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.

The Poly-Love I Need

My latest effort for our South Bay Poly newsletter.  Perhaps I've got it, more or less, this time.

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I’m trying this again.  For years I’ve tried to put my finger on, and explain, what polyamory means to me; why, for me, it is different from “free love.”  A few days ago I thought I had it; well let’s see.

For me it’s a lot like the “standard paradigm” of finding love—only with more people.  It isn’t “promiscuity” as I understand it; it isn’t “sleeping around.”  It isn’t “love for kicks with strangers.”  But it can happen with more than one person at once.

Maybe that’s it.  It isn’t sex with strangers I’ll never see again.  It’s getting closer to people I’m attracted to and am interested in; people I’d like to be close to for an extended time (possibly forever).

Not to say that “sex can’t be just fun.”  It can be.  But, for me, not with strangers.  I’m not comfortable enough with most people to enjoy physical closeness.  At the very least, if I’m with someone I don’t know very well, I have to feel like I’m becoming close to them.

Inside and Outside

Here’s another interesting fact about military bases, such as the ones I grew up on:  they’re a finite size and enclosed.  That gives them something in common with a ghetto.

I’ve already described how my family could buy most of what they needed “on base.”  We could buy food, other products, and entertainment on base, much of it within walking distance.

From the age of six to the age of fifteen—with a year and a half or so gap—I lived on air force bases, although my father was a civilian.

When I was a teenager living on base—this was in Japan—I would take long walks every day after school.  Some of these walks would take me along the southwest boundaries of the base.  I would look at the fence that ran around the base and think about how I was inside the base and the area on the other side of the fence was outside.  There wasn’t really anything to see; most of that area was dense tree and shrubbery.

It wasn’t that I particularly thought of the “outside” as being somehow threatening compared to the “inside.”  Or that I thought the people “inside” were better than the people “outside.”  I just was aware of the division.  Perhaps if I had been older, and actually a member of the military, I would have thought so.

One gets used to how one is raised.  When I lived with the military (but still a civilian) in Germany, it felt very odd at first.  Although my family lived with the U.S. Army, in our own “American” area, we were not sealed off by a fence.  My mother and I never did learn why that was.  The “campus” where I spent my first two years of college—in Munich, Germany—had once been a German military establishment—a caserne—but had been taken over by the U. S. after World War II.  It could have easily been sealed off (and probably once was).  At home with my parents in Nuremberg, it felt odd to not be “protected” by a fence around our American area.  In Munich it didn’t feel so odd—being a college campus, it seemed set off anyway.

I think I have carried this notion of being “sealed off” with me since my childhood.  One of the results of being separated is that you can easily ignore what is “outside” the base perimeter.  However, if you become aware of this tendency, you can overcome it—although you then become aware of how the people around you limit themselves.  

Perhaps that is what happened to me.