Kerouac's Prophecy

 Jack Kerouac aspired to be an "earthly prophet." He says so in his own journals. I actually prefer reading Kerouac's journals to his published work. I'm less interested in his performance on the printed page as a literary icon than in what he thought and felt in the privacy of his own inner world. Jack Kerouac talking to himself is far more interesting than Jack Kerouac talking to anyone else.

What brought this about is a passage I found some years ago in a volume entitled "Windblown World," which is a selection of Kerouac's journals from about mid-1947 to about mid-1954.  In 1947 Kerouac was writing his first novel, "The Town and the City," a conventional novel in terms of structure and style. Kerouac wrote it slowly, laboriously, by pencil.  He ended up with over 1,000 typewritten pages when the manuscript was done. It's interesting to note that when he was at the tail-end of this process, sometime in the year 1948, he had already conceived of the basic premise of "On the Road," had that as a working title, was already plotting the novel out as well as deciding to write it in a more personal style, in a form that more truly reflected the workings of his own mind.  Some years down the line, this became a commitment to "spontaneous prose" with the credo of "first thought, best thought."

A little later this next year, after perhaps re-reading Kerouac's first two novels, I may have something to say about them and about his arc as a writer. For now, though, I'm more interested in this passage that actually reflects his role as an "earthly prophet."

While Kerouac wrote his books, he also kept what he called "mood-logs" where he would talk out loud to himself, so to speak, about whatever was on his mind, what was going on in his life, his thoughts or frustrations about what he'd just written, the weather, women and what-not.  

And so it was that on a Sunday in December of 1947 -- December 7th, to be exact -- Kerouac was writing along about how he'd briefly gotten derailed and sidetracked by his new novel idea while not yet finished with his current novel-in-progress. In a long extended paragraph, without any transition at all, he willy-nilly broke from that discussion with this passage:

"However, it is suddenly occurring to me that a great new change is about to take place in mankind and in the world. Don't ask me how I know this. And it's going to be very simple and true, and men will have taken another great step forward. It will be a kind of clear realization of love, and war will eventually seem unreal and even obsolete, and a lot of other things will happen. But madness will rule in high places for a long time yet. All this is going to come up from the people themselves, a great new revolution of the soul.  Politics has nothing to do with this. It will be a kind of looking around and noticing of the world, and a simultaneous abandonment of systems of pride and jealousy, in many, many people, and it will spread around swiftly.  Enough for now."

And that was it. He moved on in his journal and never referred to this passage again. But to me, as soon as I read it, it rang true as an actual prophecy.  Why?  Well, we've got to trawl through the past once again in order to flesh that out. 

I've written previously about my coming of age in the Sixties and being affected by the spiritual undercurrents of the time.  It's hard to recapture the energy of those years for someone who didn't experience it directly.  It might be impossible to do.  But underlying all the startling, shocking, and radical changes of that decade was an undercurrent that said, "Something's afoot....a change is in the air...."

Two months shy of my 10th birthday, we had the Cuban missile crisis.  It's one thing to read about something in the history books.  It's another to have lived through it.  I remember leaving school that last Friday of the crisis and saying to a friend, "See you Monday."  He replied, "Yeah, if we're still alive."  I woke up that Sunday morning on pins and needles, wondering if all-out nuclear war would be waged that day.  "Cold war" is just a meaningless phrase unless you practiced laying down on a playground during a nuclear war drill, knowing full well that if there was an actual bomb you'd end up as nothing more than a shadow imprinted on the asphalt.

A year later, while sitting in class at school, we received the horrific information that our President, John F. Kennedy, had been shot and was already dead.  I just couldn't believe it.  I couldn't believe that something like that could happen in America.  As for today, well -- I no longer recognize America.  It's not the country I grew up in.  It's a dark and twisted mutation of itself, wherein half the populace would willingly accept an authoritarian poseur rather than the legally elected representative.

By about the age of 11, then, I had decided that the adult world was completely insane and I knew I didn't want to emulate adults in any way, shape, or form.  All bets were off.  Something new needed to be born, and damned if it didn't feel imminent.  I felt part of a generational change.  It felt as though we, the youth of the Sixties, had all sprung fully formed from the brow of Zeus; history meant nothing to us nor could it contain us. 

As always, generations split as people age and enter more fully into their individual lives. The presumed unity fractures or dissolves as people's lives become more clearly defined, and more clearly differ, by virtue of their varied choices. Besides, all cultures lie. It's just that every new generation tells the lie in a way peculiar to themselves.  That's the cynicism of my having lived through the decades that ensued after the promise of the Sixties fell flat.

But enormous change takes time.  Perhaps hundreds of years.  A thousand years ago, lords from the south of France would visit Moslem Spain, sometimes as guests at the courts of Muslim lords, sometimes as captives of those courts, but what happened was that they came back to the south of France with a new set of values -- the beginnings of chivalry, the fragile and nascent sense of romantic love, which developed into the troubadours and trouveres and the tantra of courtly love, a little later the Arthurian cycle of Chretien de Troyes -- this all began roughly 900 years ago, and it was the beginning of an entirely new cultural cycle which eventually swept all of Europe.  The culture we live in today is in the death rattle of that enormously important 900 year cycle of values.  Those values have been an enduring part of European thought and feeling ever since their inception.

We're on the brink of another such sea-change.  Despite Kerouac's implication, it would surprise me if such a monumental change happened in a matter of a few years.  I thought as a child that this was what the Sixties represented; I thought we were living through that change.  And in a way, we were part of the sowing of the first seeds of that change, on the heels of Kerouac and the Beats.

Some time later I will write of my own prophetic dream, which rose up out of my subconscious the summer I was twenty.  It was part of my catching this wave of change, or its catching me.

The disruptions we see all around us in our world, the enmity, polarized opposition, lies, hatred, violence, bigotry, lust for power and control -- all of which are in full sway at the moment -- are harbingers of this larger change.  I think an entirely new culture will have to be born, because the one we're in can't carry this change forward.  This civilization is eating itself alive and will continue to break down, methinks.  But eventually, over decades, or perhaps over several hundred years, a new impetus of energy will push through an entirely new culture, built upon values which we are only now dimly beginning to perceive, or maybe values which we're as yet completely incapable of imagining.  

Before the new values can be born, though, the old ones are rearing their ugly heads once more and fighting against this change. The atavistic impulses of selfishness, competition, domination, pride, ego, intolerance, racial, religious, and sectarian violence and hatred -- business as usual, in other words --  are cultural archetypes which have outlived their usefulness and utility and are fighting for their very lives.  This fight, this struggle, is embodied in our public figures and in the national consciousness prevalent in America right now. We're living through the resistance to the very shift that Kerouac was talking about.

If we happen to live long enough, it would be something to see the world, and humanity at large, come out the other side. 

I'll write more on this later but since it's early December, and as I read this windblown version of Kerouac's journals constantly, I thought I'd make a reference to Jack's prediction. Let's hope it comes true and that I'm wrong about it needing several hundred years to play out. 

It can't happen soon enough.