Jack Kerouac would have turned 100 today had he not drank himself right out of this world at the age of 47. Had Jack and mutual friends Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs not hunkered down in an apartment around Columbia University in NYC during and after WWII, and gotten into all manner of trouble, we'd all probably still be living two dimensional black and white lives with our three tv channels (all there used to be when I was a kid) and skinny ties. Think of the movie "Pleasantville" with no discovery of color. Inauthentic, in other words. (It's no accident that Jackson Pollock was of the same generation.)
I was never a fan of the Beats growing up. They were before my time. I rode upon the coattails of older siblings and managed to navigate the Sixties, escaping relatively unscathed. What touched me about that decade was an instinctive recognition of the desire for honesty and authenticity of feeling. It just got buried under drugs and an excess of toxic behavior disguised as "freedom." I didn't understand the genesis of these feelings, this deeply unexpressed longing. I didn't know where these new values had come from, from what cultural milieu they'd been culled, simmering in a pot of boiling herbs and given psychedelic wings upon which to fly.
It had escaped me that everyone who was anyone in the Sixties had read On The Road or The Dharma Bums or both. And had read them years before. These seeds lay smoldering beneath the facile surface of American life in the late Fifties and early Sixties, fermenting, awaiting just the right hothouse temperatures to fire themselves into voluptuous bloom.
33 years ago, in the summer of 1989, I met a fellow named Locke McCorkle. Turns out he was a character in The Dharma Bums, Sean Monahan, who owned the house in Marin which had the hillside horse pasture up above it, with the shack where Gary Snyder ("Japhy Ryder" in the Bums) and Jack Kerouac holed up together in the spring of 1956. Locke mentioned knowing Kerouac and Snyder. I had seen Gary Snyder read a couple of times down in Seattle's Pioneer Square, clad in his wool shirt, jeans, and work boots. On another author such garb might have smacked of proletarian affectation. But Gary always struck me as the real deal.
Locke told me that Gary and Jack had spent time as fire lookouts up in the North Cascades. I'd heard as much. Although a dim recollection of the cultural mythopoeia, the fact had never really grabbed my attention. Locke told me a little about Gary, Jack, and Buddhism. I was able to pull a quote out of the air from one of Gary's readings that I'd attended. Someone had asked Gary if Kerouac was really a Buddhist and Snyder said, " Jack was a Buddhist as long as you kept him out of a city." Locke laughed. A few years later, I read that Locke had died of cancer. I was sad; he seemed an affable soul. He wrote a nice little book about the sanctity of making love.
Years later, while working at a public library, I stumbled upon the wonderful book, Poets on the Peaks, which was about the meeting of Phillip Whalen, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac in the fall of 1955 in San Francisco. This time the injection took: I became fascinated by Kerouac.
You could call Jack a cautionary tale. In fact, you could say "What would Jack do?" and then if you just did the opposite, you'd probably end up safe and sound. He often wrote under the influence of one drug or another, and if he wasn't summoning the muse this way, then he was probably drinking. I'd always discounted an artist who used drugs to conjure their art. Wasn't that cheating? It's like the people who dope or drug to win at the Olympics. Wouldn't you want to just see what you could dig out of yourself, au naturale?
I'm not really a fan of Kerouac's novels, Dharma Bums notwithstanding. That one work, I do find inspiring. It makes me want to commit more simply and sincerely to my own life, my own spirituality, and it has similarly affected thousands of other people in the same way. I don't think it could truly inspire people had Jack not touched upon something real, not authentically attained something internally, spiritually, something hidden -- and perhaps even hidden from himself.
But what I really love are Kerouac's journals, say, Windblown World (kept in the late forties when he was writing his first novel) or Some of the Dharma, the journal in which Kerouac -- ever the autodidact -- taught himself Buddhism in the mid-Fifties. What Kerouac wrote for publication was a kind of act -- he was performing in a literary sense. In his own journals, Jack spoke to himself in a natural, unaffected voice. I've always felt that Jack Kerouac talking to himself was far more interesting than Jack Kerouac talking to anybody else.
What attracts many is the romantic celebrity of Kerouac's good looks, his athletic football past (a college scholarship to Columbia University, where he broke his leg and decided to become a writer rather than a football player), his infamous debaucheries, his spontaneity, the road trips with Neal Cassady, the verbal sparring with Allen Ginsberg, typing up William Burroughs' books or suggesting titles for his friends -- "Naked Lunch" for Burroughs, or "Howl" for Ginsberg's famous poem. And the chronic mythologizing of his own experience. But really, so what? Who cares?
What really grabbed me about Jack was his failed spiritual quest. His three year immersion in Buddhism when nobody in America knew diddly squat about it.
Why does that matter? Well, because he tried -- he really tried. And he was alone. It's hard to say whether anyone can really follow the spiritual path entirely alone. But I admire Kerouac's sincerity, his visceral wrestling with the demons of his own lower nature, the almost total commitment he gave it, the fact that he went for broke upon a mountaintop -- and lost. I admire that. To go for it and lose is not really a failure. It may look like that to others, but none of this is for any one life -- that's just the obsessively neurotic psychopathology of the West. What the "F" do we know? Nothing, that's what.
Kerouac cloistered himself away on a mountain with the fated name of Desolation, eschewing drugs, alcohol, and sex -- all those easy ways to alter consciousness -- for 63 days and nights in extreme wilderness -- and lost. He faced down the Void and found only the void within himself.
But I think Jack probably earned something secret and hidden in the process. And perhaps learned some lessons for future lives. Jack glimpsed something but couldn't quite reach it. How many of us have glimpsed nothing at all in our lives, much less attempted to reach those nebulous, seemingly illusory ivory towers? Jack gambled everything and came away with nothing but the emptiness of fame. In the end, there was nothing for him to do but drink himself into oblivion. Makes perfect sense to me.
So, thank you, Jack Kerouac. Thank you for your guts, your courage, your intellect, your heart, your own peculiar purity, and yes, for your all-too-human failings as well. Who can't identify with those? You left a record of where, and how, not to travel. I intend to take the advice not given and learn from your own mistakes.
And I hope to see you somewhere down the Road.
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