the other side of the door lay musical instruments:  an accordion, a double-bass, some kind of mandolin.  People described upcoming events, chatted, and snacked.  Perhaps I’d be heading home soon after all.

But the music started up again; not from the live band and musicians, but from the recordings made decades ago in eastern Europe; which, after all, is what lured me into folk dancing in 1974—almost forty years ago!—when I was in graduate school in Virginia.

My big dancing era ended around 1990, when I began to suffer back problems.  Since then I have danced only occasionally.  Yet I still remember the dances that were burnt into my feet and soul in earlier days.  So when the Stanford Dancers announced they were doing “Orijent,” I joined right in with this fairly straight-forward dance from Serbia, one of the first dances I ever learned.  Later came “Šestorka,” a more spirited Serbian dance; and “Jovano Jovanke,” slower and more lyrical; Macedonian.  Then “Ali Pasha,” just a bit faster but still lovely to sing, from Turkey.

I hadn’t done any of these dances for some time—in the case of “Šestorka,” probably not for five or ten years.  Yet I remembered them.  They were truly etched into my brain.  In my first few years of folk dancing, I learned hundreds of dances, mostly from eastern Europe.

But that is another story, to be told more fully at another time.  But it is fair to say that folk dancing is a constant that has followed me most of my life.  Whatever dancing I do in the time remaining, the music will never leave me.  The music and I have been together since around when I was ten—another story indeed, since my family has no eastern European roots.  I first heard Balkan music in a recording from Columbia Records.  Why it attracted me…certainly has something to do with my own childhood and family.  To be told another time.

Writing, Life, Kerouac

Ah, but sometimes Life gets in the way of Writing, if we let it!  I’ve been busy here with life, work, staying healthy, etc.

 

On the other hand, one thing I could probably learn from Jack Kerouac is that you can always write.  I have the impression that Kerouac was always taking notes.  Whereas I tend to sit and brood, like Proust perhaps, storing up memories to put on paper another day.

Thing is, it’s hard sometimes to live with a pen and notepad in your hands!  Now, of course, it would be “with an iPad or whatever.”

But I’m back to Kerouac again, listening once more to the audiobook version of the original scroll of On the Road, read by John Ventimiglia.  I ask myself what draws me so to this book, this writer.

But something does.  This time, when I listened to Part One of the novel, which takes up about forty percent of the book, I discovered I was fascinated, not bored.  In the past I’ve often asked why Kerouac devoted so much time to this first section (of five) of the novel.  This time I kept lingering over individual descriptions.  At the end of Part One, I went back and played the entire book up till there all over a second time.

I’ve just done the same thing with Part Two.  I’m getting a much better sense of the structure of the story now.  People say nothing happens.  I’m more inclined to say that everything happens.  I’ve got to get to the bottom of what this is all about:  This book, and my attraction to it.

Meanwhile, I’ll go on to Part Three tomorrow.  We’ll see what happens.